Uber currently has millions of part time employees in California. This ruling is a reclassification - Uber doesn't have to change a single thing about how the app works, and all the drivers are employees.
There has been considerable ink spilled about AB5 changing that, with the taxi industry lobbying unsuccessfully while it was in the legislature for a specific exemption; the B prong of the ABC test, which seems to be the critical and likely insurmountable one in the Uber/Lyft case, seems like it would likely apply to them in a similar way.
Taxi companies are individually smaller and, for that reason alone, probably lower on the direct, self-initiated enforcement priority list for the State, but there's both private action and complaint-based state action that workers can initiate, as well.
An individual taxi driver owning a cab, a license if necessary, paying for his insurance and getting the money from his passengers is an individual contractor, yes.
It's just that he contracts with the individual riders, not any higher-up monopolistic business entity that sets arbitrary business-driven rules that all taxi drivers have to follow.
Very few drivers own their cars (or more importantly their monopoly medallion). Those are owned by investors like the presidents former lawyer, Michael Cohen.
Isn't that only the case in certain metropolitan areas? It is a huge problem indeed, but the problem there is the medallion system having degraded to become a shady get-rich-quick investment scheme. This is unrelated to the way in which the drivers are operating.
They just lease their car and medallion from someone, paying that guy a fixed rate per day for that lease, but that does make them neither a contractor nor an employee of the guy who owns car and medallion.
If they also were to lease the clothes they wear while working from a tailor instead of buying them, that wouldn't make the drivers in any way into contractors or employees of that tailor.
Absolutely false. Most taxi drivers don’t own the medallion, and in fact when they start their shift they owe the taxi cab company $80-100, so they need to work for a few hours just to get to break even.
Your mental gymnastics to try to justify why taxi drivers aren’t employees but Uber drivers are is showing.
