The pattern this counters

Zippabout is built against one specific trick: pay that is quoted per job, that shifts from one offer to the next, and that never tells you the real rate per hour once your costs are in. You are shown a headline number for a task. You are not shown what it works out to an hour, and you are not shown the sums. The result is that a lot of jobs pay far less than they look.

How the trick works

• Per-job, not per-hour. A flat figure for a task hides the time and distance behind it. £12 sounds fine until it is an hour of driving and waiting.
• Costs are yours, and invisible. Fuel, wear, insurance and the rest come out of your pocket. The offer is shown before costs, so the number on screen is not the number you keep.
• Offers vary, person to person. Two people can be shown different pay for similar work, and the reasons are not explained. That makes it hard to know what fair even looks like.
• The maths is hidden. You are asked to accept or decline in seconds, with no breakdown. Speed plus no breakdown is the whole point.

What the law said

This is not a fringe complaint. In 2021, in Uber BV and others v Aslam and others [2021] UKSC 5, the UK Supreme Court ruled that the drivers in that case were workers, not self-employed contractors, and so were entitled to rights such as the minimum wage and paid holiday. The judgment looked past the wording of the contracts to the reality of the work: who set the pay, who set the terms, and how little control the driver actually had. The neutral citation is UKSC 2019-0029.

That case is about employment status, not about this calculator. But it settled something useful: a court agreed that the way this pay is framed can hide the real deal, and that the reality underneath matters more than the label on top.

What the research calls it

The legal scholar Veena Dubal has a name for the newer version of this: algorithmic wage discrimination. Her work describes pay that is set by opaque, shifting, personalised calculations, so that different workers are paid different amounts for similar work, and no one can see the rule behind their own pay. Naming it matters, because a thing you can name is a thing you can push back on.

The antidote is boring on purpose

Zippabout does not fight opaque pay with a better black box. It fights it with the plainest possible thing: the sums, on screen, that you could check on paper. Pay, minus mileage cost, divided by hours. A rate per hour. A line saying whether that clears the floor you set. That is the whole tool, and it is meant to stay that simple.

This is antidote number two in the book Grift, Inc., which is about the slow slide of products and platforms from useful to extractive. You can read about the book at griftinc.com.