On a recent Uber ride in Kingston, Jamaica’s capital, my driver told me about his three other jobs. On the weekends, he worked as an air conditioning repair technician. He also tended to a small plot of land in the countryside to grow food for his family, and sold the surplus for extra cash. He picked up Uber as a way to fill the downtime during his day job as a police officer. In a country with the highest homicide rate in the Americas, it’s remarkable that police officers have enough spare time to drive taxis.
Another recent driver was a civil servant: even the salaries of stable government jobs aren’t nearly enough to cover the basics. Many welfare programmes fail to reach the poorest individuals, who tend to be informally employed without access to proper identification or supporting documentation.
