In many ways, I can see it. I think the issue lies in a lot of Uber's current policies around drivers e.g. very strict rules around cancellations. If Uber was just a lead generation provider then it shouldn't care or intervene if a driver decides they don't want a job, but depending on the scenario you can be punished if you don't want to take a job.

Part of me thinks Uber could get away with this if they just relaxed some of their current driver policies (e.g. more limited penalties for cancellations). The issue is whether doing so would drastically deteriorate the quality of the service for riders.

I suspect if/when this gets to a higher court, the whole thing will come crashing down, because to allow Uber's weaselly redefinition of common terms, would be to allow other classes of employment to similarly become unprotected.

Failing that, if they are to be counted as individual contractors they should be able to negotiate like those: without one-sided deceptive deals.

It reminds me of before my software engineering career, when I was working at The Gap. The job wasn't great, but a lot of people really needed more hours. Unfortunately, there was a rule that nobody could work more than 29 hours a week. Everyone hated it. Employees hated it the most because if they needed extra money they couldn't take an extra shift. The managers hated it too because it was just more rules for them to deal with.

Apparently, this rule existed because there was a law saying that past 30 hours a week, employees had to get some extra benefits. Gap corporate just changed the job to avoid that law. As a result, that job got worse, and nobody got more benefits. Just unintended consequences.

I can do 10 hours or I can do 0 hours based on nothing but my own whim. I don't have a problem with people organizing to get a better deal for themselves, but I like the way it works now.

I've worked for companies that misclassify workers, and Uber isn't it as far as I understand. I may be convinced otherwise, but I don't see it.

Whether or not Uber drivers are employees or contractors under Dynamex and the ABC test is an open question, but the Uber explanation of the bill's impact is more or less correct.

Currently, most drivers seem to drive for both Uber and Lyft (based on their cars having stickers for both). But if classified as employees, and being guaranteed a minimum wage, then Uber/Lyft might require them to be exclusively available. As a result, the drivers will have to choose either Uber and Lyft and since Uber has more market share, they will likely choose Uber and Lyft will be squeezed out.

What am I missing/misunderstanding above?

An outcome like that may be possible here as an unintended consequence, with Uber and Lyft capping most drivers at 20hrs a week, and full time drivers splitting their time between the two (20hrs for each).

Does it make me a Microsoft employee if I use Outlook to conduct business? Does it make me an Ebay employee if I sell things through ebay? Until Uber eliminates the ability for drivers to drive Uber and Lyft simultaneously, and bounce between the services at will, I DO view it as drivers paying for 1) a dispatch and messaging service 2) payment processing 3) insurance 4) a resume host 5) a customer funnel. Thats more than just a technology or software company, Uber sells transportation services to drivers. The fact alone that they can have two messaging/dispatch apps open at once, on two phones, makes me question, which company do you think the driver works for? Both simultaneously? Just the one that the passenger is from? Is having both Uber and Lyft open looking for passengers any different than listing something I have for sale on Etsy, Ebay and Amazon, and pulling the listing once it sells out?

> "Transportation as reliable as running water, everywhere for everyone"

Sounds like transportation is their core business to me.

> Contrary to some of the rhetoric we’ve heard, AB5 does not automatically reclassify any rideshare drivers from independent contractors to employees.

This may seem like an immediate contradiction, but I guess they've reframed it so their proposal is actually in line with AB5?

great pr-speak

> But just because the test is hard does not mean we will not be able to pass it. In fact, several previous rulings have found that drivers’ work is outside the usual course of Uber’s business, which is serving as a technology platform for several different types of digital marketplaces.

Also seems like they will continue to thwart where they can (which I can't blame them for really) but seems aggressive to note. This reads more like a shareholder update, which makes sense.

What... how... I don't even know where to begin with this.

We expect we will continue to respond to claims of misclassification in arbitration and in court as necessary, just as we do now. But we will also continue to advocate for the independence and choice that drivers tell us again and again in surveys, polls, focus groups, and personal conversations that they value most.

Uber management is not going to get the message until top management goes to jail for contempt of court.

I understand A & B, but as for C, why does someone's normal job have to be in that same line of work to be considered an independent contractor? What does whether a person is a driver professionally, or a teacher making money on the side, determine whether they're performing work as a contractor?

Maybe someone more expert can explain.

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[1] ABC Test that all 3 conditions must be satisfied for worker to be considered a contractor:

"... (a) that the worker is free from the control and direction of the hirer in connection with the performance of the work, both under the contract for the performance of the work and in fact; and (b) that the worker performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business; and (c) that the worker is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business of the same nature as that involved in the work performed.”

The post talks about "potential harm" and says that how many hours drivers have to work and whether they can work for competitors at the same time "would all change." Is that right?

Honestly I think their argument could be bolstered a lot if they made a simple change. Imagine you call an Uber, then your app tells you billy wants your job. You can see he is 4.5 star rated with 1000 rides, he is est 3 min away, and he wants $15. Do you accept? If so Uber connects you. If not Uber goes back to finding someone else.

With that change Uber removes itself from being in the business of rideshare, and now is in business of connecting drivers with riders (as they’ve claimed all along). They need to let drivers dictate prices and ask users to choose.

"In the US, 92% of drivers drive less than 40 hours per week, and 45% of drivers drive less than 10 hours per week. [...] We will continue to defend the innovation that makes that kind of choice, flexibility, and independence a reality for over 200,000 drivers in California".

1. Does this distribution looks in California, not across whole US? Why talk about two different cases, unless you cherry pick? 2. How does this % look like, when we look at drivers that work for more than few months?

Despite how it is covered, the law notably fails to do ANYTHING to help gig employees as it just codifies existing case law.

What this law does do is carve out exceptions in that case law so that gig employees have LESS protection.

This law could have been paired with other real protections for gig employees but that did not happen. No minimum wage guarantee extensions, no rights to organize, no improvements in access to the safety net...etc

How do people let our politicians get away with claiming they are protecting people with a bill that does nothing but erode those protections?

It is actually not a terribly bad idea. They have the money to pay for the slow court battle, and it is strictly cheaper than complying.

If I am an employee of a company, they are probably not going to let me work for a competitor while I am on the clock with them.

Ironically, taxi drivers are also contractors. I’m surprised nobody has brought up the fact that the status quo pre-Uber was a contractor model as well.

The real problem is that the Dynamex decision is legislation from the bench that redefines “contractor.” The historical definition of a contractor was basically only c in the abc test. It will be interesting to see how the court decisions come down. As the press release points out, the precedent so far is mixed.

That amount of money can go a long way. Unfortunately.

The politics of what has occurred here is probably the pendulum swinging too far, but in the right direction: the classification of 'contractor' just isn't correct to describe these workers, and the legislature did its best to rectify that.

You can work only when the platform routes a job to you, not “whenever you want”. It's on-demand temporary work with a faster “job is available, do you accept it?” cycle than most, but the general idea of such on-demand work as regular W-2 employment has been around for a long time.

It's frightening to see people just lap that up because it happens to coincide with their day job. But nothing in labor law prevents a company like Uber from "disrupting work" and offering that flexibility to employees.

This would take the pressure of other industries that use independent contractors, such as tech.

Right now a couple of bad actors like Uber, are ruining the independent contractor category of work. Forcing states to put more laws in place.

That's not how it works. Uber isn't operating at a profit because their current-investor-subsidized-rates are below the cost of their service. But there is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem there: there rates are low because they want to gain marketshare, which is only enabled by the flood of VC/IPO money.

Eventually, all of the rideshare companies will need to raise their rates to cover the cost of service, and that cost should include reasonable remuneration for their workers. If it turns out the market isn't viable at those costs (i.e. if people just stop taking rideshares altogether because it's too expensive), then it never should have existed in the first place.

IMHO, the whole point of this law is just to weaken the existing precedent by giving exemptions to the Lawmakers' buddies and donors.

I guess the issue arises when we got people working full-time hours but still being classified as an independent contractor.

I'm a W-2 employee at the company I work for, and they don't dictate my hours.

To my knowledge, there are numerous business areas where it's possible to negotiate flexible work hours, so wouldn't this be here possible as well?

Ideally there wouldn't be a tradeoff, but in practice it seems like there is one.

You raise a good point that labor law has an ugly bimodality regarding employee and independent contractor, where it might be better to refactor the law so that different protections apply based on some particulars of the arrangement. Working <10hrs/wk vs >20hrs/wk is one good place to draw a distinction.

Similarly, Ebay's service is less dependent on how well you provide your commerce services, it pretty much lets the market determine your prospects on its platform. On the other hand, Uber is highly reliant on the conduct of its drivers and the service the provide.

If Microsoft is the one paying you, and dictating how you use Outlook, what you can say, who you talk to you - then yes, it does.

I'm not saying you are guilty of this, but I think many of us with full-time, salaried jobs tend to not be able to grasp that yes, you can be an employee of multiple companies simultaneously.

You can't necessarily be paid by more than one employer for the same unit of time -- but that's not what's happening here.

If a driver who is an employee of both platforms accepts a Lyft ride, they are working as an employee for that one company for the duration of the ride. If they then accept an Uber ride, they are working as an employee for that one company for the duration of the ride.

Keep in mind there's no minimum amount of time you have to work to be considered working as an employee. Even if you're clocking in for just 5 minutes, you're still a working employee for those 5 minutes and should get paid for those 5 minutes.

The only difference between this type of employment relationship and traditional employment relationships is that at least in theory, the drivers can set their own working hours. Although the degree to which Uber and Lyft exert influence over drivers' working hours makes me wonder just how freely chosen they are.

But even if Uber, Lyft, and the like are able to argue that drivers can freely chose their working hours, that's NOT the only criterion necessary to be considered contractors. It is possible to be able to freely chose your own working hours yet still be classified properly as an employee, provided other factors point toward an employment relationship.

>People don't work in sweatshops because they love the job, they do it because they are desperate

>People don't work in sweatshops because they love the job, they do it because its better than any of their alternatives

The first statement is often part of a moral argument against exploitation and expressed in conjunction with a an desire or indifference to eliminating the job. The second is usually used in an argument which frames the worker as a rational actor and lacks the moral judgement.

A common, if inflammatory, example is sex work. On one hand, sex workers can be seen a desperate, vulnerable, and forced by circumstances into an inherently exploitative relationship. Those that hold this position often believe that sex work should be made or kept illegal to protect the individuals from this exploitation.

The alternative framing is that sex workers choose the job because it is the least bad of the available options. Removing the option will only push workers into a less preferable occupation.

- what appears like sweatshops are actually significantly preferable working conditions for the local population; workshops are hot and crowded sure, but it’s sheltered and beats back-breaking farming, where pests can eat your yearly revenue overnight; (that point you agree with, as far as I can tell)

- so much that, in some conditions “sweatshops” are a positive thing and local people are excited over it: they show up early, some singing, in their best clothes; (I have no evidence of this handy right now, you might disagree but if you read the first point, it shouldn’t be a surprise); example of that is the young rural Chinese workers who were happy to be hosted on bunk beds at Foxconn and others because that meant they could save more money, talking about it like Facebook grads talk about free food; that effect might not last, doesn’t appear to have for Foxconn (or Facebook);

- in the early conditions, “sweatshops” are great and external political forces trying to ban them, or more often regulate them out of profitability i.e. existence, comes off as horribly misguided attempts; an extreme version of “better is the enemy of good” difficult to parse for a population without many options;

- adding expensive controls works against workers’ expressed interests that could be either a. legitimate but conditional (they need the money and the local standards are low, working fast is a tiring but reasonable way to achieve their goal) or b. the capitalist version of Stockholm syndrome. In my experience, it’s nowhere easy to sort the two edge-cases apart. If that’s the case, a market-liberal option is to let bad employers loose their workers by making sure there’s low employment overall, the places with real opportunities can poach them away. Also essential: personal growth needs to happen; I wasn’t super hopeful that “the market” would deliver until Lambda school.

That line of reasoning has been the first criticism of trade and workers’ unions since the XIXth century and the vertiginous growth of the Industrial revolution: they defend current tradesmen and employees against newcomers. I think trade unions can do amazing things to help spread the wealth but I would be wary about that edge.

There are newer arguments in favour of Uber in that sense:

- how easy it is to get a job, fast even: a massive upside of Uber is that you can enrol under a day and get paid within seconds of dropping your passenger; people with stranger schedules, deaf people, with non-violent criminal background have testified in that sense; anyone familiar with “Growth”, especially on a platform would recognise the approach;

- at this point, “unintended” consequences are widely documented; public servants should expect rules like that would back-fire, and adapt their rulings; Uber’s margins or lack thereof are public; other similar companies have left markets, leaving their workers in the dust; it’s easy to confuse the valuation of an IPO with free cash, to mistake Growth for Profit (God knows every reporter covering tech makes that mistake) but I doubt that Uber can afford to raise compensation by a lot;

- there are now many alternatives in the gig-economy: bad employers cannot retain workers; e.g. Amazon’s warehouse would not retain anyone if they were that bad. I’m less familiar with Amazon and convinced by that one, but if you go on money-making/saving forums, you’ll notice how so many contributors have tried and compared dozens of gig-platforms. The common thread? Everyone there started by being excluded from the standard employment market by personal circumstances, unintended consequences of regulation, prejudice or sometimes just being a terrible human begin. But that’s the starting point.

I really don’t think that the gig economy is the solution: banning 29-hour limits, having incentives to accommodate for handicap, family life, etc. for any business that can shift hours also need to be in place. Few people want a series of gigs; for the few who do, what many of those companies have done isn’t worse than the alternative. For the many who want a stable, predictable job, I don’t think the solution is to regulate industries where tasks are, say, very time-specific.

Disclaimer: I’ve worked for Deliveroo (the non-US equivalent to Doordash) and dealt with those questions a lot. I’m overall proud of the work there, from many personal contacts with riders; I also have a litany of complaints handy, mainly because it was my job to prioritise them all (and there were a lot and many were really bad but not as bad as unemployment/dealing drugs/failing to make it as a Grime singer).

I would have a more critical take against Uber Taxi, mainly around how they abused the financial illiteracy of their workers. That’s one aspect I would certainly want to see regulated.