Don't feel guilty about using Uber. Do this instead.

People feel guilty about using Uber. This confuses me.

Uber pays $15 to $25 an hour, usually $19, around $30 in big cities. This is good pay, even after substracting car expenses. Two of every five U.S. jobs pay less than $20. One in five U.S. jobs pay less than $15.

When I ask Uber drivers about their main work, the answers are usually restaurant management, security guard, or someone starting a food truck. These aren’t the sub-$15 jobs in America. Those are home health aides, daycare workers, and retail associates, jobs I’ve written about before.

Growing up around people making $5 to $15 an hour, I saw that one thing kept many of them stuck: transportation. Uber driving requires car that works, is new enough, is very clean. You can’t let your kids dirty it.

I could count on one hand the people in my community who had that.

The fact that anyone with a car and a clean background can get near median U.S. hourly wage of $23.80 is great.

Nonethelesss, gig work is hard. But feeling guilty and avoiding Uber means drivers have slower nights. When I waited tables at $2.13 an hour, more customers meant more income. More trips means more income for drivers.

What to do instead of feeling guilty:

Be ready when they pull up. Every minute they wait is unpaid.

Pin your exact location. Circling the block looking for you costs them unpaid gas and unpaid time.

Don’t slam the door. The loudness can be painful.

Keep the car clean - a spill will end their shift! Any messes, like food or sand, or even cigarette smell can force a driver off the road mid-shift to pay for a cleaning. If they only had a three-hour window between jobs and family, that ends their workday.

Don’t spill alcohol. This can take them out of commission for days. Any lingering smell means passengers assume the driver was drinking. Drivers might pay for multiple cleanings before they can get back on the road.

Use your real name. People can sign up as “Daddy” or other placeholder names. If a driver gets robbed, that’s the only name they can give to the police.

Drivers worry about getting attacked by passengers, though this shows up less in the online discourse. Passenger-victim stories spread further than driver-victim stories, likely because most readers are far more likely to be passengers.

Drivers also feel unseen by how their work is talked about. "I hate how the media portrays us as victims," one told me. Most drivers aren't trapped in gig work. 94 percent of Lyft drivers work fewer than 20 hours a week. It's a second income, something to pick up between shifts. The complaints drivers have are more specific: how little of the fares they receive, high platform fees, insurance requirements that apply to rideshare but not taxis.

The exploitation frame comes, I think, from a class gap in who’s doing the writing. From a certain vantage point, gig work looks like an awful deal. From inside the $20-and-under labor market, it looks different. It’s a job that doesn’t require English fluency, doesn’t require a resume, and pays more than waiting tables.

But even sympathetic coverage gets the policy diagnosis wrong. It focuses on what’s broken about one particular sector, even though low wage workers don’t stay in one sector. People move between food service and retail and rideshare depending on what’s available.

When I had three jobs, making any one of them better wouldn’t have helped much. What I wanted was health insurance that didn’t depend on me keeping any particular job. Big policy goals like cash transfers and cheaper housing help no matter what job you’re in. These goals are more difficult and have less clear villains to blame, but they deserve more attention.

When I say “Uber”, I mean Uber, Lyft, or Empower. I personally use Empower. It gives drivers 100% of the fare and is cheaper.

This doesn’t mean that it’s 6 in 10 people. People in low wage work tend to have multiple jobs.