“With these prices I won’t do it, I’m going to quit”, driver Rafael Espinal said.
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Drivers are urging others to turn off the Uber app, boycotting the company’s new fares by taking Monday off.
Uber drivers are on strike today to protest working conditions with the company. A similar price cut 18 months ago, Uber officials say, prompted this new cut. Over the weekend, it was reported that Lyft would also slash their fares – the only source of income for drivers.
Uber announced Friday it was rolling back its rates in an attempt to increase ridership. Now we see the media asking questions about lowering taxi and greencab metered fares.
Fellow driver Inder Parmar accused Uber of “killing the profession” of tax driving. No driver wins this bidding war.
“It took me a lot of time and hassle and nerves and stress to make the same amount of money I did in previous weeks”, said Farrukh Khamdamov, a driver with Uber for a year who spearheaded an online campaign for the strike.
Though traditional taxis’ strategy has primarily been to try to use the power of government to prevent drivers and customers from using services like Uber and Lyft, with mixed success, the competition these services have introduced has nonetheless forced taxis to make changes in their own service. ‘If every App company lowers the rates, what choices do we have left?
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“You saw the damage we caused two weeks ago, when we lit up all of SF with 6.9% surge pricing”, he says. What’s being auctioned off is their livelihoods and that’s unacceptable, ‘ he told the New York Post. The group has been responsible for a series of protests before, notably in fall 2014 when they protested what they said were low fares.
