There are many serious issues around how Lyft/Uber (and many others) treat their "employees" and I'm happy if things are moving in a direction to help them out. However, as a customer, Lyft/Uber has been HUGELY better than any previous taxi experience, in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Before Uber was a thing, I tried getting a taxi in the Bay Area at 3 different times. Months apart. Calling different companies (that I found by searching "Bay Area taxi"). In ALL cases there were issues, huge issues:
* the first one I called said he'll be there in 20 minutes(!!) but 30 minutes later he didn't show nor called. I call back and someone else answers and says they'll be there in 20 minutes, ofc 30 minutes later nobody showed up...
* the second time I needed a taxi I called, said they will be there in 30 minutes and never showed or answered any subsequent calls
* third time I think someone DID show up, after about 30 minutes (15 minutes later than they said they will)
Absolutely horrible, unacceptable experience. With Lyft/Uber I never had any such issues and I took many more rides with those. Not to mention it was much cheaper (the latter likely has something to do with the main complains being raised now by their employees).
Look, I fully support cab riders to get a living wage, even if that means significantly increasing my fare, but I do hope the new legislation doesn't result in going back to the pre-Lyft/Uber taxi experience because that was just insanely bad. Also, at least some of the drivers I talked to were doing this as an aside so it makes total sense for them to be contractors (one guy was temporarily in the Bay Area doing some construction work so he was Uber-ing on the side for extra money) so that is another issue that needs to be considered in legislation to still enable this type of use case.
I don’t think we can really put the genie back into the bottle there. Uber and Lyft have proven that app-based hailing is what people want. The costs will go up though.
I suspect it’s one of those case where things are bad because it made no economic sense to make them better, a bit like airplane boarding.
In the case of taxis, replacing them by Uber and lyft made no sense globally, because it was just exploiting the drivers, and using venture capital in an unsustainable manner.
Shortly after Uber and Lyft became popular, they were forced out of Austin due to a scuffle around local regulation. It took very little time for some new competitors to start up, one of which (RideAustin), is still thriving. The cost is almost exactly the same, but far more money goes to the drivers, and the drivers tend to be far higher quality. If memory serves me right, they even adopted some user-friendly features like a female-only driver setting first too. You can have your cake and eat it too: there's no real dichotomy between Uber/Lyft and the taxi companies.
No, "fingerprinting" was the issue the City marketed.
The actual scuffle was because the City of Austin wanted ride-level trip data and a larger fee from the individual rides. Further, Mayor Adler's goal was a tax+security screening system for anyone who wanted to transact online. Those are his words, not mine. Quoted in the post below.
Ride-level data and per-trip fees are also a requirement in New York City. In fact, now minimum wages are required in New York for TNC drivers. The point still stands, is that Uber has never, and would not ever, actually threaten to leave bigger markets. And the data isn't some evil hoovering scheme, but it is incredibly helpful with city planning:
> Like camera-wearing meerkats, taxis provided insight into the city’s transportation ecosystem. Are cabs speeding along a certain stretch of street? Time to review the street design. Getting stuck at the same intersection every rush hour? Maybe rethink the traffic light timing.
oh this is interesting to read. as someone who lives in Austin, I had heard so much about all this when it was going on but I never really actually looked enough into it to try and understand it all. At that point, I had stopped driving for lyft, so it didn't particularly affect me (especially because at the time I was living in Williamson county outside of Austin city limits so I could at least still use it for rideshare purposes), but I certainly was curious to learn more. Thank you for sharing.
Before Uber and Lyft cabs were terrible everywhere except maybe London and Tokyo. Competition was sorely needed in this industry. I hope the competition continues even if the prices go up.
Beijing, Shanghai, and a few their Chinese cities were decent enough, as were the few Indian cities I went to and Bangkok. Many smaller SE Asian cities were horrible though, with western tourists seen as prime targets for the local taxi mafia.
Anecdotal, but I've had less than great experiences with both Uber and Lyft. The most common issue if that a driver will accept you as passenger, then somewhere along the way, they cancel you, leaving you start waiting again for a new driver. Presumably they got a closer/better fare wherever they were driving from, but it sucks to be strung along 2 or 3 times like that while waiting for a ride home.
I can barely remember my interaction with anyone I met yesterday. How do you remember three distinct taxi (and therefore trivial) encounters from years ago?
Do you work for Uber, or do you just have an amazing memory?
uh... really? you should get that memory thing checked out.
I too have absolutely terrible pre-uber experiences (in the DC area). If one was out drinking in DC, and needed a cab back across the river to VA, you had to hope the cabbie had the doors unlocked, because they couldn't refuse a fair once you got in and sat in the car, otherwise they'd just drive away if you told them where you were going. And it was "cash only". Which I later learned was a load of BS, when I had a $100+ fare for work, cabbie happily pulled out the old cc scanner complete with carbon paper... Things didn't get better until my roommate introduced me to his "driver". Which is was just a guy with a Town Car that I could call, tell him where I'm going and when, and if he was available, he'd quote me a price (there was no meter or anything). And then there was the stress of is the cabbie I called for going to show up in time to get me to the airport at 6am. Uber/Lyft crushed it for all these reasons, and if the prices need to rise a little, sure fine.
The example of a new company in Austin doing it's own little Austin thing is fine, but the other huge benefit of Uber is it travel. If I get off a plane in Europe, NYC, SF, small po-dunk town, whatever, I've now got a very frictionless path to getting myself some transportation. Don't gotta look up the local cab company, don't gotta mess with the local mass transit, all my billing info is setup and ready to go. Makes me wonder if everyone seemingly hating on them or wishing them harm is too young to remember how shitty things were before. On the "employee" side, I do know a number of people who drive for either or both company, but they all do it on the side, fwiw.
I'd wager because strong emotion tends to result in strong memories, and waiting for a needed ride that isn't showing up is stressful, particularly if you have no insight into where the right might be or if/when it's arriving.
I have memories of several times I was stood up or unreasonably delayed by bad taxi service / rideshare service, and the higher-stress ones (e.g., when I was trying to catch a plane) are the most vivid. One's from over a decade ago - I can't remember where I was going, but I remember the room I was in, pacing back and forth, calling the taxi dispatcher for the 3rd time.
I remember those taxi experiences because those were the only 3 times I needed a taxi in the first few years in the Bay Area, so quite easy to remember. If I had needed to take many rides/often then likely I won't remember as many details.
The other problem is that there are a dozen or more cab companies in SF, so sometimes you'd call a cab from one company and see empty cars from other companies drive by. So you have to make the choice between alienating the company you called by taking a competing cab, or waiting and hoping that your called cab shows up.
Fun fact - Austin is a peculiar example of a city that banned uber and basically created a black market for makeshift ridesharing service based on facebook groups, google docs, craigslist adds and only god knows what else.
People think that once uber is dead ridesharing will disappear, but reality shows that once idea is in the wild it's almost impossible to stop it.
This is particularly the case when taxis are so painfully awful. Every time I ride one I vow "never again." Its always a horrible experience and costs 2X as much as anything else.
Taxis cost as much as uber's if you're traveling in a major city under about 1.5 miles. I prefer taxi's to uber's if im next to a hotspot and you can just give directions by cross-street.
I worry that this bill will ultimately eliminate a unique niche in the job market. I have several family members who drive for Uber/Lyft and consider it a great way to make money. One of the aspects they like is how much independence they have: no manager, no set schedule, no need to work the same number of hours each week or each day. The pay is fine - not great - but the flexibility makes working for Uber much more appealing than e.g. working as a receptionist or taking another service job. Many drivers I've ridden with seem to value that component as well. If Uber switches to treating drivers as employees (which makes each driver have higher overhead) then they'll probably switch to.... well, treating them as employees: stricter rules about when you have to drive, how much you have to drive, and so on. The tradeoff will benefit some employees - basically those who are trying to make Uber into a full-time job - at the expense of others.
“Unique niches” of the job market that exploit the people filling them must be regulated out of existence. Uber drivers who very carefully manage their overhead generally still earn a pittance, near minimum wage or even below it. Uber mostly relies on the ignorance of their drivers who essentially accelerate the conversion of stored value in their vehicle into short-term earnings. Then when the first bill comes for brake pads, tires, shocks, CV joints and tie rod ends they pack it in. This is why their driver turnover rate is astronomical. The other side of the issue is the drivers who ignore such things and drive all over the place in under-maintained, under-insured cars, converting a public nuisance externality into Uber revenue and prolonged starvation wages.
The claim that Uber drivers aren't actually earning money but just engaging in "conversion of stored value in their vehicle into short-term earnings" is based on a clearly flawed study [0]. Even after subtracting out vehicle wear and tear, drivers make a modest (but not great) wage. You can rail about "exploitation" and "starvation wages" but the people I know who have worked for Uber generally thought the wage was decent and the conditions were better than most alternatives. Removing the option to "be exploited" by Uber doesn't leave them working a cushy 6-figure software job; it leads to doing work they like less.
Drivers who are aquainted with you may make a modest wage, and I’ll wager you know no drivers in Minneapolis nor Orlando, for their mileage rates cause their rideshare labor to be an entirely charitable endeavor.
No one forces anyone to drive for Uber or Lyft. If they don't like the money they're making, they can go work at a regular job. With sub-4% unemployment there are PLENTY of jobs out there.
Yup. In Florida, many of them are illegals, many of them are hobos with cars, and others are indentured to crime rings where one vehicle is swapped out with several drivers whose faces apparently all look alike to the rideshare company management. Here’s an example for you: today, Tuesday, MCO is closed, yet the rideshare staging lot has over 25 vehicles in it. Yesterday, Monday, FLL was closed for weather, and the rideshare staging lot had over 55 vehicles parked in it with their homeless drivers sleeping through the hurricane to get first crack at inbound flights once they resumed. Nice work if you can get it.
Well Uber could also go the other way and free the market that they oversee - allow drivers to set their own rates and make the cut that Uber takes transparent to both driver and rider.
That’s already the case; drivers choose to sell their services to Uber at the rate Uber has offered, versus selling their services to anyone else that participates in the unskilled labor market.
Why would having a person classified as an employee turn it into a full time job? Like why would they hire managers and set schedules when it gives no benifit to Uber?
To me this closes a loophole. As you say these people drive for Uber, uber is doing the employing. This is not like if a contracted a builder to renovate my kitchen. That is the class of employment that are real contractors.
The current scenario is that you can turn the app on and do work any time you want to do it. If you are an hourly-paid employee, you can't just choose the times that suit you, because it might not suit what's going on at that time. You can't just drive where you want, because it might not suit what's going on. So the only solution is going to be something like what you usually think of for employed work. Set hours and times etc.
Because part of the equation for Uber is having enough workers out there to fill demand by random chance.
If they have to pay a full-time employee, they can schedule the employee and force them to drive to a certain location, and do a certain number of trips, otherwise they would just fire them. They can squeeze out more efficiency from a single driver rather than hope that there's enough random drivers to fulfill all the demand.
Why "random chance"? Instead, Uber could encourage more people to be "on the clock" at high demand times by increasing hourly wages during those times. It feels like you are making mountains out of molehills.
Why would they want to pay people who aren't actually doing work? That's the point if they are forced to take full-time employees, those employees should be working all the time, instead of at their leisure the way it currently is. There is no requirement to take a ride if you don't want to right now, but if there's surge, drivers will be encouraged to work. If they are full-time employees, they just work for a flat rate and at the places and times that the employer requires them to be, in order for them to be maximally used.
Hiring people to just sit around and do nothing doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
"If you are an hourly-paid employee, you can't just choose the times that suit you"
Why not?
Or more specifically: the law doesn't require this, so why would it have to change?
The bill merely states, "hey, this flexible way you've been working, that's not independent contracting, that's employment and the employer have to abide by all these other regulations." Those regulations in no way require Uber to make workers work for specific hours, pay them hourly, or schedule their work differently. In fact, it just says, "the way you're already working, that's employment." So why do you think they'd have to change how they work?
The law may not state it but economics does. Even the cheapest insurance plans cost 500/mo. If you drive an hour a month and earn $100 for the month, it is not cost effective to issue a full health plan for that. There is a break even point of course. But that break even point will not allow driver flexibility.
The real problem here is the coupling of healthcare with employment. Other than health insurance, there's very little in the way of benefits that would really need to be paid for a gig worker, I'm sure a lot of them would just prefer extra money. If the cost of healthcare was borne by the taxpayer, rather than a component of wages, then a case could be made that small shifts are feasible.
If its not legal to drive uninsured and your insurance wont cover you driving commercially why is it OK for you to drive in such a way such that if you hurt someone they are screwed because you can't pay and your insurance wont?
I think most of planet earth only wants to work 1 gig or at most 2 for somewhere between 20 and 40 hours. I doubt people who want to work a tiny number of hours make up a meaningful proportion of the workforce. In other words much ado about nothing.
> Why would having a person classified as an employee turn it into a full time job?
I'm not too familiar with employment law, but in most governments, employees have rights and benefits that cost a company a fixed amount that a contractor doesn't.
Isn't that only Fulltime employees? When I worked part time for a grocery store, I did not get benefits like insurance. If somebody only drives for Uber 10 hours a week, don't they only qualify as a part time employee and only get those meager benefits?
Uber is a marketing company. The Uber business model is nearly identical to the taxi business model it is replacing — except taxi drivers don’t have to lease or rent cars from Uber as they did with the taxi company. You also don’t have mobster-controlled “Medallions” as a means to artificially constrict supply.
I think a lot of people have no idea how the old taxi business worked.. it was far worse than Uber — it was more of a monopoly as well because you were required to drive a specifically-branded car purchased or leased from the taxi company. You couldn’t use the same car to drive for other companies. Damage had to be repaired at the specifically designated repair shop (owned by the taxi company of course,) and you had to pay for insurance from the specific taxi company “vendor” (also owned by the taxi company.)
And.. you were an independent contractor; you were the customer of the taxi company. You got to pay your own self-employment taxes, but your own health insurance and if you got sick, you still had to pay the taxi company the lease fee for the car. While you did collect your own cash fares, you had to pay a very high percentage (8-10%) on credit card fares and you were paid those fares weekly. If you lost the charge slip paper, you lost the fare, however the taxi company still had the swipe, so they’d still collect the money but just not pay any of it to you.
The taxi business is and was an incredibly corrupt and nasty business. There is a reason that job was popular with fresh off the boat immigrants — anyone who had done the job more than a minute knew how much of a rip-off it was (unless you were willing to sleep in your car and drive 16+ hour days in order to save up money to start your own limo business or convenience store which was a common goal among many of the south Asian immigrants I drove with.)
The kids hating on Uber really have no idea what they are talking about. Unless someone has actually worked in the towing, taxi, limousine, hot shot, or trucking businesses (all extremely nasty and tough businesses,) it’s pretty hard to have much credibility when complaining about the gig economy, Uber, etc. Uber/Lift/Doordash is a dream compared to the bad old days. You can have one car and pretty much drive and deliver as much as you want and make money proportional to how hard you are willing to work. It isn’t easy-street, but nobody plans on being a career Uber driver — it’s a stopgap, a transition, or a supplement. Anyone thinking that this is some kind of full time career is either of low-IQ and has no prospects of doing anything better, or just lacks ambition. Being a McDonald’s cashier ought not be a career either, but there are people working in that position for 15+ years. At that point, that failure is on them. We shouldn’t be optimizing society around making low wage service jobs into some kind of permanent career. Even a high school kid gets promoted at McDonalds if they stick around for more than a few minutes, yet there are literally people who have been making minimum wage for years. At some point people ought to be treated as adults and not like exploited children. A person chooses to drive for Uber/a taxi/whatever. They aren’t Shanghaied or otherwise indentured. If people don’t want to do those jobs, then that ought to motivate them to find something slightly better — or start at the bottom washing dishes somewhere and move up through a restaurant’s ranks. But that requires hard work and dedication— traits in very short supply in an era where people that literally sweep floors think that work is worth $15 per hour.
Source: I drove for Yellow Cab Houston in the summer of 2001. I also drove hot shot deliveries in Houston in 2008 and a good friend of mine owned a bike courier business. I also worked a string of shitty restaurant and bar jobs, lived on the street a short time and now I work as a software engineering project manager for one of those FANG companies.
I fail to see how "this is not bad because this other thing is also bad" is a valid argument. Sure, the medallion taxi system has bad things about it. But then Uber
- Pays low, doesn't pay benefits, yadda yadda. All the stuff I assume people generally mean when they talk about "the kids hating on Uber"
- Went into towns and actively broke the law (bypassing the current taxi system). Sure, "civil disobedience" and all that, but the people that actually paid any real price for that disobedience (https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/No-fair-say-Ube...)
- Uber is burning money in order to corner the market. Eventually they're going to either go under or change their entire pricing structure. Nobody is going to win when that happens. There's a reason countries wield financial weapons when other countries start dumping like that; it's bad for everyone involved but the dumper.
>...traits in very short supply in an era where people that literally sweep floors think that work is worth $15 per hour.
The move to increase the minimum wage to 15 is presented by the uninformed as a cash grab by the lazy. The truth is 15 dollars just isn't much nowadays. The old often have a hard time forgetting about the nominal value and considering the actual buying power.
Lets ignore the fact that minimum wage workers can't actually buy houses and compare the minimum wage of $1 in 1960 to the cost of a median house at 11,900. So 11,900 hours of work 1.35 years of labor hours worth.
In 2018 it was 210k divided by 7.25 is 3.3 years of labor hours. Divide by 10 and its 2.4 years of labor hours. Divide by 15 and its 1.6 years worth of labor hours.
Alternatively we could discuss tuition at a 4 year public university where our 1965 counterpart now making 1.25 could expect to pay 240 labor hours for a year of instruction vs 1380 hours to pay the 10k it costs now at 7.25 1000 at 10 or 667.
How about a loaf of bread 22c or 13 minutes of work at 1960s $1. Now 2.50 vs 7.25 about 21 minutes of work at 10 its 15 minutes at 15 its now 10 minutes.
In real terms people wanting $15 to sweep the floor want $15 to sweep the floor because that is what it now costs to have a barely acceptable life. Not a good or a healthy one but one which is spent sleeping indoors and eating decent food.
In fact the fact is those agitating hardest for a better minimum wage are overwhelmingly have a disproportionate share of the jobs AND above average rent.
Essentially if this minimum wage looks too high you might just be too old.
Not everyone has the same options as everyone else. Some of us are just stuck trying to get by.
No. Uber has presented work for which they will pay a particular rate. Individuals can accept that rate and submit themselves as candidates for the job, or do something else with their time.
If someone posts a classified ad for a handyman to fix their stairs and offers $50, I can take it or not. But taking it and then whining that I didn't get benefits... and being abetted in that whining by clueless politicians... is disgraceful.
> Like why would they hire managers and set schedules
Most probably it would be machine learning that would decide that
> when it gives no benifit to Uber?
An employee works for an hourly rates. It would benefit them in the sense that they wouldn't have to pay someone for an hour where he does nothing.
Why do your job give you a schedule?
> This is not like if a contracted a builder to renovate my kitchen.
I don't know for where you live, but here in Quebec you would usually contract a general contractor for that. Would that means that guy is now employing people and he should pay them benefits too and pay their taxes for them?
Uber is between you and the contractor, sure, but he is still a contractor, he is contracted for a single job (taking you to your destination) and the amount paid cover that job.
The contractor is free to decide when, where and for how much he works.
I strongly doubt that would be an unpopular outside of HN/twitter.
The solution is to update laws that reflect the future (ie, giving contractors better rights and better temporary unemployment social support) instead of protecting entrenched dying industries and their working hour/payment models, by forcing their business models to be the only one allowed.
You also don't have to defend Uber directly, this type of stuff will affect the whole market including any future or present companies that are far better run than Uber.
If you look at reviews for the old taxi companies in most cities they are all 1/5 stars. Plus they aren't shining beacons of worker protections or good pay either. Most taxi drivers were already contractors before Uber so I'm curious how these laws will affect them too.
> The solution is to update laws that reflect the future (ie, giving contractors better rights and better temporary unemployment social support)
Agreed. Classifying them as employees, per this bill, doesn’t do this.
Employment classification comes with a myriad of fixed costs. Particularly in California. Contractors lack these fixed costs—it’s all variable. That’s what makes them attractive for unpredictable workloads.
We need a third category, a low fixed-cost zone between contractors and employees, that includes some employee rights but not others, and confers some employee restrictions but not others. That would be transformative to our economy, and strengthen it to boot. Unfortunately, that’s is not what the California legislature is discussing. (Surprise.)
This isn't about protecting the taxi industry- as you rightly point out, many taxi drivers are also contractors. Instead, this is about properly pricing labor. The gig economy works now because companies like Uber (and many others) externalize the real cost of hiring labor.
It doesn't make sense to pay people low wages to the point where they need governmental assistance in the form of food stamps and BMR housing, and then pass on the savings to private companies who do their best to avoid paying the taxes that fund those programs. It ends up being other, traditionally employed FTEs who subsidize this business model via their own tax bills.
So you’re saying Uber should have to pay drivers more so that you have to pay less taxes? Sounds like everyone is acting in their own self interest and the market is working just fine...
No its not that is exactly what is happening, that's why previous UK Tory chancellors where keen on increasing the minimum wage - to reduce the £ spent on tax credits.
That depends on how you determine if the market works "just fine".
From the pure view of the 30 year old customer: obviously. Low prices, decent quality.
From the view of society: not so much, as society has to now take on the costs that were previously paid by the employer (and indirectly the customer)... think food stamps or social security funded by taxes instead employer contributions to an unemployment insurance, or healthcare given that normal employment would have health insurance but many contractors don't.
From the view of the 70 year old customer living on pension and depending on taxis e.g. to go to dialysis treatment: not so much, as Uber, Lyft etc. have wildly variable pricing, compared to the regulated price of a taxi.
From the view of a customer or a third party involved in an accident: Taxis have proper commercial insurance that picks up medical costs of people involved. Uber/Lyft/other companies? Not neccessarily and either people are left with the medical bill alone or society has to pick it up.
The "gig economy" is only so cheap because a lot of cost factors that made the regular services so expensive are now picked up by society at large.
The Gig economy jobs are a race to the bottom of the pay scale now. You can get the least expensive services by using workers that have no insurance, vacations, sick days or any type of benefits but is that the work environment that we want to encourage? I get it. It's nice to be independent but it's even better to have a job that lets you have at the very least a satisfactory life.
Technology can give us jobs that free us from the traditional chains that we all know but we also need to figure out how to make sure those workers don't get exploited.
Technology is just part of the answer. We also need to have social and political changes. So we can have the jobs that we want without destroying the worker protections that our previous generations have fought so hard to gain.
Making sure that there are laws that protect workers is the start. The answer to the right pay for the gig economy workers will come. But we can't do it by removing all benefits from the workers and not have any other way for them to get them.
I know one thing. What Uber and Lyft provide is needed so companies will figure out how to provide it even with new laws.
I’m kind of a techie social activist myself, and you’re very right about technology not being the whole solution. I think people forget that no technology can solve all of our problems. The technology is a tool but we also need to organize with one another in the human sphere and decide what is fair and what is not - what rules we want to play by.
And I’m with you that we should question whether we want to live in a world where so many workers lack basic benefits.
In the long term I want to see us end employment-based social programs, but we’re not there yet. Until we get there, we definitely should make sure workers are treated as workers with all the legal benefits that entails.
You're very welcome. I first came to appreciate Bookchin through his interviews on YouTube, but I am now reading a book of his essays called "The Next Revolution", which I can recommend!
Everyone continues to ignore a glaring problem in the USA: Your health insurance should have nothing to do with your job.
When people carp about "benefits," that's really what they're talking about, isn't it? And it's an anachronistic result of incompetent legislation from the WWII era.
Fix THAT. Then we can all have "benefits" without any dependence on a particular job.
True, a better future should include health care for all. Now people get locked out of health services because they don't have the right job. That should not be the case ever. Especially, if you get up every day and contribute your labor to improve society.
The bill does NOT say, Uber drivers need to change the way they work.
The bill does say, the way Uber drivers work is considered employment with respect to the law.
It changes the definition of employment to include the type of flexible work Uber drivers are currently doing.
In other words, Uber (or any similar gig-economy business) could keep working with their employees as they always have, it's just that they'll now have to provide those employees with a bunch of benefits they currently do not provide and pay a number of taxes they currently do not pay.
The idea that "employee" means particular way of scheduling hours is false. The bill doesn't say that. The law doesn't say that. There's nothing that requires that. These newly defined employees could keep all the flexibility they've had. If Uber reduces that flexibility, that's Uber's decision.
Ok but let’s consider the left end of the distribution — someone who drives four hours a week — is it really sensible for Uber it any gig platform to pay benefits? What about a single Amazon Mechanical Turk hIt — would that also carry benefits? This wouldn’t be cost effective.
I think over half these problems go away with government issued healthcare. Companies and workers can be more dynamic.
I think that the objection is not that the bill is unclear about this situation. It's that the increased cost of treating Uber drivers (or similar work) as employees will mean that it is infeasible to hire people as they do now. The bill doesn't address (I assume -- I haven't read the bill) because it's not a think the bill is intended to address. If I understand correctly, the bill is intended to address the situation where large companies are avoiding paying employment tax and benefits because they hire the majority of their employees to do piecemeal work.
Will it really result in the side effect that piecemeal work will cease to exist if workers have to be hired as employees? I don't know, but I think that's what's being suggested.
One of the responsibilities an employer has in the UK is to pay national insurance taxes, that are ostensibly believed to be how the NHS is funded (it's not), this is a responsibility that Uber/Lyft were shirking by their 'creative use of employment law' initially until they were forced to treat drivers as employees.
So no, government issued healthcare is likely to make the issue even more starkly obviously wrong.
They do, like all employees, but the employer usually pays a contribution too, by insisting that workers are 'self-employed contractors' it reduces the money being paid to the NI fund.
Contractor fees are somewhat assumed to include the rates necessary for a genuine contractor to pay the full NI amount, but Uber/Lyft relies on their 'contractors' not really being fully aware of that.
In the US, employers pay part of some taxes, with the employees themselves responsible for the rest. Self-employed folks pick up both halves, so the government gets a similar amount of money either way.
Does this not happen in the UK? Otherwise, it seems like it would be fairly easy to audit Uber (etc) “contractors” and to collect that money.
> Otherwise, it seems like it would be fairly easy to audit Uber (etc) “contractors” and to collect that money.
Yes, this could, and should happen, most Uber drivers would not be correctly filing their taxes and NI contributions, almost all would likely end up with hefty fines or prison time.
Most of those drivers are going to then be pissed at Uber for not making it clear to them that as contractors they are responsible for paying NI contributions and properly filing self-employed contractor status taxes. It wouldn't be pretty, but it'd be fun.
But since Uber were simply forced to accept that their drivers are employees, and thus Uber is responsible for the 13% NI contributions, it won't happen to Uber at least.
"they'll now have to provide those employees with a bunch of benefits they currently do not provide and pay a number of taxes they currently do not pay."
Thereby driving them out of business and eliminating this form of employment (which is clearly contractual and not "regular").
I’ve been wondering this lately: when it comes to Uber contractors vs employees, it’s always presented as an all-or-nothing kind of option. I wonder if Uber might one day offer both an employee and contract option to satisfy both needs
Do they really make enough money to pay for their food, housing in the city they work, health care, pension, kids and kids education?
If not these sorts of jobs (or with this pay) should be banned. Else it's just subsidies from taxpayers who need to pay for these things through government "subsidies".
Where I live (a nordic country) eg. taxi drivers used to be able to live a very comfortable life with their pay. And the taxi service was excellent. Not even that expensive if you think about having a private chauffeur driving you around.
Now they changed the rules (to enable "gig economy") and most of the taxi drivers don't pay proper taxes or know any address without gps, and they don't get paid nearly enough to get by without government handouts/social security, or have any pension accruing so they will need even more government/tax money when they are old.
Jeez, I don't get hacker news downvoting (and yes whining about it is against the rules I guess). Was there some fundamental flaw in my argument, was it too "mean" or did someone just disagree and downvote because of that.
I don’t see why that wouldnlt be feasible. I worked in flexible student jobs myself while beeing officially an employee.
If I were to work for the same company constantly as an freelancer the state would rightfully assume that it is to avoid the costs connected with employment. And as a freelancer I can choose my dates myself as well.
I don’t see why a more flexible scheduling system should allow you to avoid paying into a system that is there for a reason.
Personally I'd rather them devastate Airbnb. Uber and Lyft haven't caused the car market to price people out of corollas and camrys. I know it's a tongue in cheek comment but driving for uber or lyft is a choice, the housing market getting turned into hotel development isn't for a lot of people.
Yeah, this is so much truth. It happens more than in big cities too. It's driving up home prices in smaller college towns, for football, graduations, and old people tourism, and it can really put a crunch on supply for people who actually need to live there.
What's driving housing prices up are bad city/state level policies, not airbnb. Airbnb makes housing more effective, by housing more people for longer periods of time.
Housing utilization goes up with Airbnb, not down.
But the other side hasn't, so in your case its 50% increase in utilization (1/2 parties uses Airbnb). If you had use Airbnb, it would have been 2 more houses per 2 vacation trips.
Uber, Lyft (on basically all other on-demand/delivery services) are making urban living qualitatively far worse on average than the benefit of extra commerce facilitated by them. They should be banned outright. Give us our streets back.
Back when ride-share and on-demand/delivery services were not so ubiquitous, you could either get out and do a chore yourself or do without. For example, one recent weekend I casually mentioned to my wife that I was craving a specific sweet popular in my hometown in Eastern India. She surreptitiously looked up a vendor selling that sweet where I now live and had it delivered. I loved the gesture but it made me think that without delivery, I wouldn't have caused a bike messenger to pick up my snack and bring it a few kilometers to my house. Ergo, no environmental impact, no added traffic, less use of plastic and packaging, and all manner of downstream impacts attributable to me.
Yes, there are positives - less skilled/more entrepreneurial people are able to support themselves as drivers, money flows around from consumer to producer as it should in a healthy economy, my cravings are being met and my wife is able to exercise her love language, and so on but IMO, the negatives outweigh the positives.
The extra traffic introduced by delivery is untenable, at least in urban India. Delivery persons drive often don't obey traffic laws with minimal consequences. Becoming a driver provides MVE - minimal viable employment - for someone facing economic pressures so instead of upskilling to earn more, they stagnate. The environmental impact of delivery alone should make us worry about their usefulness.
Seems like you should argue for the outright banning of cars if your argument is that cars make things too easy and have a negative environmental impact.
I am curious about the choice of the word “devastate” in the headline. Should we have a business where it is only viable when paying workers less than minimum wages ? Should we have a business where your core work has to be performed by “contractors” ? That is not a business model at all.
One thing not mentioned here is how it will impact customers, and who these customers are. These regulations will result in higher fares for customers and those customers overwhelmingly tend to be people who can't afford to buy and maintain a car. Affluent people already have cars and those on the fence will choose to drive more if fares go up. So the main impact would be on people in the service industry who rely on Uber/Lyft for their daily commutes.
How can owning a car be more expensive than having someone else own a car and paying them for it, while also paying them to drive it, while also the app gets a share? Is the base cost of owning a car so high? Do the apps subsidize so much?
Cars are pretty expensive and I think most people really only need them sometimes (if you're poor enough for this to be an issue you won't be driving all over for fun nights and weekends). If you could bus to work, taxi to a few stores and only pay $100 or so - that's just insurance. If youre paying a car off its easily $200-500 a month in top. Plus gas, plus maintenance, etc.
Cars have the same issue phones do - they aren't necessarily needing to get better, but manufacturers want money so they're expensive when they don't really have to be.
Well, if you own a car just for commute, it's sitting idle for 23 hours out of 24. Whereas the Uber/Lyft driver is using it for 8-12 hours a day, and the overall ownership/maintenance cost is not linear with usage. On top of that, add UberPool, and the cost for ride hailing goes even lower. So essentially, ride hailing can be thought of as a form of public transport.
Where I live you're automatically granted certain benefits and your company is required to provide you with health insurance, pension and unemployment insurance based upon factors like the number of hours you actually work a week and the like - regardless of what your contact says. Does America have things like that? Seems like it would include a lot of Uber drivers if they did.
What other job can you think of where you can work as much as you want, anytime you want? Need a break? Click a button anytime you feel like it. Take as long or as little time as you wish. Want more work? Click a button anytime you feel like it. No timecards to punch. No boss breathing down your ass for being late. Its freedom on a level beyond practically any other major job category you can think of. What more could you ask for?
Sure you're probably not going to be raising a whole family with a white picket fence on Uber alone. They NEVER claimed you could AFAIK. Its never been portrayed as anything more than supplemental income. PROTIP: Uber is a job for the bored college student looking for a little extra spending money not the main means of survival for a struggling single mother of 10 kids. If you're at the point where you're relying on CA to force Uber to pay you more so you can put food on the table or get kidney surgery you're doing it wrong and you have far bigger problems than a company that has done you no wrong other than existing and not paying very much.
Now we're going to destroy this unique business model forever because of the greed of the taxis and people who can't understand that not every single job on earth is meant to earn you a solid middle class income.
If your business requires a consistently high amount of labor hours worked and the survival of that business depends on none of those labor hours being filled by employees, I'm not sure you have a profitable (in any term: short- to long- inclusive) business model. You have a VC ponzi scheme that inevitably collapse.
I think this initiative should be welcomed and Indian govt should also do this.
I was just talking to an Uber driver in India just the other day. In India Uber got its dominant market share by offering incentives to the drivers when they joined. Something like if you do n number of trips you will get more money. The incentives were great and so a lot of people got into driving. Bought their own cars. Got cars financed from Uber. And then as supply increased Uber pulled off the incentives with nowhere to go for the drivers.
Now a driver who got 800 rs for an airport trip by himself has to make do with 400 rs in his pocket and Uber gets a 200 rs commision.
The main point of driving for Uber is that you can get a job without a job interview. I don't know of many other jobs where you can do that. Will classifying them as employees force Uber to vet their drivers more with things like interviews to offset the extra overhead of employee classification?
What supporters of these kind of bills don't understand is that if you increase the risks and liabilities that companies providing these jobs carry, they will stop providing these jobs.
Classifying the people working these jobs as employees increases the risks and liabilities for the platform providers.
And those claiming we'd be better off with those jobs not existing are lying to the public. It's against the worker's interest to remove any employment (or self-employment) opportunity from the job marketplace. Now of course they will accuse opponents of the bill of lying, so the public has to investigate and decide for itself.
> ride-hailing companies would be responsible for half (6.2%) of employees' Social Security and Medicare (1.45%) tax, as well as the costs for administering any employee benefits (e.g., health care and 401ks)
The changes described in the bill seem surprisingly minor. As long as Uber isn't expected to pay its drivers a fixed salary, or control their work hours, I don't see how "better benefits" will fundamentally destroy their business model. It is fundamentally no different than raising the rates paid by riders, and passing those increased rates along to drivers in the form of better benefits.
As long as it is applied consistently to both Uber and Lyft, neither of them will lose market share. Ridership will decline incrementally when rates are raised incrementally, but the majority of Uber riders aren't going to take buses instead just because prices went up 15%.
I've long been a fan of the gig economy and of companies like Uber/Lyft, but the new regulations described above sound pretty reasonable. Saying they will devastate Uber's business model sounds like clickbait on the part of BI, and FUD on the part of Uber.
Does anyone know how this works for drivers that today drive for both Uber and Lyft at the same time? I see many cars with both stickers on the windshield, and it seems like a very powerful force preventing one or the other from gaining a monopoly status in the city. When a driver using both apps is waiting for a ride, whose time are they clocking under? Does that create legal incentives for drivers to drive for one company, and in doing so make it very hard to sustain minority competitor in the ride sharing space?
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[ 7.3 ms ] story [ 680 ms ] threadBefore Uber was a thing, I tried getting a taxi in the Bay Area at 3 different times. Months apart. Calling different companies (that I found by searching "Bay Area taxi"). In ALL cases there were issues, huge issues:
* the first one I called said he'll be there in 20 minutes(!!) but 30 minutes later he didn't show nor called. I call back and someone else answers and says they'll be there in 20 minutes, ofc 30 minutes later nobody showed up...
* the second time I needed a taxi I called, said they will be there in 30 minutes and never showed or answered any subsequent calls
* third time I think someone DID show up, after about 30 minutes (15 minutes later than they said they will)
Absolutely horrible, unacceptable experience. With Lyft/Uber I never had any such issues and I took many more rides with those. Not to mention it was much cheaper (the latter likely has something to do with the main complains being raised now by their employees).
Look, I fully support cab riders to get a living wage, even if that means significantly increasing my fare, but I do hope the new legislation doesn't result in going back to the pre-Lyft/Uber taxi experience because that was just insanely bad. Also, at least some of the drivers I talked to were doing this as an aside so it makes total sense for them to be contractors (one guy was temporarily in the Bay Area doing some construction work so he was Uber-ing on the side for extra money) so that is another issue that needs to be considered in legislation to still enable this type of use case.
In the case of taxis, replacing them by Uber and lyft made no sense globally, because it was just exploiting the drivers, and using venture capital in an unsustainable manner.
The difference is that Uber and Lyft won't leave one of their biggest markets.
The actual scuffle was because the City of Austin wanted ride-level trip data and a larger fee from the individual rides. Further, Mayor Adler's goal was a tax+security screening system for anyone who wanted to transact online. Those are his words, not mine. Quoted in the post below.
I detailed some of it here: https://medium.com/@CaseySoftware/mayor-steve-adler-is-scamm...
> Like camera-wearing meerkats, taxis provided insight into the city’s transportation ecosystem. Are cabs speeding along a certain stretch of street? Time to review the street design. Getting stuck at the same intersection every rush hour? Maybe rethink the traffic light timing.
https://www.wired.com/story/nyc-uber-lyft-ride-hail-data/
Do you work for Uber, or do you just have an amazing memory?
I too have absolutely terrible pre-uber experiences (in the DC area). If one was out drinking in DC, and needed a cab back across the river to VA, you had to hope the cabbie had the doors unlocked, because they couldn't refuse a fair once you got in and sat in the car, otherwise they'd just drive away if you told them where you were going. And it was "cash only". Which I later learned was a load of BS, when I had a $100+ fare for work, cabbie happily pulled out the old cc scanner complete with carbon paper... Things didn't get better until my roommate introduced me to his "driver". Which is was just a guy with a Town Car that I could call, tell him where I'm going and when, and if he was available, he'd quote me a price (there was no meter or anything). And then there was the stress of is the cabbie I called for going to show up in time to get me to the airport at 6am. Uber/Lyft crushed it for all these reasons, and if the prices need to rise a little, sure fine. The example of a new company in Austin doing it's own little Austin thing is fine, but the other huge benefit of Uber is it travel. If I get off a plane in Europe, NYC, SF, small po-dunk town, whatever, I've now got a very frictionless path to getting myself some transportation. Don't gotta look up the local cab company, don't gotta mess with the local mass transit, all my billing info is setup and ready to go. Makes me wonder if everyone seemingly hating on them or wishing them harm is too young to remember how shitty things were before. On the "employee" side, I do know a number of people who drive for either or both company, but they all do it on the side, fwiw.
I have memories of several times I was stood up or unreasonably delayed by bad taxi service / rideshare service, and the higher-stress ones (e.g., when I was trying to catch a plane) are the most vivid. One's from over a decade ago - I can't remember where I was going, but I remember the room I was in, pacing back and forth, calling the taxi dispatcher for the 3rd time.
I remember those taxi experiences because those were the only 3 times I needed a taxi in the first few years in the Bay Area, so quite easy to remember. If I had needed to take many rides/often then likely I won't remember as many details.
People think that once uber is dead ridesharing will disappear, but reality shows that once idea is in the wild it's almost impossible to stop it.
I worry that this bill will ultimately eliminate a unique niche in the job market. I have several family members who drive for Uber/Lyft and consider it a great way to make money. One of the aspects they like is how much independence they have: no manager, no set schedule, no need to work the same number of hours each week or each day. The pay is fine - not great - but the flexibility makes working for Uber much more appealing than e.g. working as a receptionist or taking another service job. Many drivers I've ridden with seem to value that component as well. If Uber switches to treating drivers as employees (which makes each driver have higher overhead) then they'll probably switch to.... well, treating them as employees: stricter rules about when you have to drive, how much you have to drive, and so on. The tradeoff will benefit some employees - basically those who are trying to make Uber into a full-time job - at the expense of others.
[0]: https://medium.com/uber-under-the-hood/an-analysis-of-ceeprs...
[0] https://axios.com/gig-economy-employment-economic-data-effec...
To me this closes a loophole. As you say these people drive for Uber, uber is doing the employing. This is not like if a contracted a builder to renovate my kitchen. That is the class of employment that are real contractors.
If they have to pay a full-time employee, they can schedule the employee and force them to drive to a certain location, and do a certain number of trips, otherwise they would just fire them. They can squeeze out more efficiency from a single driver rather than hope that there's enough random drivers to fulfill all the demand.
Hiring people to just sit around and do nothing doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
Where does it say this?
Why not?
Or more specifically: the law doesn't require this, so why would it have to change?
The bill merely states, "hey, this flexible way you've been working, that's not independent contracting, that's employment and the employer have to abide by all these other regulations." Those regulations in no way require Uber to make workers work for specific hours, pay them hourly, or schedule their work differently. In fact, it just says, "the way you're already working, that's employment." So why do you think they'd have to change how they work?
I think most of planet earth only wants to work 1 gig or at most 2 for somewhere between 20 and 40 hours. I doubt people who want to work a tiny number of hours make up a meaningful proportion of the workforce. In other words much ado about nothing.
The benefits being discussed are health insurance.
I'm not too familiar with employment law, but in most governments, employees have rights and benefits that cost a company a fixed amount that a contractor doesn't.
I think a lot of people have no idea how the old taxi business worked.. it was far worse than Uber — it was more of a monopoly as well because you were required to drive a specifically-branded car purchased or leased from the taxi company. You couldn’t use the same car to drive for other companies. Damage had to be repaired at the specifically designated repair shop (owned by the taxi company of course,) and you had to pay for insurance from the specific taxi company “vendor” (also owned by the taxi company.)
And.. you were an independent contractor; you were the customer of the taxi company. You got to pay your own self-employment taxes, but your own health insurance and if you got sick, you still had to pay the taxi company the lease fee for the car. While you did collect your own cash fares, you had to pay a very high percentage (8-10%) on credit card fares and you were paid those fares weekly. If you lost the charge slip paper, you lost the fare, however the taxi company still had the swipe, so they’d still collect the money but just not pay any of it to you.
The taxi business is and was an incredibly corrupt and nasty business. There is a reason that job was popular with fresh off the boat immigrants — anyone who had done the job more than a minute knew how much of a rip-off it was (unless you were willing to sleep in your car and drive 16+ hour days in order to save up money to start your own limo business or convenience store which was a common goal among many of the south Asian immigrants I drove with.)
The kids hating on Uber really have no idea what they are talking about. Unless someone has actually worked in the towing, taxi, limousine, hot shot, or trucking businesses (all extremely nasty and tough businesses,) it’s pretty hard to have much credibility when complaining about the gig economy, Uber, etc. Uber/Lift/Doordash is a dream compared to the bad old days. You can have one car and pretty much drive and deliver as much as you want and make money proportional to how hard you are willing to work. It isn’t easy-street, but nobody plans on being a career Uber driver — it’s a stopgap, a transition, or a supplement. Anyone thinking that this is some kind of full time career is either of low-IQ and has no prospects of doing anything better, or just lacks ambition. Being a McDonald’s cashier ought not be a career either, but there are people working in that position for 15+ years. At that point, that failure is on them. We shouldn’t be optimizing society around making low wage service jobs into some kind of permanent career. Even a high school kid gets promoted at McDonalds if they stick around for more than a few minutes, yet there are literally people who have been making minimum wage for years. At some point people ought to be treated as adults and not like exploited children. A person chooses to drive for Uber/a taxi/whatever. They aren’t Shanghaied or otherwise indentured. If people don’t want to do those jobs, then that ought to motivate them to find something slightly better — or start at the bottom washing dishes somewhere and move up through a restaurant’s ranks. But that requires hard work and dedication— traits in very short supply in an era where people that literally sweep floors think that work is worth $15 per hour.
Source: I drove for Yellow Cab Houston in the summer of 2001. I also drove hot shot deliveries in Houston in 2008 and a good friend of mine owned a bike courier business. I also worked a string of shitty restaurant and bar jobs, lived on the street a short time and now I work as a software engineering project manager for one of those FANG companies.
- Pays low, doesn't pay benefits, yadda yadda. All the stuff I assume people generally mean when they talk about "the kids hating on Uber"
- Went into towns and actively broke the law (bypassing the current taxi system). Sure, "civil disobedience" and all that, but the people that actually paid any real price for that disobedience (https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/No-fair-say-Ube...)
- Uber is burning money in order to corner the market. Eventually they're going to either go under or change their entire pricing structure. Nobody is going to win when that happens. There's a reason countries wield financial weapons when other countries start dumping like that; it's bad for everyone involved but the dumper.
The move to increase the minimum wage to 15 is presented by the uninformed as a cash grab by the lazy. The truth is 15 dollars just isn't much nowadays. The old often have a hard time forgetting about the nominal value and considering the actual buying power.
Lets ignore the fact that minimum wage workers can't actually buy houses and compare the minimum wage of $1 in 1960 to the cost of a median house at 11,900. So 11,900 hours of work 1.35 years of labor hours worth.
In 2018 it was 210k divided by 7.25 is 3.3 years of labor hours. Divide by 10 and its 2.4 years of labor hours. Divide by 15 and its 1.6 years worth of labor hours.
Alternatively we could discuss tuition at a 4 year public university where our 1965 counterpart now making 1.25 could expect to pay 240 labor hours for a year of instruction vs 1380 hours to pay the 10k it costs now at 7.25 1000 at 10 or 667.
How about a loaf of bread 22c or 13 minutes of work at 1960s $1. Now 2.50 vs 7.25 about 21 minutes of work at 10 its 15 minutes at 15 its now 10 minutes.
In real terms people wanting $15 to sweep the floor want $15 to sweep the floor because that is what it now costs to have a barely acceptable life. Not a good or a healthy one but one which is spent sleeping indoors and eating decent food.
In fact the fact is those agitating hardest for a better minimum wage are overwhelmingly have a disproportionate share of the jobs AND above average rent.
Essentially if this minimum wage looks too high you might just be too old.
Not everyone has the same options as everyone else. Some of us are just stuck trying to get by.
If someone posts a classified ad for a handyman to fix their stairs and offers $50, I can take it or not. But taking it and then whining that I didn't get benefits... and being abetted in that whining by clueless politicians... is disgraceful.
Most probably it would be machine learning that would decide that
> when it gives no benifit to Uber?
An employee works for an hourly rates. It would benefit them in the sense that they wouldn't have to pay someone for an hour where he does nothing.
Why do your job give you a schedule?
> This is not like if a contracted a builder to renovate my kitchen.
I don't know for where you live, but here in Quebec you would usually contract a general contractor for that. Would that means that guy is now employing people and he should pay them benefits too and pay their taxes for them?
Uber is between you and the contractor, sure, but he is still a contractor, he is contracted for a single job (taking you to your destination) and the amount paid cover that job.
The contractor is free to decide when, where and for how much he works.
The solution is to update laws that reflect the future (ie, giving contractors better rights and better temporary unemployment social support) instead of protecting entrenched dying industries and their working hour/payment models, by forcing their business models to be the only one allowed.
You also don't have to defend Uber directly, this type of stuff will affect the whole market including any future or present companies that are far better run than Uber.
If you look at reviews for the old taxi companies in most cities they are all 1/5 stars. Plus they aren't shining beacons of worker protections or good pay either. Most taxi drivers were already contractors before Uber so I'm curious how these laws will affect them too.
Agreed. Classifying them as employees, per this bill, doesn’t do this.
Employment classification comes with a myriad of fixed costs. Particularly in California. Contractors lack these fixed costs—it’s all variable. That’s what makes them attractive for unpredictable workloads.
We need a third category, a low fixed-cost zone between contractors and employees, that includes some employee rights but not others, and confers some employee restrictions but not others. That would be transformative to our economy, and strengthen it to boot. Unfortunately, that’s is not what the California legislature is discussing. (Surprise.)
Umm, I think you both agree. There's no disagreement that I see.
It doesn't make sense to pay people low wages to the point where they need governmental assistance in the form of food stamps and BMR housing, and then pass on the savings to private companies who do their best to avoid paying the taxes that fund those programs. It ends up being other, traditionally employed FTEs who subsidize this business model via their own tax bills.
From the pure view of the 30 year old customer: obviously. Low prices, decent quality.
From the view of society: not so much, as society has to now take on the costs that were previously paid by the employer (and indirectly the customer)... think food stamps or social security funded by taxes instead employer contributions to an unemployment insurance, or healthcare given that normal employment would have health insurance but many contractors don't.
From the view of the 70 year old customer living on pension and depending on taxis e.g. to go to dialysis treatment: not so much, as Uber, Lyft etc. have wildly variable pricing, compared to the regulated price of a taxi.
From the view of a customer or a third party involved in an accident: Taxis have proper commercial insurance that picks up medical costs of people involved. Uber/Lyft/other companies? Not neccessarily and either people are left with the medical bill alone or society has to pick it up.
The "gig economy" is only so cheap because a lot of cost factors that made the regular services so expensive are now picked up by society at large.
I am in the UK so I don't mind paying to support Medical Training, and training in stem skills those jobs are a net benefit to the state.
Technology can give us jobs that free us from the traditional chains that we all know but we also need to figure out how to make sure those workers don't get exploited.
Technology is just part of the answer. We also need to have social and political changes. So we can have the jobs that we want without destroying the worker protections that our previous generations have fought so hard to gain.
Making sure that there are laws that protect workers is the start. The answer to the right pay for the gig economy workers will come. But we can't do it by removing all benefits from the workers and not have any other way for them to get them.
I know one thing. What Uber and Lyft provide is needed so companies will figure out how to provide it even with new laws.
And I’m with you that we should question whether we want to live in a world where so many workers lack basic benefits.
In the long term I want to see us end employment-based social programs, but we’re not there yet. Until we get there, we definitely should make sure workers are treated as workers with all the legal benefits that entails.
Have you ever read Murray Bookchin?
I have not but it sounds like it's someone I should. Thx.
When people carp about "benefits," that's really what they're talking about, isn't it? And it's an anachronistic result of incompetent legislation from the WWII era.
Fix THAT. Then we can all have "benefits" without any dependence on a particular job.
The bill does NOT say, Uber drivers need to change the way they work.
The bill does say, the way Uber drivers work is considered employment with respect to the law.
It changes the definition of employment to include the type of flexible work Uber drivers are currently doing.
In other words, Uber (or any similar gig-economy business) could keep working with their employees as they always have, it's just that they'll now have to provide those employees with a bunch of benefits they currently do not provide and pay a number of taxes they currently do not pay.
The idea that "employee" means particular way of scheduling hours is false. The bill doesn't say that. The law doesn't say that. There's nothing that requires that. These newly defined employees could keep all the flexibility they've had. If Uber reduces that flexibility, that's Uber's decision.
I think over half these problems go away with government issued healthcare. Companies and workers can be more dynamic.
Will it really result in the side effect that piecemeal work will cease to exist if workers have to be hired as employees? I don't know, but I think that's what's being suggested.
Making companies pay these benefits will actually drive them to start lobbying for just that, no?
So no, government issued healthcare is likely to make the issue even more starkly obviously wrong.
Contractor fees are somewhat assumed to include the rates necessary for a genuine contractor to pay the full NI amount, but Uber/Lyft relies on their 'contractors' not really being fully aware of that.
In the US, employers pay part of some taxes, with the employees themselves responsible for the rest. Self-employed folks pick up both halves, so the government gets a similar amount of money either way.
Does this not happen in the UK? Otherwise, it seems like it would be fairly easy to audit Uber (etc) “contractors” and to collect that money.
Yes, this could, and should happen, most Uber drivers would not be correctly filing their taxes and NI contributions, almost all would likely end up with hefty fines or prison time.
Most of those drivers are going to then be pissed at Uber for not making it clear to them that as contractors they are responsible for paying NI contributions and properly filing self-employed contractor status taxes. It wouldn't be pretty, but it'd be fun.
But since Uber were simply forced to accept that their drivers are employees, and thus Uber is responsible for the 13% NI contributions, it won't happen to Uber at least.
Thereby driving them out of business and eliminating this form of employment (which is clearly contractual and not "regular").
Do they really make enough money to pay for their food, housing in the city they work, health care, pension, kids and kids education?
If not these sorts of jobs (or with this pay) should be banned. Else it's just subsidies from taxpayers who need to pay for these things through government "subsidies".
Where I live (a nordic country) eg. taxi drivers used to be able to live a very comfortable life with their pay. And the taxi service was excellent. Not even that expensive if you think about having a private chauffeur driving you around.
Now they changed the rules (to enable "gig economy") and most of the taxi drivers don't pay proper taxes or know any address without gps, and they don't get paid nearly enough to get by without government handouts/social security, or have any pension accruing so they will need even more government/tax money when they are old.
If I were to work for the same company constantly as an freelancer the state would rightfully assume that it is to avoid the costs connected with employment. And as a freelancer I can choose my dates myself as well.
I don’t see why a more flexible scheduling system should allow you to avoid paying into a system that is there for a reason.
Housing utilization goes up with Airbnb, not down.
Uber, Lyft (on basically all other on-demand/delivery services) are making urban living qualitatively far worse on average than the benefit of extra commerce facilitated by them. They should be banned outright. Give us our streets back.
Back when ride-share and on-demand/delivery services were not so ubiquitous, you could either get out and do a chore yourself or do without. For example, one recent weekend I casually mentioned to my wife that I was craving a specific sweet popular in my hometown in Eastern India. She surreptitiously looked up a vendor selling that sweet where I now live and had it delivered. I loved the gesture but it made me think that without delivery, I wouldn't have caused a bike messenger to pick up my snack and bring it a few kilometers to my house. Ergo, no environmental impact, no added traffic, less use of plastic and packaging, and all manner of downstream impacts attributable to me.
Yes, there are positives - less skilled/more entrepreneurial people are able to support themselves as drivers, money flows around from consumer to producer as it should in a healthy economy, my cravings are being met and my wife is able to exercise her love language, and so on but IMO, the negatives outweigh the positives.
The extra traffic introduced by delivery is untenable, at least in urban India. Delivery persons drive often don't obey traffic laws with minimal consequences. Becoming a driver provides MVE - minimal viable employment - for someone facing economic pressures so instead of upskilling to earn more, they stagnate. The environmental impact of delivery alone should make us worry about their usefulness.
Cars have the same issue phones do - they aren't necessarily needing to get better, but manufacturers want money so they're expensive when they don't really have to be.
Sure you're probably not going to be raising a whole family with a white picket fence on Uber alone. They NEVER claimed you could AFAIK. Its never been portrayed as anything more than supplemental income. PROTIP: Uber is a job for the bored college student looking for a little extra spending money not the main means of survival for a struggling single mother of 10 kids. If you're at the point where you're relying on CA to force Uber to pay you more so you can put food on the table or get kidney surgery you're doing it wrong and you have far bigger problems than a company that has done you no wrong other than existing and not paying very much.
Now we're going to destroy this unique business model forever because of the greed of the taxis and people who can't understand that not every single job on earth is meant to earn you a solid middle class income.
I was just talking to an Uber driver in India just the other day. In India Uber got its dominant market share by offering incentives to the drivers when they joined. Something like if you do n number of trips you will get more money. The incentives were great and so a lot of people got into driving. Bought their own cars. Got cars financed from Uber. And then as supply increased Uber pulled off the incentives with nowhere to go for the drivers.
Now a driver who got 800 rs for an airport trip by himself has to make do with 400 rs in his pocket and Uber gets a 200 rs commision.
Classifying the people working these jobs as employees increases the risks and liabilities for the platform providers.
And those claiming we'd be better off with those jobs not existing are lying to the public. It's against the worker's interest to remove any employment (or self-employment) opportunity from the job marketplace. Now of course they will accuse opponents of the bill of lying, so the public has to investigate and decide for itself.
The changes described in the bill seem surprisingly minor. As long as Uber isn't expected to pay its drivers a fixed salary, or control their work hours, I don't see how "better benefits" will fundamentally destroy their business model. It is fundamentally no different than raising the rates paid by riders, and passing those increased rates along to drivers in the form of better benefits.
As long as it is applied consistently to both Uber and Lyft, neither of them will lose market share. Ridership will decline incrementally when rates are raised incrementally, but the majority of Uber riders aren't going to take buses instead just because prices went up 15%.
I've long been a fan of the gig economy and of companies like Uber/Lyft, but the new regulations described above sound pretty reasonable. Saying they will devastate Uber's business model sounds like clickbait on the part of BI, and FUD on the part of Uber.