Completely anecdotal but I bring this question up every time I drive in an Uber and overwhelmingly the drivers tell me they want to stay independent. No one is forcing drivers into their jobs. I really struggle to understand why we need bureaucrats imposing their idea of what a market should look like on an fairly efficient market.
From my experience the drivers are perfectly aware of the costs that go into driving so I really don't buy the exploitation argument. Seems like a loss for everyone except bureaucrats. Also don't see how it's realistic to expect them to be able to adjust to this on a dime. Although large, California is still a minority of their revenue.
They want to stay independent, fine. Then actually treat them like independent contractors. Let them set rates. Let them decline rides without facing penalties by the platform. Make the changes necessary to fit the independent contractor model. And not just the rideshare company, but the state too: these workers need unemployment insurance, as Covid has shown, and somebody needs to pay for it: be it the workers or the ridesharing businesses.
I worked for SuperShuttle developing their driver mobile app.
I can tell you for a fact that a big reason SuperShuttle failed is because the drivers were independent. They would consistently reject low cost trips and wait it out until they got one "mega" trip so that they only need to actually work for about 3 hours/day. Some days they wouldn't take any trips, just hang out in the van playing Flappy Bird.
This was a main issue for the SuperShuttle because they couldn't get their drivers to do adapt when Uber came around, including accepting work that more resembled Uber pool workloads.
This is what we call "revealed preference". It doesn't really matter what ten thousand Uber drivers have told you (and some of the supposed first-hand field surveying claimed in this discussion stretches belief). The only thing that matters in the end is how the participants in the market actually behave.
I think what's happening here is the defined categories don't adequately model reality. An Uber driver is somewhere between the current legal categories of employee and independent contractor.
A fully independent contractor like a SuperShuttle driver can treat each fare as a separate contract, pick only the best offers, and generally not provide the company an adequate service level to ensure a reliable stream of customers. Each driver prioritizing their short-term interests keeps that model from being a viable profession in many cases.
On the other hand, an employer is required to provide certain benefits to employees, especially if they exceed certain thresholds of hours worked. To make the fixed cost of some of those benefits viable, the employer will usually want to require the employee to work specific hours, and often limits those hours to stay within legal thresholds.
It's the flexibility of scheduling I that I think attracts people to gig work. They'll take the ability to cherry-pick the most profitable gigs if given the chance, but it isn't a core requirement.
It's probably desirable to add a third category to provide gig workers some protections without shoehorning them into the employee classification, which many of them actively wish to avoid.
True! I use this concept a lot when arguing with people about minimum wage! I think those single Mom's should be happy to have a job, not complaining they can't pay rent! Like they can just learn to code if they don't want to make min wage
I can't tell if this is a joke or someone incredibly out of touch with the reality of poverty (this being HN, there are enough people who fall in the latter group to make it unclear)
It's a joke, I'm glad taking "Actions > Words" to it's logical conclusion seemed like someone's real opinion, really tells you about the type of people that frequent this site
This seems more nuanced than implied here. It sounds as though the 'main issue' wasn't that Super Shuttle couldn't work while letting their drivers be independent, but rather that they couldn't compete on price with a service that didn't.
If a business was paying their workers minimum wage and couldn't compete on price with another business that came in and didn't respect minimum wage laws, you wouldn't say the main issue was paying minimum wage. You would say it was the business that didn't respect minimum wage laws.
It seems like if all companies treat drivers as independent contractors, then the market will naturally work itself out. Drivers will compete amongst themselves and determine what they are willing to work for, and prices will adapt as needed to support that. However, if some companies don't, then obviously it isn't a level playing field. That will only be exacerbated if the company that doesn't then also further depresses ride prices to the point of operating at a loss.
Whether the current legislation actually achieves the goal remains to be seen, but the whole point is to level the playing field. I don't think anyone actually thinks that the way forward is to treat drivers as employees. Instead, I think having to treat drivers as employees is a deterrent to the current way contractor laws are being skirted, with the intent of pushing all companies to treat their drivers as independent contractors in order to level the playing field.
No. It isn’t more nuanced than that. SuperShuttle couldn’t make changes because the drivers irrationally refused to work more for the same pay, even though they knew the company was failing. It really is that simple.
>> because the drivers irrationally refused to work more for the same pay
How is this irrational? You offer me $X for Y hours of work. If X/Y gets too small I say "no" and do something with higher utility, even if that's playing flappy bird. I don't really care that my actions destroy the source of this opportunity because I've already rejected it.
You are right that this is simple, just not in the way you're interpreting it.
In discussions like these I like to start from a basic premise: people aren't stupid.
It's obvious to the drivers that if they don't take trips, then they don't make money. Clearly then, they've decided that below a certain dollar amount, it make more sense to them to play computer games than take a fare. How they arrived at that conclusion, I don't know. But I have faith that it made sense to them.
I do very small software projects for people I find online. I have a minimum fee. If I take on projects below that minimum, I'd have more work, but I have determined that it's in my best interest to hold out for that minimum rate. If this means that I don't make money on that side gig a particular day or week, so be it. I have my reasons for doing that and they won't necessarily make sense to anyone looking in from the outside.
It's trivial to find out why looking at driver's posts online:
There's a minimum time cost to them for each ride or delivery. There's the time you spend finding out exactly where the person is, there can be a delay between jobs, there's delays when picking up an order.
Someone who drives 10 miles for one job will spend much less time than someone who drives 1 mile for 10 jobs. And since they have X units of time to spend in the app, they'll start making less and less per mile driven.
It's easy enough to see how, at some point, they start to get paid so little that it's in their best interest to just not drive and spend the gas and their effort
__
Here's a severe case showing someone go through that exact experience:
> I accepted the pick-up and app informed me that the customer was 13 miles away I drove there[...] pressed my App for the drop-off Destination [...] and saw that drop-off was 1 mile away
> Total time of trip, back and forth, 45 to 50 minutes and 29 miles , and I earned $8 dollars
> So, after thinking about it, I have decided to ‘decline’ all trips that are more than 10 miles away from me and do not say that it is gonna be a ‘long trip’
The drivers were not investors in the company; it failing was not a huge problem for them. Having a strong preference for leisure is totally ok. The drivers didn’t have enough stock and weren’t paid enough to motivate them to work the hours the company needed to be viable. The company failed. The investors lost all their money. The founders and employees got nothing. That’s capitalism. If they’d been right they’d have made massive bank and that too would have been capitalism. Workers get to play capitalism too. Everyone played. Everyone made their choices and the company failed.
The drivers are franchisees so they have huge interest in keeping the company going, otherwise they wouldn't get any trips. It was their problem. They just didn't want to change.
They can just drive for another company, they don't suffer any significant loss the same way a McDonald's restaurant would if McD's folded and had to overhaul the entire restaurant. The drivers just install another app on their phone.
This is a problem with Taxi drivers as well. Have had friends too close to the airport miss flights because drivers keep rejecting the fare because it goes to drivers near the airport who want a long trip.
I've had taxi drivers yell at me for how close I lived to the airport. Angrily banging the steering wheel. "I waited in line for 2 hours and I get this fucking fare!?" Then they drive maniacally fast, weaving through traffic hoping to catch the tail end of passengers disembarking my flight. Mildly terrifying. Uber and Lyft were so welcome.
1. them complaining about short fair or straight up driving off before I could get in because I wasn't going far enough (lesson learned in Vegas: get in before answering questions)
2. The constant, relentless dance about their "credit card machine being broken" "you can pay cash!" "there's an ATM machine inside"
Uber and Lyft were god sends when I was traveling a lot for work. click button, get in car, arrive at place. None of the adversarial nonsense.
If they don’t want to follow the terms of the taxi license fuck them. Universal service, take every fare, don’t discriminate by race. If Uber and Lyft destroy the entire taxi industry it can’t come soon enough.
I don't want anyone working a job to live a subsistence lifestyle, but taxis have also always been a nightmare for me (in the US and every country I've ever been in) and I never want to go back. Uber and Lyft are vastly superior and less stressful experiences for the customer in every way. I'd like them to be good experiences for the drivers, too, but the answer isn't to scrap the whole thing and go back to taxis.
In some countries, the meter is just for show and every ride is a negotiated fare. Also, sometimes it's hard to distinguish taxi from pirate. Heck, in some places, even the licensed drivers are notorious for robbing tourists. Yikes.
A living wage and convenient cabs don't need to be mutually exclusive. Also, the adversarial nonsense was more than just a lack of convenience. Some drivers are just not nice people and managed to get away with it.
Maybe the causality goes the other way, people like that might have difficulty finding other jobs.
Most low-paying jobs aren't known for having lots of angry/rude people working them. Probably because in most jobs you have to work with other people or interact with customers within view of your co-workers/manager.
But that's partly because, in all likelihood, the taxi driver also couldn't set their own rates. If that taxi driver could have asked $20 instead of the $3.75 legally mandated by the meter, would you have paid it?
It seems like allowing a proper market, where both riders and drivers could bid on rides, would solve both this problem and the SuperShuttle problem.
Taxis work like this in Panama. Prices vary wildly ( but are low by developed world standards) and trying to get across town in times of high traffic is nearly impossible, nobody will take you ( they ask you where you're going, snort and drive away) until you offer at least four times the standard fare.
They're also unsafe, my brother was robbed at gunpoint by a fake taxi. I've heard multiple women who had to jump from a moving taxi to escape a potential rape.
Uber is more expensive in Panama, but I use it nearly exclusively.
It doesn't, because at 3am in a sparsely populated bit of town, there aren't enough participants for a market to work.
For me to have real choice as a rider, I need at least a few different offers from drivers on the table, at which point I can pick the cheapest/fastest/highest rated/whatever.
Likewise, for the driver to have a true choice, he has to have multiple ride offers in front of him to pick the best.
The reality is that in most local markets, most drivers spend the majority of their time sitting around because there are no riders (and therefore would never turn down any work), and riders are frequently so far from drivers that there is only one driver to choose from within 10 minutes waiting time, so they would be forced to accept the ride, whatever the price.
It was a $20-something fare. It'd vary between $22 and $26 based on traffic. I'm not sure how much of that was airport fees. For pleasant drivers, I'd bump it to $30 with tip.
Yeah, $20 and about 1 in 3 were visibly angry and not shy about letting me know it.
Context: I took this route almost weekly for a few years.
As a tourist in Shanghai/Beijing last year, this (technically illegal) practice is quite common if you don't have the right apps set up. We did frequently pay the higher fare, though the difference in currency was like $1 vs $3 iirc.
Then you are lucky. I can't count the times the drivers called me before picking me up, asking me where I want to go and then cancelling if it was nearby (or no answer at all).
I never cancel, but they do.
And when they don't do that, they are extremly annoyed when it's something close to the airport.
I've used both hundreds of times in the US, and that has never happened to me. They would only call to sync our positions to find each other, which happened very rarely.
This is basically the same thing, except cancelling based on pick-up location instead of destination. The app apparently doesn't always tell the driver exactly where the pickup is- it only gives the direction to drive and the next turn or two. It only gives the exact location once they're close to it.
This is to keep drivers from cancelling based on an out of the way pick-up location.
When they call, it's almost always to get information that the app won't give them.
I had the same thing, but the driver dropped his phone off with a friend that was still "within the airport" as we drove out the airpot so that he didn't lose his virtual place. He was pretty upset with me.
Strange. I've heard the same stories about Uber: drivers complaining about short, unprofitable rides, and then there was the study about Uber drivers who take more risks while driving making more money.[1]
I suppose the only thing preventing the adversarial behavior is that the driver needs your five-star review.
[1] in the context of why women Uber drivers make less.
Because these companies are VC and investor subsidized, and apparently breaking labour laws. It isn't a functioning market. If they had to cover the full costs they would face the same issues as taxis.
I have had this exact experience, Taxi's are the worst and there is 0 feedback loop to improve quality. I once had a taxi driver yell at me and ask me why I didn't just take an uber if I live so close to the airport. Good riddance to traditional taxis (in all but a few cities where they are still marginally more convenient in my experience).
Did doordash for a few weeks and discovered that this is exactly how the dashers in the community that made "okay" money operated. They turn down deliveries that didn't pay a certain amount and would sit in their car doing nothing if they had to.
I remember seeing off a rental travel van a few miles from LAX. They were a tiny business and had no shuttle service. Next door was a EUROPCAR rental and outside it a bunch of taxis and Ubers. They ALL refused to take me, and EUROPCAR security didn't want me catching their shuttle bus because I want a customer. I had to conspicuously beg them to let me on the bus in front of customers in the service area to not miss my flight.
SuperShuttle was bleeding money from subsidizing fares to compete with ride sharing and shrunk 30% YoY for 3 years straight. The SuperShuttle that you see is now just a brand facade and the original business is on a feeding tube.
Wouldn't most companies keep performance stats for their contractors, and if one started refusing lots of jobs, stop giving them work? Seems like Uber is just automating what is a normal part of working with a contractor.
With regards to unemployment insurance, this is really a hole in our safety net. Regardless of whether Uber drivers should be considered independent contractors, we should have a solution for independent contractors being put out of work.
> Wouldn't most companies keep performance stats for their contractors, and if one started refusing lots of jobs, stop giving them work? Seems like Uber is just automating what is a normal part of working with a contractor.
The easiest way to allow drivers to set rates, and I'm not sure if there is some reason they haven't already done this, is to just let the driver tell the app their rate, so that they wouldn't even be offered rides below it (which naturally might mean they don't get as many), and the service would just give the ride to the driver in the area with the best rate. Obviously that would mean that if you set a lower rate you'd get more rides.
> we should have a solution for independent contractors being put out of work.
It's kind of non-applicable to the situation though, because when you have market pricing like this, you never really get put out of work, it's just that the amount you get paid may vary (and fall below the point where you seek other employment). Does Uber even do layoffs of contractors?
Hard to do for people living paycheck to paycheck. Then they should refuse the job you say? Yeah right then they don't even have that little paycheck anymore.
There is a power imbalance here, and that's the root issue. The employee and the employer are not on the same level in terms of negotiating power. Hard for tech people like the HN crowd to realize, but in most areas outside overpaid overdemanded software engineering that's reality.
The first industrial revolution showed this pretty dramatically. The solution was workers rights, unions etc. Those things that others here call bureaucrats with a those-people-just-want-to-destroy-the-free-market negative subtone.
It's called a buyer's market. It's normal that there's an oversupply of unskilled labor, so the buyers of that labor have more power.
However, don't forget that it's usually the same for a business and its customers: Ride-hailing itself is a buyer's market. Lyft and Uber are unprofitable. The only way for them to stay "in business" is to constantly burn money.
Supply and demand is not a free market ideal, it's a law of nature. Worker's rights or unions can't raise market prices above demand by fiat, all they can do is limit supply so that prices naturally rise. That means more people are out of a job, but those that are in the job might make a little bit more, if the overhead of running the union doesn't eat up the difference.
You can make the argument that limiting supply is justified, just like forcing people into pension or health care systems may be justified because people are fundamentally irrational. You just have to be able to phrase it that way and acknowledge the trade-off, otherwise you're just fooling yourself.
That makes sense when the fat cats are making huge profits and paying a pittance to their workers. But Uber is losing billions every year. Where is the money going to come from?
Well, I know where it's coming from: a massive number of unemployed drivers, as rates are raised, reducing trips to the few that are profitable enough to pay for that (therefore also excluding lower-income users).
Maybe that's an acceptable trade-off, but we should be clear about it, not pretend we can just pump money from an empty well.
So people without enough savings to tide them over to the next job (about 70% of the US [0]) should be destitute if they are laid off? And in cases of national disaster, we want vast numbers of destitute people?
Preventing people from becoming destitute is a public good. People not having money to provide for their basic needs leads to increases in crime, which is bad for everyone. It leads to increases in disease, which is bad for everyone. It leads to decreases in economic activity, which is bad for everyone.
Arguing against the basic social safety net is just plain foolish and short sighted.
Cost of living found to render savings unrealistic for many. Single accident, equipment failure, medical emergency or other such unforseeable found to wipe out meagre savings without warning. Precarious nature of employment market and inadequacy of social protections found to eradicate savings at horrific rate upon losing job, such that they become a countdown to destitution rather than a bridge.
Solution rejected; cannot be broadly implemented without other changes to the system. What else you got?
Uber and Lyft already did this in California after the passage of AB5 earlier this year. That's why they now have price estimates instead of giving exact values ahead of time.
So how that works in practice? One of the major advantages of Uber for me was fixed price upfront. So now I don't know the price until I order the ride? What if the driver sets an excessive price - can I decline the ride?
My understanding is that the rider is presented with a range of possible fares before searching (e.g. $9-10). If they are matched with a driver asking for a higher fare than that range they have the option to decline.
Who will keep declining? Drivers set their prices up front (they don’t even get requests outside of their price) and riders auto accept if it’s in the range they were shown.
Quality is debatable but none of eBay, Amazon, or Etsy enforce prices. Fundamentally choosing prices is what defines markets, trying to set them is the actions of an employer.
As a kid I refereed soccer games. There was a set cost structure for each game depending on age group and whether I was assistant referee or center referee.
There was a system where I could sign up in advance if I wanted the work or not. Uber drivers know exactly what they are getting into and they are free to quit at any time.
I was not an employee of the soccer leagues, I was an independent contractor who was able to work for multiple leagues if I wanted to and who was able to quit at any time.
There is a fundamental role in society for temporary work.
The employer will always set the price in any kind of business relationship. If I hire a contractor to remodel my house for 4 weeks does this mean he is a full time employee of mine and I need to provide him benefits. If he doesn't want the work, he doesn't need to be there.
> I was not an employee of the soccer leagues, I was an independent contractor
Actually you were an employee, just misclassified. If you took them to court you would likely win.
Being able to set your own hours, working part time, working for other employers, quitting at any time - these are all possible in an employee relationship.
Just because they are possible in an employee relationship, setting your own hours is typically not representative of an employee relationship. Doing the same job for multiple customers is typical of an independent contractor relationship. I see no evidence of misclassification where this person was employed by multiple employers. Which of the leagues do you believe was his employer?
Working 2 to 3 part time jobs is extremely common in the US for low level staff and has been for decades. These people say when their available and then get scheduled in.
Of course, but that is not what make them employees, but is actually the part of the criteria for being able to claim independent contractor status. If you work one game for a soccer league, it is highly inefficient to have to create an employment relationship.
My point was having 100 clients is a strong sign that someone is a contractor having 3 is not. It’s also just one of ~20 factors.
Also, length of relationship is judged on how renewable it is not how long it lasted. You can fire anyone on their first day.
It’s really a question of how open ended the work is not how long someone spends doing it. A restaurant always needs people to cook food and a league always needs a referee as an inherent part of it’s business model. On the other hand a company might only need an architect when designing their new office, aka it’s inherently a finite business need. That architect can largely work at a location and time of their choosing, the referee needs to be where and when the games are taking place. Similarly, an Uber driver needs to be picking someone up at a specific location and specific time going somewhere else or waiting 1 hour doesn’t work.
Under current laws you are correct but I think he is trying to highlight the point that maybe the laws shouldn't have this dichotomy and we should recognize there are instances where not being a full employee yet not filling the exact current definition of a contractor should exist
The reason these laws exist is because corporations will use them to reclassify the maximum number of employees possible as contractors, so they can avoid a whole host of legal constraints around employment.
In general, flexibility in classification of workers almost always plays out poorly for the majority of workers.
Yeah, to me a contractor is just someone that does one-offs. All these other things (setting prices, hours, etc) never actually struck me as accurate.
A contractor is someone you hire to perform a particular piece of work. An employee is someone you hire for their skill who is then expected to do many (sometimes varied) pieces of work.
Uber drivers know exactly what they are getting into and they are free to quit at any time.
New Uber drivers don’t know what their pay will be. They can eventually keep a running average to get some idea, but that’s only meaningful as part of an ongoing relationship.
Surge pricing seems like a benefit to the drivers, but as they can’t simply decline endless non surge prices that’s not an individual price negotiation. Essentially, their options are quit the platform or accept the vast majority of whatever is being handed to them.
If you let people set prices some will set absurdly high prices. For good user experience those get filtered out. What gets left is the system that we currently have which is in fact price that is set by drivers—just not explicitly. When there's more drivers in the area, prices drop, when there are few drivers, prices go up. That's how it works and it makes little sense to revise the UI to present nonsensical prices (we'd always pick the lowest price of a certain threshold of driver rating) for the user to choose from in a list just to fit some arbitrary definition of contractor drafted by some dumb politician or lawmaker.
It's not really set by the drivers either, its set by the market. Uber is just a market maker. Prices too high and passengers won't use the service. Prices too low and drivers won't drive. The whole goal of Uber is to find the ideal price to maximize capacity.
I'm not sure but I think amazon enforces some kind of forced price adjustment policy. IIRC they change the prices if their algo detect lower prices somewhere else on the internet or on similar listings. I'll try to find the WSJ article where I've read about this.
Of note the way it’s implemented is actively designed not to be used. Effectively Uber lets those drivers multiply their existing calculation by some number but not for example simply set a minimum charge or actually negotiate individual trips. Further, regularly declining trips is not accepted.
Well they can in California and that’s what matters. Because this law is being contested in California.
I get the design. And of course uber wants to encourage lowering prices. However, the point remains: driver set prices, even if the design makes it less obvious. Eventually, if a driver has a number in mind, the driver flips a button to get that number.
As for negotiate individual trips, I don’t understand the point here. You set the prices for dollars per mile / per minute. The trip price is reflective of what the driver set already.
Not even everyone in California, further it’s US and other countries law ride sharing companies are breaking not just California law.
Why negotiation is important is overhead. Dollars per mile / per minute doesn’t cover time to pick someone up. If someone wants to go 1 miles and it’s going to take you X minutes to pick them up that’s much worse than a trip that’s 10 miles long and takes the same X minutes to pick them up. Uber really doesn’t want drivers to be able to decide such trips or people left for hours end up going to other platforms. However, Uber is pushing these losses to their drivers.
Now, if Uber is pushing people to take such unprofitable trips that’s fine if drivers are employees. But, it clearly breaks the model of drivers as independent contractors with each trip being independent.
PS: in term of breaking the law that’s not an automatic prosecution. Enforcement tends to be extremely lax on such issues.
>Let them set rates. Let them decline rides without facing penalties by the platform...
As a contractor I can set my rate, but the company can also simply not hire me. As a contractor I can act as I wish, but the company can terminate my contract. As a contractor, I pay for my unemployment insurance if I want it.
So... What's the practical difference? How is this any different than someone who decides to make a living by selling goods on eBay?
When I sell you my Smurfs collection on EBay, I set the terms of sale and you bid. You and I come to agreement on the terms of the transaction, within some limits that EBay, as the platform, sets.
When I sell a ride to you on Uber, Uber sets the price, tells me where to pick you up, and even dictates the route I should take. I don’t even get to see where I’m taking you until after I accept the ride.
On EBay, you and I are negotiating with each other. On Uber, the driver has no say in what the offer to the passenger is.
You know your statement is categorically untrue right.
"Uber sets the price"
In California, the driver sets their own price.
"tells me where to pick you up"
Given that this is a taxi service. The driver has to know where to pick up. In fact, how is this different from EBay? Does the seller become an employee because ebay tells the seller where to ship the goods?
"even dictates the route I should take"
No it doesn't. Most drivers use google maps.
"I don’t even get to see where I’m taking you until after I accept the ride"
That's also categorically untrue in California. The driver gets to see the trip before accepting.
Of course, all of these rolled out because of AB5. The question is: can you tell me why the driver is an employee?
If your contract can be terminated at any time without cause, that supports the notion that you're an employee, not a contractor. That's one of the aspects of the Borello test.
> If your contract can be terminated at any time without cause, that supports the notion that you're an employee, not a contractor.
How interesting. That inverts expectations: you need a reason to fire a contractor but no reason to fire an employee.
Ah, I see it:
> Whether the employer has a right to fire at will or whether a termination gives rise to an action for breach of contract; and...
You can't fire a contractor when you haven't written in end-of-contract terms in there. i.e. when you contract with someone and you say "I hire this person from time X to time Y for money Z for delivery of A" you can't just abort sometime in the middle and be like "welp! off you go then".
However, it is perfectly reasonable for you to have exit clauses in your contracts to say that you pay per ride and that either party can exit the contract at any time.
i.e. it determines whether the 'firing' is a breach-of-contract situation
Okay, that makes sense, but it's not a factor in this case. Only a naïve reading makes it work that way but that won't work if you have the exit stipulations.
Won't companies get around this rule by just having these contractors become employees of "staffing agencies". Happens all the time in the software world
> Let them decline rides without facing penalties by the platform
The independent contractor model works both ways. Uber has the right to avoid working with contractors who continually refuse work. You can't be picky about your work but also demand the company keep contracting you like you weren't.
The independent contractor model doesn't map perfectly to gig work but it's much closer than traditional employees.
The point of Uber's alleged model is that Uber is not employing the driver, but rather that it is simply matching up drivers to passengers as a marketplace.
If that's the case, then Uber has no right to avoid working with contractors simply because they continually refuse work. That indicates a non-independent agency arrangement between Uber and the driver (aka "employee") and that's what they're claiming they don't have.
I disagree. Solely from the perspective of the person running the platform, it makes lots of sense to factor in "likelihood of accepting" into your driver selection algorithm.
If I know driver X rejects all rides from a certain area, I'm going to stop showing them rides in that area. That way the user gets their driver faster.
Right, but now they're no longer a marketplace, now the're the one assigning the driver...which makes the driver their agent.
And if the driver is their agent, it matters whether the driver is classified as an employee or independent contractor.
If Uber wants to be a transportation marketplace, they can be, but they actually have to act like one. (And in fact, in CA they've been run a small trial in the Bay Area to make that shift. The trial will supposedly be expanded to all of CA this year.)
How is that relevant? If you are an agency, you are advertising availability both ways. If you filter on behavior, you are no longer acting as an independent agency but as an agent for one side.
Disclosing pattern behavior (has rejected 12 rides this hour) is the correct way to provide value-add, not silently making decisions for parties.
If you went to a recruitment agency, would you expect them to send you to interview at every single company regardless of if they think that the company would be interested in hiring you?
Clearly agencies do discriminate who they match with each other. I would say that is the entire point of agencies infact.
> you expect them to send you to interview at every single company regardless of if they think that the company would be interested in hiring you?
I expect to be matched with every available role and an attempt to be made to represent me to them (and they to me). The disclaimer that they are looking for X Y or not Z is part of that. There is a practical issue muddying the metaphor which does not apply to the rideshare matching technology.
> Clearly agencies do discriminate who they match with each other.
That needs to be explicitly outlined in your contract with an agency. An employment agency is legally prohibited from doing that. This is the heart of the legal matter, imo.
Crucial difference: recruitment agency matches based on criteria that customer and contractor provide, because they work for both as an agent.
Agencies don't match based on their own internal criteria. That would recharacterize the relationship between the agency and the contractor, flipping it around so that the contractor becomes their agent.
User experience is incredibly relevant. The entire purpose of the platform is to match drivers and riders. If it can do that more effectively, it has become better as an independent platform.
> The entire purpose of the platform is to match drivers and riders.
That's fine, but we're talking about legal relationships here, not the facilitating product. If you are going to assert you are legally acting in an impartial role, turning around and claiming partiality for one party (the riders) invalidates that position.
I think the one exception there is that you need to distinguish between people who don't take contracts and people who break contracts -- refusing to take a job is one thing, but if a driver frequently accepts a job then cancels it halfway through (eg, they are driving to the pickup and suddenly get offered a better job, on the competing platform), that is a horse of a different color.
> If that's the case, then Uber has no right to avoid working with contractors simply because they continually refuse work.
Why? Uber has a right to do whatever they want for whatever reason or without any reason. Just like the other party in the contract, the driver, can stop accepting any rides and drive for lyft if he so wants. No reason required.
Uber is arguing that drivers are not their contractors, but contractors of the riders. Therefore, Uber denying some wouldn't be the right of Uber unless they were contractors to Uber, in which case they would be misclassified and actually employees as per AB5.
In a vacuum, yes. But when the controls that Uber exercises over their marketplace inch closer and closer to the control exercised by an employer over and employee, it becomes dicey.
More so, not accepting to sell your item (labour) at the first price offered becoming a cause for delisting in a marketplace is very shady and stretches the definition of "marketplace" really hard.
So what if rideshare companies puts you under water if you are not working 40hr week just like an employee? Given the almost duopoly, wouldn't there is no recourse for workers but to accept the same terms as employees.
The essence of contractor model is that your future offers are based on past work, not past declines. If you as a driver were giving quality ride and decided to take 6 months break, there shall be no impact on your rating.
> Let them decline rides without facing penalties by the platform.
Does the model of IC have to imply that every ride is a new, independent contract? Is there no other reasonable model in which multiple rides are part of one contract? Why?
What would such a contract look like? How would Uber or Lyft hold up their end of a N-ride contract if they don't end up having enough riders that day?
The obvious answer: perhaps more similar to the way it looks like right now? I just don't see why IC implies "let them decline rides without facing penalties by the platform".
I don't think it directly implies that, but I think many of the policies in place chip away at things that should be a part of an IC's experience. Imposing penalties from declining rides means that their power to set rates is reduced.
What does the alternative look like? A contract for 10 rides? A contract for one week at a time? What if the driver wants to serve one ride, and then never again: what contract models allow that single ride to fulfill a "contract"?
The alternative is traditionally called a retainer. You hire the contractor for “various tasks over a set period of time up to N tasks and at least M tasks”
This is the indie version of being salaried. Very common among software engineers, for example.
First, Uber doesn’t have separate contracts for every ride.
If a contractor had a contract to accept or decline every jira ticket (although I don’t see anyone ever forming that contract), if they declines too many tickets they would no longer have the option to pick.
Could this be simply solved by having their star rating influenced by % ride drops? Uber can provide its price estimate as just that - a kelly blue book value so that riders can compare and contrast?
Most customers will search for a range of rating + price - so the market can regulate itself. I mean we accept amazon displaying user ratings - so I don't know why this won't work.
> these workers need unemployment insurance, as Covid has shown, and somebody needs to pay for it: be it the workers or the ridesharing businesses.
The state could also pay for it, through tax revenue. Unemployment insurance seems like a great fit for a government, since any kind of massive correlated unemployment, as we're experiencing now, would absolutely wipe out any private insurer.
And that is the way it works, in functional countries.
And I absolutely agree, divorcing healthcare from employment is the single best thing the US could do to help fix several different issues.
But "We could massively restructure the US economy" is only an answer to "how should rideshare employees be classified" if you want to ensure nothing changes.
More specifically we need to totally decouple health insurance from employment. This is not post-ww2 anymore. No more Cadillac plans from FAANG companies either unless your paying for it out of your own pocket.
This would immediately solve half of the problems with healthcare in this country if everyone had to use the health insurance exchanges to buy insurance.
My health care plan was better and cheaper when I was working for a 50 person company than it is at a FAANG. Then again, I work for the one that is all about “frugality”....
It’s not bad, but no better than my jobs before the last one.
This perfectly lays bare why I disagree with the ruling: you don't actually think drivers are employees, you just want them classified as employees so they get X benefits. It's a legislative hack.
It's seems so obvious to me that we need to create a third kind of worker: not an employee, not a contractor, but a new category that has some of the extra freedom of contracting and some of the benefits of employment.
It's important that we maintain integrity in our legal system. Uber drivers are not employees, and saying "we need to classify them as employees so they get insurance" is fundamentally backwards.
No, they pretty much are employees, sorry. Under the current framework, they fit the definition of employee well in the letter and perfectly in the spirit.
Employees can have literally every single freedom that Uber drivers have. Nothing is disqualifying.
I agree that once we reform Healthcare and Unemployment, we can create a third category if we want, but there are actually no inherent disadvantages in freedom of being an employee in this case. The classification as contractor only really benefits Uber and hurts the common man.
Your optimism is inspiring, but there's been "bipartisan support" for meaningful healthcare reform going as far back as Nixon. Probably further. If the people who actually make the rules wanted it done, it would be done.
I share your pessimism, it was a rhetorical device, hence the "Once we're done reforming", which will likely never happen. Since Biden is against any form of Universal Healthcare, it is literally impossible before 6 years into the future.
That still doesn't still solve the problem that drivers for UBER and Lyft don't get paid time off and paid sick leave.
Also, neither unemployment insurance nor healthcare are paid through taxes here in Germany, for example, yet the system works very well.
If the business models of Uber and Lyft cannot be profitable without misclassifying workers as independent contractors, then the business model is broken.
I don't understand why so many people, in particular from the US, have such problems understanding the reasoning behind laws to prevent the misclassification of employees as independent contractors.
It's actually very simple:
- If you're employed, you don't get to choose how you do your job and when, that's done by management. In return, the company pays your healthcare, pays unemployment and various other benefits. You are also protected through your company's liability insurance in case of an accident.
Your company basically pays you compensation for stealing your time but they are responsible for your well-being and safety during that time.
- If you're contractor, on the other hand, you get to decide how you do your job and when. You are free to decline offers, set your own prices and work with multiple partners at once. You get the maximum business freedom and are your own boss. In return, that also means you are responsible for your health insurance, your unemployment insurance and the liability insurance. You usually also can make more money as compared to being employed for the same job.
Being an employer and a self-employed contractor are fundamentally different work models with both advantages and disadvantages on their own. What Uber, Lyft and similar companies do is that they want both the benefits of an employee (being able to tell workers what to work and when) without the associated disadvantages and costs for them, shifting the risks and costs towards the workers as if they were independent contractors without the workers having the usual benefits of being an independent contractor.
And that's simply neither fair nor ethical. It's just exploitation. And that's why German (and most European law) protects workers against this misclassification.
I am as skeptical about uber as anyone, but didn't they do this already in california?
Riders can choose their own rates, which leads to users being offered a "closer but more expensive" option. They also got rid of the decline penalty iirc.
In my country, it's illegal for the taxi driver to decline the customer unless it has valid reasons(the customer is violent or threatening, does not satisfy the hygiene standard, road is damaged etc).
I think it's a fair regulation for it will casually lead to the discrimination.
Also, in my country, being a taxi driver requires special license and certified car so Uber/Lyft doesn't offer the service. They don't want to pay the cost of checking if the contractor satisfy the requirements of license and car.
I believe it will go along the lines of a sting. Get enough complaints, send enough undercover cops on said bad rides (short routes / racial differences - whatever the drivers are being accused of) and get em.
Independent contractors can’t set their own rates or decline jobs.
FedEx uses independent contractors with established rates and requirements to carry.
There are many independent contractors who can’t set rates or choose not to do parts of the job.
Even my local barber shop co-op makes independent contractors have price ranges and doesn’t let them refuse walk ins if they are on duty.
When I was an independent contractor I paid into unemployment insurance so all these Uber drivers should have unemployment insurance that they pay themselves.
I think the distinction is that Uber is claiming to facilitate a contract between the driver and the user. In your examples, not being allowed to refuse work (I would guess) was given as terms of the contract, whereas the argument against Uber is that Uber is setting the rates that drivers are allowed to use to enter into a contract and penalizing them for not entering into a contract. That said in the system where contracts are made between drivers and riders if a drivers accepts a ride and then cancels it that would be a breach of contract and I think Uber would be right to use that as a reason for delisting drivers from their marketplace.
Uber is the market maker, so it’s a three part contract. Between driver and rider; between driver and uber; between rider and uber.
Part of the market making function is matching prices offered and taken. Theoretically Uber is chopping off all the drivers with too high a price and riders who want too low of a price and “forcing a rate” is really just matching all the compatible rates that fall into a close range (“the algorithm”).
Maybe Uber could do more to show all the incompatible rates. But I think they delist drivers who would ask too high.
Independent contractors have the same pricing ability as drivers. They can’t force people to pay higher rates any more than a driver, they can just reject jobs that don’t pay enough.
If you’re a plumber and you’re charging $1,000/hr, you’ll certainly be punished for your high prices and for rejecting work after you’ve already accepted (your public reviews on Yelp, etc will take a hit).
“Real independent contractors” have much less power than you think in a competitive market.
If politicians really want to improve things for the working class: then lower sales taxes, extend land taxes (remove loopholes), support and encourage higher-density housing (including rooming houses), ban sugar, stop legal and illegal immigration from low and moderate-HDI countries, legalise safe drugs, and decriminalise all other drugs.
Pre-Uber, either the driver rented the car to a middleman who rented the medallion from a rich owner, or said owner was selling and financing (most banks won't touch these medallions!) a medallion at a ridiculous interest rate to a driver that planned to use it as his retirement savings (an extremely volatile asset and not very liquid).
The more I spoke to cab drivers the more it seemed their industry was a pyramid schemed aimed at helping established rent-seeker take advantage of often poor new immigrants. Uber brought a breeze of fresh air: Someone could simply buy a car, calculate the depreciation and it's value on the market (since unlike medallions cars are relatively liquid assets!) do rideshare and calculate their profits or loss. They can get out of the game at anytime, and they know exactly how much they are going to get for the car they have should they sell it.
I feel like there is a general pattern. The left tends to prioritize all the good ideas: gender equality, racial equality, income gaps, etc. The right tends to prioritize systems that actually function in the real world with real people who are sometimes jealous, stupid, unethical, liars, etc. This is just a case where the first group has run amok without talking to the second group. It's the good idea of everyone should have good benefits without taking the time to design a system that actually works in the real world.
You actually see this sort of dynamic in startups where you have two people at the top. One is the creative one who pushes all the boundaries and stuff. The other person is the more pencil pusher/lawyer/business type who makes sure the bills get paid on time.
Lots of good things happen when you can get these two types working together instead of hating each other.
Coming together is tricky when there is no common grounds.
One side wants wealth to be fairly Evenly distributed to help the poor.
The other side helps the poor by creating so much wealth that that most poor people have a lot of wealth.
These days you can be considered poor and have housing, ac, heat, tv, video games, maybe a car, and weight problems because food is so cheap.
This only leaves those who truly can not or will not work. Severe physical or mental illness, etc.
Some can’t stand that inequality exists. Others “know” that destroying inequality means we create more poor people.
That’s not even touching right to own body vs right to life crowd. There is almost no middle ground in that battle. Either it’s removing a sac of cells or killing a baby. Maybe some wiggle room at the start, but none by end
More likely that you'll have weight problems because healthy food and lifestyles are much more difficult to acquire and maintain without sufficient wealth.
No shortage of healthy, yet poor people. Then again we go back to the problem of defining "healthy". Not even the ultra-wealthy are completely illness-free.
Healthy is a BMI in the normal range and following something close to the Harvard nutrition plate (USDA one is bought by big agriculture).
Being able to afford a meal service or go to Whole Foods is also much harder when you live in a food desert. Yes we do give people EBT or something but then it is spent on junk food/soda.
So how do you fix that? Maybe if you’re overweight medically speaking pay more in insurance/taxes? That would never fly tho so we are in the current national predicament.
Really? Walking is free but driving isn't. More food costs more than less food. And lots of boring difficult healthy food (eg. veges) is cheaper than more pleasurable easy food (eg. fast food). Being unemployed provides more time to do healthy things than having a busy job.
I'd say the reason poor people are unhealthy is the same as the reason they're poor - unwillingness to work.
Living in safe neighborhood to walk in isn't cheap, nor is a gym membership, nor is having time to drive to a nice neighborhood or trailhead to hike.
> Being unemployed provides more time to do healthy things than having a busy job.
People who are chronically unemployed but physically able often have a serious mental health issue that prevents them from holding down a job.
> I'd say the reason poor people are unhealthy is the same as the reason they're poor - unwillingness to work.
The working poor usually have little time in their day to exercise for health, especially when they are working multiple low wage jobs to make ends meet. Many of them work physically demanding jobs that are bad for their health, and are exhausted by the end of their work day - and not a "good" kind of exhaustion at that.
They are poor because they live on a knife's edge, one accident away from financial insolvency or lack of sufficient access to necessities like health care and education opportunities.
Also having to work multiple jobs to break even. The problem isn't "inequality" it is that the floor in the US is so low compared to other wealthy nations.
This is a great example of having the right ideas but not understanding workable systems with real people. Let's take just one industry and I can show you how it's not as simple as you make it out to be: socialized/single-payer medicine. This is a system which reduces incentives (profits) in exchange for some equity. This is a great idea because we don't like it when people suffer. But what are the costs? Basic economics/psychology informs us that when incentives affect behavior. When the profits in healthcare are reduced there is less incentive to create new products/treatments/services. This is the tradeoff we're making. What happens down the road? Of course no one knows exactly, but we do know what will tend to happen. A new drug that might've been created in 5 years takes 7 instead. And then the next advancement that builds off that one takes even longer still. The whiz-kid who might've invented the new surgical technique which saves hundreds of lives per year might go into finance instead. What does this mean? It means we've slowed the velocity/acceleration of advancement. So people who live 50 years in the future will not have as good of healthcare as they could've if we'd left the greater incentives in place. And the people who live 100 years in the future are relatively even worse off to where they would've been because we've had 100 year at the slower pace. Since the future is functionally infinite, we are causing infinite harm to people in the future (all the advancements they won't get) at the cost of providing some comfort for some people today. And this applies to every industry, every redistribution program, every set of regulations. It's not just politics/law either, we make these decisions in our own lives every day. Are you going to buy that Apple Watch, or are you going to put that extra $ into your 401k?
Stoicism teaches us that all negative emotion is rooted in a lack of understanding. So when someone says they don't want to raise the minimum wage, or doesn't want universal healthcare, or whatever... it's helpful not to have that knee jerk reaction of "This person is bad and wants people to suffer." That's almost never the case.
First of all, "Basic economics/psychology informs" does not constitute empirical proof that UHC leads to decreased "innovation" (which is a weasel word in itself).
Second, even if we granted the premise that UHC leads to less healthcare innovation, this doesn't mean that there's "infinite harm" in to people in the future. Unless you're claiming you have a crystal ball, there is absolute 0 epistemic basis on which to make this claim. For all we know, not having UHC leads to nuclear war and we all die. Or, having UHC leads to the singularity. Etc.
Third, even if we grant that there's an innovation advantage to for-profit medicine AND we grant that you can predict the future, that still doesn't mean that there's "infinite harm", precisely because "harm" is comparative. I would argue that we've picked most of the low-hanging fruit of human medicine and that the marginal utility produced by new treatments is far outweighed by the human suffering of our for-profit system.
>First of all, "Basic economics/psychology informs" does not constitute empirical proof that UHC leads to decreased "innovation" (which is a weasel word in itself).
Either you believe humans respond to incentives or you don't. It's that simple.
> Second, even if we granted the premise that UHC leads to less healthcare innovation, this doesn't mean that there's "infinite harm" in to people in the future. Unless you're claiming you have a crystal ball, there is absolute 0 epistemic basis on which to make this claim. For all we know, not having UHC leads to nuclear war and we all die. Or, having UHC leads to the singularity. Etc.
I'm not making a "butterfly effect" argument where there's no obvious direct line between choice A and impact B. The only axiom I need is that humans respond to incentives, and then what happens when you reduce or remove incentives is obvious. You tend to get less of that thing.
>I would argue that we've picked most of the low-hanging fruit of human medicine and that the marginal utility produced by new treatments is far outweighed by the human suffering of our for-profit system.
If you believe we're basically near the end of potential for human medicine, would you support cutting subsidies and funding for research in the healthcare field?
It seems that your claim of infinite harm is based on the idea that the future is infinite. If the current subpar healthcare situation continues indefinitely, is the harm that it inflicts on its victims not also infinite? Is the benefit provided from removing this source of harm not also infinite? Then by your own reasoning, the question is not nearly as simple as infinite > finite.
Being in favour of single-payer, I can still appreciate arguments against it I guess. But this particular one isn't very effective.
Cheap healthcare advances at the same rate as expensive healthcare, it just lags some years. That's why Walmart famously has dozens of prescriptions it can offer at a price of only $4/mo. Those drugs were once very expensive and were only available to the relatively wealthy.
Once upon a time, I bought my expensive asthma inhalers from Walmart because it's the most convenient pharmacy. Then they stopped carrying it. In fact, every one did. The manufacturer's patent ran out and they stopped making it. It was several years before the drug came back on the market by which time I had moved on to another expensive inhaler.
I too was affected by this. The root cause was the CFC bans [1] to save the ozone layer. The old inhalers used CFCs and therefore could not be used anymore. New technology had to be created that used a different delivery mechanism. Profit incentive is what caused that new delivery mechanism to be created.
I think you'll find that the price just changed. People are reporting absurd price drops on a wide variety of different medications. You can thank Trump for it.
It's sort of price controls, but not the usual sort. Trump decided to enforce most-favored-nation pricing. Any price can be charged, except that the USA always gets the cheapest price. The drug manufacturers are understandably livid, so they are now funding attack ads.
Yes, we always have to think about perverse incentives and the resulting unintended consequences. But some of these problems can be remedied with more government involvement. E.g., instead of allowing BigPharma to reap windfall profits (via artificial IP monopolies) to finance R&D (which they spend less on than they do on advertising), why not treat drug development as a public good and finance it accordingly? (We might see less investment in Viagra and more in anti-malaria drugs.)
> The right tends to prioritize systems that actually function in the real world
This is a lazy take - plenty of systems have been created by "the right" that don't work, even according to their stated goals. Moreover, how do you define "work", and why are things like gender and racial equality framed as extras rather than integral to evaluating whether a system works?
> This is just a case where the first group has run amok
How did you determine someone has "run amok" here? Uber/Lyft were shut down for a day - we have yet to see the long term effects of AB5 and that's where the proof is. To take a historical analogy, of course when we outlawed child labor some businesses that relied on it shut down. If we'd just said "oops, let's reverse that decision right away" we might still be left with the impression that child labor laws had failed.
>This is a lazy take - plenty of systems have been created by "the right" that don't work, even according to their stated goals. Moreover, how do you define "work", and why are things like gender and racial equality framed as extras rather than integral to evaluating whether a system works?
I don't think you understand what the word "prioritize" means.
In this case it is the Left that seems to want the status quo ante of the situation before Uber, Lyft. Uber, Lyft etc surely tried innovation in the system to the benefit of consumers and now some in left seems to want the very inefficient in place for the decades before needs to be reinstated.
Don't knock the status quo too much. The status quo is a system that brought billions of people out of abject poverty, gave us human rights, democracy, etc. We take these things for granted, but we're in an incredibly unique and very new situation where you even have the privilege to sit around and pontificate about ideas like global poverty, gender issues, gay rights, etc. Civilizations have crumbled before, and ours WILL crumble at some point in the future. One quote I like about the US is that conservatives are progressives going the speed limit. And your comment about the right fetishizing the status quo is in line with that. A progressive wants to go a mile, conservatives are like, "Ehh... let's walk a few steps in that direction and see how it goes"
Please see my parallel post here which explains why it's not as simple as those healthcare systems "working" vs ours not working. Particularly the part about those systems causing infinite harm in the future. FWIW I'm not advocating dismantling any social safety nets. I'm only pointing out that it's not as simple as "good vs bad."
Assuming that poll is representative of the drivers' will at large, I guess then hopefully Uber and Lyft can satisfy these drivers by following the regulations required for them to be classified as independent contractors.
There is another way: laws should allow people and companies to determine their own terms for collaboration, instead of meddling with their freedom of association.
Nothing is keeping Uber and Lyft from determining their own terms. However, the terms they choose affect the taxes they pay and the benefits they provide. If they want certain terms, then they need to accept the regulations that come with them.
So I guess I'm not really sure what your point is. Is your point that companies shouldn't be required to follow labor/tax law? What's the difference between this and saying that you don't want to pay payroll taxes on employees? Or that you want to pay a lower rate? Or that you don't want to pay import taxes or that you don't want to follow required laws in what you may put in the products you sell? What exactly makes Uber and Lyft so special that they should get to choose what rules they are to follow?
Very curious about this trend I've seen on HN where instead of going to the primary source, commenters will take 2x the time to hypothesize about what the primary source could contain.
In this particular case it was so easy that it really makes me wonder.
I can think of a couple of reasons:
* Uncertainty with where in the primary source the content is
* Concern that you're being Gish Galloped with citations
* Lack of skill at skimming
Anyway, the source is particularly weird with the way it links to things and stuff but it wasn't that hard to find. I went through it and then decided to screen record the interaction afterwards. It's my second time going through but not that different from the first.
Using headlines, pull quotes, and pictures as the things I'm aiming for, I got there in 30 s. I think your comment would have taken longer for me to have written than 30 s.
> When we polled drivers about their preference between remaining an independent contractor or becoming an employee, an overwhelming number of drivers wanted to remain independent.
> "What type of employment relationship would you like to have with rideshare companies"
> (A) I don't know the difference: 3.3%
> (B) I'd like to be an employee: 20.8%
> (C) I'd like to be an independent contractor: 75.9%
Is 734 out of a population of 80,000 a representative sample? And even if it is, are the 80,000 people on their mailing list a representative sample of all drivers?
"Representativeness" has to do with the process of sampling, not the sample size -- a sample of one is in fact a representative sample of the population in the sense of being unbiased for the quantity of interest.
Here's a simple anecdote: suppose you want to measure how often a coin comes up heads. The true answer is 50% heads. If your "sample" is a single coin flip, the answer will always be 100% or 0% (both wrong answers!). Maybe you do this experiment and get 100% and I do it and get 0%. But since the magnitude of the error will be the same on either side, on average across many repetitions of the experiment (this is called a "sampling distribution") we'll get the right answer.
What adding additional sample size does is reduce the variance of the estimated statistic -- that is to say reduce the degree to which the estimate of the parameter moves around across samples. If I flip the coin 100 times and you flip the coin 100 times, we're both likely to get very close answers to one another.
The bigger concern here is not sample size, it's whether the sampling was random (it was not) and whether the sample frame -- the population from which they were sampling -- matches the population of interest (it does not, as you suggest in your post, so your instincts here are good!).
There is very little reason to believe the people who chose to reply to the email are as-if random with respect to the question being asked. Rather, I would expect diehards of RideShareGuy (who likely converge on RSG's approximate editorial position on this issue) are more likely to reply. There is also likely to be confounding based on age, hours worked per week, geographical location in the country, etc.
There is also very little reason to believe RideShareGuy's mailing list represents rideshare drivers as a whole; again, selection based on age, tech savvy, English competency, SES, geographic location, etc. all likely to be confounders.
If this were a classical random sample of a valid sample frame, the parameter of interest would have a classical margin of error +- 3.6%, which is small compared to the overall story being told. This speaks to your concern. A simple rule of thumb is that classical MOEs are +- 1/sqrt(n) where n is the sample size. This comment is too long so I won't get into the derivation here.
I actually think this question presents a lot of interesting problems for a survey statistician. In particular, I would guess there is extreme subgroup heterogeneity -- that is to say there are classes of people who overwhelmingly want to be contractors and classes of people who overwhelmingly want to be employees. My guess would be that the population-wide parameter is of little interest compared to identifying those groups. If we discovered that, say, every person above 40 hours a week wanted to be an employee and every person below wanted to be a contractor, it'd be an error to present a weighted average of the groups versus exploring policy solutions that reflect that heterogeneity.
Thanks for the detailed dive into this! I found it really interesting.
> The bigger concern here is not sample size, it's whether the sampling was random
This confuses me a little. Aren't both of those things pretty important? To go back to your first sentence, a sample size of one could be perfectly random, but it will be pretty useless at telling us anything interesting about the population. Obviously that's a silly case, but what about 10 people? 100? I would venture to guess that a random sample of 100 out of 80,000 people would be unlikely to tell you anything useful about those 80,000 people, at least not without a margin of error much higher than the effect being measured. So that suggests to me that sample size is pretty important too.
> If we discovered that, say, every person above 40 hours a week wanted to be an employee and every person below wanted to be a contractor, it'd be an error to present a weighted average of the groups versus exploring policy solutions that reflect that heterogeneity.
That's a really good point. It's possible, and likely, that any single chosen classification is going to make a lot of people unhappy. Better might be to develop new rules and classes that fit the situation and different drivers' needs better.
Sorry I missed your reply here, but on the off-change you get this: a random sample of 10 people is unbiased for the entire population. A random sample of 1 person is unbiased for the entire population. The limitation of very low sample size is that it is going to produce high variance; on average it will be correct, but across multiple surveys our estimates will move around a lot. We can define a margin of error around our estimate to formally account for this. If what we're interested in is a binary yes/no answer, using the classical calculations and without trying to add more complexity for you, the margin of error is +/- 1/sqrt(n), so a sample of 100 people gets you in a qualitative ballpark of whether a property is very common, common, rare, or very rare. If you want to tell whether 69% and 71% reflect statistically different underlying propensities, you will need a much bigger sample. But if you just need to know "does there exist a decent swath of people who say yes to this?", a very small sample will do on average.
The full population size is generally irrelevant statistically (it applies to a "finite population correction"). Almost all the statistics you see presented publicly ignore FPCs by assuming the population is infinitely larger than the sample. Even when people take census reads of a full population they typically assume the population is a realized sample of a larger meta-population.
In general if you are seeing publicly presented poll data, sample size is not the thing that should be sending up red flags. Differential non-response and selection bias; sample frame matching or not matching the population; underlying noise in the conceptual measure; design effects caused by weighting; and many other components are all part of "TSE" (total survey error), which dwarfs the impact of sampling variation as a concern.
Now, mind you, subgroup analyses often do cut samples too finely... e.g., an N=500 sample subset to Men 65+ and people trying to make inferences but not properly reflecting either the sampling considerations or reduced subgroup sample size).
Let it also be noted from those classical calculations that larger samples are diminishing returns: N = 1000 -> 3.1% -> N = 5000 -> 1.4%. Five times the cost of surveying if not more, only a halving of the margin of error, and limited extra power to answer most real questions of interest.
The secret is that your status has nothing to do with what you want but the terms of employment. It doesn't matter if 100% of them want to be contractors the judge just ruled it doesn't count as contractors by law.
If Uber wants contractors they need to make sure the terms of their employment follow the law, including classification.
I rarely use ridesharing apps but I always ask about this kind of thing and I have the same takeaway as you.
The drivers seem to like the situation they are in.
I could really care less about the "technically..." type of arguments. The drivers don't think they are being exploited, they like the job and the freedom it gives them. Any law that puts an end to that is _bad_ for those people.
Just because these laws were put in place to help people doesn't mean they always help people. The people who are supposedly being helped by the law here think it's hurting them. The law is supposed to serve the people, not the other way around. The law needs to change to allow these people to continue the situation they enjoy.
It drives me crazy to read people arguing about the technicalities of the law and ignoring what the supposedly exploited people are saying.
Do you also explain some of the downsides of being an employee? I don’t know if they are dying for the rigid hours, bureaucracy, same environment etc. it’s not all upside being an employee
The implication is in either case it’s an explicitly hostile action by the government in favor of special interests, and the majority of drivers did not want this.
Can anyone more knowledgeable on the topic pitch in — is there any truth to these arguments?
The Los Angeles taxi union prevented (read: bribed and coerced) the state / city government from installing a train from LAX to DTLA because they were rolling in cash.
Then, they got pissed about Uber, and had a rule enacted that forced passengers to take a bus to an external lot which turned the world's worst airport congestion into a way worse situation.
It is not unrealistic to think that they are a driving force behind this situation as well. California is corrupt as fuck, from GM paying LA to take out way more efficient train lines so they could sell buses to Beverly Hills preventing LA from building a subway. It makes living here absolutely miserable.
@tom
No, it's not being built. The train that is currently under construction will connect the airport terminals to a cab stand and car rental station less than a mile from the airport because LA taxi drivers threw a shit fit when they suggested building a train into downtown and Santa Monica.
By the way, we're paying $4 billion for that. $4 billion to carry passengers less than a mile from the airport so they can then take a cab...
LA cab drivers are all unionized now and they had their entire hand stuck in this process. It was corruption as an art form.
The train that is currently under construction will connect the airport terminals to a cab stand and car rental station less than a mile from the airport because LA taxi drivers threw a shit fit when they suggested building a train into downtown and Santa Monica.
This is false to the point of being deliberate FUD.
The LAX people mover is $4 billion because the FAA requires a fuck-ton of care to be taken so that construction and the people-mover itself doesn't interfere with the operation of the airport. It is a 2.25 mile system with 6 stations: the terminals, the rental car facility, the parking lots, the metro station, and two employee-only facilities.
The shuttle you speak of will only operate for 2-3 years, between the parking facility (expected completion 2021) and the terminals, while the Peoplemover is built out to the terminals (expected completion: 2023).
LA taxi drivers had literally no influence over the design of the airport or public transportation to it. I don't understand the bizarre logic required to think that a few hundred people making just above minimum wage have the political leverage to block a multi-billion dollar project.
No, it's not. Nothing you wrote contradicted anything I said. The ultimate passenger destinations are less than 1 mile from the airport. They do not include connections to ongoing transportation other than cars, buses, and taxis. It cost $4 billion for something that adds little to no value.
LA taxi drivers were actively protesting outside of the airport when the original train was proposed. Stop lying.
I agree with you. It is bizarre that they have any influence whatsoever, but they do, and they have been forcefully exerting it for decades.
The ultimate passenger destinations are less than 1 mile from the airport. They do not include connections to ongoing transportation other than cars, buses, and taxis. It cost $4 billion for something that adds little to no value.
Again, that is completely false.
Only the parking lot facility is less than a mile from the airport terminals. The public transportation hub itself is 1.25 miles away from the airport; the same facility will provide access to rail, bus, taxi, and apptaxi (fka rideshare), and the rental car facility at the end of the people mover is roughly 1.5 miles away (across the street from the transportation hub), or roughly 2.25 miles from the other end of the peoplemover in front of tom bradley.
https://www.lawa.org/-/media/lawa-web/connecting-lax/lamp-bu...
LA taxi drivers were actively protesting outside of the airport when the original train was proposed. Stop lying.
Yes, they were. And their protests accomplished nothing. Because taxi drivers have no leverage.
It is bizarre that they have any influence whatsoever, but they do, and they have been forcefully exerting it for decades.
No, they have not. They have had literally no influence on public transportation to the airport.
Think about it: they couldn't even stop Uber and Lyft from operating at the airport. And you think they had the leverage to stop public transportation for decades?
(Another example: Uber complained about the new temporary pickup lot for taxis/apptaxis, and LAX made changes the next day to accommodate apptaxis. The taxi drivers made the same complaints...and got no changes at all...Almost a year later, the regular taxis are still complaining about those same issues.)
What rail? The one into Inglewood? Super helpful for everyone involved.
I'm not arguing the measurement of 1 mile versus 1.5 miles with you. You are nitpicking to confuse the argument and it doesn't change the point in the least.
I have lived in LA long enough to see proposal after proposal made, the taxis protest, and the proposals get canned. You can talk about lack of influence all you want, but they have gotten their way every time they made a statement for the last several decades by threatening to shutdown airport traffic. They are nothing but thugs.
Blame the corrupt officials that enabled this, you can hardly blame a union for trying to act in their own self interest. They don't represent you but the city does.
Regardless, you couldn't have this effect without the corrupt politicians that ARE supposed to represent your interests, unlike the taxi union. What's the point of raging at perfectly understandable lobbying?
The Los Angeles taxi union prevented (read: bribed and coerced) the state / city government from installing a train from LAX to DTLA because they were rolling in cash.
This is false. Pure FUD. The LA taxi union isn't a very powerful union, and was never the primary roadblock to building the Green Line all the way to the airport. The FAA was the reason: they thought the power lines for the rail line would interfere with landing paths of planes. https://www.dailynews.com/2008/01/09/why-green-line-stopped-...
California is corrupt as fuck, from GM paying LA to take out way more efficient train lines so they could sell buses to Beverly Hills preventing LA from building a subway. It makes living here absolutely miserable.
This is also a fraudulent representation of history. The old rail lines (i.e., Pacific Electric) were never profitable because they were intended as loss leaders for suburban housing developments. The lines ultimately went bankrupt when cars became popular because they had a max speed of approximately 15 mph. When LA formed its nascent public transportation system in the 50s, it acquired the few busy/profitable lines remaining. Some of those rights of way were used for new rail construction (for example, the E line to Santa Monica).
Every other city in the country has figured out rail transportation. The FAA could have been pacified if there was any political will to find a real solution. Blaming the FAA because they rejected one design is pure bs.
GM most definitely ran a campaign through the '50s and '60s designed to increase the use of buses as a replacement for street cars. That's not anywhere close to debatable and LA was not the only city that went along with it.
And if you're going to continue to claim that corruption is not the driving force behind these decisions then I would love your explanation for BH doing everything in their power to prevent and delay a rail line because they didn't want homeless people to be have easy access to the area. It's all about money, not the common good. Nobody here is planning for anything other than their own pocketbook.
The FAA could have been pacified if there was any political will to find a real solution. Blaming the FAA because they rejected one design is pure bs.
It's literally the truth. You can't build a rail to the airport if the ultimate governing body for airports in the country won't let you build the rail to the airport. It took decades to get the FAA to withdraw its opposition, and that didn't happen until a Democratic president took over.
I would love your explanation for BH doing everything in their power to prevent and delay a rail line because they didn't want homeless people to be have easy access to the area.
That's not corruption. That's residents of the city of Beverly Hills being opposed to having a rail line in their city because they don't want homeless people having easy access. (And they're not wrong to be worried about it; the homeless use the E Line daily to shuttle between Santa Monica and downtown LA.) It's not corruption simply because you disagree with them. That's how democracy works.
Notably, the businesses in Beverly Hills were very much in favor of a rail line station terminating in the city. However, businesses aren't voters, so if the rail station had been built over the objections of the voting residents, that would be an example of corruption.
Was there ever a legitimately priced proposal for a train to go from LAX to DTLA? The only reason the Expo line worked was because the rights of way, and in some cases the rail itself, was already in place. I don't remember seeing anything other than concepts for an LAX train (not the people mover under construction now, an actual train) and thinking they would never get the funding and permits to make it work.
To your comment about rideshare pickups at the terminals. Just no. Pre-COVID I was flying for work weekly and Uber & Lyft pickups were awful for congestion in the circle, in addition to taking forever to get to you. It was often faster to walk off-airport and get a ride from the Hyatt. And that was with normal level of traffic, not the expected Olympics-level. I'm sure the taxi union was involved, but the decision to switch to LAX-it made a whole lot of sense.
Also a frequent flier. It sucked before but the solution was 100% designed to benefit cab drivers. Moreover, it absolutely fucked up the entrance to the airport which went from long, but doable, to dozens of people missing their flights per-day bad.
I live in Playa Vista and had a 1.5 hour trip to LAX in November. I was this close to driving through there at 3am and stealing every one of their traffic cones.
What "Los Angeles taxi union" organization specifically lobbied against the LAX train, which, by the way, is now being built?
There may well have been industry lobbyists fighting this but until very recently (the last five years) almost no taxi drivers in Los Angeles were unionized.
The Green Line (opened 1995) was originally supposed to have a real LAX station, instead of the (current) station-near-LAX-with-a-bus-transfer. The Crenshaw Corridor train (which connects to the Green Line) will open an LAX station sometime in 2021, if it isn't delayed.
The Green Line (opened 1995) was originally supposed to have a real LAX station
...until the FAA intervened and said the Metro couldn't build all the way out to the airport, due to the potential danger from crossing existing flight paths. (In a nutshell: the Green Line would have crossed perpendicularly to the existing runways, which would be fine normally but a huge risk in the event a plane overshoots or undershoots the runway.)
I remember when there was a crackdown on software independent contractors. What most contractors did was go through an agency that managed your services. The difference in pay was usually 20% since the agency took 20% of your pay.
I suspect this will happen ultimately with the drivers - although I can't imagine the drivers will be thrilled with a 20% cut in pay.
I believe the idea is that employee protections and standards must come from the government.
Sometimes it comes up naturally (see the benefits of being a software engineer) but when unemployment is high those protections tend to go away especially for jobs that have minimal barrier of entry (ie ride share driver). Right now drivers have very little leverage or power over Lyft/Uber except for not participating in their market.
The question of AB5 is the right protections and classifying them as employees is I think the debate. I believe most drivers want independence b/c most drivers only drive part time. But the drivers who drive full time want better protections.
I tend to agree with this, I've always thought ridesharing was rather beautiful in terms of economic efficiency: pair those with extra money but who don't want to drive at that moment with those with extra time who want money. As long as there is adequate education about the all-in costs of car ownership I am all on board. And at scale it reduces traffic (or at least amount of cars in an area).
In ages past my first thoughts upon hearing of Uber was entirely about "matching" as you described.
I recall thinking it would be great for adhoc rideshare commuting to/from work.
Somewhere it turned into a money sucking business platform. Maybe because it required funds to run the servers required and went off the rails from there?
> I really struggle to understand why we need bureaucrats imposing their idea of what a market should look like on an fairly efficient market.
Because, that's not the argument. The argument is the precedent it sets. We've seen companies utilize weak independent contractor regulations in the past to take advantage of individuals (most specifically, the Dynamex case that lead directly to this), despite many of them not knowing/not complaining. This is why California is so hard on independent contractors. I would prefer a state strong on worker's rights than vice versa.
> From my experience the drivers are perfectly aware of the costs that go into driving so I really don't buy the exploitation argument.
Your anecdotes don't mean anything, sorry. We have vast evidence that companies will take advantage of worker's in an independent contractor situation to their benefit. We have evidence that Uber had requirements in it's worker interactions (route penalties, hour requirements, etc) that do not fit independent contractor ideals.
> Seems like a loss for everyone except bureaucrats.
The bureacrats gain nothing.
> Also don't see how it's realistic to expect them to be able to adjust to this on a dime.
I can only assume you don't live in California. This isn't on a dime. They were notified over three years ago. The FTB and legislature have been on them about it constantly. The law was introduced in 2018-12-03 and signed into law on 2019-09-18. I know operations can be slow, but two years should be plenty of time, considering how fast they were able to adjust to failing markets like Germany that they ultimately lost anyways.
> Although large, California is still a minority of their revenue.
It makes up 16% of Lyft and Uber's users. It has the highest valued rides, lowest effective overhead (driver retention, driver acquisition, passenger acquisition) and most effective mileage.
But you're right, they should give up their most established and profitable market or California should shut up. Because you talked to some people.
>Completely anecdotal but I bring this question up every time I drive in an Uber and overwhelmingly the drivers tell me they want to stay independent.
Why would you bring this up every time you get in an Uber? Have you considered that maybe, just maybe, these people are concerned about complaining to a stranger about their "employer"?
Imagine someone walking into your office and asking you, "hey, do you like this company?"
This is a disgusting comment and shows an incredible lack of understanding around how labor rights historically have been both won and lost.
The further allowance of classifying people as contractors will only expand until companies can further use this as a tool to pay people less and avoid taxes (where based on federal judicial precedent, the healthcare premiums both individuals and employers pay are considered taxes under federal law). Today Uber drivers, tomorrow nurses and teachers, ect. Also people are absolutely being forced into working as rideshare and delivery drivers, the alternatives are often destitute poverty.
These companies had a long time to get their act together on this issue, they just decided that a capital strike was more favorable to them at this time.
Until we live in a country where healthcare is separate from employment, hiring someone on as a contractor just so you can avoid healthcare costs for them is absolutely exploitative (both of the law, and to the workers themselves).
imo biggest problem with the independent argument is Uber and Lyft actively penalizes you as a driver if you decline unprofitable trips. Also I believe Lyft (unsure about Uber) even stopped showing you how much you make per trip and instead just rolls it into one summary, presumably to make it harder for you to do the cost/benefit of deciding whether a trip is worth doing.
that sort of big brother behavior is the antithesis of independence and throws out any argument that Uber is somehow just providing drivers with lead gen software like they’re Salesforce or something
yeah it feels like a few product level changes could easily swing the argument back in their favor - but I guess the risk has always been the impact to the efficiency of the marketplace and overall customer experience.
1. Valid survey questions are very hard to phrase. Asking someone about their job when their job depends on your goodwill in not conducive to truthful answers.
2. Given the corporations' behavior, the driver's job depends on their following the corporate script.
Because taxpayers in the state of CA are in effect picking up the slack when the employer fails to pay for sick and family leave, unemployment, and healthcare.
This change didn't happen overnight. AB5 was passed 6+ months ago, after over a year of political negotiation.
I think the problem is that driver’s want to remain independent, but their cost is borne by the society. Such as the recent CAREs act had unemployment for drivers. I am assuming they also get subsidized healthcare, and would be eligible for Medicare ? Their employers don't really contribute to these things. But perhaps the law should just have complied them to contribute via additional taxes instead of asking them to be classified
If you're an IC, you have to pay Self-Employment Tax to cover the employer's part of the payroll tax deductions. Plus you're also liable for all the usual payroll taxes. That burden doesn't go away just because you get a 1099 instead of a W-2. So it's the drivers who are in theory paying in to healthcare subsidies and Medicare.
Taxes are on earnings after top-of-the-line deductions for business expenses including gas and depreciation that they'd lose on the W-2. Drivers aren't stupid as you think.
If they were employees they would be required to be reimbursed for business expenses including commercial insurance, and mileage to cover gas and depreciation.
The reimbursement requirement is baselined with respect to minimum wage, so it could be effectively $0. If it is not $0, the form would be additional W-2 pay, which is allowed by law, and this would be subject to all taxes. On top of the tax loss, calculation would not be at the generous IRS mileage rate that drivers currently exploit, but true expenses which most say are lower. Yet people continue to think drivers are stupider than they are at doing what they do every day. It's pretty fucking arrogant.
CA requires that employers reimburse employees for work related expenses, so there is no issue with expense kickback taking someone below minimum wage. Reimbursement is not earned wages, it is not taxed. It is true reimbursement could be lower than the IRS rate, but actual costs are pretty close to the IRS mileage rate in practice. Depreciation has a real cost that is ignored by many
I'm sure there's a few drivers really want to stay independent, but have you considered that the majority only "want tob stay independent" because the current situation? That doing this full time won't be enough income to feed the family, so they want to stay independent in order to have another job? If doing this full time is enough income, maybe they no longer need to be independent?
My impression is that Uber fulfills a niche for drivers who want a certain tradeoff between flexibility and job security. There are people who fit into that niche and people who don't, but forcing the company to change its value proposition is going to make some people start or stop driving for Uber depending on how well the new contract suits them. This could be a net economic win or loss, but we don't know the numbers.
In the long run, if there are enough drivers who value the flexible arrangement that Uber provides, then either another company will fill that niche or these people will find similar work elsewhere.
Imagine for arguments sake you were deriving your income from a company that’s known to be highly aggressive in suppressing threats to their business model.
Imagine that you held an opinion that was counter to a major legal and public option battle that company was engaged in.
In the situation, what would you say if someone approached you while you were on the job and started asking for your opinion on this topic?
Would you if some random person, who for all you know could be an Uber/Lyft employee, and even if not, is someone who uses Uber/Lyft and therefore is likely happy with it, asks you a question about it?
Ah, well. I think I can make this circular. It is perhaps exploitative to demand these laws. It's unfair treatment of Uber/Lyft employees to imposing regulatory regimes against their wishes (claiming it actually benefits them) to satisfy the political benefits/desires of an outside group. Society should not allow that exploitation to exist whether or not the outside group realizes it is exploitation.
It's pretty silly to say that protecting workers is exploitative. You're essentially trying to redefine the word "exploitation" be reversing its meaning.
Yes, it's amazing that the top comment misses the point completely. Plenty of inmates become "institutionalized" and claim they would prefer to stay in prison, but no one would ever cite that as a legitimate reason to keep them there.
This whole business has nothing to do with the drivers, neither what they want, what's good for them or even what's good for customers.
It's about a class of politicians (unions and the leftist politicians they back/finance) scared to death to see their historical grip on power disappear because of a paradigm shift and who are using the people's goody-two-shoes knee-jerk reflexes to try and regain said grip.
But you also have people like DHH claiming otherwise.
To those of us not living in US, America just feels like a nation that constantly shout at each other, and now it is amplify by its a dominant media platform; Twitter. Considering lots of news media quote, find new information and use Twitter.
Either one is an arbitrary choice that influences the market.
Why should a supposedly free society be free to accept only how Uber or Lyft might have it?
It isn’t just bureaucrats but the public that votes them in. You’re cherry picking bits n pieces from the broader social narrative to highlight. Why should anyone care what any random poster on HN thinks is just as valid and vapid a question once you take 5 minutes to think it over.
HN is just as knee jerky and shallow as Twitter and Reddit. Don’t kid yourselves folks
Sure, Uber drivers aren't forced to work at Uber specifically, but everyone is obligated to work in a capitalist society if they want to survive, so it is important that employers in general are bound by laws that protect workers.
In this case, California created new laws in response to employee abuses at Uber and Lyft.
This notion that Uber and Lyft drivers can afford to quit and find a new career is infantile. The real world does not work that way, and people who labor for low wages should be protected from abuse.
We should all care. Uber doesn't provide health insurance. Instead Uber drivers get their healthcare costs covered by the rest of us (either via ACA subsidies or written-off care provided to the uninsured).
> Uber drivers get their healthcare costs covered by the rest of us
So what? People without jobs also get their healthcare covered by MediCal (with zero out of pocket expenses). Is that also a problem? Wouldn't it be better if we had universal healthcare?
It would be better if we had universal healthcare, but that will not happen for, at the very least, 6 years. Meanwhile, Uber should not be allowed to undercut competitors by simply offloading costs to the common man.
Employer-provided healthcare is a byproduct of WWII-era price-fixing that gave employers no way to compete on wages (so they started competing on benefits, including healthcare).
>Completely anecdotal but I bring this question up every time I drive in an Uber and overwhelmingly the drivers tell me they want to stay independent. No one is forcing drivers into their jobs. I really struggle to understand why we need bureaucrats imposing their idea of what a market should look like on an fairly efficient market.
Everyone who works for Lyft or Uber is making an active choice to work for Lyft or Uber. It isn't surprising they would choose to continue working for them rather than risk losing that job entirely. That doesn't mean these people aren't being taken advantage of by these companies.
It is comparable to someone being paid below minimum wage under the table. If that person entered into that arrangement voluntarily, they likely did it because that is their best option. If that person is given the choice of supporting a lower minimum wage or being fired, they will likely support the lower minimum wage. That doesn't mean that society as a whole would benefit from a lower minimum wage. We should instead enact laws we think are best for society as a whole (I'm not convinced that AB5 is necessarily that, but I am speaking generally here) while also implementing social policies that can take care of the people like this who are caught in the transition of raising labor standards.
Exploitation does not just go away when you consensually sign a contract.
In any idea that these folks resemble independent contractors in any way is bullshit. They can't set the rates of the rides or that they give to Uber or Lyft. They can't set the basic terms on when and where you accept rides. When someone doesn't want to drive me across the bay, I can hardly blame them, but they have no leverage to dictate their own employment except by quitting. I guess these people end up accepting some kind of opaque, kafkaesque punishment to their livelihood. Independent my ass.
Granted, single payer healthcare would ameliorate some of the problems here, but it's very difficult to categorize the cut that Uber or Lyft takes for the commodity service they provide, protected by absolutely massive moats of capital, as anything but exploitative.
> overwhelmingly the drivers tell me they want to stay independent.
However, I overwhelmingly don't want to pay for their healthcare or food stamps because they aren't earning enough money.
I personally think that AB5 doesn't go far enough. If you employ people for more than 40 hours, you should owe healthcare and benefits, period. It doesn't matter whether those 40 hours are one person or 10 people or whether the people are contractors or employees. If you can't deliver benefits, fine, then you owe as payment to the government to provide that.
We WANT people to have stable employment, not gigs.
Not every business model is economically viable, and (at a guess) rideshare-drivers-as-employees might be one of those un-viable models.
You can ban exploiting labor, you can force companies to share more with the workers, but you can't legislate well-paying jobs into existence. You might view Uber as an exploitative employer, but it isn't some wildly-profitable company that is failing to share its bountiful profits with the workers.
I don't care whether Uber and Lyft stop doing business in CA as a result of AB5, but I think that's a fairly predictable outcome.
> Not every business model is economically viable, and (at a guess) rideshare-drivers-as-employees might be one of those un-viable models.
And that's fine. We have minimum wage laws for a reason.
A "contractor" who is earning near or below minimum wage isn't a contractor--they're a mechanism to skirt labor law.
I want to see every layer of "contracting" have to pay benefits. If the contractor is expensive enough (aka $100K+ a year), people won't care. But, yeah, if the "contractor" is skirting labor law, they'll lose--big time.
> I don't care whether Uber and Lyft stop doing business in CA as a result of AB5, but I think that's a fairly predictable outcome.
I'm willing to roll the dice on this one. The last time Uber and Lyft pulled this stunt (Austin), a whole bunch of companies stood up to take their place. Uber and Lyft then went to the state to override Austin--so we never got to see the end evolution of that.
Maybe the business model isn't viable. However, I'm willing to let a bunch of people try competing against it without having to compete against VC subsidy.
But not allowing those people to work with uber would just make them... even more dependant on the state? Either:
1) They are driving because it's the best opportunity available for them, and losing that possibility would force them to work less desirable/paying jobs, have less disposable income if uber is just a side gig for them or just end up unemployed. Which would lead to them contributing even less to their healthcare/education/etc costs.
Or
2) You are assuming that they are driving even if they can get 40h jobs with good benefits but just choose... not to? Or that if uber inevitably ends up closing their California operations, they will magically find those cushier jobs & those who drive to add to their income will just find an extremely flexible side gig that can net them hundreds of dollars a month?
I don't understand how unemployment is a more desirable outcome. Because uber will absolutely not pay for each of their driver's benefits. And that's even if they were able to afford it (they absolutely can't).
> However, I overwhelmingly don't want to pay for their healthcare or food stamps because they aren't earning enough money.
So you response is to support a solution where they can't earn any money because it's not enough money? Congratulations, now these people are idle and you're now paying even more to cover their needs whereas previously your taxes only had to cover some of their needs and they could participate actively in the economy, working their way up to better opportunities.
> whereas previously your taxes only had to cover some of their needs
I don't believe this. I also pay for the negative externalities due to them driving: increased traffic, increased pollution, increased accident rates, hospitalization (driving is one of the most dangerous acts for people under 30), etc. I don't believe that the tiny amount they get driving for Uber/Lyft even slightly offsets this.
> working their way up to better opportunities.
Unfortunately, Uber/Lyft are a trap because they sink time in return for not very much money and give you nothing in return. I would rather support those people idle--so they can go to school, learn English better, learn a trade, work a job that has a promotion path, etc.
We have long ago decided that we don’t let people give away certain rights, even if they do it freely, even if they want to. I can’t work for a business for free, or for below minimum wage, even if I call myself an “unpaid intern”. I can’t work for a business as a child (below working age). I can’t ask a business not to withhold income tax from my paycheck, or to not pay their half of the social security tax, or withhold my half. My employer has to pay into the unemployment insurance pool on my behalf.
We have these rules because every unscrupulous employer out there has exploited one or more of these ploys at some time in the past, and would gladly do so again.
Companies are constantly looking for ways to avoid one or more of these restrictions. One way is to claim someone is a contractor - basically another business - and therefore is responsible for making sure its own employees are treated according to the law (usually there’s only one employee...). This is a constant cat and mouse game.
Uber and Lyft claim to be transportation marketplaces where riders and drivers meet up and contract for services, except they dictate every aspect of the transaction, other than when the drivers choose to work. It’s not 100% of the way employees at Wal Mart or McDonalds are treated, but it’s at least 80% there. We have to draw the line somewhere, and the TNC’s have fulfilled almost all of the standard tests for when someone is considered an employee.
"except they dictate every aspect of the transaction" - I think they do it out of necessity, here in India at least.
Ferrying passengers is a very risky business. So protect the passengers, Uber/Lyft have no other option but to kind of police every aspect of the driver - passenger transaction. Despite all that, there were multiple rapes of women in Uber/Ola cars in India, drivers were ghosting Uber/Ola, they have tried to outsmart the routing algorithms by crowding in hot zones, tried to take cash from passengers without running the trip and what not.
While I espouse for drivers being treated fairly, whether as employees or contractors it's not that simple to bring in protections for the drivers without monitoring/scrutiny.
The contractors/employees of McDonalds are in a very different setting, and their customers are almost at no risk and there is little to no scope for embezzling cash, short of robbing the joint. So the comparison doesn't really hold true.
> other than when the drivers choose to work.
That's not true. What about who else they can work for? That's not enforced either.
Which other businesses commonly allow people to work when they want, work for whatever competition they want, take any amount of 'vacation' in between?
You're fitting something new into an existing category by handwaving away lot of important nuance, when it is exactly this nuance that makes a ton of difference and why the new type of work may not fit into an existing category.
At least in California, an employer has virtually no say about who you work for in your off hours. If you want to work for McDonald’s 9-5 and Wendy’s 6-midnight, it’s nobody’s business but yours.
I don’t believe a driver viewing the available riders is “working” any more than someone looking at prices in the apps to ride are “riding” until they accept a fare. People interview at many jobs simultaneously, bid on multiple contracts simultaneously, but they are not _working_ them simultaneously until an agreement is made.
So unless a driver has a rider from lyft and a rider from uber in the car at the same time, they are not simultaneously working for both.
That being said I don’t know if there is some employment or contract law that makes me wrong, or even just terms laid out by uber or lyft.
Right so your point is that the driver is only an employee while on a trip. And while waiting for a trip, the driver is not an employee?
I am sure uber/lyft will be more than happy to pay minimum wage if the wage only counts when a trip begins. But the reason the companies are against the law is because the law requires minimum wage while the driver is not driving too. Which means that a driver could actually get 2 minimum wages at the same time while driving for both uber/lyft.
But of course that won’t happen. Uber/lyft will ban driving for competitor. Set up shifts such that every driver drives 37.5 hours a week. It is simply not worth the hassle of paying all these benefits for drivers who log in for an hour a day at random times.
> Right so your point is that the driver is only an employee while on a trip. And while waiting for a trip, the driver is not an employee?
I think I agree with this. Seems like you could still have the traditional, if not archaic, model where they are paid by hour of work, and simply track the time they spend en route to pick up and while driving, in place of or combination with however it's worked out today.
_How much_ they pay per hour of driving I think will still be subject to the usual market forces. Same for restrictive covenants. Uber and Lyft aren't just competing for customers, they're also competing for labor. But this is all I think orthogonal to the question of "what is the true nature of the relationship between the companies and the drivers," you're talking about outcomes of possible answers that should not have bearing on what the answer is.
The agricultural business. If you live in California and eat fruit you’re one degree away from it.
Piecework is neither uncommon or novel. There are a million other examples.
Silicon Valley sure likes to resurrect depression era business models (piecework, SRO’s, renting out spare rooms, housekeeping and errand services for the wealthy) and call it innovation.
Uber let’s drivers set their own rates in CA [0]. What is also interesting is that before Lyft/Uber many taxi drivers were contractors renting their cars for an hourly rate. With rates set by the government, it’s really not much different than “rideshare”, just less flexible for them and the customer.
One issue is the type of market transport is and the variability in demand. You can do just a few Lyft trips, or just 1 and then do something else. CA employment law does not allow “micro shifts” like that, you have to pay the employees for a few hours. With no government restriction the market works itself out, with a large number of people who work a bit at peak supplementing those who are more full time. I think the legislature took the lazy way out, they could of set up rules for minimum compensation, benefits, And worker protection without the rest of the employment baggage.
You can't just hand waive away a fundamental difference like that. From my conversation with some Lyft/Uber drivers they really treasure that aspect and they would rather quit if they are forced to be regular employees with dictated working hours.
Becoming an employee doesn’t necessarily mean you have to work a rigid schedule. There are plenty of employees, like flight attendants, who bid on shifts on a periodic basis, and who have the opportunity to trade or add shifts freely.
I see you’ve never worked minimum wage jobs before.
There are not “plenty” of unskilled jobs that allow you to set your own hours.
In fact, all of jobs I had accessible to me before I had a degree had ZERO flexibility on hours. You were scheduled (rarely ever during standard 9 to 5 hours), and if you didn’t show up, you were fired.
I would have happily taken a few bucks less than minimum wage for the ability to set my own hours and educate myself. Who are you to tell me I’m being exploited—-as you sit at your 100k+ computer job looking down at me.
"Uber and Lyft say drivers prefer the flexibility of working as freelancers, while labor unions and elected officials contend this deprives them of traditional benefits like health insurance and workers’ compensation."
I was curious about what drivers think. I guess they're not happy [1] but want to be independent contractors still [2].
> ...Uber drivers reported earning $13.47 per hour, which means that on average, drivers report that their car is costing them over $6 per hour to operate.
If you were to drive full time, that would get you about 27k/year, which is about the average income that a taxi driver makes. Rideshare companies are asking you to take more personal financial risk than you might as a taxi driver, but giving you more flexibility.
Still 27k/year is not much money really anywhere in the country. I think this is a symptom of some major underlying problems with our economy rather than an indictment of the rideshare industry. If we can't afford to pay drivers a living wage to do their work, then the people who are using these services aren't as well off as they think they are.
There is significant evidence that long term unemployment REALLY hurts someone's hiring chances when applying for a job (see https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/04/co... from 2013 with linked papers). As a stepping stone to a living wage, driving rideshare likely helps people looking for better paid work, especially given you can clock off for two hours to take an interview, then clock back on. Try that working any other job.
The rideshare side of the ledger has better mental health & life satisfaction, more money and better job prospects, vs the welfare side with more free time.
I'd prefer to frame the "living wage" question as of all the people who drive Uber/Lyft, not Uber/Lyft drivers which puts their job above their humanity and implies it is a permanent state of affairs, anyway of all the people who drive Uber/Lyft at some point in their lives, will they be better off with the option of driving Uber/Lyft, or better off in a world where Uber/Lyft is not an option?
But in the study linked, they're really testing whether a resume gap hurts your chances of getting hired. I'm skeptical that it would translate the same to gig economy job, given you can't ask them for a reference, nor is there any indication of how much you worked (did you work 40 hour weeks? a few hours a week?), or how reliable/timely you were.
People exist who are uncomfortable blatantly lying even if they can easily get away with it, and they tend to be good employees compared to the alternative, depending on the job specifics. Real gig work as a resume filling removes their disadvantage.
Our economy has become so overwhelmingly top heavy that the majority of the population is losing the ability to take part in it. The middle class used to be the mean income, but these days the mean has drifted so far from the mode that the distinction between middle class and lower class has all but vanished. Just taking a brief look at the 2014 census numbers, the mode income was centered around $22,000 a year while the mean was $75,000. Let that sink in. The largest percentage of the US population makes less than $25,000 a year.
The mode is meaningless with such a huge continuous range. A huge chunk of people are right at that income level because of minimum wage. 50% of the people still make more than 50k.
That chart is s great example of exactly what I'm talking about. Look at that 95th percentile line. It's LEFT of the center. 95% of the population is making less than HALF of the top earners.
Do you even know what point you’re trying to make? Because I don’t think this chart is saying what you’re trying to imply. All this chart shows is that there is a long tail of possible incomes to the right.
It doesn’t tell you how much that 5 percent is making in aggregate compared to the 95 percent. Put another way, you could stuff everyone on the right into a single >250k column and it wouldn’t be as tall as that 90th percentile column.
This chart doesn’t really say anything about wealth inequality (which is what “point” I think you were trying to make) and neither does the mode of the incomes.
Median is just the arbitrary mid point between the two extremes, that doesn't actually mean anything useful to the average person. If you picked someone at random from the subset of the US population that reports an income (presumably the working population) and asked them what their income is, the most likely answer is the mode value, or in 2014 about $22,000. That's reality. That's why that is important.
The median income ($53,000) is literally pointless except as yet another indicator of how unbalanced the economy is. If the economy was perfectly balanced the median and mean would be the same, but they're nowhere near that. The median was $53,000, while the mean was $75,000. An incredibly large chunk of the US is making significantly less than a handful of massive earners. And that's not even factoring in all the dirty tricks that the richest use to hide their wealth like offshoring bank accounts and shifting most of their assets into capital gains.
Median is significant because half make more and half make less. That over half of America makes over 50k is very meaningful.
Mode is just the exact number that appears most often in the distribution. Salaries are a continuous range, except for the various minimum wages. That is why the mode is so low. It doesn’t tell you anything.
>and asked them what their income is, the most likely answer is the mode value, or in 2014 about $22,000. That's reality. That's why that is important.
FFS no. That’s not what the mode means. Mode does not imply that’s the majority probability, it’s just the single highest probability out of the possible outcomes.
Statistically speaking, if you asked random people what their income was, the majority would not have an income of $22k. Let that sink in. Your whole mental model of this is deeply flawed. “Mode” != “majority”.
Consider this distribution:
1,2,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16
What is the mode? Do you see why the mode is meaningless shit when discussing what the distribution looks like?
This information is only useful if it is contrasted against the number of people who want/need/are able to work. People like the retired, teenagers, stay-at-home parents, college students, etc. all may make some small amount of income each year but generally speaking don't work full time. This isn't evidence of people struggling. It is evidence of people exercising their personal rights which include not being a worker.
You're suggesting that the retired, teenagers, stay-at-home parents, and college students make up the majority of the US working population? Yeah, not buying that one at all. The US economy is fucked right now, we've been madly spinning the plate to try to keep it going, but it's starting to wobble badly. Unless something major is done soon it's only a question of when not if things start to implode.
> You're suggesting that the retired, teenagers, stay-at-home parents, and college students make up the majority of the US working population? Yeah, not buying that one at all.
No where did I say this. What are you talking about?
My point was that the mode income, that is the income reported by the largest number of people was incredibly low. You claim that's because there are a bunch of people that don't really need/want to work, so they don't make much. That implies that that group represents the majority of the working population (in order to be the mode income). You're point might have been correct if we were talking about the mean income being very low, but in this case it's exactly the opposite.
I was talking to a taxi dispatcher at some function here in Canada, and it came up that each vehicle on the road would drive about 500km/day. That's about $200-$250/day in what the per distance rate many employers give out(40¢-50¢/km) for fuel and wear on vehicle. But assuming an 22hrs of driving a day(on a taxi with multiple drivers), that's about 22km each hour or $11/hr for fuel and wear on the vehicle according to what many employers would pay in addition to time driving. This is in Canadian dollars, so $11/hr is about $8/hr in USD and works out to an average of $16USD/hr of driving(assuming (22km|13miles)/hr average)
I wouldn't be surprised if drivers are underestimating their costs. The true cost of vehicle ownership is rather murky and I doubt many of these drivers are self-taught accountants.
That's why the driver attrition rate is so high and Lyft/Uber have to constantly run driver recruitment efforts in mature service areas. After the driver ruins their original car in less than a year, they quickly realize the true operating costs.
Say what you will about the taxi business but at least taxi drivers knew that the gate fee on a leased vehicle was $100/day.
TCO for a Prius is about 6k a year for non-rideshare applications. The link has this cost around ~13k per year, which isn't outlandish. I think you are right in general though. Uber will let you drive an F-350, but there is no way you will make money with it.
I am almost certain 6$/hr doesn't count depreciation and only part of maintenance. Just fuel costs mean that if you were to drive an average of 20mph, you would pay on average 3$ in gas (in California).
($25,000 cost to buy car new -
$4,000 residual value at end-of-life
) / 100,000 miles usable lifetime =
$0.21/mi depreciation of value
$3.22 / gallon * (1 / (17 mi / gal fuel efficiency)) =
$0.19/mi for fuel
Maintenance:
$40 per oil change / 8,000 miles = $0.01 / mi
$600 tire change / 60,000 miles = $0.01 / mi
$1,186 average yearly repair / 16,000 average miles driven = $0.07 mile
That all adds up to $0.49 / mi and does NOT include insurance and DMV registration fees.
But in most cases, you aren't buying a car just to drive for Uber (more than half drive between 1 and 15 hours a week [0]), you're doing it on the side. Your per mile costs for driving for Uber are the marginal costs (costs of additional insurance, fuel, marginal wear and tear, etc).
Also, if you're driving for Uber in a new car that gets 17 mi / gal fuel efficiency, you're not making wise moves. There's a reason a lot of Uber drivers are using 5 year old Prius's - this cuts the fuel cost in half, and the depreciation down quite a bit.
Well, no, because if you are an Uber driver the vast majority of the depreciation in the value of your car comes from driving Uber. Cars depreciate in large part due to mileage.
Finally, "marginal wear and tear" is a completely absurd concept. The cost of wear and tear on maintenance of a car has a positive derivative and thus has no margin, the more wear and tear the more expensive wear and tear gets. In other words, the limit of the cost of wear and tear as wear goes to infinity is divergent towards positive infinity. Thus, there is no marginal cost.
In the real world, you can't spend an infinite amount of money on a car. There is a limit. The margin will come up at some point unless the driver is completely irrational.
Sure, but in the real world that cost is having to buy a new car, which easily increases the cost per mile by 50% and invalidates the point that "you were already driving a car".
It's an exceptionally poor strategy to drop $25k on a new car that only gets 17mpg when your intention is to be a rideshare driver. A purely internal-combustion Civic or Corolla gets twice that. A Prius more than 3x. So do the ones that are 3-4 years old already. And the Prius will probably last closer to 200k miles.
I would guess that the ridesharing companies will buy fleets before they'll pay Chevy Tahoe rates for compact sedans.
Your cost per mile for gas is way off. MPG is way higher for typical Lyft/Uber.
Usable lifetime is also pretty low. A modern car can pretty easily get to 150k miles even driving Uber/Lyft based on the mileage I’ve seen in the cars I’ve ridden in.
Those are your two biggest factors in your calculations and you can cut them both by a good 30%.
It's also important to note that the 13.47$ an hour is heavily biased towards expensive cities, where it really isn't much, and is actually often under the minimum salary.
Its probably also worth noting that it is $13/hour while working. Your income will fluctuate heavily with demand, which further increases your risk. This of course is also true of taxi drivers.
Who says driving for Uber/Lyft should be a full-time job, or statutorily viable as a full-time job? If you consider it only as a second or third job, then it makes a lot more sense that your second or third job is not going to pay as well or have the same benefits as your first job. Those aspects would be expected and reasonable. The low-risk, high-reward jobs fill your primary job slot, then you seek other options as needed. (After all, if it was any different, you might quit your first job and drive for rideshare instead)
This is just repeating TNC company propaganda. Nobody is saying this has to be a full-time job. Many, many people work part-time jobs and they are all employees of their workplace. Many of these people also have second part-time jobs, where they are also legally employees of the second company.
This is a common logical fallacy promoted by low-wage employers. To turn it around, why should anyone be happy to make LESS per hour for the extra hours in a day they are working?
Fast food restaurants like to argue that they keep their wages low because their workers are young students who just want some pocket money for a car or concert tickets. If you’ve walked into a McDonalds lately, you may have noticed that more of their employees are middle aged folks or even seniors who are trying to supplement their retirement savings.
I often ask my rideshare driver about why they drive, how long they’ve been driving, etc. Very few of them are driving as a hobby or to pick up some side cash. For most of them, it’s their main source of income.
Why is it necessarily better for someone to have a single job verses multiple gigs? Not everyone wants to be a shift worker or office drone. Its just an implementation detail of the economy not some sort of indicator of a problem.
If you have multiple gigs then at least one of those gigs should provide basic benefits such as insurance. What gig is better at doing it than the gig powered by a megacorp?
> I was amazed at the series Breaking Bad, that a teacher would take a summer job to make ends meet. At a carwash no less.
Breaking Bad isn’t supposed to be a documentary. Teachers don’t have summer jobs at car washes. Tutoring is both easier and pays better, as does summer school. Working at a car wash is an example of shitty choices, as is his entire relationship with his wife. It’s like his decision to go into drugs in the first place. He’s a public sector employee. He does not need to make drugs to get excellent health care. He does it because he wants to. Working at the car wash is not something he needs to do, it’s a way of expressing his martyr complex.
Who said they needed the extra gig to make ends meet? Some people might just enjoy it, or want to earn a little extra during their free time, or have a seat open on their commute.
To view temp/gig work with a full-time lens is disingenuous, imo.
It doesn't solve anything, but having an income stream that's not connected with your job should help make crappy jobs livable, and also increase bargaining power for workers, due to having better alternatives.
Also, increased spending does tend to result in more jobs, at least in normal times.
Can you provide a specific fairly objective definition of what a "crappy" job is?
Is it just a job you don't like doing?
How does adding UBI address bargaining power beyond a temporary fix? Eventually prices will adjust to take into account the buying power of UBI. UBI will become the new baseline and people on UBI will lose the benefits of that buying power. Not denying that UBI won't provide a temporary fix, but there is nothing about UBI prevents the market from adjusting to take into account UBI.
if only the people who were driving as an addition to their primary job, uber would be severely hampered. the ease of access and response is predicated on full time uber drivers
You can't really compare yearly salaries unless you pick something to standardize on. You will notice that I didn't pick on benefits at all. I would guess that the reality is most people depending on rideshare for a living are doing multiple jobs.
This is kind of the state of the country really. Ridesharing is an OK gig until you get into an accident, you're fine without health insurance until you get injured, you don't really need a union until you start getting treated unfairly, you can pay for college as long as you consistently have a good salary... we're being statistically gaslit with the idea that most people can scrape by without higher wages and better general protections.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
I think you're gas lighting us by ignoring the fact that this personal risk is taken at personal choice. If someone wanted the arrangement that comes with an employee/employer relationship there are jobs that offer that. But not everyone wants that, some people prefer, for their own reasons that are really none of your business to be an independent contractor. This is about choice plain and simple.
Personal risk isn't an isolated thing. Thousands of people taking personal risk have systemic effects, and these companies aren't paying into it, even though everyone around these "risk-takers" suffer the consequences.
> Thousands of people taking personal risk have systemic effects
How do you know the personal situation of each of Uber's/Lyft's drivers? How do we measure risk for each person in an objective way? Some people might be at no risk, some higher. We can't know! What right is there in taking away options that benefit some people because it might possibly not work well for someone who voluntarily signed a contract? This is not liberal policy. This is paternalistic, state-controlled economic oppression.
All rideshare drivers are (by definition) participating in the most dangerous activity (western) humans do on a daily basis. Every non-utilized minute they spend on the road adds risk to them as well as to other members of society.
The fact that in most places in the world there's legislation that defines requirements and responsibilities for professional drivers, from qualifications, to insurance, alcohol intake, maximum working hours, minimum rest hours, etc., Implies that it totally does exist.
I think you're gas lighting us by ignoring the fact that these types of choices aren't fully unconstrained. People aren't assuming this risk because they prefer to, but rather they have limited choices available to them given their resources and background.
> but rather they have limited choices available to them given their resources and background.
So let's take one more choice away!? Not every person looking to make some money is looking for something with as much commitment as employment. Not every business needs people to work according to their schedule at a specific place. While you think you're giving full-time employment and benefits to all of these people what you're really doing is taking certain kinds of opportunities away.
Yes! If the free market results in employers offering shitty choices that take advantage of workers with limited options, the government should step in and attempt to correct the power-imbalance that puts the workers at life- and liberty-threatening disadvantages.
Extrapolating from your logic, indentured servitude would still be allowed to exist.
Banning a form of work where workers owns the means of production doesn't seem to be in the workers interest. I'd rather they regulate it in a better way, for example rewrite union laws to make it possible for gig workers to unionize.
Uber drivers do not own the means of production, as ruled by the recent California courts, because they do not own the capital of their employers, which is the IP of Uber. This is why socialists are developing and operating open-source and decentralized alternatives to Uber in many countries, so that they will indeed own the means of production.
That said, I agree that employment laws need a rewrite for these situations, but we won't get the needed reform to get the gig-worker system to work under either Biden or Trump, so not for at least 6 years.
>While you think you're giving full-time employment and benefits to all of these people what you're really doing is taking certain kinds of opportunities away.
This is some of the most phenomenal bullshit I've ever read.
There's nothing stopping Uber and Lyft from allowing people to work their own hours and also giving them benefits if they meet hourly qualifications.
You're talking about people making <$30k a year while shouldering most of the risk and using their own cars as if they're shopping around for the best FAANG salary.
> There's nothing stopping Uber and Lyft from allowing people to work their own hours and also giving them benefits if they meet hourly qualifications.
There is, if the driver drives in bad hours making their income not come up to minimum wage uber would be forced to pay the driver anyway. In order to avoid this uber would be forced to limit when and where people can drive.
Being an employee means that the company has to ensure that the employees time is well spent so that it is worth the minimum wage and benefits at least. Being a contractor means that the contractor himself is responsible for what he is doing is profitable enough for him to live on. So changing them to employees means that now uber has to ensure every driver only drives when it is profitable for uber.
So everyone who wants to handle this responsibility themselves don't want to be an employee.
Uber can simply adjust their algorithm and refuse to give shifts to drivers if there is enough drivers to cover the "bad" time period, which would be the exact equivalent of Uber drivers right now not getting rides (and not getting paid) when there is no demand.
>if the driver drives in bad hours making their income not come up to minimum wage uber would be forced to pay the driver anyway
is this a California specific law? There are lots of variable hour workers out there that may skirt by below the hour threshold for a short amount of time, but generally the employer can set reasonable adjustment periods where they'd lose their benefits for continuing to do so.
The solution is to ensure the worker's employment status is within the legal definition as it's defined. Gig economy could usher in a new era of worker flexibility, but it could also usher in a new era of worker exploitation.
The gig economy keeps pushing risks and cost down the chain, while also showing signs that it may not be a sustainable model as a whole without venture capital to burn through or an end game of predatory monopolist behavior within the market region.
No, but there are people who would rather keep more of their paycheck than spend it on premiums or taxes for socialized medicine and take on that risk. Those folks are usually younger people who are more likely to work at these entry level jobs. On the flipside there are people who will risk life and limb doing something unnecessary (skiing, rock climbing, parachuting, etc.) and maybe some of them even feel safer because they know they are insured. Why should we outlaw one form of risk and not another?
People take risks. Life is all about risk and choices. I will never believe it is moral to take those choices from anyone.
Not everyone has that choice, which is why so many people depend on gig economy jobs as their livelihood.
If you do not have in-demand skills for the market, have a family to feed, and the cost of training exceeds your expenses, Uber/Lyft might be one of your only job options.
I'm not a resident of California (rather, Minnesota), but I do want it to change. I don't use gig services because I think anyone doing 40[1] hours of work deserves a wage they can live off of, along all the other employment protections we've worked so hard to implement. Gig services are cheap because they don't meet that requirement. If gig services were required to meet that minimum wage and workers' rights, then I would be very happy to use them.
And where does that "enough money to live off of" come from? Unless the company has a lot of fat to trim, it has to come from customers in the form of higher prices, or from investors throwing more cash onto the bonfire. What happens when customers would rather not use your service than pay the amount whatever you're proposing takes?
It's very possible that this market only exists at the size that it does at a price that doesn't support what people in the US think of as "a wage they can live off of", and that by mandating more compensation, then there will be a whole lot of drivers for whom this just isn't an option anymore.
That said, I think drivers should be able to set their own prices, and that there should be a real market with bidding, but the UX will probably suffer.
> Unless the company has a lot of fat to trim, it has to come from customers in the form of higher prices, or from investors throwing more cash onto the bonfire.
Nope, there's lots more options than that. Cut executive pay. Tax high earners more and provide social services like healthcare and public transit, to reduce cost and demand on these services. And yes, prices would likely go up, because they're no longer being subsidized by gov't welfare.
> It's very possible that this market only exists at the size that it does at a price that doesn't support what people in the US think of as "a wage they can live off of"
Then the market is exploiting labor and is being subsidized by the welfare system (else the workers couldn't live, by definition). If we're going to subsidize unprofitable activities, we should do that as a society, not by funneling cash to Uber's owners.
This doesn't really work when Uber has something like 3 million drivers worldwide. Distributing the CEO's entire salary among drivers would yield them only a handful of coins worth of extra income per person per year. There's simply no way to translate exec pay into meaningful comp for drivers at this sort of scale.
I do, however, believe it's possible for the government to establish better social services (e.g. universal healthcare at similar tax rates exists just north of the border) if only the US govt adjusted its spending priorities.
>Nope, there's lots more options than that. Cut executive pay. Tax high earners more and provide social services like healthcare and public transit, to reduce cost and demand on these services. And yes, prices would likely go up, because they're no longer being subsidized by gov't welfare.
Executive pay, etc was what I was referring to as "fat". But what fraction of Uber's expenses do you think executive pay makes up? This is an oft-stated refrain, but anytime anyone runs the numbers, it quickly becomes apparent that those aren't large enough to make any difference across the huge number of employees involved.
I'm totally onboard with the social reforms you mention, but these are outside the purview of Uber/Lyft and this attempt to force them to treat these people as employees.
> It's very possible that this market only exists at the size that it does at a price that doesn't support what people in the US think of as "a wage they can live off of", and that by mandating more compensation, then there will be a whole lot of drivers for whom this just isn't an option anymore.
And that's different from many other hypothetical services how? If we accept that the floor should be lowered it should be for everyone, and if we don't it shouldn't. It should be an even playing field, not something where some companies slip through by not employing their workers.
You're right, I don't think they should exist in their current form, they don't seem to be viable without near-monopoly pricing power anyway. I'm just saying this because people act like we can just mandate that companies pay more, without mentioning that it's probably going to mean that those jobs just won't exist. There's a reason taxis were a niche service in most parts of the country - people haven't historically wanted to pay what they cost outside of eg going to the airport. Which means that almost all those people everyone is claiming to act on behalf of are probably going to have to find something else to do for money if Uber is forced to take them on as employees with full benefits and high wages.
If you don't use gig services, will the gig workers become employees and make more money? Isn't it just as likely that the services will go away and the gig workers will not have a source of income at all?
Serious question: is your main complaint the low pay, or lack of benefits? If Uber increased pay to an average of $30/hour after expenses but still treated them as contractors and told them to buy their own health insurance, would you be ok with that?
Both. I'm not an employment law expert, but things like mandatory breaks, working conditions, PTO (pa/maternal leave, etc.). If you work a full time job, you are entitled to a comfortable life with a healthy work/life balance.
Am I misunderstanding, or are you saying that freelancing and independent contracting should not be permitted under any circumstances? Is there no sufficient amount of money where you'd acknowledge that workers are not being exploited in a fee-for-service structure?
And what about small business owners, who effectively have zero paid leave or vacation?
> are you saying that freelancing and independent contracting [and small business owners] should not be permitted under any circumstances
It's a good question and I'm not sure. I think my answer is some weak form of "yes." My goal is to enforce a good work-life balance, I think society benefits from a healthy workforce. So they wouldn't be impermissible per se, but they should meet those same requirements. However, obviously that's really hard to enforce for a contractor type situation, and some people genuinely thrive in their jobs in a healthy way. So, I don't know what the right balance is. I believe France has some mandatory maximum work hours regulations. Those might be interesting to look into.
I know some will argue this point, but I really do think it's clear that gig workers don't fall into those two categories, regardless. The power dynamics are totally upside-down between traditional independent contractors and SBOs, and Uber/Lyft drivers.
> - There should be a limit on number of hours worked (regardless of type of employment).
I'm not getting into the specifics, my point is everyone should get the worker protections we have developed over the decades. If that includes mandatory time off, great, but it doesn't have to. I pointed to France's model as one potential example of how it might apply to non-employees like contractors.
> - Everyone should be an employee, and not a freelancer or otherwise independently employed
I don't care about the categorization so long as the worker protection regulations are being met.
> So, I don't know what the right balance is. I believe France has some mandatory maximum work hours regulations. Those might be interesting to look into.
I never thought I would see the French system pointed to as a potential example. If you’re talking about the 35h week keep in mind that it is a really contentious topic there!
I wouldn't use France as a model for economic regulations. I love the country, but its economy isn't one of its strong areas. Ironically, many companies in France primarily hire contractors now because of the many onerous regulations around employees. One of Macron's big pushes has been to try to make the French economy more competitive by stripping some of that out, but it's obviously been controversial.
Also, why should a bureaucrat tell me what the appropriate work-life balance is, as an independent contractor? I'll decide that balance for myself, based on my life situation, thanks.
The highest leverage way to help low income people in California is by focusing on reducing the cost of being alive. High barriers to earning money will just continue the decades long out migration of low income workers.
In California, if they cared about that, they could move that needle with housing policy, and nationally, with an immigration program that focuses on high end talent (such as H1B’s), letting low end wages lift up. That’s a real bouyancy that would make Uber drivers better off.
“Employment protections” are not important at all for workers’ prosperity. Just imagine if they were absent. The most marginal workers would be better off.
Do you also not eat at small independent restaurants? The owners also don't meet the same requirements, and in many cases make even less than uber drivers.
Supposedly driver's unions lobbied the state government to make this change. So it's a vocal minority that's speaking on behalf of the majority that didn't want to join a union in the first place.
I think the idea is that we're in a local maximum for "how good is the current arrangement for society as a whole". Any small change to the arrangement is going to make things worse for one party or another, and probably even make things worse for society as a whole. But there's a chance that a bigger change could get us to an even higher maximum, where everyone is better off, both individually and on net.
It's hard because you can't just jump there, there will be some people or entities that are worse off during the transition. Also there are unintended consequences so things might not go as you expect.
Usually to (attempt to) make changes like this, it has to be a government doing it, because it's a coordination problem and you have to force people to look past their short-term self-interest for a little while.
"I guess they're not happy [1] but want to be independent contractors still [2]."
Any normal employee or freelancer is not happy, but still goes to the job because there are bills to pay. It is normal to want things to be always better but low skill jobs are not going to be goldmines no matter what the regulation says.
This reminded be of the Planet Money episode on long-haul truck drivers [0]. It's a similar contractor v. employee (company driver) scenario. Not a happy story, unfortunately.
> (In a May online survey drawing responses from 734 Uber and Lyft drivers nationwide, 71% said they wanted to be independent contractors)
As others are mentioning, the survey was very simplistic and most drivers don't understand the full ramifications of AB5.
That said, I still think the majority of fully-informed drivers would vote against AB5.
Enforcing AB5 will very likely result in: 1) substantial increase in benefits 2) slightly lower base pay 3) half of drivers losing their job 4) scheduled shifts.
My guess is #3 is the biggest issue for most drivers.
This. I dislike how other people ("officials") are deciding what workers want for themselves. How about we stop patronizing the workforce and let them make decisions for themselves. People lean on Uber and it's not like they don't understand what money they're getting for their time. At the end of the day, shutting down Uber would just be a pain in the ass for the people.
That survey has been thrown around a lot, but there are a lot of problems with it. A big issue is that the survey was explicitly of people who follow a specific website (and potentially align with that websites opinions).
Another is that once you explain that California allows flexible schedules even for employees a lot of people who say they want to stay independent contractors change their mind. The biggest thing that drivers want is flexibility in their schedules, and there's a lot of misinformation saying they'd be required by law to sign up for shifts if they were employers. Once you correct for this FUD and drivers realize their favorite part of being a contractor isn't at risk anymore the answer seem to shift quickly.
Even if it was true though- most people who work at sweat shops are happy to have the job because they need the money. That doesn't mean that it's right to allow crappy conditions for them.
California is a single party state with a supermajority of delegates. This means that Democrats can pass pretty much any law that they want without any real opposition.
The unions in California are unhappy with Uber/Lyft employees not being union members since their presence is an alternative (read danger) to some of the unions (teamsters/taxis). Unions have a lot more power with Democrats since they are some of their biggest supporters, so the legislature tends to do things that benefits unions.
Since California is effectively a single party state, the legislators that voted for this don't need to worry about things like being reelected because they are unlikely to actually see real opposition outside of a primary challenger.
Exactly what the poster said. California is a single party state. There is no choice in most elections. Due to the way elections work, you're usually choosing between democrats who believe the same thing. There is no dissent.
I honestly don't mind paying more if it goes to support the drivers, but I haven't really seen a compelling argument for why all drivers should count as employees. From my perspective being an "employee" implies certain things that don't seem to apply here (predictable work times, exclusivity (so many lyft drivers are also uber drivers), etc. ) "Freelancer" seems way more appropriate, the only problem is the lack of protections. It seems to me that culturally "gig worker" has become its own category anyway and it makes more sense to create a new legal category with its own set of legal protections.
I know people will point to health insurance... but that's a separate problem with having health insurance tied to employment. I think it's awful that people that aren't considered full time employees don't get health insurance.. but I also think that's the government's problem and obligation, not Uber or Lyfts
Is it actually simultaneous? Of course drivers use multiple services, but I’ve never taken a ride with uber where the driver had passengers from lyft in the car, eg.
Drivers usually keep both apps open and active, then accept the first dispatch they receive and temporarily go offline on the other app while finishing the trip. Then lather, rinse, repeat.
I used to work multiple jobs at different restaurants, where I’d do a morning shift at one and an evening shift at the other. They could be considered competitors.
What is the difference between what I did and what drivers do, besides the frequency of and duration of shifts? I don’t know what kind of laws might govern requirements here. Could be different between cities/states/countries, too.
Now, maybe they’d dictate requirements for things like shift duration if drivers were considered “actual employees” but then they’d presumably also be receiving other benefits that might obviate the need to drive for multiple services.
Sure, and in a world where Uber & Lyft drivers are employees, drivers would be forced to work shifts in the same way. They’d have to clock in a certain number of hours as part of the condition of “employment”, be it full time or part time.
What they would not be able to do is drive on both simultaneously. There’s virtually no low skilled minimum wage job that affords you the flexibility of setting your own hours at different employers.
I agree that may be an outcome. But don't put the cart before the horse (in this case, the horse is the question: "what is the nature of the relationship between Uber and Lyft" and possibly even "what should the nature of the relationship between a company and an employee and/or contractor even be").
I think it might be helpful to define what "simultaneous" means in the context of drivers. I stated that I believe it would only be simultaneous if a driver had passengers from multiple rideshare companies in the car at the same time. I agree that this would be unacceptable. I don't believe it's unacceptable for drivers to canvas multiple rideshare apps for fares as long as they drive them separately.
In the status quo, drivers are able to turn off their dispatch whenever they want. They can drive 20 hours one week, 2 hours the next, take an indefinite break, then drive 40 hours. There's no boss, there's no clocking in. There's no getting "fired" for flaking.
An employment contract would allow Uber/Lyft to enforce hours and contiguous schedules. On top of that, it's extremely trivial for Uber/Lyft to include exclusivity clauses in employment agreements. It's in their best interests to do that, since they have entire projects dedicated to handling "multi-appers".
Keep in mind that traditional taxicab drivers were able to go "off-duty" whenever they wanted because they, too, were independent contractors.
Aside from the health insurance problem, I think they should be able to earn minimum amounts, there should be a limit on how much money you can lose per hour driving for lyft or uber. Workers comp should be included as well, its morally wrong to have someone work for you and not take care of them if they are injured while working.
I wouldn't mind at all if tipping culture disappeared, but I think it's naive to think that costs wouldn't go up dramatically for customers. Customers are footing the bill one way or another, it's just a matter of whether we're willing to pay enough to ensure everyone gets a livable wage.
The real problem of tipping culture is it transferred the conflict of interest from businesses/employees to customers/employees. Yes customers may end up paying the same, but when the employees want more, they will not ask for it from the customers.
I’d rather my cost go up and tipping disappear (leaving the total the same) if it means I don’t have a societal obligation to tip. Then I can actually use tips for what they’re supposed to be for: above and beyond service.
I've not tipped a few times, usually in anger, and one shameful time when had less money than I thought I did. Still, this is just a few instances out of probably thousands. I'm certain that I am not saving money because of tipping.
I'm on the same boat. But if you're living in America, you tip. Several projects have been undertaken over the years to try to eliminate it but time and time again it's failed.
The drivers wanted in app tips. I think Lyft and Uber set rates assuming no tips, because usually people don’t tip and they get enough government heat already. They don’t want to end up like Door Dash and start using tips to explicitly cover base rates.
This is a myth. Tipped employees typically do way better than the minimum wage.
Tipping encourages good service. Go to your average European restaurant and you can see what the alternative is: lazy and often outright rude waitstaff who resent their customers.
I’ve been to many European restaurants, being European myself, and I don’t usually find that waitstaff are rude or lazy. I actually think I would be a bit nauseated by a waiter putting on some sort of over-friendly spiel for me to encourage a higher tip.
It makes sense that receiving tips can be more lucrative than a low fixed wage. Is it the case across the board? I imagine that young and attractive people do better in that regard, irrespective of actual performance.
And as a result, whenever you want something, you get it quickly. Be it drink refill, sauces, an extra order, the check if you’re in a hurry to leave, etc. A skilled waiter can make himself available without interrupting too, by being on the lookout for eye contact and walking around his tables. I find it very pleasant.
I once worked for a company which was already established in many markets, no tips allowed and fair pay. When the company entered the US market we got asked about tipping left and right. Workers seem to like the gamble on getting a huge tip and for certain industries customers just assume that workers aren't well paid.
But do you tip at Mc'Donalds, the gas station or the supermarket?
The larger issue with employers paying insufficiently is minimum wages that are too low. Federal minimum wage still applies for tipped workers, as far as I can tell, so employers are required to compensate the difference if workers make less. The same seems to apply to most states that have higher minimum wages, and in a few the minimum wage (excluding tips) is the same regardless of tipping.
This is a symptom of the core, underlying problem. The coupling between employer, employee and health care needs to be undone. Employers aren't healthcare providers, we don't need additional middle-men and bureaucracy dictating, by proxy, how people receive care and from who. Universal healthcare would let Uber and Lyft continue to do what their primary focus is, and drivers would be able to do whatever they want work-wise and not have to worry about its affect on their ability to receive healthcare at an affordable price.
The subset of politicians who are pushing for universal healthcare don't all belong to the group supporting coupling with employment. I'm not really sure where you heard that? For instance, I don't believe Medicare for All, at least in its proposed form, encourages coupling employment with healthcare, but correct me if I'm wrong.
one was a contractor for a company that did content moderation/fact checking on a big tech website. when ab5 was passed they predictably laid off everyone in california.
others include freelance writers, and other online work
yeah i mean frankly speaking it’s just not worth the risk to hire someone from ca given the law. it’s not like ca employees provide anything special over other state’s that would justify paying them more for low skill jobs that can be done remotely
The only reason we haven't seen other professions being widely decimated by AB5 is because they all lobbied for exemptions which again shows how corrupt this law was.
Because collections of people organized into corporations have greater bargaining power than individuals in negotiations.
Traditionally the answer to that is unions or professional group who can bargain on behalf of all their members, but it's hard to unionize fields with low barriers to entry (and harder when the workers are living paycheck to paycheck and thus can't strike easily), and impossible to unionize independent contractor drivers based on how the laws are written.
If you're an independent contractor, then joining together with other contractors to demand a higher rate is price fixing. This is generally considered illegal, whereas employee collective bargaining is immune from anti-trust laws.
Speaking as someone generally ignorant of unions, I believe the teeth of unions lie in the collective bargaining that comes from making them mandatory. With right-to-work laws in some states (and other countries) this is often not possible, so workers can choose to look out for their immediate interests which undermines the union's power that comes from representing most or all employees. In other words, unions generally require more than just freedom of association or speech.
> I believe the teeth of unions lie in the collective bargaining that comes from making them mandatory
I don't believe that at all, mandatory unions are illegal in Europe yet unions are stronger here. It wouldn't surprise me if making them mandatory actually makes them weaker since workers are so afraid of creating unions that could potentially harm them, while I can always ignore an optional union so they aren't a problem.
I didn't want to make a Europe-wide comparison as the roles of unions and the rates of union membership vary widely across the continent, including several places with lower membership than the US.
I don't think requiring unions is the only way to do it, but the countries that have a high rate of unionization seem to have other incentives in place, such as Sweden and Denmark where unemployment insurance is generally provided through unions in contrast with Norway or France, where this is not the case. The latter countries perhaps consequently have much lower rates of membership, closer to that of the US.
I genuinely don't understand this position. I don't see how replacing a "bad" option with no option helps anyone, especially the people that were willing to take the "bad" option.
The missing link is that you're raising a false dichotomy. Its a sliding scale of profit margin. Instead of bad or none, the choice is more low paying options or fewer higher paying options. Some will receive higher wages, while some opportunities will not be available.
Both sides believe the net benefit backs up their stated position and there's very little compelling data one way or another.
I'm not so sure how false it is. If there were a better option, wouldn't people be using it already? And since they're not, aren't we just... firing them and leaving them to figure it out? Seems heartless. Honestly it comes across as "F the little guy, give me the policy I want." (I'm not accusing you of that, your tone came across as quite polite.)
the option is to provide the infrastructure for the market to figure out, but you need some baseline first, and we don't have that baseline. Decouple healthcare from having a job and you're already halfway there, like the rest of the world.
banning prostitution is the best example of this dumb line of thinking. If they could do something better they already would be doing it. Replacing a "bad" option with "no" option does not help them.
"I was so poor I had to sell my body so as to not starve to death but selling my body made me depressed and so I spent all my money on drugs leaving no money for food, throwing me into a life of starvation."
fixed that for you to make the two sentences equal. Making prostitution illegal doesn't prevent the men and women who sell their bodies from starving to death after they lost their source of income. I'm all for social programs preventing people from starving to death though, that seems like a much better solution than banning prostution.
If the economy cannot support enough reasonable paying jobs with adequate health insurance, then the answer is to re-think how the economy works, not create more garbage jobs that earn miserable livelihoods.
If we did things like abandon employer-subsidized healthcare for a modern single payer system, then maybe it wouldn't be so disadvantageous for drivers to be classified as contractors.
> If the economy cannot support enough reasonable paying jobs with adequate health insurance
I don't see why anyone other than the person doing the work gets to define what "reasonable" or "adequate" is. It also seems completely heartless to me to put people out of work in order to push a political agenda.
Great, let's rethink how the economy works. AB5 does not do that though. It is actually a return to historical norms (in that it mandates foisting the institution of employment on something that is wholly new). AB5 is an incredibly conservative bill seeking to return to the pre-uber status quo. It is not a 'rethinking of the economy'.
I never said it was. I'm not defending AB5. I'm saying that the current situation is untenable, and neither of the solutions being provided to us do anything to solve the problem.
Yeah and what if they won't have a job at all because Uber/Lyft suddenly became too expensive for anyone to use?
If the costs increase dramatically, demand goes down and thus fewer drivers needed, as people look at alternatives like getting their own car, public transportation, bikes, etc.
This is a pretty absurd argument to make when the alternative is quite literally these jobs not existing at all as almost just happened at midnight tonight.
No such thing as fair in life. So why have some bureaucrat write laws to dictate fair based on their politics? The market isn’t political.
Having said that, Uber drivers exist because it does provide enough money to have people show up and provide a service. If it didn’t, no one would do the driving. Not to mention most drivers don’t want to be considered employees.
But Uber/Lyft have nothing to do with the job market being garbage.
If anything, they provide options to help ameliorate the situation.
Instead of the government playing court for something nobody wants, maybe they can do their job: set an an appropriate minimum wage, ensure better safety nets so people don’t need 3 jobs, provide better options to employers so jobs aren’t lost, etc.
I don't think the job market being garbage is Ubers problem to solve. If the job market was flourishing drivers would still be "unhappy" with their experience on these platforms and AB5 would likely still be a thing. Uber offers a convenience. I think drivers like that convenience so much so that it prevents them from seeking traditional employment and leads them to want to fit a square peg into a round hole.
Capital has an immense amount of leverage in the market, and the only way for that power to be counteracted at scale is through government action and/or labor organizing. Individuals can't will a reasonable employer into being on their own.
There was a time, not very long ago, when people "chose" to send their 12 year old children into dangerous factories for 12 hours a day. Government rightly restricted corporations from offering that option to desperate people.
You can't let the market decide because the market is doomed (in the treating-people-as-human-beings sense) by the lack of infrastructure in the first place:
- no healthcare means you're a slave of whatever you can find,
- tipping culture means your employer can pay you shit
Unless you are entrepreneur with access to capital, I'm not sure how you can expect individuals to will a good employer into being if none is to be found. Using the government to create better conditions for the working class is a completely reasonable use of the political process.
Didn't we already go through this line of reasoning during the industrial revolution? Didn't we already have our muckraking moments to show exactly why this line of reasoning is full of assumptions, totally devoid and dissociated from the actual reality of people's lives?
Given that the industrial revolution in retrospect has clearly improved the lot of the entire world, comparing uber to the capitalists of the industrial revolution in attempt to castigate them is actually quite laughable.
I have always been curious about this. What did the drivers do before these services existed? What prevents them from returning to their previous life if workings for Uber/Lyft is really as bad as I have been told it is? Why did they start driving in the first place?
The market has previously decided unsafe factories and child labor is ideal. Often market forces are great but empirically they do not solve every case and as a society we must evaluate each case accordingly.
Cocoa for chocolate, materials for phones, etc show that the market continues to be just fine with practices like child slavery. Alternatives may exist but most companies are still "striving" rather than there.
the hypothesis is being an employee is better for the workers, and if so it's something they'd willingly choose if given the option. The current data says that's not the case, but would be an interesting experiment. If given the choice of the current setup vs one of being an employee, what would drivers choose.
The market is just people and they decided not to openly revolt against government, tacitly approving it doing the work it’s long done of lifting up the bottom of society no one else wants to invest in.
The majority is not high tech types, nor does it need to aspire to be.
How do you separate this all from physical reality so easily?
Economics is not physics. The math is defined by biologically biased humans. Physical reality works how it do regardless of the syntax you want to emit about sound economics.
You really are just asking questions that have been debated forever. The answers haven’t changed. The narrative you would choose to recite isn’t the same as many others. And westerners aren’t a literal majority
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
How do you know that? Because of industrial revolutions, minimum wage and stuff was even thought about and eventually implemented! Without industries that afforded that, these social policies would have totally collapsed!
it's not that simple. by that logic you could say eliminate minimum wage and any other legal employee benefit. companies are in a position of power so they must be regulated
The democratic process has been known to produce sub-optimal results. The only way to correct those results is to criticize the status quo. This is all part of the democratic process...
I'm in a non-rideshare field. The law here (AB5) has been a disaster, a total mess.
One proof point, workers in a TON of fields have absolutely flooded Sacramento to get exception after exception into this law. This is not a normal principles based law. This a law with "principles" that are so ridiculous that everyone then goes let's carve these random folks.
Get a grip.
Imagine if we had laws like this elsewhere. It's pathetic - really.
Some of the carevouts.
physicians
surgeons
dentist
podiatrists
psychologists
veterinarians
insurance brokers
lawyers
architects and engineers
private investigators
accountants
securities broker-dealers and investment advisers
direct sales salespeople (often horrible abuse here with door to door sales)
marketing professionals
travel agents
human resources administrators
graphic designers
grant writers
fine artists
enrolled agents
payment processing agents through an independent sales organizations
photographers or photojournalists
freelance writers
editors
newspaper cartoonists
and lots more
I think gig musicians want to be sure they have a carveout.
Fisherman are doing carevouts.
I think truckers are getting a carevout.
A bunch of beauty industry jobs
A ton of contractor and subcontractor work
There has got to be some transit union or something pulling strings here - because the law is horribly unworkable even for folks who DO want to do the right thing. Most are resigned to waiting until everything is carved out but uber and lyft.
Am I understanding this correctly? You mentioned the market cap because you're proposing that they leverage their market cap to pay for this by making share offerings available on some short enough cadence to ensure cash flow? Or to collateralize some loan with the current ownership?
That's not a conventional strategy but perhaps you can make a good argument for why it will work.
This argument that local laws can't be followed because "what would other jurisdictions do" doesn't seem to apply to authoritarian places like China who impose pretty onerous requirements for operation (like state ownership).
There is another option for Uber/Lyft - to let drivers set their prices and/or routes. Of course, that would make them less of a unicorn and more of a utility and that would crater their valuation.
> There is another option for Uber/Lyft - to let drivers set their prices and/or routes. Of course, that would make them less of a unicorn and more of a utility and that would crater their valuation.
That isn't enough, is it? Don't they still fail the "core business functionality" part of the test?
I'm not making an argument for or against Uber. Just explaining why they didn't just eat the cost of this because it would have been insignificant/cheaper than fighting it.
How much of this debate would be moot if we had a proper social safety net, so workers didn't depend on their employers for necessities like health insurance? Social democracy can make the economy more agile, not less.
I'm sad that here was a rare chance that people voted on something, and the effects of the vote would have been palpable.
We'll have scare tactics, stays, negotiations, changes to the bill, etc., all leading to a complete lack of shock and awe. People will not pay attention, and continue assume the effects of votes is nothing. And I wouldn't want to convince them otherwise.
To be clear, this comment doesn't assume people actually want Lyft to leave. Whether people are thrilled or filled with regret, it doesn't matter. I just want them to feel the power of a vote.
Recognize that more reasonable solutions exist, for example,
modifying AB5 exempting anyone pulling in >$50K ($25/hour for any hour available or logging into the app).
Propositions, being like an unchangeable binary library, are 'take-it-or-leave-it' laws.
So basically "if you are poor you can't use Uber/Lyft you would exploit yourself out of desperation. Go find a different job that pays a living wage/benefits. If you are middle class and already making enough to live on, that's cool you can use Uber/Lyft to supplement your income since you won't abuse yourself trying to make the platform sustain you."
They're lucky to have that judge. Uber and Lyft have consistently flaunted the law with a basic attitude of "screw you, our service is too popular, if you try to regulate us out of existence then your constituents will be madder at you than us". But right now, the service is not popular at all. I was a relatively heavy user of Uber and I haven't even thought about calling one in months. Food delivery sure, but I don't plan on using ride-sharing services for at least another year... who wants to sit in an Uber with a stranger, breathing each other's air? Who wants to DRIVE for Uber, breathing strangers' air all day? Besides, there is nowhere to go. No events, bars are all closed, etc. The ride-sharing economy has just evaporated.
> who wants to sit in an Uber with a stranger, breathing each other's air?
XD There are countries (like any other country then US) that have something called PUBLIC TRANSPORT. And people use is every day regardless of pandemic.
> The ride-sharing economy has just evaporated
Uber is still much more "healthier" than public transport.
I am posting from the Bay Area, we have public transit here too. Not as good as other countries, but it's normally quite popular. My girlfriend actually works for the transit agency. And right now, let me tell you, they are completely fucked. Ticket revenue is down something like 95%. Nobody wants to be on BART or Caltrain right now. (Although it's worth noting, here specifically the trains are typically used by people who also have a private car that they could take instead if they choose.)
I'm from the Bay Area and public transit here is laughable at best. To go some place would be 15 minutes by car and 45 minutes by bus - if the bus comes on time at all. The light rail in South Bay moves slower than traffic sometimes. Caltrain runs once an hour (apart from 4 hours every weekday when it's once every 20 minutes). BART extension took over 15 years!
How is this remotely a good solution? DC Metro's transit and NY transit runs circles around the one here, not to mention ones from Korea/Japan/Poland runs circles. I've been forced to take public transit for over 5 years and boy do I hate it if I've to actually get somewhere on time.
Honestly I think all of these ideas about what isn't and is a contractor are wayyyy over-specified.
To my mind, a contractor has always been just someone you are hiring for a particular piece of work. It's about one-offs. You are not hiring them for a year, in which time they will do an indeterminate number of pieces of work. That is what an employee with a salary is for. You are hiring them to do a particular piece of work. That is why you pay them per piece of work. So to me, the simplest (and only) test should be: "are you paying them per piece of work?". If yes, contractor. If no, employee.
I can't think of any occupation where the "employee" is getting paid on a per-task basis (rides in this case) and I would consider them an employee.
If I hire someone to write blog posts for me, and I pay them per blog post, they're a contractor. The employee version is someone I pay a set salary to based on their skillset, and then they output some indeterminate amount of work.
If I hire someone to watch my kids for me, and I pay them per time they watch my kids, they're a contractor, not an employee. The employee version is a nanny who lives in my home.
If someone is getting paid each time they perform a ride (and not otherwise), they're a contractor. An employee is someone that you are paying even when they're not driving.
I don't think "setting prices", "choosing which hours", etc. has anything to do with it.
If I hire someone to write a blog post for me this morning and tell them I need it by lunch time, I'm not giving them a choice of when they want to work – they need to do it now. But they're still clearly a contractor.
The question remains whether or not contractors under this definition need similar protections that are afforded to employees, and I definitely think this is a question worth debating/considering. But California conflating everything to be an employee seems like the worst way to approach the issue.
>I can't think of any occupation where the "employee" is getting paid on a per-task basis (rides in this case) and I would consider them an employee.
Piece rate work payment exists in construction, agriculture, and other industries. People are permanently on staff, but only paid in direct relation to their productivity. It's an old trick to extract the value of labour.
What really irks me about this whole thing is how Uber Eats and Door Dash is unaffected by all this. Delivery workers have almost exactly the same paradigm, but I guess they're not enforcing it, because of the number of restaurants, drivers, and eaters that will be affected?
What is particularly egregious is how traditional taxis are being ignored, despite having most of the same labor problems as app-based transportation services.
Possibly a dumb and general question. Is Uber and Lyft responsible for state tax revenue from its contractors? Or are the contractors supposed to pay their own taxes? I could understand the states having problems with contractor's paying their own taxes considering their incomes are lower.
Independent contractors pay their own taxes. Uber and Lyft offer tools and assistance to help drivers adequately report and take deductions etc. as needed (Lyft at least offers the ability to export ride data etc. as needed, I believe but am not sure if Uber does the same).
Companies pay taxes for their employees (different tax relationship altogether). Another way to think about it is... do you ever pay taxes for a painter or plumber that does a job for you? (probably not)
If so, I understand where the state's are coming from. They need to make a special low-income contractor status with which the parent company is responsible income tax for contractors.
I know global warming is a pretty controversial topic on this site, but I expect the frequency and severity of "other issues" to increase in the future. Thus what you're saying is there will never be a right time.
It won't even have to wait till then. November is the Prop 22 ballot. If it fails, I imagine Lyft/Uber will just have to start switching.
By Sept. 4 each defendant must submit a sworn statement from its CEO “confirming that it has developed implementation plans under which, if this court affirms the preliminary injunction and Proposition 22 on the November 2020 ballot fails to pass, the company will be prepared to comply with the preliminary injunction within no more than 30 days after issuance of the remittitur in the appeal.”
I and many others have never been as reliant on Uber and Lyft as we have now. I’m fortunate enough to have finances to adapt to this, but a lot of people don’t.
Yeah, removing the means to make a living from 200K people in CA while also pushing millions of people to crowded and epidemiologically disastrous public transportation seems like a particularly idiotic idea right about now. I'm not necessarily against better labor protections, and I only do Uber rides maybe 3-4 times a year, and not in CA, but I'm sure there will be a better time to argue this out to its logical conclusion.
I read the following section in it “Oral argument shall be scheduled for October 13, 2020”, but nothing about an October deadline.
Here is the relevant section in full.
>> start
On August 10, 2020, the trial court issued a preliminary injunction enjoining Lyft, Inc. (Lyft) and Uber Technologies, Inc. (Uber) from classifying their drivers as independent contractors and from violating certain laws. Both Lyft and Uber have appealed the order, and the trial court stayed the injunction for ten days to allow them to seek relief in this court. Lyft (in case No. A160701) and Uber (in case No. A160706) have each petitioned this court for a writ of supersedeas. The People have filed an opposition to the petitions. The petitions for writ of supersedeas are hereby consolidated for purposes of decision. The petitions are granted and the preliminary injunction is stayed pending resolution of Lyft and Uber's appeals, subject to the condition that, by 5:00 p.m. on August 25, 2020, Lyft and Uber shall both file written consents to the expedited procedures specified herein. If Lyft and Uber do not both file such written consents, the stay shall expire at 5:00 p.m. on August 25, 2020.
The procedures are as follows:
1. Lyft's and Uber's appeals shall be consolidated. Lyft and Uber may file separate briefs or combined briefs as they prefer.
2. Lyft and Uber shall proceed with an appendix in lieu of a clerk?s transcript on appeal. (Cal. Rules of Court, rule 8.124.) They shall cooperate to prepare and file a single combined appellants' appendix, rather than separate appendices, which they shall file no later than the date they file their opening briefs. The appendix shall include a full copy of the index at the beginning of each appendix volume, and the digital copy of the appendix shall include pdf bookmark tabs for each entry on the index.
3. Briefing shall proceed on the following schedule. The appellants' opening briefs shall be filed no later than September 4, 2020. The respondent's brief shall be filed no later than September 18, 2020. The reply briefs, if any, shall be filed no later than September 25, 2020. Absent unforeseen extraordinary circumstances, there shall be no extensions. Oral argument shall be scheduled for October 13, 2020.
4. On or before September 4, 2020, each defendant shall submit a sworn statement from its chief executive officer confirming that it has developed implementation plans under which, if this court affirms the preliminary injunction and Proposition 22 on the November 2020 ballot fails to pass, the company will be prepared to comply with the preliminary injunction within no more than 30 days after issuance of the remittitur in the appeal.
5. Should Lyft or Uber fail to comply with these procedures, the People may apply to this court to vacate this stay. Unless otherwise ordered, the stay will dissolve upon issuance of the remittitur in the appeal. (Cal. Rules of Court, rule 8.272.)
<< end
Hopefully, the above should help others here figure out where the October deadline is coming from.
Indeed. This is great point. JS developers have made seminal contribution to our collective well being by their virtuous signals and thoughtful commentary on anything that matters.
With the advent of E-protests they are finally being able to highlight against injustices taking place anywhere in the world.
I laughed at this, but I do think I should point out that in a democracy it's good for people to have opinions about things that aren't their profession.
I think it's less about people having opinions and more about people being so self-righteous about something they don't understand as well as they think they do.
haha, point taken. But I'd say it's good that they care. Developers are in a different income bracket. Concern is far better than cold indifference, which is what usually happens...
When companies like Uber/Lyft depend on safety nets like unemployment without ever paying into the system, what’s happening is that our children are paying for returns on VC capital.
People profiting from these types of companies should feel bad about themselves.
Huh? As I understand it Uber/Lyft drivers are not eligible for unemployment benefits (recent laws/court rulings aside). So they don't depend on the safety nets in any way.
edit: Unemployment insurance is paid by companies for their workers who may use it in the future. It's not a shared social obligation from taxes. Nor is everyone eligible to use it merely by existing.
The CARES Act and state-level programs are paying unemployment assistance to contractors and self-employed individuals not usually covered by unemployment [0], [1].
Which is a one-off "world is burning down" case which no one planned for or expected. Hardy a long term plan by the VCs to take advantage of everyone else.
I'm guessing unemployment insurance didn't cover a lot of the rest of the unemployed either for COVID (as it ran out due to never being designed for this situation) so it came from taxes. In which case no one paid into the social safety net except through taxes (which Lyft/Uber are not exempt from).
Any remotely competent student of history can foresee occasional economic crises with high unemployment. That’s why we have a national unemployment insurance scheme.
Maybe you don’t foresee a pandemic, but only in the same way that you don’t foresee getting side-swiped when a car passes you while blowing its tire. Or having your house’s roof ripped off by a tornado. Totally unforeseeable events, but somewhat predicable circumstances.
The bailouts in crises are not one off because there’s always going to be another crisis.
Taking care of contractors who work for employers that arbitrage labor protections == corporate bailouts.
Actually what happens is we get lower Uber/Lyft rates for consumers... consumers that may depend on it in low infrastructure areas such as other low income workers.
In a competitive market there is no such thing as “free profit” for companies. Most savings that apply to all market competition across the board transfer to lower prices in the general market.
Uber would only net the profit if for some reason it was the only company that didn’t have to offer those things out of pocket.
And, if those other people did it, then I would be saying this about them.
“That’s how the world works” is the oldest justification for injustice.
If capitalism really is just a spreadsheet feudalism that deprives even the yacht owners of human moral autonomy, then maybe it’s time to burn down the system. NB: I don’t buy it, and I think markets can function alongside patriotic responsibility.
The gig economy model can be better, but I don't think it's helpful to blame individual companies. It's an entire system at play. Some people are totally happy with earning over a few hours a week. It's not a one size fits all system, so the model needs to be more flexible.
The gig economy exists only because of the rapid advancement in technology. When the law catches up with that maybe it will be fairer. Until then they take and cut corners on whatever the law hasn't caught up with yet.
That's pretty much the total opposite of what's happening right now. Uber (and the recent group of "tech but not really" unicorns in general) have if anything burnt hundreds of billions of VC/PE money thus directly subsidizing the costs of hundreds of millions of users, for very slim profits at best.
Yes, it's because they are expecting future returns on their "burnt" money. But considering the risks, the enormous amounts involved, the meagre margins involved even in a market dominant postion and that there are still no signs of profitability or even positive cash flow, I don't see how this can be seen as just a wealth transfert from society to the wealthy. Even in their best case scenario, they will be able to get meagre returns from perpetually capital intensive, low margin businesses. That's far from obscene wealth extraction imo.
Sure, some early VCs made tons of money off of this new era of unicorns, but that was pretty much all coming from other VC or private equity that have had to keep the money pump going.
What is also less discussed is that (unlike many other tech platforms) Uber/Lyft facilitates wealth transfer in local economies (to some extent) due to how locally it operates.
Uber has claimed that more than 80% of all the fares ever collected has directly gone to drivers. By creating massive demand mostly in the well-off parts of a city, it opens up a channel for one-to-one wealth transfer to the predominantly less well-off drivers.
This is quite different from other platforms that suck up money from local economies and then disburse most of them to the elite few, or park the cash in some offshore accounts.
I think there's a nuance here that is often lost in this kind of discussion about inequality.
I agree, though that's a whole different subject. VCs are usually a very small share of their portfolios, and I guess the high risks are well known.
But it's true that VCs, private equity and bull markets in general, which people always think of as profiting mostly very rich people are actually essential to fund most retirement plans, pensions and insurances.
Pension funds have traditionally invested very small parts of their portfolios in riskier investments. It's usually done to slightly enhance yield.
But in the past decade pension funds have increased their "alternative" investments since their traditional bread and butter,bonds and fixed income, have had abysmal yields due to low interest rates. Yet with pension payout obligations having only gotten bigger (especially in europe, with the aging population, the pressure to generate returns is pushing the fund managers to seek out riskier and riskier investments.
So, the folks who make money on this massive arbitrage of the welfare state can feel bad on their yachts and the ones who lost money can feel bad on their slightly smaller yachts.
I think it’s fairly clear I’m referring to the VC and founders who chose a business model that effectively arbitrages others’ belief in an obligation to contribute to the social safety net.
In what situation aren't investors borrowing from the future? That's basically the entire state of our economy right now: that the wealthy older generation invested heavily in the future, and then squandered that investment and stuck the younger generations with the bill.
Amazon pays more in payroll taxes, SUI, and Social Security alone than the entire revenue of the vast majority of any company you could select in the world.
You can also not want a social safety net and also be upset at the free rider problem.
Unless you’re living off returns on capital, your tax dollars and your children’s future tax dollars are keeping Uber/Lyft independent contractors fed and off the streets.
I’m not sure why you’d be more angry at people who don’t want to see homelessness/hunger than at people who are pocketing everything in good times and peaking out in bad times.
Ok I'll bite. Can you point me to something that shows that rideshare drivers would be hungry and homeless were it not for progressive generosity? Literally any sign that they disproportionately rely on public assistance? And to the extent they do, which they don't, did Uber and Lyft create that situation?
What exactly are Uber and Lyft free-riding off of? What public service are they abusing by operating a ride-sharing marketplace? In what way are they avoiding their "fair share" when their employees and investors already shoulder a massive and disproportionate part of the state's tax burden?
We do not let people in the united states die on the street from medical problems. If someone gets ill or is in a catastrophic accident they are brought to an emergency room and cared for. Despite said hospital sending a bill to the impoverished person, they cannot get blood from a stone. The hospitals are supported by the federal government via various programs like the VA, medicare, and medicaid who increase their prices as hospitals need as the government cannot handle them closing.
The free rider issue here is that company's are not paying their employees enough to handle basic maintenance of their bodies, and so public tax dollars are covering their catastrophic care.
Eventually everyone will get sick and need to see a doctor. If a company does not pay enough to their employees to get doctor visits than they are paying the basic maintenance costs, in the same way as a corporate fleet of cars not paying for oil changes is not paying for maintenance.
The difference here is that when a corporate fleet seizes up we let them fail. When citizens get sick and start dieing we, as a society, have decided its unethical to let them die for lack of funds and cover their health care.
Any company who relies on this is a free rider who is making our society pay for their basic maintenance costs
Uber and lyft would still exist without unemployment so how do they depend on them?
If there was no unemployment insurance uber and lyft would still exist and saying that uber and lyft depend on these social safety nets is just dishonest rhetoric.
What most of the people in this thread don't realize is the reason that Uber became large?
The smart ones will understand that Uber's entire subversive cross border growth tactic was tracking cops, which is a felony.
They hired Eric Holder to do the clean up job with workplace harassment as the cover story.
Eric Holder is not the best sexual harassment lawyer, he's the best lawyer to go close private backroom deals with Attorney Generals in all 50 states.
Uber not only did this domestically they did it in places abroad too, india etc...
They were able to fly under the radar long enough to circumvent localized taxes.
Medallion holders pay taxes into their locales, Uber does not.
TNC liceneses are a small fraction of the profits generated.
AB5 California Contractor/Employee Policy:
To hire a contractor, businesses must prove worker
a) is free from the company’s control
b) doing non core/critical work to co
c) has an ind. business in that industry.
Must meet all 3 or be classified as employees.
The lack of property taxes, more pension fund shortfalls, etc... means that California is racing to collect taxes.
The first levers are things like weird fees on receipts, then it moves to applying payroll logic and taxes to businesses (employee vs. contractor), then to wealth taxes, and then the real big kahuna is the VAT taxes.
The VAT taxes are coming.
Taxi cab drivers were middle class and medallion ownership created wealth.
Uber exploits its contractors, operates at a loss, and is propped up by political nepotism and cheap laundered CCP cash.
David Plouffe's job was to run an astroturfing campaign in every major city.
For those wondering why Lyft and Uber doing the shutdown, it's to bully voters into voting their way on Prop 22 in November.
They had two years to adjust their businesses for a proposition approved by voters. They chose to spend nine figures fighting it in the press and the courts.
I mean - if no one else comes up with a business now that works well and people enjoy doesn't that prove Uber and Lyft are right in that the platform is valuable and unique?
If California lawmakers are using this as negotiating tactic that's cool with me - but I'm not sure why we wouldn't expect Uber or Lyft to negotiate as well.
> I mean - if no one else comes up with a business now that works well and people enjoy doesn't that prove Uber and Lyft are right in that the platform is valuable and unique?
To me, it proves that investors don't have the appetite to fund an underdog fight against the two large companies. There are ethical alternatives (at least half a dozen when I last checked a couple years ago), but they're slow-growing. The fact that the conversations seem to default to assuming there are no other alternatives already speaks volumes about consumer mentality.
They did not have "years to adjust their businesses" to a changing landscape of demands, the worst-case scenario of which literally destroys their innovation/business.
"You had years to plan for us removing 95% of your business!" is quite the argument.
Their business was a legal dodge to begin with and they knew it. You can't start a business selling cocaine through a series of complex transactions such that it's "technically" legal and then complain when the government tries to regulate your "innovation" to bring it in line with existing law.
While cocaine is illegal and most voters still think it should be illegal, no voters think that calling a cab with an app should be illegal (at least provided the driver is compensated fairly).
> For those wondering why Lyft and Uber doing the shutdown, it's to bully voters into voting their way on Prop 22 in November.
Why is this getting downvoted? The strategy seems fairly obvious: by threatening to end service, they're trying to scare voters (and the legislature) into repealing this law.
Uber and Lyft could, under this law, continue to operate in a legal, legitimate manner, no longer relying on the legal loopholes that this law closed. The fact that they would rather shut down entirely than follow their own state's laws is deeply disturbing.
From my experience the drivers are perfectly aware of the costs that go into driving so I really don't buy the exploitation argument. Seems like a loss for everyone except bureaucrats. Also don't see how it's realistic to expect them to be able to adjust to this on a dime. Although large, California is still a minority of their revenue.