SomeUber driverswork dangerously long shifts
One morning late last year, Uber driver James Lindsey saw he had a chance to more than double his pay.
Instead of the $ 8 per hour average he had been making, the 48- year- old Provo, Utah, resident says that day, rates jumped to $ 20 per hour for no apparent reason. To take advantage of it, he drove for 20 hours straight.
“I felt trapped,” Lindsey said in explaining his dangerously long shift. “I thought, ‘ I might never see it this good again.’ ”
For some Uber drivers, long shifts have become the norm. Dropping fares and profitable incentives lure them to keep driving past safe limits. Because the ride- hailing service doesn’t set a cap on how many hours its drivers can work at a time, there are few legal ways to stop them.
By contrast, rival Lyft shuts off its app, which drivers need to find customers, after 14 hours at a time and doesn’t let drivers back on for six hours to let them rest. As a result, the potential danger for Uber passengers and drivers alike continues to grow, even as efforts to limit driving hours spring up across the country.
“I’ve never come across Uber telling drivers howmany hours they can work,” said Marvin Schulman, a Florida attorney who has represented traffic accident victims involving fatigued Uber drivers. “They can just drive around the clock.”
Dawn Gearhart, a policy coordinator for the App- Based Drivers Association, says she has heard complaints from “hundreds” of drivers who work up to 16 hours a day because of low pay or tempting incentives.
Gearhart says drivers receive notifications saying they aren’t picking up enough passengers and they need to take on more rides if they want to keep driving for Uber — which can happen even after a full day of work if drivers “consistently decline trip requests,” though it won’t lead to a permanent loss of their account, the company says.
Others say that they’ll just do “one more trip” so that they can reach their monetary goal for the day as they are struggling to make enough for basic ex- penses such as gas and car insurance.
“Drivers say, ‘ everybody’s doing it,’ ” — that is, driving to the point of fatigue, Gearhart said. “It’s a shared experience.”
Uber says that it investigates reports of fatigued drivers and takes “appropriate actions” in response.
In addition, the company sends inapp notifications to drivers in some cities reminding them about the importance of taking breaks and getting enough rest.
“We know that sleep is the only proven way to prevent drowsy or fatigued driving, which is why awareness is important,” Uber spokeswoman Brooke Anderson said in a statement.
The company said that just 7% of drivers work more than 50 hours per week, while more than half of drivers in the U. S. use the Uber app less than 10 hours a week.
But for that small fraction of drivers working full- time with Uber, driving for long hours at a time can be a financial necessity. Uber says that overall driver earnings have remained stable despite fare cuts in dozens of cities that lowered the cost for passengers. However, drivers including Lindsey say they saw their profits drop over the past few years despite these assurances that more frequent rides would make up for the reduced fares. He quit driving for Uber in February.
Another former driver, Malene Comes, 45, quit after working long hours that still didn’t help her make ends meet.
While living in Albuquerque last year, Comes found that weekday rates hovered around $ 5 per hour — so she spent five months driving for Uber on Friday and Saturday nights, when rates were slightly higher. She drove from 4 p. m. to 6 a. m. — around 16 hours at a time — to make $ 250 per weekend. But when her profits fell by $ 100 late last year, she could no longer afford the car she bought to drive for Uber in the first place.
Comes says she stayed alert with the help of numerous energy drinks, but the fatigue started to weigh on her as she was nearing the end of her 16- hour shifts, when she started making wrong turns.
“A few times I got worried about my fatigue level,” Comes said. “But that was the only way I could make any kind of money.”