What this means is, practically speaking, companies like Uber and Lyft are not so much intermediaries in a single transaction but one party in two separate transactions: the rider pays Lyft, and then Lyft pays the driver, based on two totally separate pay structures and calculations.
In its statement to Jalopnik for this story, Lyft explained how the decoupling of driver and rider payments influenced their decision to no longer show the driver what the rider paid. “Because driver pay is decoupled from what a rider pays, we wanted to highlight aggregate earnings content and basic insights like total hours & booked hours which can encourage drivers to rely less on individual ride details, which can be misleading, and more on the larger weekly earnings picture.” But as commenters at Uberpeople and The Rideshare Guy’s post on the subject pointed out, there’s nothing stopping Lyft from providing both.
Earlier this year, the National Labor Review Board’s general counsel issued an advice memo siding with Uber and Lyft’s interpretation of the independent contractor debate. But Marshall Steinbaum, an economist at the University of Utah who studies labor markets, said the removal of the rider’s fare affects a key element of the National Labor Review Board’s calculus on the subject.
One of their criteria is, in Steinbaum’s words, “whether the workers are at risk of ‘profit and loss,’ i.e. does their performance affect their revenue. [It’s] hard to say it does if the worker doesn’t know what the revenue is.” Steinbaum went on to call it “farcical” that Lyft can simultaneously claim to be merely facilitating a bilateral transaction when “drivers don’t know what the platform is charging.”
Sanjukta Paul, a law professor at Wayne State University who specializes in antitrust law, agreed that this change was “very interesting” from a legal perspective. “What kind of independent business isn’t allowed to have access to its own business revenues, by its software vendor?”
When asked about Steinbaum and Paul’s comments, Lyft replied, “Drivers still see these revenues on a weekly basis as the new weekly pay statement includes the weekly total amount riders paid, including all fees, taxes and other pass-through costs.”
At least some drivers say not being able to see what the rider paid will affect their revenue, or at least the thoroughness with which they can analyze their profitability. One veteran driver told Jalopnik that he used to look at every fare to see if the rider paid way more than he received. If that was the case, he would contact Lyft support and “pursue fare adjustments.”
“I’d consistently get adjustments,” the driver said. “They’d apologize. They’d admit mistakes. They’d explain new Power Zone features [when drivers receive a few extra dollars’ bonus in high-demand areas] and different rate card adjustments internally that were not debugged properly yet. They’d say sorry and compensate...I lose all of this now.”
