When I was in college, I used to work Uber as a side gig. One day, while working, my account was blocked, and I would couldn't pick up any more passengers. I was 2 hours away from home. Apparently, one of the customers had filed a complaint about a missing item (gloves or some bs like that), it was not in my car. My account was blocked until the case was "reviewed". So I had to drive back 2 hours without picking up any passengers. (The passenger later found the item in their bag)
There should be a way to codify law that requires companies to provide compensation for the trouble. Companies far too commonly assume guilty until proven innocent. It puts all the responsibility on the consumer because they want to avoid liabilities.
Yeah the law should be gig work is illegal and the OP should have been classified as a part time or full time worker who would have been paid for the entire time on the clock during the work day, including the time wasted while the company toiled to resolve a customer dispute.
My dad drives for Uber Eats as well as Skip the Dishes (a Canadian gig work food delivery app). He gets paid more per hour on Skip but the app will not allow him to work as much as he wants, it forces him to sign up for 3-4 hour shifts a week ahead of time. Sometimes Skip will only give him 1-2 shifts in a week (8 hours total work), which is simply not enough money to get by.
So he uses Uber Eats to pick up the slack. The app lets him go online and go offline any time he wants — no shifts, no scheduling ahead. He’s also completely free to reject as many orders as he wants until he gets ones that offer a bigger tip. Skip, on the other hand, penalizes his earnings if he falls below 80% moving average accept rate (over the last 10 orders).
If Uber were forced to employ all of their drivers full- or part-time, he would lose all of the flexibility he now enjoys. He’d have scheduled shifts and have to clock in and clock out at specific times on specific days. He’d likely also lose the ability to reject orders entirely.
I can tell you right now, he would hate that. So would many other gig workers, who take full advantage of the flexibility to be able to look after their families and otherwise live their lives. Compare that with the chaos that is the life of a retail worker stuck with an automated shift scheduling system and zero start/stop time consistency and zero flexibility.
Do you realize what you're saying? Gig company A only dribbles out 8 hours of work a week so your Dad is forced to also work for gig company B, but needs flexible hours to do so.
You are completely failing to see my point--if gig company A had to employ your Dad as a part time or full time employee with guaranteed minimum wage or work hours and other benefits he wouldn't have to tetris together an insane set of gig work jobs to keep from being evicted or starved.
Your dad is forced to be an indentured servant for these companies that can't make money without exploiting people like him. And somehow you are immediately going to bat for these employers... pretty sick IMHO.
He DOES have a boss that mandates when he needs to work--the apps penalize him if he isn't taking rides and eventually cut off his work entirely if he isn't taking them (which is the whole point of the original article and legislation in Seattle!).
That’s exactly how an app which treated him as a part-time worker would work. If you stopp accepting every ride that’s offered to you, you get fired. What else would you expect?
I find it so puzzling that some people can’t accept that there are gig workers who prefer the flexibility and many of them wouldn’t be able to work at all if they had to be treated as part/full time.
The commenter also says nothing about being penalized for not taking shifts. If they sign up for a shift, they are expected to work that shift. It is a completely different model than Uber Eats, which he can sign into or out of at any given time, without penalty.
They're not his employer so they shouldn't penalize him. If you're truly a gig worker, why are you being penalized for not accepting some job? How does that make sense?
If they were employing him, penalizing him for declining work would be fine.
Any company which would have to directly employ him would certainly penalize him for not accepting work and would not allow him to start his shift whenever he wanted.
That other app he’s using seems to be somewhere in between gig and normal work (so you seem to get the worst from both worlds).
> If they were employing him, penalizing him for declining work would be fine.
Because Skip has shifts and he is expected to deliver to a certain standard during that shift. The “should be an employee” people seem to want their cake (be classified as an employee) and eat it too (not get punished for not doing acceptable workloads as an employee). Smh
You're talking about a different app not Uber, which doesn't penalize per acceptance rates. Besides, I don't think you understand how these gig apps work. You can only accept or reject if you're clocked into a shift. His dad can clock in at anytime but he won't be penalized on Skip if he's not clocked in.
This discussion of work like something that people can whenever they want, however they like feels so off base to me. It's work. It's something that people have to do in order to survive and live. Yet for people who promote the flexibility of gig workers it gets talked about like a sport or some other fun activity of choice.
It all comes down to trade offs in the end. Either we optimize for people to hold jobs that allow them to survive in society and earn enough to do things like pay rent and buy food. Or we optimize for job dabblers who don't really need the work but want some extra cash. I believe we should optimze for people to hold steady jobs that allow them stability and do important stuff like pay rent and buy food. We should optimize for survival of the worker and workers require steady employment.
There are plenty of people who can only work part-time yet may still need money. People in school, people with young kids, people with medical conditions that limit their activities (sometimes variably by day/time), etc.
Not everyone doing gig work is hustling as a second job to get ahead (though that should also be both legal and accepted, IMO).
Why don’t we optimize for both and allow the market to decide where each model is best suited to provide services?
Eg, ridesharing can be done ride-by-ride by people choosing to accept fares from a marketplace but stocking store shelves works better having people there on committed shifts and delivering packages is in between, where people sign up for shifts but are expected to complete the full shift.
Why can’t we fulfill the needs of both people who want reliable, shift-based employment and people who want variable gigs?
> His dad can work at anytime, anywhere and doesn't have a boss to mandate when he clocks in.
That's not exactly true if we consider the environment that allows companies to operate like this, insomuch as his dad will eventually starve or be homeless if he doesn't eventually clock in. Hence the indentured servitude. The "worker's choice" of "just do gigs for a different gig company" doesn't really work if all gig companies stand together at the other side of the homelessness cannon.
This represents a poor understanding of "indentured servitude", or a deliberate broadening of its meaning to encompass other things.
The term refers to situations such as "An employer pays for transit of one or more people on condition that work of the employer's choosing is performed until the cost of transit, and any accompanying expenses, are repaid to the employer." Generally, these include specified wages, but employers commonly arranged that expenses and wages combined guarantee that the workers will be unable to pay off the contract within any specified timeframe. This often resulted in lifelong service, and could at times extend to workers' heirs (whether debyst inheritance be legal or not, as such workers were often at severe disadvantage to risk challenging the employer on any matter). Effectively, indentured servitude was usually indistingushable from slavery.
To address your "will eventually starve if he doesn't _eventually_ clock in", this seems to be the default case for all forms of employment (even if you employ yourself, in the wilderness, entirely on your own). The exception being that some places have sufficient social or legal safeguards to prevent a "clocked out" person from meeting this fate.
I’m not GP, but I think you’re missing their point. They described the Canadian job as “gig” but it’s actually structured more like more traditional part time work. It sounds like you’d prefer to outlaw all part time work?
The point is true gig work allows you the flexibility to fit it around whatever else you have going on, be that part time work, starting a startup, taking care of a family, etc. of course it’s downsides and probably needs some more rules to protect the workers. But banning eliminates the opportunity entirely.
It sucks to be a freelance writer and it’s easy to get screwed; should we ban that too?
Personally, I think part time jobs should have to come with the same benefits as full time, by law.
That would encourage companies to offer full time positions. Current law (in the US) financially penalizes full time employers, which is why most part time workers end up working multiple part time jobs.
My dad (and loads of other gig workers) don’t want full time Uber jobs. They like gig work because it gives their lives flexibility. The employer-employee relationship is about more than money & benefits, it’s about power.
A full time job gives your employer the power to dictate your life schedule to you. Your boss wants you at your desk at 8am but you have to take your kid to school at 8:30? Too bad! You’re there at 8 or you’re fired.
It’s even worse in retail and food service, as I alluded to in my original post. These workers get their schedules a week ahead, with shifts all over the place. One day you’re opening at 6am. Next day you’re closing at 9pm. Good luck having any kind of life outside of work with a schedule like that!
> "part time jobs should have to come with the same benefits as full time, by law."
All this does is eliminate more jobs.
In your hypothetical scenario, a company that hires 2 or 3 people part-time would need to do health insurance for each of them, benefits for each of them and the additional full-time equivalent paperwork for each of them...
In that scenario, the company would end up just hiring 1 person full-time for the hours, and have much less added overhead costs.
This would lead to higher unemployment, because now instead of 3 people being employed part-time, only 1 person is employed.
Where's the good in that? Maybe I'm just not seeing it from my perspective, if anyone else can chime in?
Do you know this is exactly how it works in most first world countries already? (except for the health insurance bit, because most first world countries have a public health system). Part-time workers get holiday pay, sick leave, and every entitlement of full-time workers, at a rate commensurate with their hours.
That is irrelevant, because of how it's measured: 1 person working 40 hours/week and 9 people not working gives an unemployment of 90%, but 10 persons working 4 hours/week gives an unemployment of 0% -- yet both scenarios have the same amount of work. Of course using part-time jobs reduces the unemployment figures. It says nothing, however, about the availability of work.
It sucks to be seven years old and work in a textile factory, and they totally get screwed. So we chose to ban that. Slavery is another labor practice we've banned. Not sure what your point is about freelance writers.
>Your dad is forced to be an indentured servant for these companies that can't make money without exploiting people like him.
This is absurdly patronizing to people making their own choices, and the freedom to seek employment or work as they see fit. As someone who, as an independent contractor in CA, was the victim of such patronizing sympathy that resulted in regulation which was deeply contrary to my own interests, please stop trying to "protect" people like me. Ironically, that regulation was targeted at Uber, who then received a specific carve out that left me screwed over as a small independent contractor.
If gig company A had to employ your Dad as a part time or full time employee with guaranteed minimum wage or work hours and other benefits he wouldn't have a job.
That's true for basically all the "gig economy" apps, which are just enormous money sinks which fuck over (disrupt, according to their propaganda) whatever market they enter and then either collapse leaving a rotting corpse where a functional market used to exist or become monopolists and then proceed to level the market in order to milk it up as much as possible. And then they collapse anyway.
If we had any kind of sense, as a society, this shit would have been banned years ago.
The demand for food delivery still exists and plenty of other companies would fill the void, that's how the free market works. Right now these apps are exploiting workers so they can pocket more money for shareholders and paper over a failing business model.
Love how you talk about the "free market" here, but also insist that certain types of employment should be illegal. (As an aside: we don't have a free market. Such a thing doesn't actually exist in the real world.)
I don't think we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Certainly there's some legal regime where workers can continue to enjoy the kind of work time flexibility they have with gig work, while also being compensated and treated fairly.
However they would have no incentives to hire people who prefer highly flexible work hours and would force his dad to work fixed shifts which clearly not something many gig workers prefer (and I’m sure many of them would prefer higher grade pay for instance than whatever you’re proposing).
If the best the current system can offer is "either debase yourself like a peasant into multiple gig jobs that regularly screw you, or, be homeless, and sorry there's just nothing we can do about that" eventually people are going to start considering other systems.
Social unrest is bad for business. I'm not sure why companies keep turning the screws when profits are at record highs.
To be honest, I think Skip and Uber Eats are either struggling or in a seasonal down cycle right now. Very few orders coming in, and it’s not just my dad. He talks to the other drivers out there and they say the same thing.
I think on the one hand maybe a lot of people are away on summer vacation so not ordering food as often. On the other hand, interest rates in Canada have shot through the roof, so maybe a lot of people are cutting back on ordering in and choosing to cook more to save money.
Unfortunately, interest rates also affect my dad, so he’s getting squeezed pretty hard. I can’t blame the gig companies for that though, that’s the Bank of Canada’s doing.
> If the best the current system can offer is "either debase yourself like a peasant into multiple gig jobs that regularly screw you, or, be homeless, and sorry there's just nothing we can do about that"
It's not. Gig work is one of many options.
You can be a full-time employee. You can be a part-time employee. You can start your own business. You can work for local, state, or federal government in innumerable roles.
Or, if it suits you, you can be a gig worker.
Focus on specific cases of companies treating workers unfairly, as this legislation appears to do. There's no point railing against "the system" because there is no "system".
Show me the full yime jobs as food delivery driver that would meet the demand for such jobs and I'll give you $100
Prottip: they don't exist
Delivery drivers always got paid jack and made the majority of thier income from tips. It was always a bad industry and Uber etc just make it worse by taking an additional cut and causing businesses to outsource to fewer total workers across the industry than would be employed/were employed under the traditional model where any business that wanted to do delivery had to do so by directly employing someone.
There's another side to that coin. If every restaurant that wants to offer delivery has to have their own driver, that means there are tons of drivers sitting around doing nothing while waiting for orders to come in. By outsourcing delivery to Uber, all restaurants in a city can be served by one pool of drivers, leveraging economies of scale. This opened the door to many more restaurants offering delivery because they didn't need to pay drivers to sit around.
Considering current labor shortages it wouldn’t be at all unreasonable to conclude that many gig workers do this because they actually prefer the flexibility these app provides to working fix shifts with almost no way to influence tour schedules yourself. All these champagne socialists seem to ignore that for some reason..
In some ways gig work can provide a level autonomy not normally available to the people taking gig work, sure, but it doesn't change the fact that gig workers are exploited, and that's bad.
If the alternative is more degrading forms of labor, with businesses sneaking around full time protections by only giving people 30 hours of work, and paying an absurdly low minimum wage, that's hardly an indictment of the idea of strong labor protections - quite the opposite. Why did you bring up socialism? Are you saying capitalism can't provide good labor conditions and we need socialism to do so? Extremely based take.
When what you want is full-time work with benefits, and all of the fixed schedule commitment and expectation of "you will always show up at a given time for a specified duration" stability that comes with that, then gig work seems like a major step down and even a cynical plot by corporations to deprive you of something you think you should rightfully have. But when what you want is gig work and all of the flexibility that comes with that, and there are many people who want this and have wanted it for years - even decades before the so-called gig economy became a buzzword- then gig work is perfect and irreplaceable.
There are some niches that have operated under the gig work model for almost 100 years, such a certain sectors of trucking where drivers own their own rigs and specifically choose to enter that line of work, as opposed to a salaried job where they don't have to worry about maintaining their own vehicle, precisely because they want the ability to simply switch their (very well-paid 6 figure minimun) job off like a light when they feel like it, for a couple of weeks or a couple of months or longer, and then switch it back on.
I personally know a guy who has performed with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra for almost 20 years doing exactly this. he's a trucker with his own rig and his own schedule on his own terms for 6 months out of the year, and tours with the orchestra for the other 6 months. This type of lifestyle would not be possible if there was no established gig system available for people who wished to have that flexibility.
Temp agencies have existed since forever. You call them, I’d like to work, you get a shift or a week of shifts or whatever. No commitment beyond that. Denying people part time work status has no benefits, part time workers already had opportunities to be super flexible
More likely, as a college student the OP wouldn’t have been able to get a shift scheduled because Uber would prioritize drivers who can work full time.
And Uber would have a terrible time finding employees in a university area where most of the local population and workforce is beholden to a part time class schedule. It would leave them open for a competitor who values and works with part time workers to swoop in and eat Uber's lunch.
If you're so sure about how to create a better business that all the employees would prefer why don't you do it instead of speaking about things you clearly don't know about?
You've been told multiple time people value flexibility and yet you keep fixating on an old work model that you want to apply to everyone. More options are better. Full time jobs didn't go away. This whole industry didn't exist other than getting paid per shift as a pizza delivery driver.
How many gig workers do you personally know? I know more than 20 and all of them prefer gig work to signing up for a full time delivery position at a restaurant.
Gig work is available to immigrants super fast as well. Go to any major city in Europe and see migrants and refugees making a living delivering food. Do you think they are dumb and choose the worst job they can get?
Talk to some people before you pontificate over what they should want for themselves. They can literally stop the app at any point so your problem isn't that gig work exists, but that other people value things you don't.
> Gig work is available to immigrants super fast as well. Go to any major city in Europe and see migrants and refugees making a living delivering food. Do you think they are dumb and choose the worst job they can get?
Frequently it's their only option, the only job the have access to, so in a way, you're right.
What's the alternative, getting rid of the only jobs that are flexible enough for people that have constraints? Not everyone can work part time or full time, that's the point being made all over the thread. The freshly-arrived immigrant is just one example. There's other examples in the thread, and I know people that do it around their kids' schedule to supplement their income, that use it as a side-job so they have funds to start their business or fund a hobby, etc.
One can stay here debating all along why people get to those situations in the first place, and that normal jobs shouldn't require extra work, or that immigrants should be able to find easy "normal" jobs etc, but the point stands for me that a world where I can pick from three options (full-time, part-time, gig) is better than a world where I can only pick from two.
That being said, I'm supportive of more regulation around gig-work to protect gig-workers, but that regulation needs to be specific to gig work and not just force it to disappear outright. A gig-worker shouldn't be able to be kicked out without explanation, there should be recourse for customer ratings, they should be covered by some kind of global insurance, etc, but these things will need to be tweaked to this new reality instead of us pretending like there aren't many many people around the world that prefer this work arrangement.
Or, we discover that we can't really have on-demand food delivery without a level of human suffering we find unacceptable, and it goes away. Uber dies. So what?
I definitely see the argument to classify workers as a more "permanent" status and guarantee all the benefits that come with that. But that would likely increase prices, decrease demand and cause some drivers to lose jobs.
Ofc, this depends on the region (country, state, etc.), I'd love to see some estimates on how much prices would go up in a particular region, and how much the demand would potentially decrease - when classifying drivers as full / part time workers.
Will be keeping an eye on this Seattle experiment.
> But that would likely increase prices, decrease demand and cause some drivers to lose jobs.
In California Uber and Lyft rammed through a proposition to enable them to continue their labor abuses. Anecdotally, the prices have gone through the roof and I've never had more trouble getting rides, so I don't believe that. It's a failed business model because Uber has to provide a return to investors and livery is basically a race to the bottom without some form of price controls.
Ballot initiatives are not rammed through. Consumers want Uber/Lyft. Taxi cartels were so God awful to deal with even crappy tech alternatives are better.
Maybe people had different experiences with taxi's but I've taken uber 30x more often than I've taken cabs, and still have had 10x as many bad experiences with taxi drivers. From not turning on the meter, to being rude to my wife, to purposefully taking roundabout routes in order to inflate cost, to being told a taxi would show up at 1am, only to have it show up at 8 am.
plus in places like South America uber is the far safer option. I know my wife and her friends hated taking taxis as they were much more likely to be sexually harassed or deal with some strange person. Uber isn’t perfect but it has significantly reduced this since the people who do it get kicked off the app.
A lot of complaints i see on HN are very first world and don’t see how much some of these companies actually help.
> A lot of complaints i see on HN are very first world and don’t see how much some of these companies actually help.
These companies are not set up as charities. If they happen to help people, that’s a side affect of the primary purpose - generate maximum revenue.
Regulation is required where a businesses incentives do not align with societies (mining is an easy example). As much as C level execs will argue, self regulation has never been an effective mechanism. So Uber is incentivised, naturally, to provide a safe experience for a rider, as to do otherwise would reduce revenue. They are not incentivised to provide their drivers any semblance of a “life worth living”, as it has no positive correlation to revenue. This isn’t out of malice, it’s just economics at work. If we, as a society, want a better standard of living for gig workers, then regulation, flawed as it is, is the only mechanism I know of that has some chance of working.
See Ohio for what happens to an unpopular ballot initiative.
I’d vote against the Ohio initiative and for the Uber one.
I hated taxi cartels. They had horrible customer service, high prices, and I’m a big dude who had to deal with them. I cannot imagine how toxic it was for gals.
> It's a failed business model because Uber has to provide a return to investors and livery is basically a race to the bottom without some form of price controls.
or taxis, i mean, they’ve been around since the horse and buggy days and probably even way before that, i don’t know enough about the history, but i’m guessing taxi style travel services were even around during the silk road era. uber didn’t invent travel for hire.
this is going to be a rant, but i mean…
the reason uber and lyft (and countless other “disrupters”) disrupted anything is they pretended the externalities didn’t exist/ignored the very externalities the already existing industry had previously already sorted out and lived through.
and lo and behold, no one even halfway intelligent is shocked that all of these issues arose at scale.
i’ll repeat what i’ve said countless other times: anyone who thinks they have a “disruptive” idea yet hasn’t extensively studied why the already existing industry does things a certain way, is an absolute lightweight and no one should be investing in with them.
we have a major problem in some of our industries of people who have deluded themselves that the people who came before were somehow primitive or less enlightened.
we see this all over the place, from people who want entirely rebuild large software packages from the bottom up, from submarine tourism companies, to “house flippers”, to short-term rental apps, who because their egos refuse to let them explore the history of their project, they just end up in the exact same place. only they took a really long, wasteful, and stupid detour to get there.
if an industry is doing something you think is wrong, explore the history of why it is done this way. don’t pretend like that problem doesn’t exist and then call yourself a disrupter. this is a recipe to have everyone laugh and go “it’s not like you weren’t warned there was giant hole around the corner and then you drove right into it.”
and even worse, if they have explored the history of their project, know very well the problems coming, but try to externalize that to wider society, it’s outright malicious.
> leaving customers to rely on…the bus? Or just not traveling.
again, taxis have been around for pretty much ever.
> It's a failed business model because Uber has to provide a return to investors and livery is basically a race to the bottom without some form of price controls.
You can't have a race to the bottom without competitors still in the market.
If competitors like Uber leave the market, Lyft can raise prices.
In the long run, there will be a balance between competitors entering and exiting the market just around the point where the industry is barely viable as a business.
That's also how eg restaurants or cafes work in many big cities; and this explains why so most cafes fail, but why there are also always some cafes around.
The underlying economics don’t change if workers are paid per gig or per hour, so the customer is unlikely to notice anything.
What changes is the information asymmetry where Uber etc knows a lot more about the conditions of people working for them than the people taking these jobs do. As a general rule those with more information are simply in a vastly better negotiating position.
This is not correct. The costs of employing drivers would increase. The driver supply would go down and the price of an Uber ride would therefore increase. This is basic econ.
If uber wants to kill their margins even more by reducing supply and driving up costs, that's their own mistake to make. They instead could keep the service cost that works at the price it's at right now by reducing executive compensation and finding other ways to increase efficiency.
Or they could keep pissing off the people with the monopoly on violence, maybe that'll work long term?
Company’s can reduce pay down to minimum wage, the only way it would force them to pay more is if on average people where making less than minimum wage on average.
You could have made the information asymmetry arguments perhaps a few years ago. But these days Uber's practices are fairly well known, so no one has to go in blind.
It’s all about edge cases, ie what specifically happens when a customer throws up in your car.
That’s not something the average person off the street is going to ask. But many are going to be pissed learning they will reimburse you for paying someone to clean your car but not the time it takes you to do it yourself, nor the lost wages until it’s clean.
If you take the inside view and look inside Uber, you might find that they handle each specific edge case according to specific rules.
But taking the outside view, you don't need to know all the specifics. You can just check Uber's general reputation (or lack thereof perhaps) for fair dealings with drivers. That general reputation will reflect how they are dealing with those edge cases in general.
Just like in the 2010s you could be reasonable certain that a job at Google meant you got free food, even if you didn't know the exact specific rules about what food would be available when and where.
Reputation is something companies manage, which introduces bias.
If people get a worse impression than reality they can release more information, but if the public has a better impression than reality then they have zero incentives to say anything.
Information asymmetry isn’t about people knowing nothing. If you’re offended a job at some salary you know roughly how much they are willing to pay but you don’t know the minimum you can negotiate for. Similarly, companies don’t know the minimum you’re willing to accept but they do know quite a bit about market rates.
If they could just decrease executive pay, why aren't they doing that already? In a sense, executive pay comes straight out of shareholders' pockets, so they would clearly have an incentive to decrease it, if they could.
Executive pay seems fairly independent of the issue at hand.
> If they could just decrease executive pay, why aren't they doing that already?
Counterpoint: if they could extract more profit from the market by increasing prices, why haven't they done so already?
Market determines viable price for service, not cost. If the cost of doing business can't find a balance at rates the market will pay at acceptable profit margin, the business simply doesn't exist. Many aspects of our lives suffer from this reality: renewable energy companies in many places survives only because they're propped up by government subsidy.
The answer to "why aren't the executives cutting pay" is obvious: it's up to the executives, and why on earth would they cut their own pay, when they could instead simply decrease worker conditions and cut cost of labor? Without a union, executives have literally all the power.
Executive pay + shareholder profits (through stock buybacks, dividends) are where all the massive margins go to right now. There's no more profit to extract from the market (unless the finance team is terrible at their jobs and have been leaving money on the table) so that's where the money to cover increased cost of labor needs to come from.
I'm not really upset at the idea of CEOs making less money, I don't get what the big deal is.
So market set the pay for services however executive pay is not affected by the market at all?
Uber pays its executives what it does because other comparable companies pay the same. If they cuts that people they’d want to hire will choose to work for other places and they will have to find someone who agrees to work for less (which might or might not be bad a thing)
And arguable, executive pay is perhaps a lot more elastic than ordinary workers' pay. Companies aren't shy about paying huge bonuses to their CEO one year, but cutting them to nothing the next. Ordinary workers have a much steadier pay check, even when working for Uber.
Similarly, most companies are also quite willing to hire and fire CEOs. Statistical distribution of CEO tenures is a well studied subject.
> The answer to "why aren't the executives cutting pay" is obvious: it's up to the executives, and why on earth would they cut their own pay, when they could instead simply decrease worker conditions and cut cost of labor? Without a union, executives have literally all the power.
No. Uber still has to compete for workers with other companies looking for labour. Unions presence or absence doesn't change that dynamic.
> Counterpoint: if they could extract more profit from the market by increasing prices, why haven't they done so already?
Not sure that's a counterpoint to anything? Yes, I assume that they are setting their prices to maximize long term profits.
However, if regulation increases costs across the industry, supply curves will recede, and if demand curves stay roughly the same, prices will rise (because the point where the curves meet will be at a higher price point).
They do work for shareholders but since shareholders aren't equally divided, i.e. one person or company may own a larger portion, and it's difficult to sue over this, executive can ignore the shareholders to an extent.
How would you prove a decision was wrong without hindseight? How would you prove an executive shouldn't make X amount of money?
Imagine I'm the CEO of Nike, I make $100 million a year. The company is doing amazing. Is that because of decisions I made, marketing, good product, word of mouth, things that happened before I was CEO. Prove that I shouldn't get that money.
> We can have higher employment and cheaper prices than we have now if we literally reinstate slavery.
Agreed. And companies would do it too if they didn't also need us to buy their products.
It's basically what has happened to manufacturing. Offshore factories are making products at literal slave wages and they get to sell to Americans for higher prices.
The wages are slave wages to the first world economies, but not to the developing world.
China for example has seen a massive decrease in the percentage of the population living below the poverty line as they’ve become the largest manufacturer.
At the end of the day these people are choosing to leave their farms to work in these factories because it enriches them. I’m not saying they’re great jobs, especially to us, but it’s not slavery.
> This is a common misconception.
> The wages are slave wages to the first world economies, but not to the developing world.
I know of this rationalization, but I don't agree it makes things ok.
Look at the Foxconn debacle where employees were committing suicide and strikes for better conditions were met with violence. It doesn't matter if their wages are technically slightly higher than the prevailing local wages. If you look at their quality of life, it's deplorable. Health care? Clean water? Safe homes? Paid sick leave? Work-life balance? Disability protection? Retirement plans? Do workers in China not deserve those things?
Why aren't first world business paying first world wages no matter where their workers are? They know they extract profits at the cost of human dignity for their workers. They know that offshoring jobs allows them to ignore American labor laws. It's not ethical. But as long as it happens somewhere else we can pretend it's not our problem.
No, there are certain upsides to gig work (mostly being able to set your own hours on the fly). What gig workers need is just better labor protections and benefits.
Perhaps the state shouldn't be in the business of telling consenting adults what services they can buy or sell to each other provided they're not harming others.
It's hard to see a victim here; no victim, no crime.
Am I missing the sarcasm? If your brother in law is relying on Uber, then employment protections would mean he doesn't lose his sole income unfairly and without notice.
Uber argue that most gig workers are just doing it as a spur of the moment side hustle, and therefore the flexibility is necessary. But your anecdote is the opposite.
We accept it because philosophically and logically it makes perfect sense that either party to a transaction should be able to revoke consent at any time for any (or no) reason, absent an explicit contract to the contrary.
Showing up for work on Monday is no guarantee you will show up on Tuesday. Correspondingly employing you on Monday is no guarantee you will be employed on Tuesday.
I think it's a bit silly to expect any other state of affairs.
The scenario you describe is only possible if there is only one employer.
The moment you have multiple employers to choose from (ie an actual market for labor) then the insecurity is removed. Indeed, for the most part, if you can deliver value, you can find someone to pay you for it and your bills will get paid.
It's not a matter of my view. The people you describe are only screwed if:
- they have no savings or access to credit
AND
- they get fired on short notice
AND
- they can't get another job
I'm not sure that making the employer fire them with a longer notice period, given that they can't get another job, means they won't be screwed. Therefore, I don't think there is any utility in so restricting the employer.
Not having savings is bad and dangerous. That's not caused by labor law.
What kind of jobs can you find on a single day's notice? Abusive gig work only.
Where I live the notice period is three months. I don't think you can imagine how nice it is to not have to worry about being fired on the spot, and when it happens you know you will have time to sort it out.
...or both could be presumed innocent until at least both sides of the story are heard. Uber is not obligated to take action immediately upon receiving a customer complaint.
One of the few advantages of middleman is to provide both sides of transactions with some level or protection. The store down the street may resell the same products from AliExpress but provides more protection than the fly by night resellers on Amazon.
I would trust Amazon slightly more than Aliexpress and both significantly more than the store down the street to make right any issues with goods bought there.
Amazon is very quick to refund, Aliexpress is slightly slower and more effort, a local shop is up to how they feel with only the vague threat of a chargeback.
It does not work that way. Innocence is applicable when punishment is applied. The driver was the one that was punished, therefore the rider was an accuser, whose innocence is irrelevant.
Yes, and assumed the driver was guilty. The two way road is that the middle-man has to assume innocence from BOTH parties until otherwise proven. Period.
The unemployment rate is extremely low these days, yes they do have other options in most places. Many choose to work for uber because they prefer the flexibility to having to work shifts with very limited options to alter your schedule.
This seems like a perfectly normal consequence of the "at-will" employment resultant from the primary place liberty has in our society. I see nothing wrong with it and think this paradigm should continue and expand. I would say you have as much reason to continue to expect Uber issue you contracts as Uber has that you continue to accept them, namely none at all. A consensual relationship is one that can be terminated at any time without justification.
One day your job is going to be a gig job. Sooner or later. If it happens to be later, are you going to be cool living in a privileged oligarch class that has its boot on the face of humanity?
When your philosophy was developed, if you didn’t like your circumstances you could literally move to the wilderness and make a life for yourself by exploiting unclaimed land. Or if you lived in a different part of the world then nations would go to war with each other over resources.
We don’t live in a world with unclaimed land anymore.
It would be really super duper nice if nations stopped going to war with each other over resources.
We have to figure out how to coexist with each other, and that means treating humans with more dignity than an object that is ruled by an algorithm.
The philosophy was developed because people cannot agree on the basics, and there is no supreme moral authority to appeal to. It follows that any enforcement of one person or group's will on another cannot be morally justified, no matter how well-meaning the imposers are. This is the only basis by which people who are fundamentally, diametrically opposed can coexist peacefully.
This assumes an universal ultimate moral precept: that peaceful coexistence despite moral disagreement over every other precept is the ultimate and univeral moral rule.
Of course, one thing on which the vast majority of people, regardless of their different moral systems, agree on is that this is not the case.
So, that means that land should be free, pedophilia and child porn legal, total anarchy?
There's no such thing as not having the will of a group imposed on others. The best we can do is formalize a non-violent system of consensus of rules we can live by, and then allow only said system to use violence to enforce such rules.... Which is literally what government is.
Pedophilia and child porn involves people who cannot consent, so no. Funny how that's the one that folks reach for though isn't it? Mandating that relationships are consensual isn't equivalent to anarchy. It's exactly one of the rules you're talking about.
I’m not saying I disagree with you re child porn, but realize that you are encoding a lot of moral judgement in what qualifies as consensual. What makes the relationship between Uber and an Uber driver consensual? Can you give consent if your alternative is starvation or homelessness?
I agree it's not an absolute, immutable concept, but I think it's a hell of a lot clearer than "good" or "right" or "fair". What makes consent is the fact that either party can opt out at any time for any/no reason. It's consensual because we are decision-making agents, and in spite of privation we can still choose to refuse to transact. Consent is violated by force or direct threat of force, not by the circumstances the transacting parties may find themselves in.
If you're very horny can you still refuse to consent to sex? If you happen to be dying of thirst and I offer you a glass of water, can you refuse? You can. Are there may reasons why you would? I don't imagine so. Does it follow there there are no circumstances under which anyone would refuse? It does not.
These are are problems of the commons[1], and do need governance. They don't however represent direct interactions between people (unlike say employment or sex) and so consent isn't really in-scope here.
It's not though, it's simply another option in the market. More options are always better than fewer. No one is forcing anyone to take these gigs, and the relationship between gig provider and worker is frankly none of anyone else's business so long as it's consensual. There is none of your air or water being contaminated.
I'm just using the common definition, as applied to personal/romantic/sexual relationships. I even linked a video that quite clearly explains the definition.
The legal system that decides when we can give consent (when we become adults, the age of majority) and when we can't (legal incompetence ruled by a court of law).
Who and what determines whether a human can consent? It it an age thing consistent across all humans or a developmental thing? If it's a developmental thing, well then how do you feel about those with developmental disorders (mental or physical)? Is it the case that one legally definable day based on age you become inarguably and unambiguously capable of consent?
Obviously, not arguing for CP here, but I'm pointing out that the age of consent is indeed is a (valuable!) will imposed by society on others. I'm bringing CP up because it shows a bound on behavior which exists, and thus there is a line which needs to be drawn.
As I've written below[1], I agree consent is not an immutable fact of nature, but a human construct with arbitrary boundaries. Most of your questions are answered already by the legal system which defines the concept though. In order to consent (say to sign a contract) you have to be of the age of majority and not ruled legally incompetent by a court of law. So basically yes, an age thing, and the "who" that decides is a court of law.
All I'm suggesting is that this liberal imposition - that relationships between adults (as above caveated) must be symmetrically consensual - should take precedence over how good, right, just, harmonious, or fair said relationships are perceived to be. If we think we can make something more fair but less consensual, we should not.
Isn't that just forcing the group that wants the status quo's will upon the group that wants change? That doesn't seem like it promotes peaceful coexistence. It just allows the group currently doing the oppressing to continue to do so.
Corporations aren't entitled to liberty. Uber isn't a person, it's a hivemind - if it has to cut off one drone, it doesn't affect the hive. Except drivers aren't drones who can simply accept being liquidated for the good of the hive. Allowing that behavior is anti-liberty - the liquidated driver has had their means of providing for their own liberty revoked by an entity that is private, arbitrary and capricious.
He wrote about ideals but was not an idealist nor ideologue, and in fact was very pragmatic in nature. That’s possibly his nature or from his work as a doctor. What also stems from that, and his religious outlook, is that his ideas were to serve humans better and promote their good and benefit.
Hence, I doubt he’d find a giant company using its negotiating power - and not forgetting its other legal shenanigans (most relevant in this case would be trying to prevent unions[1] forming) - that necessitates harm to an individual through a “consensual” contract to be part of his idea of what liberty looks like. Would you negotiate such a contract for yourself? I doubt it. Can an Uber driver negotiate it away? I doubt that even more. In fact, there is no negotiation, it’s a take it or leave it offer.
In short, he didn’t seem interested in allowing powerful interests to crush individual interests based on some ill-conceived notion that it’s a free market or that there is true freedom to consent in any meaningful way.
You can be left exactly as high and as dry as the contract you signed stipulates, and if you have a dispute we have a pretty good system to work that out.
As a practical matter, that doesn't work when the power imbalance is so great that one side doesn't have a realistic way to negotiate the contract.
I.e. if the best job that someone can negotiate is one where they are being exploited or abused, then that doesn't make the exploitation/abuse any more just.
The trouble is that most people will become homeless if they don't get a job. As long as there is a steady rate of unemployment, there are people that can't meaningfully decline whatever conditions are in their employment contract.
And that's what this pretty good system doesn't account for: the inherent coercion of a fundamentally unjust system
I’m not sure about equal as life can be messy (you have a cash flow problem and need to sell now, the buyer knows that - can that be equal?) but certainly fair should be a good start.
Why do the power dynamics have to be the same? Are you suggesting that two parties cannot have a consensual relationship unless they have the same amount of power? Why not?
Because it will be inevitable that someone with less power will enter into the relationship out of compulsion due to (real or perceived) no other choice, and not because they want to.
in employment, yes, I am suggesting that, and that the basis behind at-will employment is flawed, there are plenty of ways to allow for the paid-person to exit a contract whenever they want without it meaning the company fires them whenever they want for any reason.
in other contexts, no, I am not suggesting that, but there are some fringes that try
Why is employment special? Why is a person more entitled to employment than any other sort of relationship (which you seem to agree ought to be consensual)?
There is very thin line, alas. And it goes to same old "were you really happy to use taxi before uber". In 2 countries where I did live and in many where I used just them, I wasn't happy.
Taxis were as unreliable and untrusworthy and they could be - unpredictable prices, you never know if it will actually come even if company accepted your request, shady city navigation when pay by meter etc.
So I'm all for company like Uber to be able to cut such bad actors very fast to be able to provide good service for customers. But that ability seems like quickly and universally degrades to "we own you and your schedule" attitude by ubers of the world
Probably everyone who has used a Taxi in Germany in the past can tell you how professional, knowledgeable, and safe Taxis were there, and that came through very strong regulations.
Getting a taxi concession was no joke. You literally had to study on the layout of the city. And given that those are European cities, there is no grid system. You also had to know about safety and take first aid courses.
Additionally, taxis require special inspection on top of the rigid inspections necessary for cars in Germany (you wouldn’t want to endanger people with a rust bucket on the autobahn). So yes, they were exceptionally safe.
Taxis are mostly Mercedes in Germany, as traditionally Mercedes had the most experience with taxis, and the proper programs in place for taxi use. When I see a Mercedes E wagon on a freeway, I still think "taxi" (like some think police car when they see a Crown Victoria).
Source: There was a time where I took a taxi almost every day in Germany, and a close family member owns a German taxi concession for many decades now.
Lyft+Uber are an absolute joke in comparison.
(I talk mostly in the past tense, because I haven’t lived in Germany for long now. I don’t know whether the gig economy damaged the enormous quality of taxis over there.)
100% this. I used to love to go to NYC and ride in the taxis. Such interesting people. Now, I get into a car and have to pretend I'm happy there are mints because they don't want to be poorly reviewed. When no one had to care about reviews, people could be real, and occasionally uncomfortable, but always authentic. Those days are long gone and fuck Uber for destroying that.
All my pre-uber memories of taxis in NYC are negative. The drivers drive super crazy, accelerating and breaking a ton because the meter pays them a higher rate if they hit a certain speed. I enjoy uber much more and still meet interesting people.
I think you misunderstood the commenter. Having a genuine conversation with a stranger doesn’t really ever mean that you’re going to turn that into a friendship. It’s quite normal to connect with someone in passing and leave it at that.
"make friends" is a saying. It doesn't literally mean to make actual friends.
Regardless. If I'm taking an uber/taxi/etc, I want to get to my destination safely in a reasonable time, in a clean vehicle. If the driver strikes up a friendly conversation that's fine. But its definitely not what I am in the car for. If the driver is silent for the entire trip, that is also fine as long as they get me where I need to go.
> Probably everyone who has used a Taxi in Germany in the past can tell you how professional, knowledgeable, and safe Taxis were there, and that came through very strong regulations.
If you required taxi drivers to have a PhD, they would be even better!
I don’t know how to read this comment. Assuming it’s about regulations potentially impeding the ability to scale, the (million people) city I grew up in did not seem to have problems providing enough taxis in any way.
As far as I’ve heard from my family member, taxi concessions were highly sought after, but from my experience there were always more than enough to serve the population well. Some taxi drivers were employees of actual owners of the taxis, some (like my family member) owned their own taxi(s).
Taxi medallions in New York used to be traded for more than a million dollars in 2013.
Taxi customers effectively had to pay for the labour of the driver, the actual cost of running a car, and for the cost of capital to finance the medallions.
Taxi medallions set a cap on the available supply of taxi services. Demand was driven by the market. Cost of labour was driven by what drivers could earn in other industries. We can treat the actual cost of running the car as approximately fixed.
Because of the fixed supply of taxi services and high demand, prices were high. But the extra profit went all into inflating the cost of the medallions, because labour costs were essentially determined by competition for labour from other industries.
After Uber and friends entered the market, the cap on supply was effectively lifted. Prices of medallions crashed, because with extra supply and approximately the same demand curve, the market price for taxi services dropped to just above the cost of labour and car.
> [...] but from my experience there were always more than enough to serve the population well.
Whether you interpret the pre-Uber era of New York's taxis as 'enough to serve the population well' is up to you. But keep in mind that the drivers themselves did not benefit at all, since the cost of capital for the medallions ate up all the excess income.
(Many medallions were rented out by investors, but some drivers were also medallion owners. So in the latter situation they benefited in their capacity as medallion owners, but were 'exploited' in their role as drivers.)
I don't know anything about the taxi industry in New York, or how well it is regulated. I have no idea whether NY medallions are traded in a similar manner to Germany's taxi concessions, or whether they are really related in any way. I was not bringing up New York at all, and whatever problems NY has with medallions either do not seem to apply to Germany, or at least do not seem to translate into customer effects, given that I was talking about how good, reliable, and safe taxis are in Germany. From what I can tell, they seem to be able to make a living.
Apparently, by requesting it from the state, and fulfilling a whole laundry list of requirements. Including exams, background checks, disclosing financial information, adding an alarm system to the car, and more: https://www-bussgeldkatalog-org.translate.goog/taxikonzessio...
This also mentions that a concession cannot be sold, but if an entire taxi business is sold, the concession can be sold with it. It expires after 5 years however.
I still don't understand how what is going on in New York has anything to do with taxis in Germany. Whatever Germany is doing seems to work, and whatever New York is doing apparently not? I don't know, I'm not familiar with NY taxis.
I just looked it up on Wikipedia. Apparently, in Germany Uber only dispatches to local rental car and taxi providers, so it effectively seems to be a frontend to German taxis.
They also mention the rather strong transport laws, that most likely prohibit them from offering the same model as in the US. (But I really don’t know.)
> They also mention the rather strong transport laws, that most likely prohibit them from offering the same model as in the US. (But I really don’t know.)
You are correct. Uber tried their usual model here and we threw the law at them. Then they tried to ignore it (cause, why not, it worked in various US cities). And got hit over with the law again and again. Then they changed it to their current model.
> [Ubers] are as unreliable and untrusworthy and they could be - unpredictable prices, you never know if it will actually come even if company accepted your request etc.
Seriously, the number of times I've seen cancellations because the Uber didn't want to go in that direction or that neighborhood... or had unreal surge pricing applied, etc.
And that's today, so I doubt the Seattle change will make much of a difference. Many (not necessarily most. I don't have that data) drivers game the system in its current state.
Sure, but that's somewhat unavoidable. It's not as if cab drivers didn't discriminate on their fares before Uber, or inflate/make up prices via all kinds of underhanded means.
Uber and the like are getting worse, but they're just coming down to the level the taxi industry has been at for most of the last century.
> Sure, but that's somewhat unavoidable. It's not as if cab drivers didn't discriminate on their fares before Uber, or inflate/make up prices via all kinds of underhanded means.
In many places (e.g. New York City) taxis are regulated and this behavior is illegal.
The main improvement of Uber in NYC was that actually hailing a cab can be difficult in remote areas or during busy hours, and Uber solved that problem.
I've had the opposite experience. Exactly once I had a cab driver try to mess with me about fare (I told him to turn on the f'ing meter or you're going to have some big problems).
For going to an odd location, once in a while I've had a problem in Manhattan where the drivers are all heading home for the evening and they won't do trips that are "out of their way". But it was about the same frequency as Uber canceling (or hovering nearby waiting for you to cancel).
Sure, if you're somewhere where Uber is as available as a Taxi and charging more, then you should be hiring taxis if that's your experience. In my experience, Uber is still a bit cheaper than the taxis I've hired and a better experience.
I find it hard to believe that most people find Uber to be a equal or worse experience that they're paying "dramatically more" for, but still buy it anyway. It's also not as if the Taxi companies aren't taking home the bulk of the profits in the old system. It's bad all the way around.
Yes, Uber drivers are constantly canceling rides or just sitting in one spot until I’m forced to cancel myself and then dispute the charge. Thankfully Lyft still exists, I’ve switched to them and haven’t looked back. I can get to where I need to go much faster and more reliably, at roughly the same price or often less.
Yes because Uber didn’t have to actually compete with taxis. They offered a nicer service at a cheap cost and both of these things were an illusion. The price was subsidized and the drivers weren’t required (at the time) to meet any of the regulations that apply to drivers or third party passengers (for good reasons.)
So they replaced one crappy service with another that has a better UX. All other benefits seem to have vanished when forced to actually make money and we’ve seen a ton of rationale for the existing regulations in the process. Similar to Airbnb
I don't disagree with most of that, and I generally try not to use Uber or Lyft these days, but "replace a crappy service with a crappy service with better UX" is... not a bad business model. Almost every time I've taken a normal cab, the car was worse than every Uber I've ever been in, they tried to bully me into paying cash, and half of the time there was a screen in the car showing me ads non-stop, and it still cost more.
I had essentially sworn off of taxis, or even visiting cities where I would need to get a taxi. For all of their supposed regulation, there was almost no other industry I wanted to interact with less.
Uber had a really low bar to clear, and even at increased prices, I'm unsure if it would drive me back to cabs.
Surprising to some, perhaps, but the average Uber ride did not end in violence or a vehicular accident injuring people that had to be prevented by regulation. To the dismay perhaps of taxi/limousine commissioners, the average driver was a relatively decent human being who - given the preexisting apparatus in place to license drivers - did a good job, and cared about his car and his rating on the app to continue to do so. What happened for decades in cities like New York where taxi medallions were so expensive you could retire on their sale was big tech disrupting a dysfunction at its best. As for the cost, I didn't lose any sleep at night worrying that I was subsidized by Saudi Royal Family money. When the prices went up, it was never at a rate much worse than a cab.
> ride did not end in violence or a vehicular accident injuring people
That is not why registries and medallions existed. The point of it was to prevent a race to the bottom that crowded the streets with empty taxis all honking at each other.
> race to the bottom that crowded the streets with empty taxis all honking at each other
Which is, to your point, exactly what has happened with Ubers and Lyfts in Seattle.
In any popular neighborhood on any popular evening, public transport becomes even more difficult to use because Uber and Lyft drivers absolutely do not respect bus lanes or bus stops. They turn, even more than they already are, into fare pickup zones for these private companies. If a bus driver does manage to make it close enough to honk but far enough to not pick up someone safely, the gig worker does not do anything.
I'm starting to see this at the new train station that opened on the north end of Seattle. There is a "kiss and ride" area and it is routinely covered up with people driving vehicles festooned with the logos of the app companies. Some have even figured out that, apparently, they can get even better ratings by dropping their fares off at the bus stops in the bus-only lanes.
Meanwhile, there's nothing any of us can do because there is no public registry or complaint process for the public to gripe about app gig workers, and if you ask for one you are pilloried as wanting to "take away good pay from hard-working immigrants" or some other trope.
Automated fines for driving on bus lanes was already done at scale in Moscow more than 10 years ago. I assume there's no budget to do this immediately in Seattle?
In any case I guess one could try to organize and write to the police / local councils etc...
The point was to build a cartel, keep artificially high prices for a very poor quality service, and it worked, all over the world, but for cartels, not the consumers! Until UBER delivered the whole world from this universal established cartel-taxi-model for the benefit of all.
I’m not sure if you’ve noticed but from my pov the quality of the service has gone down. Uber started paying drivers less. Drivers left. Uber is now less aggressive when it comes to taking drivers off the app. Now, Uber costs the same as a taxi, or more, and is just as shitty as taxis.
The nyc medallion system needed disruption, sure, but I’m not sure if the current state is a net benefit to very many people, excepting some entrepreneurs who made the right bets.
Regardless they knowingly broke laws and incentivized that business model[1]. Also just because the average ride didn’t end badly doesn’t change the fact that some of them definitely did.
Uber still provides a better service for me in areas where I can use it. It's not as cheap, but in the cities I live and travel to taxis are still sketchy and unreliable compared to Uber.
Edit: honestly what is the rationale for the existing regulation?
I see the arguments for regulation around employee protection. But a lot of the licensing regulations seem designed to enforce artificial scarcity and restrict competition. The medallion system in NYC comes to mind. The value of an NYC medallion was insane pre Uber, there's no good reason for that.
Some of the licensing was clearly regulatory capture by existing taxi companies.
> Yes because Uber didn’t have to actually compete with taxis.
Taxis in many cities were/are horrible, Uber is a godsend in cities like Manila where the option is to (a) get ripped off (for sure) by a taxi or (b) use the Uber app and don't get ripped off. It is honestly an improvement. Likewise for didi dache in many Chinese cities where getting ripped off is common.
In Denmark we sort of made it illegal for gig drivers, not for food delivery (unfortunately) but what the “scare” did to taxis was it made them get the same Apps that Uber has.
So now taking a taxi comes with most of the benefits of having Uber, while also having all the benefits that come with the rather highly regulated industry of taxi services.
I guess it’s more expensive, but then, does Uber make money? Because if they don’t, then when will it disappear?
Pre-Uber, I would use taxis when visiting NYC all the time. It was fine; taxis were all over the place, and hailing one was easy. Hotels and some higher-end restaurants would even help line one up for you. Drivers were all over the map, though: some were quiet, some loud, some annoying, some offensive. Most drivers drove aggressively. Some cars were clean, some dirty. The credit card machine was usually "broken" (wink, wink). No good way to get any of this feedback acted on.
In SF (where I've lived since pre-Uber times), taxis were useless. There was pretty much nowhere in the city where you could reliably flag one down. You could call a dispatcher, but the standard answer was "a taxi will pick you up in 20 minutes", and then at least half the time they'd never show up. The rest of the time it'd take at least twice that amount of time.
So I walked or took transit when I had the extra time in my schedule, or I drove. Which sucked in many ways, as parking is annoying in SF, and if I'm going out to drink, it means either carefully controlling how much I drink, and leaving some buffer time at the end of the night to sober up, or leaving my car wherever it is, and hoping I don't get a parking ticket in the morning (a hope that failed often enough to get expensive).
Nowadays I still walk or take transit as much as possible, but I hardly ever drive in the city. Uber/Lyft have completely filled this void. As much as their business practices have been terrible, there's nothing else that fills their niche.
> So I'm all for company like Uber to be able to cut such bad actors very fast to be able to provide good service for customers.
The problem with this is that there's no due process. Some disgruntled rider can be an asshole and rate a driver with 1 star, with a comment about feeling unsafe, and that's it, even if the driver didn't do anything wrong. How is that fair?
Meanwhile, taxis have always had predictable pricing based on tariffs.
Honestly, I think the answer usually is in robust competition.
thing is, with this brave new world of purchasing services through apps and websites, competition is not assured. You will have a very difficult time fighting through the gauntlet of adtech and dark patterns, you might have a hard time getting a fair deal. Do people really get fair pricing getting a hotel, a plane ticket, a rental car, a tow truck or an emergency plumber anymore?
When I was in college and didnt have a car, UBER is one of these things that have improved my quality of live like no other thing. If not for UBER, I would have a miserable existence. Long live UBER.
"Employee benefits? No no, they aren't employees, they are contractors who operate with a dramatically higher degree of autonomy... Except when we fire--er, unilaterally sever relations, because they are being autonomous in ways we wouldn't accept from employees." /s
Our discourse on this topic is horribly stunted by everyone — on both sides — insisting that there are only two God-ordained classes of employment: "employees" and "contractors".
We would have infinitely more sophisticated discourse if we allowed for the possibility that our taxonomy does not capture the reality we live in, where there are intermediate classes of labor which should have some (but not all) the rights, protections, and expectations accorded to full-time employees.
Novel categories for niche situations might be nice to have, but the lack of some Perfect Category isn't the main cause of the disagreements/injustice going around. No matter how many are invented, we'd almost certainly still have the problem of people mis-categorizing for profit.
> Our discourse on this topic is horribly stunted by [...] insisting that there are only two
Most of these cases involve resolving how (or whether) a current situation must be brought into alignment with current laws, rather than how laws could look in 10+ years, so I think it's reasonable for much of the discourse to reflect that.
Sure, we could dramatically overhaul national employment laws and legal theory, but that's not what courts are supposed to do during a lawsuit, and it's usually outside the scope of what many local/state legislatures are prepared and willing to tackle.
> Sure, we could dramatically overhaul national employment laws and legal theory, but that's not what courts are supposed to do during a lawsuit, and it's usually outside the scope of what many local/state legislatures are prepared and willing to tackle
Literally what you are saying is "well that might be a better place to be, but the courts can't do it, and also it's too hard for the legislatures".
If you truly believe that making good laws is too complicated for the government to handle, then people and corporations are perfectly within their moral rights to ignore the bad laws and to do everything in the power to evade the consequences. You've lost the mandate of heaven, it's time to start over.
More like: "You shouldn't be surprised that changing X doesn't come up so often, given that a majority of discussions involve timelines where X cannot be implemented or groups that simply don't have authority to change X."
I don't even know what point is being made here, but it's ridiculous to claim that people in the 1930s or whatever crafted the perfect labor/employer social contract which would be applicable ad infinitum.
But won't someone think of the shareholders? Surely we can't deprive them of positive financial outcomes over something as silly as a living wage for workers?
The nature of gig work is that you always need to be looking for your next gig. The problem they talk about here is getting cut off from the matchmaking service, not that one customer doesn’t like you.
A lot of drivers I see are on multiple different gig apps they use interchangeably. There are like 3 food delivery apps and then 2 ride sharing apps. Anyone doing gig work full time is probably on all the apps. Also I don’t think they permanently end the relationship until they’ve investigated it. No way they permanently cut drivers just for an accusation of a rider.
That’s obviously a bit different from a regular job.
That's not the case in Finland. In Finland the "independent contractors" who make food deliveries are expected to commit to a certain amount of work at a regular interval (you know, like 8 hours per day for 5 days a week or so).
There is a lot of competition for these courier gigs, so the companies can choose who they allow to get gigs.
The power to completely cut off someone’s access to a service without recourse or explanation, be it email or food delivery or something else, is one of the most horrifying and dystopian realities we as an industry have willed into existence.
Glad to see municipalities finally taking some territory on this, it’s long overdue.
Yes, but remember that the polite fiction of the rideshare companies is that they're providing a service to the drivers by connecting them with riders. So the gp's point is a sound one even in this context.
Gig companies call it a two-sided market place and just use different names to describe “producer” and “consumer”. From this point of view both are users.
I’m wondering if the biggest problem is that at some point in history, losing access to an email account wasn’t the biggest deal - fast forward 20 years and I’d prefer to lose access to my physical mailing address, anything important is sent electronically.
I’m still not sure if there’s anything preventing TLD providers from revoking your domain for any purposes (higher bidder, etc).
I think we're in the worst of both worlds currently. Our online identities are already critically important, yet we're still bound to the physicial address for critical things like banks, employment screening, etc. that refuse to move away from physicial residency check mostly by inertia (I see laws not getting updated as part of that inertia)
I doubt a lot of that is inertia though. Most of those are due to tax/regulatory burdens that make it important to have some idea where your customers/counterparties are physically located. Outside of some inconceivably radical changes, I don't see most of the stuff you list being able to get away from the idea of a permanent residence.
There needs to be a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to a US government provided email, electronic money account that can never be blocked from receiving and sending money, and identity verification services as part of everyone’s rights.
On the contrary, if the government of India brings such a proposal I would be terrified.
I would not want the lives of citizens be tied so strongly with government provided infrastructure that the babus can "turn off" your digital life on a whim and suffocate you out of existence...maybe because you tweeted a joke, criticized a low level minister, praised a neighboring country, "hurt religious sentiments", or other flavors of independent opinions and free speech that the rulers of the day (present or future) don't support.
Fears like these are already voiced by privacy and citizens rights activists about the national ID system (Aadhaar), digital payments infrastructure, and all kinds of interlinking of databases and making such linkages mandatory for availing all kinds of services -- from birth certificates, to banking, to tax returns, to voting.
> that the babus can "turn off" your digital life on a whim and suffocate you out of existence
Hence the constitutional amendment. If you cannot trust the government to uphold the law, perhaps like it is in India, then this might not be a solution. But it should still work in the US.
Americans don't have a constitutional right to food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, education, employment or to not get shot in the street, and you want the constitution to guarantee everyone an email address?
I mean, the real issues here are labor and consumer rights, and the arbitrary power that American capitalism gives to corporations and employers, but God forbid Americans take either of those seriously, that would be communist.
Better than what? Currently, there is no legally guaranteed infrastructure for online transactions and identity verification.
Clearly, the world is transitioning to a place where your quality of life without an online presence is severely reduced.
Currently, due to the lack of government provided infrastructure, we all live at the mercy of a few giant corporations, who answer to no one and are free to refuse business to anyone, at anytime.
I do not see why anyone would want private banks to be able to hold the specter of canceling your account and blacklisting you over your head, or google/apple/Microsoft/whoever locking you out of email, or some underpaid ATT/Verizon/T-Mobile worker forwarding your SMS so someone can steal your 2FA codes and empty your accounts.
Yes, the USPS is an ideal vehicle to do it (they already verify identities for passports), but it would also be necessary to have a law that says this digital "personhood" cannot be taken away. For example, even if you are convicted of crimes, you should not be able to lose your ability to receive and send electronic money.
> The Congress shall have Power...To establish Post Offices and post Roads
It does not obligate the congress to do so, and most certainly (and unsurprisingly) does not contain language that guarantees any sort of right to email service.
Email is a subset of mail ergo the laws that apply to mail apply to email. Are you telling me that the method of delivery whether it be by horse, car, person, or telephone wire should impact the applicability of the law?
This is outstandingly wrong, the internet is no more protected under the constitution than any network of computers (aka none) from free speech, mail delivery, etc.
You may make the argument that it should be, and I might even tend to agree, but you don’t get to declare that the Constitution agrees with you. You can certainly even claim the spirit of the law should extend to the internet due to its ubiquity (which i might agree with as well), but that’s nothing but an interpretation.
You’re pushing on a string here — when I asked for some supporting evidence for their claims, the poster responded that… Well… I’ll let the response speak for itself:
> I don’t need a citation other than the fact that they share the common root word, and that people with common sense, which we would hope to be on the Supreme Court, see the argument that I’ve made is perfectly logical. I don’t need freaking precedence. I’m setting the precedence right now by giving a better logical argument than anybody else apparently ever has
I don’t need a citation other than the fact that they share the common root word, and that people with common sense, which we would hope to be on the Supreme Court, see the argument that I’ve made is perfectly logical. I don’t need freaking precedence. I’m setting the precedence right now by giving a better logical argument than anybody else apparently ever has
> The power to completely cut off someone’s access to a service without recourse or explanation
This is also relevant a different context: Google (or some other similar provider) cutting off your access suddenly, throwing your life suddenly into extreme disarray.
They were loading up encampments with propane and diesel fuel [1] mere feet from the Parliament buildings. The threat was dispersed peacefully, including by temporarily suspending access to bank accounts - as a Canadian I fully support the government's actions. Those whackadoodles are free to - and continue to - protest things that don't exist to this very day [2]. I believe one of them continues to believe she's the Queen of Canada. [3] You know, the Queen who died last year. This was not about what they were protesting, but how, and the threat it posed.
This is completely different from a few different perspectives but the most relevant is that they lost access by judicial process with legal recourse.
This article however is about private companies making (from some people's perspectives) capricious business decisions with no recourse because gig workers are not deemed employees.
> They were loading up encampments with propane and diesel fuel [1] mere feet from the Parliament buildings.
You make it sound like the fuel was intended to blow up Parliament or something. Clearly it was meant to keep their trucks running and the propane was for cooking and heating the people within the encampment. This was a completely non-violent protest.
No, I implied it was a dangerous situation and I said it had to end.
These whackadoodles fell down the conspiracy rabbit hole during COVID, like many others. They were irrational people making irrational decisions. Who knows what they would have done with that fuel when a month or two went by and nobody was listening to them. Maybe some oil-powered camp fires? One of their leaders was the QAnon Queen of Canada. We'd waited long enough.
Imagine how the US government would have reacted to a stockpile of fuel outside the gates to the White House. There would have been no survivors. That's true in most jurisdictions around the world. The Canadian government ended this stand-off peacefully -- with people who were demanding things that literally couldn't physically be delivered. That's a damn miracle. The inquiry found the government's actions justified [1], and the ringleaders in this zero-ring circus have pled guilty or are on trial. [2, 3] And now that it's over, everyone is free to go back and protest!
Stop sticking up for these nutbags, lol.
It's time to put this whole COVID-induced mania behind us. Pretending these are somehow ideologues holding rational positions and making good decisions on that basis is just divorced from reality.
At the time, 2/3 of Canadians supported this action. Less than 1/4 were strongly opposed. Not just that but all the Premiers from across the political spectrum and all the Federal politicians had to sign off too!
This went about as well as it could have. Respectfully based on your post history it sounds like you're American. It doesn't seem like you really have the context on this one.
"We are today serving notice if your truck is being used in these illegal blockades, your corporate accounts will be frozen. The insurance on your vehicle will be suspended,"
Blocking up city streets for weeks, disrupting people's lives, preventing emergency services from operating because of it, all while "protesting" when >90% of truckers were vaccinated, far greater than the average population, oh and all major trucking companies supported vaccines and mandates for obvious reasons. Meanwhile a select few "truckers" some funded by US interests, were, as you call it.... protesting. Give me a break.
> Donor information that was leaked from the GiveSendGo campaign—which has raised more than $9.5 million—revealed that more than half the donations going to protest organizers have come from the U.S.
> An analysis of the data by Newsweek found that California, Texas, Florida, New York and Michigan topped the list of the highest number of U.S. donations by state.
> An analysis of the data by Newsweek found that California, Texas, Florida, New York and Michigan topped the list of the highest number of U.S. donations by state.
California, Texas, Florida, and New York also top the list of the highest number of people in the US by state (and while Michigan is the whole way down at #10 rather than #5, the gap between #10 and #5 isn’t that big – much smaller than the gap between #4 an #5), so this much of the analysis says very little, because the very large size differences of the few largest states are masking anything interesting that might exist in the distribution.
It's actually a lot more thorough than I imagined, especially as it is a city ordinance and not a state law. Gig companies gonna soil themselves trying to work with this. Lots of lawyers getting overtime right now.
Which may not be a bad thing. As other commenter shared anocdote, him getting cut off because of bogus accusation is not nice. If Uber had to eat the loss, instead of carelessly impossing it on their "employees", they could probably do more thorough screening of onboarding employees, which would benefit the customer as well.
Earnestly not trolling, but would that actually benefit the customer? Part of the benefits of a service like Uber is having a lot of people willing and able to drive to/from places all over. If they're rejecting more people and increasing cost due to more thorough screening, the service likely gets worse and costs more, which means less people use it, so less people want to drive for it, and that starts to spiral.
I'm willing to believe that outcome may be better in the abstract, since I'm not a big fan of Uber in the first place, but it's not clear that the average user of Uber wants that trade.
I don't see how it's a fallacy to accept the parent's premise that Uber should be screening more people out of being hired by them, which then necessarily leads to less people driving for them, and that that would reduce the availability of the service. Making the service less available doesn't tend to increase usage of it.
Pointing out that Decision A will likely lead to Outcome B, which may in turn cause Outcome C doesn't automatically mean it's a fallacy. It certainly doesn't mean that you snarkily posting wikipedia articles accusing me of bad-faith argumentation is justified.
Stating A may lead to B, which may lead to C, without any justifiable argument for why we should believe C is the most likely (or even highly likely) outcome is the textbook definition of slipper slope fallacy in arguments.
In this case, it's not patently obvious that fewer, higher quality drivers is a net negative.
I don't think it's obvious that more screening leads to "higher quality" drivers or that customers care. That's the premise of my original post. More screening leading to less drivers feels like it's not a "may" in this case, since the original post was essentially saying that there were undesirable people who had gotten through current screening and should be driving.
From there, sure, it's unclear if less "better" drivers are a business positive, but either way, that's an interesting discussion worth more than just "haha you did a fallacy". Claiming that it's likely that having less drivers that are "higher quality", whatever that means, will improve the service overall is just as much of a guess as what I put forward.
Either way, to go back to my original post, it's unclear to me that the users of the service are, on average, that upset about the quality of their drivers. The alternative is taxis, which certainly aren't better on average at screening their drivers for anti-social behavior in my experiences.
Nothing about what the parent commentator said is fallacious and leaning on pattern identification -> fallacy doesn’t really work because we are not making formal logic arguments.
So, I work as a full time employee for a "big tech company located in downtown Seattle", my employer can terminate me anytime, on the spot, for any reason. But if I was a uber driver, I'd receive some "protection", why is that?
When one group of people fight for and/or win new rights, it doesn't mean that people believe that is the only group who deserve those rights. So yes, you should be protected too. Same with those gig workers. We all should be protected and we should celebrate anytime someone gets that protection. We don't have to view the world as a zero-sum game in which someone else getting something means you lose something.
If you're terminated you still get benefits like COBRA healthcare and can in almost all cases file for unemployment (which is money you've already paid into the system anyways). You have protections and a basic safety net. Gig workers have _none_ of that help.
You should probably reflect on why you don't seem to realize the extreme privilege and benefits you have and instead choose to blame or vilify low paid gig workers who are subsidizing and delivering the treats you demand and consume daily.
you receive WAY more protection than an uber driver (even with these rules) - federal law (and probably state?) dictate a whole host of reasons that employees may not be fired for, and there are an army of attorneys who will happily (and are legally empowered to) sue your [former] employer in an actual court (not arbitration), and what's more they'll almost always work on contingency.
Why else would uber be so desparate to prevent their drivers from being classified as employees?
Totally the same context in every way. Those fatcat parasite uber drivers deserve to be taken down a peg eh?
Why isn't the question why you have to live without any sense of security and basic human dignity?
That is essentially the life of a prostitute. You get paid today if you're lucky, and it might even be a lot, but are neither seen as or treated like a human, just a "provider". You give up the autonomy of your own business and the lions share of the rewards for your own work to be a mere employee, in trade for all the same risk as being out there on your own. That's showing 'em.
I would actually be embarrassed to admit that I had so little self esteem and dignity that my uber driver has higher minimum standards for professional relationships than myself, but hey that's just me.
Given that the unemployment rate in the US (at least) is still extremely low (about 3.5%), it’s at least worth considering that if the people working gig jobs wanted full or part-time employment, with the set of trade offs that entails, it’s probably available to them.
this is also tap dancing around the rigidity of full-time and part-time jobs were dependability on a daily basis are required something that gig workers enjoy not having to conform to
This is a good point. Gig workers enjoy being summarily fired by a robot with no explanation or recourse, now they will have to move to another city in order to keep doing so. I would hate to be a gig worker in Seattle today and see that the people that pay me to work have to give notice before banning me from their app.
We can't have it both ways with utter flexibility on the business side and no support on the social side. Cutting flexibility on the business side is an option, the other is to increase the support without an employer paying for it.
So more taxes to pay for support. Both will be opposed by the same group of lobbyists. You're paying a game of "heads I win, tails you lose" with them.
A large part of what matters is voters and I personally would absolutely vote to expand social safety net but would vote against any effort to move to a European style of employment law (ie. no at-will).
> The law also requires the companies to give 14 days notice of termination.
Is there such a requirement for at will employment as well?
I doubt that it will help, though. Instead of deactivation companies will shadow ban or “effectively” deactivate. When you can log into an account, but there is no more work for you.
It’d be great if there were wider regulation preventing sudden deactivation by services in general. Getting locked out of your email, creator’s youtube account or a a small company’s account with a payment provider due to some algorithm without recourse can be equally painful.
constructive dismissal. In some other industries similar tactics are used to deny the existence of an employer-employee relationship. Indefinite contractor status. Possibly broken up with mandatory away time every year. When the company no longer needs a worker or find their performance unsatisfactory they don't renew the contract. No termination needed. If they're paranoid about illegal employment termination lawsuits they can start managing out a worker through bad performance evaluations, assigning them less projects, a performance improvement plan.
Remember when people on HN were defending the treatment of gig workers as some kind of late-stage capitalist utopia where the surfs getting exploited to keep the engine of VC-welfare-fed transportation stopgaps was somehow the best thing for society?
The "innovation" is not paying or treating their employees well--sorry, their "gig workers"--and pocketing the saved money so it can go to the shareholders.
No they can't. Do you really think someone who is working multiple gig jobs just to make less than minimum wage can decide instead of paying rent or putting food on the table they'll instead allocate that money to their brokerage account and buy shares? Get real.
Gig work is a modern form of indentured servitude. Instead of a person with a whip telling you to work or die it's an app.
If someone is working multiple gig jobs they are making more than minimum wage. The unions and labor groups that promote this propaganda are just deep-pocketed as any corporation, at least the corporations do something useful.
They accomplished it by removing the only American “safety net” for our completely broken health and other infrastructure: having an employee-employer relationship.
As long as healthcare and job are intimately tied, these “hacks” are exploitive at large.
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California is not where I think of for the most "liberal" state at all, unless you mean "the most Nancy Pelosi-electing neoliberal" state. But then, it's also the state that gave us the scourge-on-US-history named Reagan, so what's your point?
WA, OR, CO, hell, maybe even MN, are all states that - just off the top of my head - I'd classify as far more progressive than CA, and particularly, less beholden to Silicon Valley investor money.
WA was (alongside CO) the first state in the country to legalize cannabis, Seattle as a city has some of the strongest renter protections in the country behind NYC and Chicago (admittedly this is a ridiculously low bar, "literally any rights at all" is better than 99.99999% of the country), pay transparency even went into effect here before CA. I wouldn't assume that what a CA court thinks of Uber drivers is necessarily what a WA court will.
WA is culturally progressive, and economically regressive. It's perfect for wealthy people who have gay friends and like to smoke pot. Not so great for the working poor.
I won't entirely disagree that it's fiscally regressive (most regressive tax policy in the country IIRC), but we're talking about the city of Seattle specifically which tends to favor worker rights a bit more than the statewide government does. See: sick leave policy, minimum wage policy, etc.
In the 1930s the Postmaster General made a famous quip about the “47 states and the Soviet of Washington.” It still leans very far left, more than California in my opinion.
> California is regarded as the most “liberal” state.
California is neither the most “liberal” state as leftists use the term (meaning “supporting capitalism”) nor the most “liberal” state as rightist use the term (meaning usually one of “to the left of the rightists doing the describing” or “leaning toward the Democratic Party”.)
Vermont probably wins using the right-wing use of “liberal”, Given how the left-wing use of the term fits the dominant philosophy of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party and maybe a moderate fringe of the Republican Party, probably one of the near-parity states would fit that description.
Why would employee or contractor status be relevant here? Seattle doesn’t classify these workers as employees any more than California does. This is a legislative labor protection that does not depend on employee status.
Tangent, but your citation to the appeals court ruling is not the final word in the Prop 22 review. A little more than 1 month ago, the California Supreme Court agreed to review its constitutionality according to the California Constitution. I imagine we’ll get the final word either this year or in inventory he next two years.
Fair enough, that said I think Uber should not be allowed to use their app to send me push notifications on how to vote and I suspect that shifted the vote somewhat.
