By putting too much faith in the importance of ratings and making the process too casual, low-income individuals are at the mercy of the gig economy

Q: I recently took a cab via the ride-share service Uber. The car stank, the seatbelt didn’t work and the driver was intermittently on his cellphone. At the end of the journey, I was invited to rate my ride. I haven’t done so yet, but I want to give him one star. Should I?

A: OK. I understand why you might ask this and to a large extent, how you respond will depend on how you behave in equivalent real-world situations. But to my mind this is relatively straightforward. You received bad service and you are a complete monster if you go ahead with a bad rating.

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Ratings culture, as we know, has run out of control. It’s the first thing TV satirists reach for when they write about the internet. Ratings! Where will they end? All those smiley/frowny faces and thumbs ups and thumbs downs have ushered in a horrible reductionist phase in world history. It’s not just rate my ride but rate my everything, and it has made us all hungry for worthless approval.

That’s fine. But it’s important to make a distinction between ratings on Facebook, which might chip away at our collective wellbeing in ways that, in the long term, have serious existential consequences but no immediate effect, and their impact in the gig economy, where the outcome of a one-star review can be immediate and dire.

It’s true that we’ve always had ratings. We complain to Ofcom (or in the US, to the FCC) when a TV show offends us. We rate with our feet and our remote control. These are broadly impersonal mechanisms of review, for which the balance of power is weighted against the individual reviewer, to preserve against cranks and people trying it on. Prior to the internet, it took time and effort to register an opinion, which not only raised the value of the exercise but meant that in broad terms, most individual complainants were punching up.

By contrast, the gig economy, by putting too much faith in the importance of ratings and making the process of rating too casual, has exposed low-income individuals to the Emperor Nero-type whims of the people in the back of their cabs. On the rare occasions I dig deep and fork out for a regular taxi these days – as opposed to a ride-share company – the thing I enjoy most is the sheer luxury of being in a ratings-free zone.

I think a useful equivalent is to consider what you do in a restaurant if you receive bad service. Do you calibrate your tip according to how fast your food comes out? I doubt it. Slow service in a restaurant is usually the fault of the management, not the server – but even if your waiter is genuinely bad, my sense is most of us wouldn’t dock him the tip. There is no legal obligation to leave a gratuity, but it is still understood to be a nonnegotiable part of the transaction on which a large part the server’s income depends.

Here’s the problem with star ratings: they are unsubtle. That’s why film and theatre critics hate them. If you give your driver one star, it will not address the fact of the broken seat belt or phone use. It won’t distinguish your grievance from the guy who gives him one star because he’s having a bad day, or hates Arab drivers, or threw up in the back and was yelled at and decided to take it out on the victim.

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If there is a genuinely dangerous car on the road, then giving him one star isn’t enough of a response; if the ride was merely shoddy, then the consequences of one star are too dire. We know, from recent reporting, that ride-share services take their driver ratings system very seriously. At Uber, for example, when a driver’s average rating slips below a certain point, he is summoned to HQ for something called a “quality session”, which it is impossible not to hear as a euphemism.

If you feel strongly enough about the faults in the service, then I would suggest that rather than rating him you email customer service to voice your specific concerns. (Although again, even that worries me, given the dispensability of the “service providers” who work for these companies).

So here’s how I think you should look at it. How would you rate your own performance at work today? And I don’t mean your overall average. I mean how would you rate every 20-minute chunk of your time, from the minute you clocked in to when you went home? How did you do between your snack at 11.30am and lunchtime? What about the 10 minutes you skived off to go and sit in the toilet, or the dental appointment you attended on company time, or all that private email you sent during the afternoon slump?

Unless there’s a very good reason for it, don’t dignify these ratings systems by assuming they’re real. Over-tip, over-praise, and give everyone who serves you five stars as a matter of principle.