New Uber Survey Shows Most Drivers Are "Satisfied," but Doesn't Ask Them How Much They're Making

Some app-based drivers and labor advocates support a Seattle City Council bill allowing drivers to unionize. Alex Garland

That photo above is from a rally at Seattle City Hall last month where drivers for app-based ride-hailing services called on the city to approve a bill allowing them to organize and collectively bargain.

At the event, drivers shared their experiences, including one Lyft driver who said she was deactivated after attending a Teamsters organizing meeting. She wasn’t the first in Seattle to complain about retaliation.

Those kinds of stories—paired with other concerns about working conditions for app-based drivers—have inspired the effort to let drivers unionize.

But they stand in sharp contrast to the way Uber and Lyft have portrayed working conditions for their drivers. (Both companies denied the allegations of retaliation.)

On Friday, David Plouffe, a top Uber advisor and former Obama staffer, came to Seattle to talk about the “future of work.” His message: drivers on the platform are overwhelmingly happy and in no need of bargaining rights.

But, as Sydney pointed out after that event, the trouble is that Uber doesn’t release much data about its drivers, so we’re left taking the company’s word for it. (In some cases, like this recently resolved case in Spokane, the companies actively fight releasing data.)

Today, Uber did finally release some data in the form of a new online survey of drivers. The results back up part of Plouffe’s point, but leave other major questions unanswered.

The survey of 833 drivers shows that a majority (69 percent) have some other form of part-time or full-time work. Just 20 percent of drivers said Uber was their only source of income and 12 percent said it was their “biggest source, but not only” source of income.

The story those survey results tell is important for Uber. The idea that most drivers are happy with the flexibility the job provides because they aren’t depending on the company for their livelihoods is a (problematic) cornerstone of the argument against giving drivers more rights. These survey results add some legitimacy to Uber’s claims.

However, the survey doesn’t answer other major questions about the working conditions for drivers—questions that are at the heart of the unionization debate in Seattle. Among them: How much are drivers making?

On Friday, Plouffe told a crowd at the Impact Hub in Pioneer Square that: “Generally this is a very good income. I think when you talk to our drivers, and again most of our drivers don’t come from the driving industry, they’re comparing it to other options in the retail industry and the restaurant industry, they say two things: They say it’s a very good amount of money, in many cases better, and they control the terms of their wages in terms of the schedule.”

Here in Seattle, some Lyft and Uber drivers say they make as much as $25 an hour, but others say they make far less. One driver who’s advocating for the unionization bill said in August he makes less than $2.75 an hour working full-time on three ride-hailing apps. (Because drivers are considered independent contractors, not employees, the company is not responsible for making sure they’re paid the minimum wage.)

Today’s survey gets us no closer to knowing which end of that spectrum is more representative of the majority of drivers.

While the data says 81 percent of surveyed drivers are “satisfied with [the] experience overall,” it doesn’t include questions about whether the jobs provide a living wage. Because of that, we’re still left with nothing but Uber’s word that most drivers make, as Plouffe claimed, “a very good income.”

Working Washington, the labor-backed group pushing for the unionization bill, also takes issue with the way Uber presented today’s survey data. Sage Wilson, a spokesperson for the group, says in an e-mail that the company pulled a “statistical trick” because it packaged the results of the survey based on the number of drivers rather than hours worked by those drivers:

So by their figuring, 5 people who drive a few hours a week are given 5 times the survey weight that a long-term, full-time driver gets — even though that one driver likely serves more passengers over more hours than the part-timers do.

Basically, concluding Uber is terrific based on this survey makes about as much sense as concluding your own workplace is a great place to be based on the number of “World’s Greatest Boss” coffee cups which appear on managers’ desks.

I’ve reached out to Uber and will update this post if I hear back.