The Social Costs of Uber

Abstract

The rise of the car-sharing company Uber will likely have mixed effects on labor standards. On the one hand, Uber’s partial consolidation of the car-hire sector and its compilation of data on passenger and driver behavior could enable the company and regulators to ensure safety and root out discrimination against passengers with relative ease. In that regard, Uber may be an improvement over the existing taxi sector, which is quite difficult to regulate. Uber’s longer-term impact on labor standards is quite unclear, however, and it may have dark implications for the future of low-wage work more generally.