I include Uber in this rant. The gig economy that these organisations operate is thoroughly repugnant. While they float on the borderline between legality and outright illegal, they infest our roads with unqualified riders who are supposedly self employed, yet if HMRC were to look closely at their business practises, would decide that they are in reality employed. There is little in the way of oversight as the DVSA discovered when they conducted a sting operation recently. The modus operandi seems to be to have a group of boat people occupying the same dwelling with one machine, one insurance certificate and one CBT certificate. That or they forge the latter. Certainly I’ve had them turn up for training on an uninsured machine. Also untaxed and no L plates.
Meanwhile, the organisations are creaming off a tidy profit at the expense of this activity. We have now seen the riders engage on a nice little side-line of cash for crash. Now, the owners of the business are not involved in that, to be sure, but their business practices actively encourage people who are at the bottom rung to add on a little profitable side-line, so it’s inevitable that something like this will be going on.
I had one this week. The husband rode the bike in for his wife to use for her CBT. As soon as I see the stupid blue box on the back of the bike, my hackles rise. I can’t help it as I despise the whole enterprise and want nothing to do with it, so have to struggle to smile and be polite. I’d make a brilliant actor. Anyway, when I checked, the certificate of insurance didn’t cover the wife as a named rider, so she couldn’t use that bike and had to hire one of ours.
She was a rarity among my experience of delivery riders in that she was good enough (just) for me to issue a certificate. I made a small error when filling it out. I have always struggled with writing legibly. It’s why I use a fountain pen for handwriting. It slows my hand down. Usually, my brain is racing ahead and my hand struggles to keep pace, missing out letters and sometimes whole words. When filling out forms, I use upper case for the same reason, it forces me to take it slowly. Even so, I make the occasional slip up and I did on this occasion. I realised and corrected it as required by the DVSA. I drew a line though the mistake, leaving it clearly visible, wrote the correction above and signed the correction. This is the official way to do it and the certificate is a legal document acceptable to the DVSA, the police, insurance companies and so on.
Not, apparently for the cunts at Uber who rejected it. They, it seems, know better than either me or the DVSA. The people who operate what can best be described as sharp practice are now telling me how to complete a CBT certificate satisfactorily. I had to issue a duplicate, entirely unnecessarily, because if she had been going for test, the examiner would have accepted it, but not the cunts at Uber.
My irritation, nay, anger, is that people I utterly despise, who are barely the right side of both the law and morality, who wouldn’t recognise ethical behaviour if it slapped them in the face with a halibut, are setting themselves up in authority over me when it comes to issuing a CBT certificate. How fucking dare they! Frankly, I want no relationship with these charlatans whatsoever. I don’t use their services and never will. I am a reluctant party when it comes to training their riders. If it was my ATB (authorised training body) I’d have a set up that actively excluded them. It’s possible to do this if CBT isn’t sold as a standalone product, rather as a part of a test course. As a one-man operation it would be possible to do this, taking those learners who want to ride a motorcycle, not have a scooter just for convenience or to deliver pizzas.
As an aside to this, there is an organisation called Ride To. This is another arm of this gig economy. The hedge fund managers who finance these outfits rightly recognise that motorcycle training is a marginal business, so not worth investing in. Ride To is a solution to this. Inserting themselves between the business and the client, it acts like a booking service, creaming off money from the business for its ‘service’ of finding a client. The whole idea is parasitic. Which is why in the Bristol area, they have very few takers. The London boys are more inclined to play the game. The logic being that an unsold slot might as well be sold at a lower price rather than leave it empty. But the margins are so low, that you might as well leave it unsold as you won’t be involving the expenses incurred with running the course for some parasite to profit from.
Although I don’t have an ATB as I can’t be bothered with the hassle, I do have my own training operation, however this is purely for advanced riding, so fortunately, I’m not on their radar. If I was, they would be getting the same sharp response that they got from an ATB I worked for recently.