Employees might not get to claim the cost of their car (loan and depreciation), but contractors will. Healthcare doesn't come into it, NZ has government provided healthcare.

While you don't get vacation, you get to claim a lot of expenses.

In New Zealand, it's pretty much "at-will" anyways, with the cost of removing an employee typically being 3-months wages.

Personally, being a contractor was much more profitable than being an employee, even if I was on the same wage.

There is a model where a driver picks up the uber app and drives a couple times a month because it's a way to earn beer money once in a while. What percentage of trips do we think are driven by drivers like this? I bet a small percentage, maybe less than 1%.

Once a driver starts driving more than 30 hours a week for Uber, they're effectively Uber Drivers, and the employment concept starts to make sense.

The primary "innovation" of Uber is political, not technological. They've managed to circumvent labor protections and at the same time position themselves as the middleman between drivers and riders.

In another Universe, a technology company would develop software that taxi companies can use to provide the same services that Uber does. But that wouldn't be as profitable as there wouldn't be scope for labor exploitation.

Something that has been baffling me is how Uber is not in panic mode and it's market price not affected by Waymo?

I've always been skeptical [of self driving] but at this point (after having a few rides with Waymo) it appears that the folks at Alphabet have figured it out already and are coming for Uber. Why is not that affecting Uber's price?

New Zealand (where I live) has changed the law before to make employees contractors because of either corruption or economic necessity depending on which side of the fence you stand

Weta Digital had people building models on "at will" contracts and not paid very much. They were working on a film for Warner Brothers (if memory serves, I am not looking this up)

A contractor was fired and took a case that since they: worked only for Weta, only on Weta equipment, and for all the working hours there were for Weta they were an employee of Weta (that is the law here - until then)

The employee won.

Peter Jackson and Richard Taylor are very rich, very entitled, and Warner threatened to throw their toys across the room and the government changed the law so that any artist, or computer programmer working on a movie or a computer game had no employment rights....

I doubt that will happen this time. I do not think Uber wants to pay enough.

Between this and the Australian government's ruling on after-hours emails, seems like ANZAC countries still maintain worker's rights.

I'm surprised, and somewhat disappointed, that no state/country has created a formal third class of worker. There's obviously some type of gig-worker role that is neither employee nor contractor.

This is really good. Quite a lot of 'disruptive' business lately are actually just going around the laws, and sometimes borderline exploiting people.

From my experience, in big cities, Deliveroo and similar apps riders are mostly half legal young immigrants not realizing (at first) that they are being exploited and that they take quite some work risks without any coverage at all. But hey, at least we can have a Big Mac delivered to one's door for almost nothing.

Uber drivers, by any reasonable standard, are contractors not employees. Uber does not, to the best of my knowledge, tell them when or where to drive nor does it force them to pick up passengers. That's the distinction between contractor and employee.

Declaring Uber drivers to be employees seems to be a political move, likely lobbied for by low wage employers that are being forced to offer higher wages because many of their former minimum wage employees are now contractors for apps.

One question I would ask is how fast is Waymo growing? At this stage isn't it too early to comment on the viability? Concerns around safety may take a decade of safe riding/data to come down. Also, when you talk about Uber's stock price - Uber may not only be restricting itself to retail use cases but UberFreight could be a big market as well. In the logistics space too, adoption of self-driving may be slower than in retail is what I suspect.

Also, on an apples-to-apples basis, ~46% of Uber's revenue comes from markets outside the US where self-driving is yet to go through its own motions, regulatory approvals, local dynamics, learning (see how autos drive in subcontinent), etc.

Waymo is far from a full rollout across the US, let alone the world. That’s why.

Waymo is only testing in 4 cities. Market share is barely scratching the surface. Maybe in a decade, it will be viable replacement.

Waymo has zero presence in the vast majority of the United States and nowhere internationally. Meanwhile, "uber" is a verb and noun like Kleenex. And even if in ten years Waymo displaces Uber for transit, Uber will be dominant in food and grocery delivery.

Like if you don't live in the Bay Area or one of the very few places outside it where Waymo has been testing, people have never heard of it.

Basically, Uber is everywhere and Waymo is nowhere. Uber achieved dominance by rapidly scaling and being able to fight regulation with venture capital. Waymo hasn't been able to do that anywhere.

Google is risk-averse. There is no real incentive for its management to be aggressive. Even with the Gemini AI, they only acted after being pushed around by OpenAI.

You need someone ruthless and aggressive at the top, like Travis Kalanick, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk or Steve Jobs who basically stop at nothing. Folks who act fast and can take big decisions. MBA business types often get caught up in endless meetings, prevaricating over inessential things.

How many cities is Uber in? How many cities is Waymo in? That's why

Uber is going to be a front end to Cruise.