On most Monday mornings at 9:45, twenty-five female business owners from Harlem, New York get together in a conference room at the Grameen America office on 125th Street for their weekly meeting.

Seated around pale white tables in a room with windows on one side and frosted glass walls on the other, all of the women have received small loans from Grameen America. A non-profit charity which provides loans starting at $2,000, the micro-lender aims to help low income female entrepreneurs who wish to start or expand a small business. …

When Tina Raveneau started driving for Uber in July 2017, she thought she had it all figured out. As a single mother, she needed a job with flexible hours so she could devote time to her son. Uber was promising just that; the flexibility of working when she wanted and the advertised promise of $1700 a week in take-home pay. So Raveneau quit her job as a store manager and started driving. She planned to rent a car first and then save up, so she could eventually buy one for herself.

Two years down the line, Uber’s promises have proved…

Noah Forman, an Uber driver, urinates into his used coffee cups. Why? Because stopping to use the restroom could mean losing an hour’s worth of fares.

Forman works 8-to-10-hour shifts, but he only stops to use the restroom once. In the night, he looks for a “safe” spot, usually near a fire hydrant or a dark alley, and relieves himself in a used coffee cup or a disposable bottle.

Most Uber and other e-hail drivers in the city resort to using coffee cups or disposable bottles to urinate. All 15 of the drivers interviewed for this story said that they…

In a sharp response to new city regulations meant to rein in e-hail companies, Uber has told drivers that it will start locking them out of their apps if they are in an area without enough “rider demand.”

Uber said this was in response to the Taxi and Limousine Commission’s minimum payment standard for drivers and the body’s push to limit the number of empty cabs on the road.

Angered by Uber’s announcement, drivers organized a protest on the morning of September 17. Over a thousand drivers formed a caravan and halted rush hour traffic on Brooklyn Bridge and FDR…

Driving down Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn in his 2000 Ford E-450 shuttle bus one recent afternoon, Winston Williams spotted a woman near the Barclays Center waving him down. He pulled his shuttle bus up to the sidewalk, opened the door, and let her in. The woman took a seat, and Williams pulled back out into traffic.

Williams was born in Jamaica and came to New York when he was 12. He began driving a commuter van (or “dollar van”) on Flatbush, home to the under-performing B41 bus, in 1995. …