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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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Lol, Uber has been offering this for years.

Another example is that the financial industry already pays for employees to take late night taxis home.

It's common in law, too, and you can also order food if you're working late. I worked in an office on the North Side from 2015 to 2017, when we moved into new digs in the Strip District. The move roughly coincided with Uber Eats launching in Pittsburgh and us switching over to them for our "late night perks". To be clear, the late-night car service is aimed toward people who rely on transit to get to work and is only offered by companies that don't offer parking passes. the rationale was that after 8 pm, transit switched from operating every 15 minutes to operating every hour, and since we were on the North Side you'd have to either walk across the bridge to Downtown or take 2 buses unless you happened to be on your route already, and doubling the wait times made that impracticable. I lived in the exurbs at the time and almost always drove in anyway, so I never used it.

Anyway, prior to the move the firm used a black car service which was better than Uber but a bit intimidating for normal people. A guy a worked with who used it once was kind of freaked out when a guy showed up in a Lincoln and opened the door for him. The reason why we switched was that the process, for both that and ordering food after 7 pm, used to be cumbersome. You had to use the company credit card and get receipts, and then fill out an expense report and submit it to HR. Then, just to make things perverse, HR would come back to me with another form I had to sign to demonstrate that the expense had been approved by an attorney (even though I already signed the expense report). The HR lady was thrilled about the switch because we could just order everything through the company account which would put the appropriate restrictions on time, location, price, etc., and then not worry about the forms. Then like 6 months later they started charging an additional 10% on business accounts and she was mildly pissed. I still had to deal with a ton of other credit card approvals, petty cash forms, reimbursement forms, mileage logs, and other bullshit that I (and everyone else) waited to do until the last minute to the long-suffering HR lady's eternal consternation. Good times.

In any event, I haven't heard of anyone using Uber for Business other than for occasional transportation like when traveling out of town or something like that. I don't see it ever becoming an everyday perk for anyone, let alone common enough to have any significant impact on traffic. Perks are usually commensurate with the level of responsibility and the nature of the work involved. Lots of people work late, but most of them can't bill food to the company because the added value doesn't justify it. When the extra 3 hours you spend at work clearly nets the company an additional thousand dollars, 20 bucks worth of takeout isn't an issue. Company cars are usually reserved for people in sales or other jobs that require you to be on the road all day, and even then they have to pay taxes on them based on personal use. One firm I worked at gave the attorneys parking passes but admins had to take the bus. This is because they expected the attorneys to work late hours regularly enough that paying for a spot was cheaper than paying for a car service. Admins never worked late. I switched jobs specifically because I hated being stuck at work late enough to be able to watch night games at PNC from my office window.

I was able to speak this evening with someone I know who works in a suitable job, suitably high up, for a large multi-national. They also pushed back a bit, but I was able to prod. That company has fleet vehicles for a few categories of folks, many of which are plausibly job-needs-based. Some of those job-needs seemed like they might be replaceable by an ACaaS. Probably the biggest one that wouldn't have worked was a set of positions where they would be visiting multiple locations each day with overnight stays along the way. The problem here is actually kind of subtle, because it's not the first problem you'd think of with Uber. With Uber, your first problem would be that you may just be heading from town to town on your trip, so you might not get a human who wants to drive out there. With ACaaS, if the same company runs in the neighboring town, it can just join the fleet there. No, the problem was that then you'd have to pull your suitcase out of the trunk every time you got to a new location, and you're visiting 3-4 of them before you stop for the night!

Beyond job needs, this multi-national gives every single VP or higher a fleet vehicle. Why? Honestly, my interlocutor explained the reasoning, and there was nothing there that really made a distinction. Why not offer it to one level below VP, even a cheaper car (they offer different tiers of cars to different levels already)? No real reason. It would cost money. But it costs money to give them to VPs and up, too. At one point, the explanation was that the people high up enough already made so much money that they didn't want any more cash, so it was about finding other perks for them. (I lol'd a bit.) I guess you can save a little in taxes. I didn't dig in to details of how they compute it, but I was told that they do have a monthly charge on their paycheck to cover whatever taxable portion; it seemed like they didn't have much detailed paperwork and that it was a mostly fixed monthly charge; it also seemed pretty cheap. We consulted with ChatGPT about reasons to offer company cars, and it threw in that there could be cost benefits by making a deal with an auto company to buy higher volume for cheaper or to save on insurance.

Reason after reason just didn't draw a line. "It's a status symbol." Well, if your employees were all some multiplier more productive, couldn't you give one level below VPs their slightly lower status symbol, and give more expensive status symbols up the chain? Basically, it's expensive. If it was cheaper, I guess they could throw the perk around a bit more. Of course, like any perk, some employees might not even value it much; might prefer cash. My wife complains that her salary is lower because they offer health insurance, even though she doesn't use it, because she's on my insurance.

I was at some point told that those folks definitely didn't need company cars. In fact, when I poked around with whether something like Uber/ACaaS could make any sense if it could be done at the right price point, I was told that it would absolutely be just fine for those folks who are getting their car just because they're a VP-or-higher. Okay-ish for some job-needs. Just don't have a suitcase.

Their view, from the perspective of a multi-national, would be that it would be extremely localized. You mention some of the factors. Are you paying for parking passes? How much does that cost in your area? Would they be transiting in/out otherwise? If your city is going to hell in a handbasket, what's the value of making sure your valuable-enough employee doesn't get stabbed in the subway? We sort of settled on the idea that some set of factors could make it plausible in some places (again, the price point is a huge driver). But you're not going to have the same case in Peoria that you would in NYC or wherever.

They also told me that there are, indeed, folks in the business who are, for lack of a better word, agitating for the company to subsidize commuting costs for more employees. And it seems like this sort of Uber type thing is vaguely in scope of one of the ways they're proposing to do that below the level of company cars. I'm more of a 'just give me cash' kinda person, unless, like I said, there is some very acute parking situation or something that really aligns the business incentives.