Could someone knowledgeable about employment law explain what will change for Uber/Lyft drivers if the companies are forced to reclassify them as employees?
The post talks about "potential harm" and says that how many hours drivers have to work and whether they can work for competitors at the same time "would all change." Is that right?
This is just a PR post by Uber. Don't take any of it as fact.
No one knows the true impact of this. Companies will find lots of interesting ways to follow the letter of the law but not the spirit of it. As they always do.
If you really want speculation on it then find someone who's actually a lawyer and not directly affected by it (so they aren't biased). Which I haven't seen yet.
There are some other excellent explanations in this thread, but it boils down to the idea that if drivers are employees, the company starts to care about how much they work. For example, if they work more than 40 hours in a single week, they need overtime pay. That means that a driver today who decides to work 80 hours one week and take a vacation the next would (if classified as an employee) be costing Uber a lot of money, so they will probably need to ban that behavior to stay competitive. From an employees perspective, this means they have less flexibility in their work schedule.
The post talks about "potential harm" and says that how many hours drivers have to work and whether they can work for competitors at the same time "would all change." Is that right?