Today evening, it was a traffic filled ride from Jalan Ampang to Bangsar Village and my Grab driver was a Malaysian Chinese Woman with a very Singaporean accent ma. She was complaining about the traffic and the way that Waze was taking her. We got chatting as I could sense she is up for a conversation and felt like she had a career earlier, to taking up Grab three years back. She was an operator at Micron in Singapore at Bendemeer Road. She got her PR but surrendered it when she moved back to KL to get her CPF money. She regrets surrendering her PR, as she could then drive Grab there and earn as much in a day as she earns in a week.
The Cheras native, drives for 14 hours a day, and drives long hours as she needs the money although the flexible nature of driving Grab is a key attraction, as well as not having a boss to boss over them. She earns RM 200 per day after fuel and car maintenance. She takes a day off per week in which she invests in a massage that she calls it her hobby. So it is a spend of RM 85 for a two hour massage to restore herself.
A lot of Grab Drivers are women in KL, and this aspect of the platform ecosystem is indeed encouraging, although as per my non random purposive sampling, Grab Plus drivers are educated and use good business models to drive revenue, as entrepreneurs which they are at their scale.
Change Thinker 