The human price of dynamic pay
She hoped platform work would provide flexibility and independence, but dynamic pricing soon undermined both.
“I work only throughout the whole day and … early in the morning till evening time… I find it very unfair that there are female drivers that want to work, but we can't work the areas that the male drivers can do because obviously … we're going to feel unsafe… So, throughout the day, they'll give us the lowest fares… It's just absolutely horrendous prices”, she explained. Safety concerns meant she avoided night shifts, the very periods when “surge” prices were often highest. As a result, her daily earnings remained low and unpredictable.
“The prices change so much, up and down,” she said.
“You just all over the place because you … can't know what … you're going to be earning. Like, there'll be days … and I'm like, oh my God … I can't live on this. Like, it could be 60 to 80 pounds … So how can you live off that kind of wage?”
Given that the company calculates working time only from passenger pick-up to drop-off, excluding long waiting periods between jobs, “It’s below even the minimum wage,” she said.
The uncertainty affected every part of her life. “If you’ve got commitments and family and children, then you just can't plan it because you don't know what your wage is going be, because every month your wage goes up and down, up and down” she said. “It drains you”. She described sleepless nights, poor diet, and a sense of constant anxiety about bills.
Dynamic pricing also complicated her sense of control over the job. She noticed the option for customers to make cash payments reactivating on her app even after she had turned them off, leaving her feeling unsafe: “Sometimes it happens. You’ve switched it off, but somehow Uber switches it back on”. This reinforced her perception that the platform’s systems prioritised revenue rather than driver safety.
When the level of payment dropped between acceptance and payment, her attempts to query this were dismissed: “They say, oh, have you got any … pictures or anything to send us to say that was a correct price? But surely their systems should be able to pick that up”. Such moments deepened her frustration, illustrating the lack of accountability within algorithmic pay systems.
Her schedule reflected the cost of this instability: six days a week, up to thirteen hours a day. “You have a day off? Yeah. You are absolutely exhausted”, she said. “But if I don't go the next day, I won't earn the money that I need to earn to pay all … outgoing ... So, it's just like … a cycle because you think, I need to do it”. This cycle left her socially isolated, working only to cover basic expenses.
“Obviously if they gave us good prices in the day as well, we could have a manageable … better life” she said. “Our health would be much better”. For Zara, dynamic pricing magnified inequality, exposing women drivers to both economic and physical insecurity. It trapped her in an exhausting loop of unpredictable earnings and deteriorating wellbeing, an experience that speaks to the broader consequences of algorithmic wage control.
Zara’s account shows how dynamic pay interacts with gendered safety constraints, excluding women from higher-paying hours and deepening income insecurity and exhaustion
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