Rightly so. The 'gig economy' is abused by quite a few companies to create employment like situations without the required trappings (social security payments, employee protection, hourly minimums and so on). This was long overdue, let's hope it has precedent effect for other companies that abuse the ZZP construct.
I drive Uber for a few months. I hate the idea of "hourly minimums". Maybe we can have that for full time drivers.
But, I would go out on "unprofitable times" (when my hourly pay was substantially less than minimum wage due to a lack of rides) and read books (that I would have read anyway). Doing this I made small amounts of money while doing a leisure activity.
I loved the ability to drive less than full time in exchange for less pay. I don't want to be "on the clock". If I am on the clock and I am not actively working, that is time theft. If I am driving Uber and I don't feel like taking that ride because I'm at a good point in the book I'm reading, I'm free to just sit there.
I liked that option.
Rather than require minimum hourly pay, I want to increase the minimum per mile pay and require Uber to pay the drivers for the time and miles spent driving to the riders.
You might be willing to work for less than minimum wage, but in reality minimum wages exist because without them they create a race-to-the-bottom for workers, and it's very hard to write a policy that's something like "you can pay a person less if they are enjoying it and are reading a book and not really doing that much".
Waiting time is a regular part of jobs and we pay for it in other career paths - can you imagine if everyone only had to pay security guards for the time spent apprehending thief's and they got no pay for all the waiting around reading newspapers they do?
This is basically the line of reasoning that changed my opinion on this issue. Previously I thought, well it's up to people when they want to work and how much for.
The problem with that is these services are only viable because there is a core of drivers that work long hours and have this as their primary source of income. Part time casual drivers are also an important part of what makes services like this effective, but without the core drivers there's no service. What's happening at the moment is that the low expectations of the casual drivers is under cutting the livelihoods and bargaining power of core drivers. That's not an equitable state of affairs.
Yeah, its the comparison between those who are there to skim of the limited hours of top demand or don't care about making reasonable living out of it. And those that can't find other work and want to earn reasonable living doing reasonable hours.
Fair enough, but gig work is still work. They're still doing a job, and so the standard expectations of a liveable wage and fair treatment should apply, as for any job.
I'm a lot more relaxed about minimum wages and such than I used to be. Here in the UK we've ramped up minimum wages over the last decade or so and the feared impact on jobs for low wage earners never materialised.
I'm a conservative and free market liberal because I'm primarily interested in what works. Ideology be damned, and I've been slapped in the face by a reality check that actually some basic wage floor rules and employment standards work just fine. Those minimum wage rises? Conservative government.
So kill the innovation Uber created so someone that misunderstood what gig work was can force a full time job out of it? Uber may as well shut down because they will be just the same as a taxi. Why would I use them if they’re more expensive?
It was meant to be something someone did on the side. It paid well so people turned it into a full time job.
Then if these people are really poor they can get free heath insurance right? And they have a retirement account through the gov right? What other benefits do they need? All those garbage/useless mental health services the code shops push around?
>Can you imagine if everyone only had to pay security guards for the time spent apprehending thief's and they got no pay for all the waiting around reading newspapers they do?
Yes, it's called a commission. Many jobs pay that way.
Making a comparison between a security guard and an Uber driver is like making a comparaison between a limo chauffer and a bounty hunter. It's an unnecessary and convoluted analogy given the differences in goals. Regular taxi drivers are paid per ride (i.e. a commission) and Uber drivers are taxi drivers without the medallions. I don't see how one would take issue with Uber drivers doing what taxi drivers do while simultaneously operating as rational actors by undercutting the competition on price.
> Yes, it's called a commission. Many jobs pay that way.
Well in the case of commissions for employees in Europe you still have to guarantee a minimum wage and fill any gap between commission payments and the minimum wage.
> Making a comparison between a security guard and an Uber driver is like making a comparaison between a limo chauffer and a bounty hunter.
Well, the bounty hunter comparison depends on if you are an employee or if you are self-employed. Let's remember the precedent for uber drivers being employees has already been established in European/Dutch courts.
If a bounty hunter is an employee in Europe (i.e. working for a bounty hunting firm rather than owning one), if any commissions don't make their wage up to the minimum wage they will have to be paid the difference by the employer. The worked hours for bounty hunting include any waiting time on the job. I don't see why Uber should be exempt from this rule when every other industry, including the traditional taxi industry, has to follow it.
It sounds like you have another source of income. If you were in the middle of a good chapter you could turn down a ride. I don't think you're exactly the kind of driver these companies are looking for, but if they were I think they'd have a hard time finding enough of you.
I feel like being able to monetize your freetime is a luxury a society can't afford when your leisure activity could be someone's job. You could spent time volunteering, like meals on wheels or something. But instead you're driving down the labor rate, as a hobby.
That sounds harsh and I don't want you to feel personally attacked, so I'll just it's cool, no one's perfect. But jobs need to pay live able wages, IMHO.
> It sounds like you have another source of income. [...] I don't think you're exactly the kind of driver these companies are looking for
Uber/Lyft have said on various occasions that the majority of drivers are part-timer/casual. While being able to read books between trips might seem a bit of a privileged situation, many who do Uber for supplemental income don't have room to engage in luxury.
I personally know of someone who does deliveries as a side gig from a restaurant job (which is already grueling on its own) because they really need the extra cash and there's literally nothing else on the job market with the flexibility of gig economy stints.
what i liked about the gig economy was having the freedom to get what i had to get done without being micromanaged. there is a large portion of gig workers who don’t want to be a standard worker because it cuts into that freedom. so i can see both sides of the argument but for me delivering food was a lot better than waiting tables. way too much stress serving and having management try to control you at every step in the day. so hoping this new trend doesn’t undermine something special about gig work. it was my main source of income while in college and it was perfect for that. i could sign in, make money and then go back home and work on what i had to get done, real jobs often are not flexible and kinda hold you back in life because you have less time to better yourself due yo requirements with work hours etc
In that situation a "0 hour contract" would mean Uber has to pay for all of their benefits even if they don't work at all. A net negative for uber, so the 0 hour contract isn't created. The only way this changes while not ensuring uber loses money on their drivers is if they operate like a regular company and have both part-time and full-time employees, with 20 hour minimums for part-timers.
when people are on 0 hour contracts, the company still has to pay social insurance for the employee. Some of which are not bound to the hours worked.
Also, a 0 hour contract is a iffy construct. If someone can show they worked N hours on the regular, they have the right to get a contract on the amount of hours they worked.
Also, 0 hour contracts are only allowed for a limited number of times afaik. (2x up to one year i believe).
I think the conundrum is that either Uber pays for downtime (employee model) or it doesn't (contractor model). It's literally impossible to be actively driving passengers for a solid 40 hours a week while maintaining reasonable work hours. For the model that pays for downtime, it needs to make it up somehow since it wouldn't be able to afford people just sitting around doing nothing in the middle of nowhere. Typically, this is accomplished by mandating employees to be "clocked in", unable to refuse rides, and chasing some sort of quota. I'd be curious to hear about different options.
At least how I see it, many of the problems are that the company is not giving the protections that they've historically supposed to have given. I think one option is to extricate those protections from the employers and bring them to a different level. It could be a union, it could be a local/regional/national/(dare I say global) government, it could be some other org that provides those services. Then the employer could still give the flexibility and not have to worry about providing those extra benefits.
What's blocking them from doing metrics based payment, but with employee like protections? Pay people for the time they mark themselves "available" (regardless of if there's any rides), and require that drivers take anything you give them while they are available. I imagine you could put in a cap and a floor if you really wanted to. You could even allow drivers to reject a certain percentage of rides if you felt like it.
The point wouldn't be to control the drivers, but for uber to assume some of the risk.
Ultimately there is no such thing as driver protections. Either they bring in more money than they are paid or they are going to be out of work (either by being fired, or the company going under).
A company isn't going to let people just do whatever if the company is assuming risks. For example, say demand peaks at 7-9am and 4-6pm. The company could simply dictate that that's the only times you can work (because the full time old-timer high earners already took all other time slots). But maybe you're a stay-at-home parent and only have free time during school hours, so for you, that's objectively a worse deal, since you get to take home $0 as opposed to whatever you could make under a work-at-any-time model.
Or maybe the company tells you that you can't work on-and-off around your town like you used to, due to existing driver saturation, and they tell you that you have to drive to the downtown of the nearby metropolitan city for a shift (many full time drivers I've talked to actually do this today to get better on-the-clock volume).
Or maybe you just can't work at all because there's enough drivers on the road today already.
There's a million scenarios like these.
As a thought exercise, you could go out and drive an Uber casually for a couple of hours, and simultaneously pay yourself whatever amount you think is fair, out of your own pocket. The gist is to track your on-the-clock time and mileage (which is fairly easy w/ the app), and then work out the math to figure out how much the rides should've cost to pay the amount you decided. If the exercise comes out to charging $40 for 10 min rides to account for suboptimal downtime, or you're finding that you need to work a 12 hour day to hit a similar income threshold as a full timer elsewhere, you can be sure that you've neglected some important aspect of the unit economics math and you would've failed at being Uber.
> Ultimately there is no such thing as driver protections. Either they bring in more money than they are paid or they are going to be out of work (either by being fired, or the company going under).
If we’re starting off with that as a belief why have any regulations at all?
> A company isn't going to let people just do whatever if the company is assuming risks.
Companies routinely do that. Hell sometimes that is the entire reason for employing a specific person, is to let them do what they want and then reap the economic benefit from owning the outcome.
Regulations or no regulations, that's just a fact. You can't have a company paying out more than it intakes, that's just basic math.
People are so quick to say "oh just raise wages" as if Uber/etc never contemplated the idea (recall we're talking about the company that popularized the idea of surge pricing for rides), but I don't think many of the armchair analysts have put an ounce of thought into what actually happens when you dictate monetary factors (let alone the gradient of effects relative to different degrees of change). Uber/Lyft were fairly clear about potential impact of employment mandates on service reliability when prop 22 was making the rounds, and I find it curious that there's simultaneously a sentiment that pre-uber service availability was crap and a sentiment that one just ought to raise prices and somehow people will get to eat their cake and have it too.
> Companies routinely do that
You're giving an apples-to-oranges example and you know it. Hiring Rob Pike vs letting unskilled drivers sit idly on company dime are completely different scenarios. The latter group doesn't even generate leads (unlike cabs being hailed off the street).
I think there are quite a few options. It took me about a minute to think of the below, so I'm sure with the resources of Uber they can come up with something better:
- Driver 'clocks in' when they are in the app and ready to receive rides.
- They get paid as normal, however there is a guaranteed minimum which means that they will get paid the minimum wage.
- Driver can decline rides, but there is a % threshold at which point they can be performance managed if required (i.e. warnings for declining too many rides and then removed if required).
- Driver clocks out when they are no longer wanting to receive rides. 3 declines in a row or something similar automatically ends shift. Shift can also be ended due to low demand, unless the driver has signed up for a particular shift ahead of time.
That's not particularly great, and I'm sure some people will have builds/other suggestions, but Uber is a 76 billion dollar company, I'm sure they can come up with something better and a way of operating within labour laws.
I think part of the problem is the market, for some markets. The new law would not affect NYC or dense urban areas because there is lots of order liquidity there. But what about rural Pennsylvania? (Ask me how I know? Hint: management consulting air dropped to remote client location)
When i'm in rural areas, there are often no taxis and one will show up an hour after you call, maybe. Without order liquidity, it is infeasible to maintain supply. Which company (or person) would stand ready to ride just in case an order came thru once every 4 or 5 hours?
The current market response to this is simply not supporting the market. The alternative is Uber where presumably the person is doing their yard work and jumps and does a ride if one happens to pop up. I cannot imagine Uber will sponsor idle wages in rural regions where you get an order or two a day.
> Without order liquidity, it is infeasible to maintain supply. Which company (or person) would stand ready to ride just in case an order came thru once every 4 or 5 hours?
The only solution here is if the ride is absurdly high, to the point where you break even with drivers in the nearest high-population city, which people also don't want since they'd be paying multiple hundreds of dollars for a ride. At that point, people will just get a car.
The issue with uber is that it's compensating for a lack of public transportation that takes you exactly where you want to end up at (or public transportation at all in most of the U.S.). Maybe the only way car-on-demand is profitable is if (A) we get self-driving cars, or (B) the government creates their own system with lower fares and runs it at a pure loss with no profitability in mind.
I think even absurdly priced rides dont work beyond a certain level of illiquidity. Matching price to order is just too spotty. A perfect example is landing in an airport on a late flight -- i've waited 45min for a taxi at Delta Terminal in NYC. As a business customer, I would have paid $100 or even $200 for a ride that cold night. Most business travelers are cost elastic, esp post-travel. Except there is no way to broadcast that willingness to pay to cab companies, esp at an off-terminal like Delta Terminal. I dont think people realize how truly game-changing Uber and surge pricing was.
> I cannot imagine Uber will sponsor idle wages in rural regions where you get an order or two a day.
If Uber can't operate while paying minimum wage then maybe they shouldn't be operating.
Every other company has to work out how to pay minimum wage. An unprofitable rural convenience store doesn't get to pay its clerks less because the sales aren't high enough, so I fail to see why it should be different for Uber and their drivers.
I mostly agree with you -- but a more apt analogy would be if clerks could work from home and had the option of choosing their shifts in 20-30 minute slots and they could continue watching TV at home (or whatever) if they werent called...so basically a babysitter might be a better example. Should babysitters be paid for 40hr weeks just in case we need one in the middle of the week for 2hrs?
To be fair, an appropriate Uber setup here would also require that drivers know the destination beforehand and get compensated if the ride is cancelled and have the ability to decline rides.
The problem for both babysitters and uber drivers in low-usage areas is that there is NO economic model that allows for 40hr workweeks once population (or usage) declines sufficiently. All these gig models work very well in the city but totally break down as you go to rare use areas. A new model is required -- i'm not saying Uber is it, but Uber is closest.
Anyone who isnt in an urban environment, or who's landed at an airport at 2am knows this is a problem. We just need a way to fairly compensate people to solve it.
I mostly agree with you too - however I think there is a subtle difference between an employee explicitly wanting to work these incredibly short shifts, and an employer mandating it.
I.e in your example, where someone wants to work in 30 minute increments and that is the staff member's choice and the employer is happy, then fine.
However it would be unreasonable for an employer to say to a staff member "I'm only going to pay you in 30 minute increments, and after each 30 minutes you can go watch TV, but if a customer arrives when you are on break I want you to run back to work straight away to staff the till, and I'm not going to pay you for the time watching TV".
It's reasonable to ask the Babysitter to work part-time and have fairly short shifts. An example of being unreasonable would be to say that they have to take calls during the day with customers and they will only be paid the minutes talking to customers. It's worth saying the laws here change if you are an employee vs sole-trader, and most babysitters would not be classed as an employee while Uber drivers are.
If the babysitter is an employee of a babysitting bureau, sure. If they're an independent contractor, negotiating babysitting contracts on their own, no (well, strictly speaking, they are at that point their own boss and can decide if they want to pay themselves for downtime or not).
For any situation in-between, the answer probably ends somewhere on the spectrum between "yes" and "no".
Yes, that would be technically possible. But it will not happen because of how the incentives are set up. If Uber now has to bear the cost of being an employer, it will need to exercise its power over the employee drivers and force them to work.
Well, 'need' can be synonymous with 'not burn money in a way that leads to bankruptcy'. Uber is largely an uneconomical business that won't work if they end up having to keep their <10 hours a week drivers AND pay benefits.
There are some consequences. If they will be hired as employees it will be first with a temporary contract. Since
there is a limitation to renewal of fixed term contracts,
after a certain period the employment is seen as an indefinite employment contract rather than a new fixed term agreement. Meaning then they could not be fired something Uber will not want. The limit is 3 years or 3 contract renewals:
Are some of these drivers not working for other companies also? In that case they really are freelancers/entrepreneurs not employees...I think the decision will be appealed.
As some Dutch media, (not all), persist on their annoying habit of copy pasting ANP press releases and not doing much of real journalism...or not linking to original sources even if you paid for their subscription services...I am adding some original resources here:
The Netherlands Trade Union Confederation (FNV) has around 1 million members,
is both a trade union federation and a trade union and launched the lawsuit.
> Are some of these drivers not working for other companies also? In that case they really are freelancers/entrepreneurs not employees...I think the decision will be appealed.
That's a pretty bad test on it's own. Plenty of people working in restaurants work for multiple companies, they're still employees.
> Plenty of people working in restaurants work for multiple companies, they're still employees.
And do they cook one food order at a restaurant they work for, then 15 minutes later walk across the street and cook for a competing restaurant for 30 minutes, and then immediately walk back across the street and cook a food order for the other restaurant? No, of course that's not normal.
This will ultimately accelerate the ability of the strongest companies to destroy their competition and potential competition. If Uber doesn't bleed to death financially first, that will be Uber due to their global scale.
Uber may not realize it because they're stupid, but this bolsters survival of the strongest in the segment. They can easily kill off competition using this by eating the labor supply. Someone that would have previously worked for multiple companies - trivially flipping between services as it was most ideal for the driver to grab a fare - will no longer be available for multiple companies at the same time. They'll now largely hold a normal job and will not want to work for multiple companies, pulling two shifts per day. Sure, there may be exceptions of drivers that want to pull a weekend job with another service or work two jobs per day, but exceptions is all they'll be. This will narrow the market winners dramatically and quickly.
Monopolize the market, consume the labor supply, raise passenger fees, lean in to killing off the competition. It's super simple.
If I were Uber I'd abuse the stock market for funding to pay artificially high wages to the labor supply (get all the best drivers), and I'd hire more drivers than I absolutely need (deprive the competition), and begin this killing process immediately. I'd go one market to the next, using Uber's market cap as the funding base to monopolize each market. This type of ruling makes labor supply a competitive advantage to whichever company can acquire the most and best drivers. A global ride hailing app will be advantaged over the smaller local/regional competition accordingly.
The next ride hailing app in the market that wants to get started will find no available labor supply to compete with. Welcome to competition stagnation.
And of course then the moronic regulators will come back around, having created a monster, and they'll have to pursue anti-trust (or the equivalent) against the market winner they helped to cause.
> And do they cook one food order at a restaurant they work for, then 15 minutes later walk across the street and cook for a competing restaurant for 30 minutes, and then immediately walk back across the street and cook a food order for the other restaurant? No, of course that's not normal.
As a former Lyft/uber driver this is absolutely correct. It gets even hairier: suppose you are sitting on both apps (or even more) waiting for a ride. Do you get to double-bill two companies for minimum wage hours?
I think what is going happen is if Uber and Lyft are forced to recategorize as employees, they get to do something like "compel drivers to wear a uniform", so like a polo with the brand on it, and prohibit wearing of competitors logo. Or prohibit displaying competitor logo on the car (displaying is a legal requirement in many jurisdictions). In the end the take-home for the driver is going to be worse.
I'm quite frankly surprised that Uber didn't preempt the legislation by creating a class of driver that is an employee, putting these sorts of onerous restrictions on the driver, plus other ones like "you must start and end at central processing center, drive an uber-owned car", "requiring shifts on ADA-compliant vehicles", "being required to comply with an uber-generated shift schedule", in exchange for bare minimum wage and benefits.
Is Uber the only rideshare company available in Europe? In America, every rideshare car has uber and lyft stickers, at a minimum. Just about every driver keeps both apps open and takes rides from wherever they come in.
I think GP has a good point, I took a slightly america-centric POV on the issue; topic is specifically about Dutch legal system. Nonetheless the end bit about 'strategies' is likely to be applicable across jurisdictions.
> It gets even hairier: suppose you are sitting on both apps (or even more) waiting for a ride. Do you get to double-bill two companies for minimum wage hours?
IMO this is a no-brainer, the answer is yes, double-bill. The same applies if you get two remote jobs, you bill both.
I don't think it'd be strictly illegal, they'd just have grounds to fire you if you ever refused a ride (that goes for both Uber/Lyft).
Maybe fraud and breach of contract if, in the full-time contract, it says "you affirm you do not have another full-time job that will interfere with this job".
IANAL, but my understanding is: Double-billing hours is probably illegal, but many remote programmers likely have two "full time", salaried, jobs with no stipulation about "you must work X hours"... at the very least a legal grey area, and if you breach some contract clause, you are most likely in breach of contract, which is a civil suit, and most likely you'll just be dismissed, no severance will be offered, and they might try to take away any unexercised options grants.
This is not just programmers by the way. I know of people in other professions doing this. And as long as there isn't a conflict based on anything you signed or company policy I'm not sure a company has recourse beyond terminating you
Again, I don't do it because I can't handle the stress of two jobs, but I don't begrudge those who can
Assuming (which is very safe in most cases) that the employment contract has something in it that is being violated by double-dipping, it is both garden variety fraud (in many cases state and therefore dependent on the state laws in question), and in some cases federal depending on the circumstances. In the jurisdictions where fraud against an employer is based on the amount of money at play, it's still almost always going to be a felony because it takes very little time to reach the common thresholds (e.g. $1k) when double-dipping.
Additionally, it's a pretty obvious opening to a lawsuit in at least most jurisdictions for breach of fiduciary duty (under the duty of loyalty -- Google this + your own jurisdiction for more details on what it covers where you are) and breach of contract.
Now, the employer probably won't sue or prosecute in most circumstances, so you may get away with it. But that's some high-stakes roulette, especially since you're not going to get UI if you get fired for gross misconduct and you're not going to get a good recommendation.
> They can easily kill off competition using this by eating the labor supply.
I'm not at all sure they can. You haven't really explained here why Uber is apparently capable of hiring all drivers and starving the labor pool, yet Applebees can't use the same strategy for cooks, or Amazon the same strategy for warehouse workers or software engineers.
Calling them "moronic regulators" without explaining why the same model that works in other markets can't work in this one isn't all that compelling.
There are meaningful alternatives for your examples. If you didn't want to work at Applebees, you could work at Chilis.
Right now, I would be willing to bet that a large majority of Lyft drivers also drive for Uber. Uber is so much larger that there is no real alternative. If the law makes it so that drivers can choose only one rideshare app, they will all choose Uber because its bigger.
This is an extraordinary claim, this has never been a problem in a major city in recorded history.
The idea that Uber would pay drivers so much to have extra drivers just sitting around doing nothing is absurd. The idea that there would be no suitable drivers left to other firms to hire is absurd.
If any of this claim made sence, then this would have happened 50 years ago, we've had drivers around for a while.
Yet it does not happen in haulage where drivers are actual professionals, it does not happen for solicitors where labour supply is way more constrained. What do you have to backup your claim?
> this has never been a problem in a major city in recorded history.
This _has_ been the case in major cities around the world before Uber took over. NYC has the yellow cab monopoly. London had the black cab monopoly. These companies grew large enough to buy up all available labor (this was made easier by the medallion system).
Uber is no different. It _already_ has a dominant market position. Other rideshare companies _already_ share their drivers. The amount of drivers who drive for Lyft only is vanishingly small. If you force all those drivers to choose, they will choose Uber and Lyft will die.
"YC has the yellow cab monopoly. London had the black cab monopoly."
Exactly, legislative monopoly - they didn't run out of people with cars willing to drive. You are talking about labour shortage, that's a completely different argument
And there is not (unlike the medallion system, as I understand it) any specific limit on how many can pass The Knowledge (the test you have to do to become a black cab driver; before that, you can get a taxi license and work for a minicab firm). The reason it's not instant is that it is one of those "requires a substantial investment of time" scenarios.
So I don't think painting "London's black cabs" as a monopoly holds water.
Speaking about financials...The court ruled that in certain cases drivers can claim overdue salary. Uber had according to statistics approximately 5,200 drivers in NL on December 2019.
I bet employers are wishing they never got involved in benefits. Now they're just the governments execution arm for social programs and they're stuck forever.
Looking back, the only reason employers started getting involved in Healthcare was because the 1942 Stabilization Act restricted them from raising wages and they had to come up with a more creative way of competing for talent.
Now the ACA forces companies to privide insurance by law. Under Biden's Covid plan they're now going to be the execution arm for vaccine mandates. It's crazy to think that to start a business you need to almost immediately be prepared to be a federal government franchisee.
Considering those same employers also get massive subsidies for every kind of self-inflicted damage, which results in massive C-suit cash-outs and buy-backs, this is the least the commons could hope for.
I guess I was thinking more about small to medium sized businesses. A business with 50-100 employees has to enforce government social programs but there won't be any c-suite golden parachutes.
I wish more people realized how anti-capitalist the current healthcare system is in the U.S.
If you want to encourage business, then remove barriers. Governments should be taking care of healthcare, not businesses.
Businesses should be focused on the core work they do: Running their business. Not on providing health care.
(Same goes, really, for childcare, transportation, and similar benefits that large employers sometimes offer, often because these things are not effectively provided by the government.)
Completely agree. Universal healthcare would empower a lot of entrepreneurs, make it easier to attract talent for smaller companies, and free me of a completely ridiculous amount of paperwork and oversight each year. If someone told me, as a business, I could just pay a tax and know my employees had access to the same quality of care as everyone else, I'd sign up in a heart beat.
Most of those seem decent [1] but mostly related to reducing taxes on income you put into the government social program instead of letting you invest somewhere else. Not sure employers would see the tax breaks as enough justification if they weren't forced.
My point is that it didn't used to be a law. Why can't the government enforce it's own social program and let businesses focus on their primary goal instead of healthcare compliance.
> It's found the most efficient/popular way to do that is through businesses.
Not at all, look up the history of health insurance in America, companies providing it was not by design, it was in fact done to get around government laws on wage caps during the great depression.
Now days the system is entrenched, there are a large # of corrupt players who leech of the healthcare ecosystem in America, and they pay good $ to lobbyists and PR firms to keep things that way.
Right now 1/3rd of health care costs go to working out billing. That type of insane inefficiency would not be tolerated in a true capitalist marketplace. Imagine if Visa charged 33% commission on every sale and then had a law passed saying all purchases had to be done with a Visa card! That'd be an insane drag on the economy, America's GDP would plummet.
But we literally accept that exact scenario with health care costs. (Except for cosmetic procedures, which have a competitive market that has driven technology forward and prices down!)
> Taxi drivers are not knowledge workers, or artists and clearly not entrepreneurs.
> They are easily replaceable "cogs in the machine", like many non-specialised factory workers, office clerks, retail employees and so on.
> There's a reason why humanity introduced protections for vulnerable workers in almost every society.
I appreciate the point you're making, but I also think you are grossly undervaluing the specialisation of cab drivers.
In the UK, the Knowledge [1] is a notoriously arduous exam which certainly makes cab drivers anything but "replaceable 'cogs in the machine'".
In fact, I think the fact that people view these jobs as being replaceable is what leads to their deterioration. Someone who has a GPS but no innate and learned knowledge of the terrain does not provide a service comparable to someone who has a thorough understanding of the domain. And the more people rely on the former, the more they think that that's all there is to it, and so it becomes a race to the bottom of sorts.
I'm not sure if I'm articulating this fully, but basically: jobs such as cab driving require specialisation and skill to be done well, but are often replaced by those without that skill doing freelance driving, which leads to a deterioration of expected service, and people ultimately thinking that the workers are all interchangeable.
I agree uber drivers =/= black cab drivers, but I'd also argue that most people don't want or need a black cab driver today.
What extra services does a black cab driver provide over an Uber driver in London?
- Better knowledge of traffic patterns?
- Ability to recommend places, give you local knowledge
That's all I can really think of. I agree that local knowledge is sometimes useful, but the vast majority of the time I know exactly where I want to go, and if I'm looking for recommendations I'm likely to trust the internet more than a taxi driver.
It's all about the subtle nuance of the service provided. A skilled driver will know which route to take if the passenger wants the absolute quickest route, or if the passenger wants a scenic route, or which cobble-stone roads to avoid if the passenger says they're feeling a bit ill, or hundreds of other such intricacies and peculiarities which come with offering expert service which someone who just has a GPS app on their phone and some free time can't begin to offer.
My point up-thread was that this tier of service used to be more or less the de facto standard of service that you would get for a standard, not a premium, fee. Over time, it has deteriorated and is now the domain of specialty car hire services. I'm not sure that that's a good thing.
My point is that the "standard" fee is premium when compared to Uber which tends to cost half as much in the countries where I tried it.
Aside from solving the trust/scam problem, that's one of the reason why people like Uber - it made 'car as a service' affordable. Without Uber, I might have bought a car, because a factor of 2 completely changes the picture.
>In the UK, the Knowledge [1] is a notoriously arduous exam which certainly makes cab drivers anything but "replaceable 'cogs in the machine'".
>In fact, I think the fact that people view these jobs as being replaceable is what leads to their deterioration.
Uber and the online routing within the app made this obsolete. The jobs that gig economy jobs may be skilled, but these gigs now aren't. The platform took the skill away from the job. The workers are just drones now.
> Taxi drivers are not knowledge workers, or artists and clearly not entrepreneurs.
Of course they're entrepreneurs. They have to own or finance a car. They choose when and where to work and for what company to drive for. They can also work for black car in addition to ride share and can even manage private rides. They have some ability to accept or reject fares.
> There's a reason why humanity introduced protections for vulnerable workers in almost every society.
No one is restricting "knowledge workers" from being able to strike a contract. Why can't we afford the same dignity and respect to "cogs in the machine"? You ever thing these "protections" that "humanity" places on "cogs" can end up hurting them? Like how immigrant taxi drivers in NYC were encouraged to rack up 100k debt to buy medallions
You can choose when and where to work. Most businesses don't have pricing power. There's a market price. They can charge more or less sure but in theory there's a market clearing price, and anything above/below that price will yield suboptimal returns. You're romanticizing the discretion individual businesses have.
There is a very simple litmus test to decide if someone is an entrepreneur or not: do they own the customer relationship? If they do they are an entrepreneur otherwise they aren't. This is the core of the dispute with the app stores and various companies as well: they don't want to end up at the mercy of a third party for their customer relationships.
"Of course they're entrepreneurs. They have to own or finance a car."
When we were taught business in school, it was about setting the price, hiring staff, choosing a target market. You know, thigs that make a business a business.
I am willing to bet my house that there isn't a single business or economics testbook where maintaining a car is even a consideration.
> When we were taught business in school, it was about setting the price, hiring staff, choosing a target market. You know, thigs that make a business a business.
You have a very narrow understanding of business and entrepreneurship. Not all businesses have employees. Every business book will tell you almost all businesses are price takers, not price setters. You can't wave a wand and say "I want to charge X".
The target market could be Uber, Lyft, black car, limo or personal. Maintaining equipment and accounting for depreciation is very important
"You can't wave a wand and say "I want to charge X"
Of course you can! Whether anyone pays is another matter.
"The target market could be Uber"
1 company is a customer, not a market. You are perverting the term to the point where it looses all meaning. It's like Agile - everything is agile now.
"Maintaining equipment and accounting for depreciation is very important"
So is a regular exercise routine, but neither of them defines a business. Are half the country are 'entrepreneurs' now because they have to drive kids to school? This is absurd!
You don't like my criteria, fine, but the only criteria you put forward aren't even relevant to lawyers, accountant and hundreds of other kinds of Real businesses that do have employees, set the price, run their marketing, etc.
Exactly. It's unskilled or semi-skilled work. Treating them the same as freelancers doesn't reflect reality as they have almost no leverage in there situation with their employers.
Then you're not going to do it for the money that uber pays.
As a ZZP you're meant to provide for your own pension, sick leave, disability insurance. No way what Uber pays is going to cover that.
This is why they're doing it of course, to avoid having to provide those things. But those are statutory rights in the Netherlands. And for good reason, otherwise if someone becomes disabled it ends up on the state's plate. We don't leave people by the side of the road if we can help it.
Coercion is a bit a radical expression, I would call it dire economic straits, make a quick buck on the side.
Whatever the reason, good on the Dutch and the union not letting them trample on their values by these "honorable" folks and their values, here is the hall of shame:
Wednesday February 22: Cocaine and groping.
Thursday February 23: Investor betrayal and accusations of stolen technology.
Fowler, a former engineer at the company, alleged in a blog post that she was sexually harassed at Uber and experienced gender bias during her time at the company. She claimed that one manager propositioned her and asked for sex, but her complaints to HR were dismissed because the manager was a high performer. She said Uber continued to ignore her complaints to HR, and then her manager threatened to fire her for reporting things to HR.
Isolated incident? Not so
Employees did cocaine during a company retreat and a manager had to be fired after groping multiple women, according to the report. Former employees said they'd notified Uber's leadership, including Kalanick and CTO Thuan Pham, of the workplace harassment.
Google, another Uber investor(!!!!), sued the company for intellectual property theft.
Uber's SVP of engineering stepped down over sexual-harassment allegations at his former job at Google.Singhal went through the standard background checks before his employment at Uber and that the sexual-harassment allegations during Singhal's time at Google never came up.
The New York Times revealed that Uber has been secretively deceiving authorities for years with a tool called 'Greyball'
Escort karaoke bar visit in Seoul, After the evening, a female Uber employee told HR that the trip made her uncomfortable.
Uber delays the investigation into workplace harrasment after information pours in from "hundreds" of its employees
Apple CEO had threatened to yank Uber from the App Store if it continued to violate the App Store's terms and conditions. As an act of fraud prevention, Uber had affixed a small piece of code that could tell if someone was using the same phone over and over again and then wiping it to take advantage of promo codes
Waymo accuses Uber of creating a shell company to bring on a former Google engineer.
Uber is about as close to a ship of theseus as it gets.
All this stuff you're talking about is ancient news from like 4 years ago. Since then, the entire C-suite left, including Kalanick and Thuan (Singhal spent virtually no time at Uber), not to mention crazy high attrition rates at all levels, and several rounds of layoffs to top it all off.
Since then, greyball and its ilk got shutdown, the CSO got fired for hiding a leak, HR ramped up from its comically understaffed numbers, and Uber even "fired" a board member for making a sexist joke.
The only high profile scandal under new management that I recall was the Tempe SDV death, and that division got sold off to Aurora...
Nope, this excuse does not fly.
First they do things clandestinely, then try to prevent any court case, then drag the court case out as long as possible and then it's supposed to be ancient?
You're the one clearly pushing an agenda, I'm just stating facts. IIRC the discussion here at the time about the lawsuit you linked characterized it as "frivolous" and "sour grapes", and other words to that effect.
If I wanted to make claims about saintness, I wouldn't bring up Tempe, I would've brought up the stuff about the CLO leading equality efforts (him being a black person), or the stuff about Afghanistan relief donation matching and other similar initiatives. But like said, I'm not interested in playing good-guy-bad-guy games, and I'm perfectly content w/ characterizing Uber as a company seeking profits just like Microsoft, Google or FB or whoever else is getting a stink eye these days.
You're free to be cynical, but doing so by cherrypicking only stuff that supports "your" side is kinda intellectually dishonest. </two-cents>
Elaboration: My impresssion is that rideshare driving is an incredibly liquid market, so its really hard to imagine a mechanism for long-term wage suppression other than external factors like an untrained workforce or poor economy overall.
Why aren't these payments taken from the employee then? In my country retirement and social security appear right in my paycheck. Why isn't it the same for freelancers (when they declare taxes)? If their wage is too low as you claim, this isn't something that will change when they become employees, so this solves nothing. If this is about a minimum wage, then the real solution is forcing freelancers to work a minimum of monthly hours, which treats the root problem.
This assumes the meaning of freelancers is being able to join and leave an employer when you want, and not being able to fix your own prices and refuse gigs like others are saying. I think you should be able to open a freelance provider with restrictions, as Uber is doing. I see no reason to outlaw that.
> This assumes the meaning of freelancers is being able to join and leave an employer when you want, and not being able to fix your own prices and refuse gigs like others are saying.
You see it that way, but the Dutch law doesn't. If the freelancer has no real choice and cannot dictate his/her own terms they are not a freelancer but an employee without the benefits of an employee. Social programs should be displayed these days on your paycheck if you are an employee. Not every (administration) company is doing it properly though.
Forcing freelancers to work more hours for less than a sustainable minimum pay solves nothing as the minimum wage is calculated on a full workweek.
I'm sure Uber is allowed to offer freelance work, but not with the current way of doing business. As soon as they let the freelancer dictate the pay (or at least properly negotiate) it looks they will be fine.
Not sure what country you are, but most also have the Employer pay on top of that too.
So you might pay a 10% social security tax, and the employer might be paying an additional 15% that doesn't appear on your payslip.
That's what Amazon, etc. are talking about when they say they pay a load of employment taxes.
That's also why a lot of countries are eying the gig economy with skepticism, it's actually often just a massive tax dodge for the company to not pay employment taxes.
I never understood why this distinction is made and why it’s not just obfuscation. The real numbers are the cost of an employee to the employer and the amount the employee gets, the difference is what the state took as a tax, and the way that cut is divided to different state budget chapters is inconsequential to both the employee and the employer
<In my country retirement and social security appear right in my paycheck
What country is that? US, the only country that its politicians actively lobbies against universal healthcare, healthcare that is successfully implemented in every! f*ing! other! Western country?!! (and quite a few other countries that are not Western, such as my full of corruption Eastern Europe one)
Every country that funds social programs with an income tax has mandatory employee contributions, differing only in the visibility of the cost to the employee (up-front taxes vs. a line-item in the pay stub vs. a "employer portion" which isn't reported to the employee but directly impacts the employee's wages).
You can be a freelancer just fine, nothing stops you from doing that. But not within the Uber framework because you aren' a freelancer within that framework. So this is pretty specific: the Uber framework does not check enough of the boxes that would allow their pseudo employees to claim they are freelancers, which effectively makes it just another tax dodge, which it always was.
No. The 'tax loopholes' are simply shifting the responsibility of paying those taxes from the employer to the employee, which when the company is doing well and the relationship is otherwise balanced is a net neutral. But once the larger picture is taken into account things like health benefits, continuing to be paid when temporarily unemployed (which for a gig worker is several times per hour) and so on become externalized to society when really they should be the problem of the employer.
The current situation allows Uber to play its employees against the state (as they're very transparently trying to do in the referenced article with their remark that their employees (because that what they are) would prefer to be self employed, which is nonsense only when compared with the situation where Uber would not employ them at all. The vast bulk of the employees really would like steady employment.
So the tax dodge should stop but not through fixing the tax loophoes, but simply by recognizing that which is already the fact on the ground: that these people are employees in all but name. Note that this is Europe where - to many American companies' surprise and detriment - it is not only the letter of the law that matters but also the intent of the law, in this case the intent of labor law here is to ensure our social contract continues to function. Hacking your way around that like you can do in the United States - where it is the letter of the law that matters far more than the intent - is going to be met with significant pushback from the courts.
Taxi businesses in the U.S. played this cat-and-mouse game for a long time, and generally 'won' the right to offload liabilities to drivers without much pay. Why anyone thought or thinks Uber is 'different' is hard to understand.
Was that also the case for taxi businesses in European countries with functional social states? Because, this being a legal ruling in Europe, US precedent doesn't really matter.
The reason for this is that you can be compelled by your totally-not-employer to pretend to want to be a freelancer.
That's why different countries have various guidelines, e.g. if you economically depend on 1 contrahent (you fill in one invoice a month to the same one company), you are not self-employed, if you can't organize your own work however you like you are not self-employed, and so on.
So in general if you are driving for one company and 75% revenue comes from them, you are really not a freelancer.
This was and to a degree still is a big problem in e.g. Poland, where if you are unskilled you can be compelled to accept so called "trash contracts" which deny you any employee rights, but you are cheaper to the employer who exploits you.
It might be foreign to Americans who in general have extremely poor worker protection laws (even worse than the trash contracts I mentioned), but in many other countries it doesn't really work like that.
I know some software consultants that have one major client but appreciate the work mobility and forcing them to get into a full employment contract would restrict their opportunities and payment. Forget definitions, why should we outlaw this?
For exactly the reason, the parent post said, it makes all worker protection and benefits laws meaningless, and most people think these laws are a good thing.
If this was possible then every company would say:
"We don't want to have to bother to pay your vacation days, sick leave(for as long as you are sick), maternity/paternity leave(up to 12 months in most European countries), or to have to give you a permanent contract with limited termination grounds, so 'choose' to become Freelancer that works 40 hours a week for us or we will fire you".
It's true there are some people who like to work as you describe, I know some myself, but experienced software developers are a outlier case who are in an extremely fortunate position, not something the law should be optimised for at the expense of the majority.
All those things should actually be under the purview of the government, rather than businesses.
But that would increase government expenses because many more people would become eligible for the benefits. Using businesses as a proxy lets society implicitly restrict the quantity and quality of those benefits to certain people.
>All those things should actually be under the purview of the government, rather than businesses.
you know the reason these things are payed for by bussiness right?
most social welfare programs are created after world war 2, because the alternative was the workers simply seizing the wealth of their former bosses by force.
OP seems to greatly understimate how close most countries in europe came to a mass revolt of civil war after world war 1 and world war 2. (1848 revolutions are also an important time in history for civil rights).
the dutch for instance, have a constitution thanks to the threat of revolution in 1848. The alternative was the threat of revolution and the violent end of the monarchy.
The same is basically true for labour rights. In most european countries these got implemented after world war 1 and during the great depression, a time in which a lot of people got destitute and had acces to weaponry.(World war 1 also left a massive social trauma in many nations, leading to revolutions because of its effects on society).
"All those things should actually be under the purview of the government, rather than businesses."
How does this make sence - are we meant to move you on government payroll for the 1 week you have the flu and can't work? Should the government pay for your annual leave?
Even with a real UBI system, having random fluctuations in earnings when you get a cold or break a leg is not reasonable.
Additionally, this idea will incentivise employers to destroy human capital - like an employer could drive their employees to burnout and then discard them because they bear no consequences.
This is already happening to a large extent thanks to gig economy- Uk employers have cut their investments in staff training by 2.4 billion since 2011.
> Even with a real UBI system, having random fluctuations in earnings when you get a cold or break a leg is not reasonable.
You should have enough savings set aside that going without a paycheck for at least a week or two won't put you in dire straits—the official recommendation is actually several months. Anyone who is self-employed is already managing their own (unpaid) vacation time and medical leave. It is the expectation that income is guaranteed even when you aren't working—that you can safely live paycheck-to-paycheck without planning for the future—which is unreasonable.
UBI doesn't really count as "planning for the future" unless it's somehow contractually guaranteed for life and not subject to being curtailed as a result of shifting politics. A social program instituted with the passing of a bill can be limited or revoked in the same way at any time. If the goal is to ensure a predictable income stream then a fully-funded, non-revocable trust or annuity for the benefit of a specific person is a much more stable option.
> … like an employer could drive their employees to burnout and then discard them because they bear no consequences.
Just assume that an employer will take whatever an employee is willing to give regardless. It's the employees' responsibility to push back and manage their own work-life balance. It would be unreasonable (as in: an obvious conflict-of-interest) to expect employers to prioritize employees' welfare over their own.
"Just assume that an employer will take whatever an employee is willing to give regardless. It's the employees' responsibility to push back and manage their own work-life balance."
We have tried 'maximum capitalism' experiment in the 1800's: it gave us children in coal mines working 10 hours a day and dying of blacklung. It gave us people in workhouses losing their hands because the steam press malfunctioned and then starving to death because they have no way to support themselves.
Do you want goid old days back, or do you have good reason to believe it will be different this time?
You are describing corporatism, not capitalism. It is not "maximum capitalism" to always side with the employer in any dispute, ignoring the natural rights of the employee. If the employer causes harm to an employee, deliberately or through negligence, then the employer must make the victim whole. Non-aggression and strict liability for any harm done to others are integral aspects of a capitalist society. Employees have their own responsibilities, of course. If they knowingly take risks in pursuit of better pay then they ought to bear the consequences—the employer is not always at fault. This is a natural consequence of having the freedom to make your own choices.
Most places they don't prevent what you describe. There are usually just some extra hoops to jump through and/or some tax implications.
E.g. I'm in the UK. I've been a contractor with multiple contracts as well as with a single employer both in situations where they are obviously acting as an employer, and in situations where they were genuinely not.
Here there's specific legislation to handle this now - "IR35", which ensures that if your contract is equivalent to employment you'll be taxed accordingly, with an "umbrella company" acting as an employer on behalf of the company that you're contracting with if that is the case to prevent there from being a tax advantage from pretending to be freelance if you're in effect an employee. It doesn't stop you from doing it - it just takes away the tax advantage and creates some bureaucratic hurdles.
But it's easy to avoid as long as you're not trying to avoid taxes, by setting terms that ensures it doesn't match the criteria. Employers are often keen to do this, and it gives you extra negotiating power.
E.g. when I was doing this, key points involved the fact I had a small marketing budget to bring in additional work, I didn't usually work out of their office, I controlled my own hours, I determined how to carry out the work, I negotiated my day rate, the contract had a defined end-date (we could renew, but there are pitfalls there), and so on. Another strong sign you're genuinely not an employee is a right to substitution (e.g. if you can provide someone else to do the work, when you're not available and that right is genuine). UK tax authorities (HMRC) has a checklist as to what they consider "deemed employment" and or that falls under IR35 (it's not an absolute set of criteria, but basically the more you look like a business, the more likely you are to be considered one).
So for high earners like software consultants with an actual reasonable power balance vs. the other side, this is rarely a problem. It cost me a tiny proportion of my revenues to make sure that I met more than enough criteria to be able to do as I pleased.
But most of the people these regulations are there for are in a substantially weaker position. If you're a low enough earner to not be in a position to work around this, then you're not likely to have the power to genuinely negotiate either.
Who is "we" in this situation? For this specific case, it seems different countries have different opinions about what is the right tradeoff between allowing freelancers with leverage to enjoy their situation, and protecting workers with less bargaining power from being locked out of worker protection systems.
It's unavoidable, since different countries have different worker protection systems. For instance, some of these countries have to pick up the tab when employers cheat their way out of paying their dues.
Nothing is stopping you from being an actual freelancer. A large point of this ruling was that people working for Uber aren't actually freelancers, since they're not free to pick their clients or set/negotiate their own prices.
Both are features that Uber can implement, but you can't cheat the market. At the end of the day, if you're just driving someone from point A to point B, you're competing with everyone else at the moment doing the same. As a driver, your client in this case is either Uber, Lyft, or another ridesharing service. If they add the ability to decline riders, I don't see how it would be used for anything else besides discrimination.
But the same rules applied to all taxi drivers before Uber. In a lot of place taxi driver were forbidden to not accept customer hailing them, and the price is controlled almost everywhere. The logic would be that all taxi drivers have to been employed.
> In a lot of place taxi driver were forbidden to not accept customer hailing them
I've hang out with my fair share of taxi drivers around the world (mainly Europe and South America) but never once heard of them being forbidden of not accepting customers, and heard plenty of stories when someone really fucked up tried to hail them but they declined. It doesn't mean it's not forbidden, but hard to reconcile my understanding.
What places are you specifically thinking about where taxi drivers are not free to chose their customer?
In New York, the taxis with "medallions" are required to take you to places within the metro area. I'm not sure at what point that requirement sets in, whether it's hailing, or once you're in the cab, etc. but it's well-known that you can report them for refusing to take you somewhere.
It depends, there's a lot of local and national regulations in different countries.
For example in my part of the UK, only designated taxis can pick up ride hailers on the street, sort of like black cabs in London.
Private firms who use their own fleet of cars can only offer pre-booked services, e.g. pre booked airport runs.
Uber and co. shook this up a bit by offering a grey area, where the taxi ride isn't exactly hailed on the street (instead through the app) and is sort of "pre-booked" when you request it as the driver has to accept the job.
> For example in my part of the UK, only designated taxis can pick up ride hailers on the street, sort of like black cabs in London.
Yeah, that makes sense, that's the only thing I've seen around the world as well. But can these designated taxis reject customers at will? That was my question.
In most countries Taxi drivers cannot refuse a passenger hailing them. Its difficult to enforce and they normally claim they did not see you but they must take you:
Then it's stopping you from working for a company that forces you to take clients at a given price without an employment contract and all its implications. What if that's what I want? I think some Uber drivers appreciate the work mobility.
I know that there are circles in which it is argued freedom means being allowed to sell yourself into slavery, but you'd hope the vast majority of us have come to understand the danger of that interpretation of freedom.
You want to be forced to take clients you don't want. You want someone else to decide a price you might not want. You want to be unable to get employment benefits you might want.
I mean, that's some niche requirements there, I would categorise it as serfdom.
I am onboard in principle - I want try all the psychedelics, fly a plane without a licence and experiment with explosives for education purposes, but as R v Copeland shows, the law can't cater to everyone - tradeoffs have to be made.
What you want is to work with a service that customers will choose to rely on. This implies that sometimes—to get the benefit of being "an Uber driver" and not just some random guy with a car taking people for rides—you need to accept clients you wouldn't have chosen on your own, at standard prices set by someone else. It's not that you wouldn't prefer to pick and choose your clients or set your own prices, but if you insisted on doing things your own way all the time you wouldn't have nearly as many clients since they couldn't trust your service and your revenues would be much lower. Uber sets standards for drivers, which means clients can expect a certain quality of service, without which they would be much less inclined to accept rides, even from the same drivers.
You can certainly take that approach if you want, though. As an independent driver you own all the capital equipment in this business (your car) and you can stop working for Uber at any point without penalty and start offering rides under your own brand, on your own terms. However, you'll find that you still need to meet certain standards as to price and reliability if you want people to choose you over calling an Uber. Working for yourself doesn't mean you get to do whatever you feel like all the time without any commitments.
I'm a consultant in The Netherlands and for this purpose I control my own BV. Similar to an LLC in the USA.
But I don't drive a taxi, I do computer stuff. If you want to legitimately be independent in NL you can. I have a few friends in the construction industy(plumbers, carpenters, electricians, etc) who are ZZP'ers.
There are a few options open to people who legitimately want to be independent in their work, and this has absolutely nothing to do with this ruling. Or about Uber.
Uber is lying when it says that 90% of Dutch Uber drivers want to remain independent. There have been protests of Uber drivers wanting exactly this kind of ruling from the courts. And two major political parties (Groenlinks and PvDA) have been fighting for this. Uber is full of shit and they know it.
Just to point out, that a BV and an LLC are very different, in that anyone can have an LLC in the USA but the tax reporting requirements and overhead for a BV in NL are quite high and don't make much sense to anyone with an income less then.. well, quite high, by most standards. I know a lot of freelance software engineers in the netherlands, but none have a BV.
I know a lot of freelance software engineers in the Netherlands and quite a few of them do.
BV starts to make sense from about 100K turnover because you gain some tax advantages, it also makes working for larger entities easier and it allows you to charge a higher rate and to be in an easier position to work with subcontractors. It all depends on what you want, there are plenty of ZZP'ers in software development on the low end, but most of the high end will be through BV's.
What are those tax advantages, assuming that you're talking about income and not business expenses/investments? Why would making a BV enable you to charge higher rates if you're still the only 'employee' in the BV and have the same insurances?
In Switzerland and Germany there's a difference between an AG (Aktiengesellschaft) and a GmbH (Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung).
Both have more or less the same tax and structural advantage (like limited liability, a far easier time to get acknowledged by social security, etc)
The main difference is capital requirements and more formality for the AG. For example: The law requires yearly external audits for an AG, while that's not necessarily the case for a GmbH.
Does Holland also make such a difference, or is BV the only such corporate form?
Note: Differences listed apply for Switzerland. It could be different in Germany.
Nice overview(s) for Germany and most other countries with comparisons where appropriate.
Regarding the AG in Germany and required regular external auditing, in my university course where I learned about the charasteristics of the most common German legal entities [0], there was no such requirement listed or talked about, maybe that's only for Switzerland?
The GmbH on the other hand requires a minimum capital of 25.000€ and is expensive to form (from the course mentioned above >1.000€ in fees for notarizations etc.) which is one reason why the "UG (haftungsbeschränkt)" (essentially "baby's first GmbH") was established a while ago.
A UG only has to have a minimum of 1€ in starting capital but has to
> "enlarge its capital by at least 25% of its annual net profit (with some adjustments), until the general minimum of €25,000 is reached (at which point the company may change its name for the more prestigious GmbH)."
What is the difference between those freelance software engineers and the Uber drivers if they are freelancing for one company only?
As far as I know, and I am happy to be corrected by somebody more knowledgeable, the famous Dutch ZZP'ers are tolerated. There is in the Dutch Law not a clarification of their legal and tax position:
Both freelancing and ZZP don't have a legal definition. It's just a business. In these cases a business of one. Without being incorporated, so if you screw up, creditors can come after your personal bank account.
Correct. With a BV in the Netherlands, you get immediately the fiscal Calvinism of the Dutch tax office at play. Despite the fact that:
- You work for yourself so you get 100% of the risk
- You have no benefits
- If you are sick you get no pay, unless you make a very expensive work sickness/income insurance
the Dutch tax office, judges that they do not want you
to be in a "too advantageous fiscal position" ...( Not making this up...these are their own words) so, forces you to pay yourself a minimum yearly salary that is updated every year so they can tax you. It is currently at 47,000 EUR per year I believe...and is independently of you making money or not...
the reason they use this salary is for tax purposes. otherwise doing tax fraud would be easy with a BV. by simply not paying yourself a wage and living of the BV instead.
The BV has to pay taxes. And costs have to be business related. Since when living from your own work is considered fraud?
There is a fundamental principle here, and that is the tax office considering that, unlike a permanent employee who cannot be fired and has almost no liability, an entrepreneur, despite taking all the risk and having non of the benefits, is judged that it should be forced into the same tax position. Where is the upside then?
This coming from the same tax office, that has enabled some of the biggest tax dodgers in the planet:
"Netherlands earned €25 mil. from Google's tax avoidance"
"The Netherlands is still one of the world's main tax havens, coming in fourth place on Tax Justice Network's biennial ranking of tax havens. Only the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands and Bermuda scored worse than the Netherlands when it came to tax avoidance."
Good luck with that, if you pay for all the mandated services, you will run a deficit.
Yes people laugh off drivers as a no skill job, but it's a craft. Shift work, passenger safety and so forth, they need to pass a test, sure that's a bit outdated in the time of online maps.
But I can not simply open a dentistry just because I feel so due to lifestyle choices.
I got a black cab a couple of weeks ago in London (it was chucking it down) near St Pauls. Asked to go to Nandos in Southwark.
The vaunted "knowledge" failed miserably as he pulled over to drop me off -- I looked up and saw we were just south of Tower Bridge. he clearly hadn't got a clue. I said "just take me to Southwark tube station". I know there's all sorts of one way systems but when he was heading to Bermondsey I just told him to let me out and got the tube (well tried to - Southwark was closed, so ended up at Waterloo and having to walk)
Uber just works because it's not based on a system from 1865.
> sure that's a bit outdated in the time of online maps
As a passenger I feel it's a significant qualitative difference if I have a driver who knows his way around town compared to one who obviously and fixatedly relies on the GPS.
Indeed, here in Belgium there are extensive requirements for taxi drivers in terms of certification, education and vehicle maintenance. That's one of the reasons Uber never really succeeded here - even as a "freelance driver", you still need to be qualified and that takes time and effort.
In London you can now report the driver if they're on the road with a "broken" card machine, as that makes the car considered "unfit".
A lot of drivers still use unapproved card devices, though (TFL points out handheld terminals are explicitly not approved, yet I regularly have taxi drivers insist their fixed terminal isn't working, and to use a handheld one), which I'm taking means there's assorted tax fraud going on.
Obviously this takes the company to provide those sorts of jobs. The problem for Uber is that they won't be able to —as easily— have slack staff, because they'll have to pay them minimum wage to wait for new fares.
Not in the Netherlands anymore according to this judgement. You won't have that choice anymore unless there are some very specific circumstances (an interior decorator working for clients would not be in an inferior position to some kind of organisation, for instance).
If you're a freelancer, a client could not be enforcing the demand that you don't work for other similar employers, nor demand that you take every single gig that they ask you to do.
Uber wants it both ways, and correctly, the courts have stopped them from doing so.
> demand that you don't work for other similar employers, nor demand that you take every single gig
That's news for me.
Where I live, every single taxi driver has an app open for every uber-like company in the city, including Uber (there are at least four that I know of, most certainly more).
Absolutely it will. Everytime you try and force a labor law, companies have people who are smart and figure out a way around it. Now they can tell Uber drivers when they will work and where they will work. So if you don’t want to work the night shift, too bad. They will keep the part time hours to just the minimum needed and whatever shortfall they have to hit their yearly plan will be supplemented by releasing drivers who won’t work busy and profitable times. If you are the guy who drives a few evenings a week on the side, you may be out of luck.
You should also have a choice to not use Uber; besides customer discovery, what does Uber offer you that's worth their bad pay and commission?
Plenty of old fashioned taxi companies that operate via a phone number or text messages. You don't need Uber if you want to be a freelancer. And as a court ruled, you're not actually a freelancer if you work for Uber.
How does that work out for a single taxi driver and customers calling them directly? They may be on the other side of town and get 5 calls at the same time, leaving most of their customers without service. Or more likely, customers will want to call one number and have a local cab dispatched to them from whoever is available.
Now what would be nice is if someone would start a service, say a mobile-web-first service, that a bunch of independent cab drivers could sign up for. Then that service would act as a dispatcher (taking a cut of the fare), and send a dispatch message to whichever independent cab driver is closest by. Of course that sounds a lot like what Uber is doing. Which then goes back to, are these drivers independent, or are they working for that dispatch service?
To make it truly independent, they would need to have more than one dispatch service that they could work at the same time (say both Uber and Lyft). And have a protocol so that dispatches from both services don't step on each other. Plus the ability for a customer to flag them down at random. Now they really are a self-employed contractor using these services as customer discovery / dispatch services.
What does that have to do with employment status? Does the Dutch Commercial Law state that the employees should only work on firm-appointed hours? The hours worked are already logged, the only new responsibilities fall on Uber except for filling a few documents for employment.
They can still offer flexibility. No one was really, really autonomous, autonomous, though.
Are the drivers you talk to actually friends of yours? Are they driving to make a living? Are they stuck driving due to poor child care choices? Are they on the clock and hesitant to dismiss the company they work for?
Have you asked them if they'd rather the company process the taxes? Do they have difficulty doing so? Have any of them found themselves in a hole because of the 'contractor' system?
I'll add that this isn't like a normal contract job: Uber needs drivers. Without drivers, they wouldn't have a business. And they need them constantly - not in the way that a firm needs temporary help to upgrade things.
I'd say "wrongly so". The right answer is somewhere in the middle, leaning to "contractor". Drivers literally never have to even show up. The flexibility offered by contractor status is the #1 benefit to drivers.
Yes, Uber, since their gig workers are now employees. \s
Under Dutch law, to be classified as an independent contractor you also need to be able to set your own prices and have a "significant" (the law is fairly specific but it is too long for a HN comment) say in exactly how you provide your services. The court ruled that Uber drivers do not meet this bar and are therefore not independent contractors. TBH, the "ZZP" construction used has always been a fairly transparent attempt by Uber and the other gig companies to evade labor regulations for their own profits and I'm glad that the court has issued a clear statement about it.
Just because you can pick your own hours/work schedule, that doesn’t make you an independent contractor. At least it’s not determinative in the US under federal law nor any state that I am aware, but maybe that is the Dutch law and the court just got it wrong here
Here in the Netherlands, where the ruling was made, it's definitely the case that being able to determine your own hours is one of the requirements of being a freelancer.
When I was freelancing, clients could not tell me at what time I had to be in the office, when I could live, or on which days I had to go, to avoid me being considered an employee.
To determine if they are employees we look for ways the Uber/driver relationship is similar and different to other businesses using the employee model.
To determine if they are contractors we look for ways the user/driver relationship is different from other businesses using the employee model.
If no other businesses allow employees to set their number of hours with such flexibility then that is evidence the relationship doesn't fall under the employee model.
This need not be all or nothing but it is (obviously) a factor.
It's funny that Uber decided to force employment laws to avoid paying social security, taxes and other obligations related to regular employment, but won't force employment laws to allow employees to work any number of hours they want whenever they want.
Especially in the EU the gig economy is relatively new and its not at all like factory workers who're getting shafted more and more as the years go by.
Being an Uber driver is a new thing which people started doing voluntarily knowing full well what the conditions were. For people then to start complaining "this is a abuse" and OMG no social security just seems ... weird.
Here in Belgium you now need to have a taxi license and everything good about Uber is now gone (it's more expensive, the drivers are all moody a-holes and they've gone back to doing detours for no reason just to jack up the price).
Social security is just a hole in the Dutch law, freelancers should just also start paying social security. Like they do for instance in Spain, then they can also get unemployment money etc.
The effect of this will be temporary 0 hour contract and you create exactly the same situation with less flexibility for the employee and a limit of three contracts of a year.
I'm Dutch but not particularly knowledgeable about this, but as far as I understand it the reason being a ZZP'er is so popular is precisely because you don't have to hand in a lot of money to required stuff like retirement and insurance and stuff.
The types of zzzp'ers I'm most familiar with are in construction and they are cheaper than traditional businesses. They're outcompeting traditional businesses because they don't have to pay retirement and insurance and all that.
It's been a topic for years here what to do about ZZP'ers because if something _does_ happen to one at work (ie an accident to their health or to the house they're working on it whatever) they typically don't have insurance which leads to big personal problems for them.
It's like a high risk high reward type of thing, but the issue is that they're also outcompeting traditional workers all over the place.
Otoh, if you were to require them to pay for stuff like insurance and retirement, the whole idea of being a zzp'er will cease to make any sense. You don't earn any higher any more, you will need to charge more so people have no reason to prefer your services over traditional ones.
Zzp'er just means that you work alone and have no personnel. Ie,
similar to a freelancer basically.
Also sadly enough, often zzp'ers are less skilled than traditionally employed individuals. Not exactly sure why that is but might be related to how they were trained and a lack of institutional knowledge due to not working with an established workplace/having regular colleagues etc
Everybody pays retirement, the public one, you pay it through taxes. They probably don't pay a private pension. And insurance yes, some don't pay disability insurance which pays you for a while if you're injured and can't work (don't underestimate here the lobby of the insurance companies who pay the press to complain that people don't buy their insurance policies. In the end they are the ones who profit most). One benefit of being a zzper is that you don't have overhead. When you're employed the company gets 100/hr for your work and pays you 25/hr, some of that money may be there to keep you employed when there's less work to do, although when a company is in trouble they will find a way to fire you. The most part goes to the owner of the company, who can take it out, or grow the company, but in the end for their own benefit. There's other dynamics of course, take construction companies, projects come and go, sometimes one company gets a big project, then sometimes another one gets it. These are different companies. They couldn't always employ the same number of people, but they benefit that they can quickly scale the workforce by hiring zzp-ers.
If ZZP outcompetes more "socially responsible" options, it's a buggy system and should be fixed. Freedom as a freelancer should probably be the only/primary benefit of such a designation, not the ability to dodge responsibilities.
Must is just as wrong as won't. The ideal solution is, drivers being given the choice. Wanna earn more (but less predictable), pay less tax, have less social security, work whenever you want to? Or do you want to earn less (but completely predictable), pay more tax, have unemployment security, work fixed hours.
> The ideal solution is, drivers being given the choice.
Choice is real only when you have options. Here, the option of having a fixed-income, fixed-time taxi driver job will get out-competed in the long term because it is more expensive, so the other option will be to have no job. Not paying into social security and pension funds saves a lot of money! It may even seem beneficial to the driver in the short term. But it offloads the costs further down the line to society or the driver personally (when reaching pension age or getting sick).
Maybe that type of innovation is simply not good for society and better avoided.
In this case, the consumers are making the choice, not the drivers. I'd generally prefer consumers to have more options than drivers, you can't just sacrifice one for the other...
Same as any independent contractor / self-employed person. In a sane country, they'd be required to pay into social security system themselves. In many countries, however, being self-employed is a tax loophole.
The issue is that minimum employment rights are less effective in general if it’s possible to opt out of them. For lots of people, they’re not worth sacrificing earning potential for (this is one of the reasons contractors exist).
Most people wouldn’t think that a person earning a high hourly/daily rate working in some big enterprise, or a freelancer that takes home a respectable annual income is being exploited. But lots of people think that lower income gig contractors are definitely being exploited. I think the truth is actually a bit more complicated than that, but in any case, the law in most countries is that a person must not be allowed to enter into any arrangement that resembles employment if a set of minimum entitlements aren’t provided.
One way of looking at contracting arrangements is that they’re simply a way of bypassing these requirements. This never used to be a contentious issue, because contractors used to be primarily high income earners. But now that there’s a new class of lower income contractors, they must be protected, and the regulatory response has generally been to outlaw elements of contracting agreements in general.
A more sensible approach, if you wanted to achieve this outcome, would be to apply these regulations only to contractors that bill below a particular rate. But that would require making legislative concessions for high income earners, and nobody cares about doing that. I’ve been a contractor for years, and I can guarantee you that nobody is being exploited when I bill some huge bank an especially high hourly rate for months on end, but anti-contractor regulations routinely interfere with my ability to do so.
Welcome to society. I'm not sure where you live but in every country I know of there are plenty of things you can't do with your car and/or your free time.
Not harming others is a condition you just added to the argument, and it is also a condition that Uber does not meet in the eyes of Dutch law. By not paying taxes on the wages of their drivers, Uber shifts the costs for the healthcare, pensions and general public services (dikes, fire services, etc etc) of those drivers onto the rest of society, thereby harming all those companies and citizens that do pay their taxes as required.
> … thereby harming all those companies and citizens that do pay their taxes as required.
The only one harming them is the tax collector. Taxes are the harm here; Uber is providing a means for some to avoid being harmed. It's just too bad that they can't help everyone else the same way.
I don't know where you are from, but in the Netherlands our taxes actually pay for useful stuff. Corruption is low and public infrastructure is well maintained. Sure, it would have been even better if some things had been avoided (the F-35 springs to mind) but overall taxes bring more good than harm to the citizens here.
Taking what belongs to someone else and choosing how it will be used without the owner's consent is the purest essence of theft. It makes no difference whatsoever that—according to your own values and preferences, not theirs—you think the benefit outweighs the cost. You don't get to make that choice for them. Regardless of how the money is used the very fact that their choice was taken away is harmful in itself, and only by returning what was stolen—plus compensation for lost time and opportunities—can the victim be made whole.
because it ignores the reality of european society: it's not a libertarian utopia, it's a society where the states do dictate things.
More specifically, it's blind to the fact that the parent comment is about existing regulation which is being abused.
It's like arguing with someone saying "you can't drive at 100 km/h in a residential area" with "well I am a CAN person myself, and I don' think we should say CAN'T".
Driving at 100km/h in a residential area harms others with a high probability. Can you say that of someone working the way they want to with transactions consented between two adults?
that is not the point I was making, the point is that it's stating an opinion that a regulation is wrong versus an argument that the regulation is being infringed.
The whole appeal for the drivers was "employment-like" opportunities with more freedom for themselves. This takes that away. If they wanted regular jobs they would have sought that.
You make it sound like the job situation in the Netherlands is desperate. From what I can tell by searching, unemployment is only about 3%. Where's the desperation in that?
Uber drivers I've talked to didn't join because they were desperate -- they joined to have more freedom and control.
Everyone is abusing everything. We've seen time and time again companies abusing employees with hard work, long schedules, unsafe environments and skimping on safety, which is why we have laws for safe working environments now.
Sometimes work is physically hard, and the effect of that type of work usually doesn't show until you've done it for a longer time. So not only should you get money for the time and effort you spend, you should also get money for how hard the work was on your body. Pension and other benefits help with this.
That's not so much an effect of years of hard work as it is that as you get older your capacity for hard work declines. Also we already have government pensions. So why should a company have to provide them? The economic effect of this is that workers have to wait years for some of their pay instead of getting it right now.
As programmers or office based workforce, the worst hazards might be carpal tunnel syndrome, bad back from bad posture and maybe an upset stomach from a bad coffee.
I have known plenty of young guys in the UK who went on these fly in fly out jobs on gas or oil platforms in Australia, as it's a relatively uncomplicated way to get a well paid job (the only good thing about it) due to easy access to Australia, being commonwealth etc.
Some of them turned into literal cripples within 2-3 years, others half cripples requiring re education or placement in a less physically demanding job.
It's not the same doing this once for a weekend and then classify it as "not so hard" and go out there, work in 100 deg heat or sub freezing temperatures every day, rain, wind etc.
It grinds down a body slowly.
> That's not so much an effect of years of hard work as it is that as you get older your capacity for hard work declines
Sure, if you're a programmer this might be true, but for most of physical jobs out in the world, the physicality of the job is literally tearing down peoples bodies one way or another.
> Also we already have government pensions
Yeah, so not "A job should trade work for cash and no more" but "A job should trade work for cash + pension" as pension is a social benefit.
> The economic effect of this is that workers have to wait years for some of their pay instead of getting it right now
No, the economic effect of this is that workers get paid for their work now, and the effect of that work in the future.
To be honest if there was government provided universal healthcare, basic income, and housing guarantees I would totally agree. It would create a ton more mobility, and take a lot of power away from employers.
That's what I'm talking about though. The government thinks people should have these things but doesn't have the political will to implement them so they demand that employers provide them rather than just paying cash. This is the reason that the category 'employee' exists in the first place.
‘so they demand that employers provide them..’
Yes, that’s the situation in the US, yes, not sure how relevant it’s to this discussion, though. In many European countries healthcare is funded through a payroll tax and provided by the government/a public agency.
That comes from a privileged point of view. People with little skills will be coerced to give up these things and the cost will be shifted on other people.
sadly, that is not how capitalism works in practice.
employers have a vastly higher amount of leverage at the negotiation table compared to employees.
Dutch society (and most of western Europe) has made an explicit choice to create a social contract in which employees and employers are bound by the law of the government in question. and that law contains rules about employment.
mind you these rules exists because of the risk of the threat of violent uprisings in the 1850's.
the revolutions of 1848 are a result of working in the way you just stated. it leads to massive unrest and instability.
You can include southern and eastern Europe as well, it's just bit different there.
When society was still less mobile and many jobs were meant to be forever(when I started to work, this was coming to an end slowly), workers took their jobs very seriously(none of that we are family messaging on intranets like these days) and everyone knew their place, workers respected a managers authority and I have seen on more than one occasions how attempted manager power play was shut down right on the spot, often with let's say credible promises of sever aggression.
Some parts of Europe have a population that's a bit short tempered, such things like some coked up Uber manager touching someone's gf or wife would be dealt with swiftly and personally.
There are many such social contracts, written, unwritten and I am proud that Europe has them and is keeping them.
Interestingly, having spent plenty of time in LATAM, many people consider themselves leftists, but it's very, very different, the social system is bad due to lack of money, or impractical allocation of funds, but the will and spirit is there.
If this ever happens in the U.S. I won't bother with driving Uber anymore and this would probably put them out of business. The Taxi industry will win back from the disruption that Uber caused.
This has nothing to do with worker's rights. No one gave a crap about Taxi driver's work standards and they are/were treated worse than Uber drivers.
This is all about the Taxi industry fighting back.
75% of all ride share drivers would prefer to remain independent.
In Chicago, I can make $42/hour driving Uber. I still don't understand how anyone can claim I'm being mistreated.
I also have never heard a proven argument against Uber.
- Uber passengers LOVE the service. Way more than taxi service or public transportation.
- Since Uber started, drunk driving injuries/fatalities are down 30%-35%.
- Drivers can be anyone with a working car. There is no "interview". You get background checked and your car is inspected.
- Drivers get to write off miles.
- Drivers get discounts on service at Jiffy Lube and tire stores.
Now if people are worried about employment practices, why not look at Walmart, Amazon, Target, and most retail stores. They intentionally staff people with erratic weekly hours, keeping shifts to 4 hours (no breaks or lunches required) and no one reaches 35 hours to enforce benefits.
You can't compare Uber to Retail.
I'm 100% liberal and support progressive worker protection, but Uber isn't actually hurting anyone. Only the Taxi industry and the cities that used to make a fortune on selling "medallions" to license taxis. In Chicago those were $400k and in NYC they were even more. So imaging you're a Taxi company with 200 medallions. Uber basically just shredded your net worth.
>Now if people are worried about employment practices, why not look at Walmart, Amazon, Target, and most retail stores. They intentionally staff people with erratic weekly hours, keeping shifts to 4 hours (no breaks or lunches required) and no one reaches 35 hours to enforce benefits.
> They intentionally staff people with erratic weekly hours, keeping shifts to 4 hours
I literally have family members who work full shifts. You're taking anecdotal examples and extrapolating that to the entire retail force. dumb opinion.
My ex-wife has worked in retail at all levels for 40 years. District managers intentionally force schedules to be broken up so breaks and lunches, outside of managers, are never needed. They intentionally over-hire to make sure they pay the absolute least amount. The average weekly schedule is 30-31 hours and those are broken up into 4 to 6 hour chunks. You may get a break if you're lucky. You may get a lunch if you're on for 8 hours. But the clear direction of the industry is to limit each worker to the least amount of hours, eliminate non-working time, and make sure benefits and overtime are never paid.
The ACA has absolutely nothing to do with employer based healthcare.
The cost of healthcare is the direct result of the creation of the HMO laws during Reagan's presidency, allowing hospitals and doctors to make pre-arranged profit oriented agreements that increased insurance costs.
A recent study suggests Chicago drivers earn less than minimum wage.
> After accounting for driving expenses and self-employment taxes, the average TNP driver in Chicago earns about 3% to 5% less than minimum wage. In 2019, drivers earned $12.30 per hour, or 5% less than the city’s minimum wage of $13 per hour at the time. In 2020, drivers earn slightly above minimum wage, but the hourly rate of pay was artificially inflated due to the reduction of traffic congestion on Chicago roads. With pre-pandemic levels of traffic congestion, drivers would have only earned an hourly wage of $13.62 per hour after expenses and taxes, which is 3% below the city’s minimum wage of $14 per hour at the time. The authors note that the city’s minimum wage will increase to $15 per hour on July 1, 2021.
So it's unskilled labor that offers the same (+/- a single digit percentage) pay after expenses as compared to other minimum wage jobs, but offers substantially better flexibility of hours. I can still see why plenty of people would prefer it to flipping burgers.
I 100% refute that story. After taxes I’m still making close to $30/hr. I get to write off mileage at $.58/mile so my taxes get lowered.
I can show anyone my weekly driver log that shows how many hours I drove and how much I was paid. It is at least $42/hr and on weekends it can be $50/hr.
The take away here is not that you are wrong or that Uber is a bad choice for everyone. It's that some number of people provide diving services to Uber at a rate lower than we generally allow.
So it's about if we want to let companies hire individuals to do contract work that would be below the level we would allow someone to hire an employee. And, if we do (which I think we should) how do we set the standards of such an arrangement? Being an app driver is clearly different from being a traditional independent contractor (handyman, etc), but it is also different from being an employee. What a fair and just version of this relationship looks like is, to me, obviously unsettled.
P.s. Uber lost ~$4.5B last year on ~$11B revenue. It does not seem reasonable to say that the payment rates you've been getting represent what Uber 'will be' in a long term way. The economic situation is not sustainable.
Well good thing independent contractors are exempt from minimum wage laws! And union protections, mandatory breaks, sick days, workers compensation, health insurance, overtime pay, discrimination law, unemployment insurance, employer liabilities to social security pay...
Wait a minute, I think this is intentional! Can you imagine an employer trying to subvert the gains of the labor movement?!
Uber isn't subverting the labor movement. It's a very small part of the overall economy. Go look at bigger industry practices to find the bad guys.
The Uber model will never translate to Retail, Tech, Banking, Finance, Healthcare.
It does translate to transportation, food and package delivery. Let the disruption make capitalism more efficient. Focus on areas where a balance is important, like making healthcare and college universally free.
If I subtract my entire vehicle cost over three years, I’m still making $25/hr or more.
But everyone seems to forget that it’s the independence that driver’s love. I can turn the app on/off whenever I feel like it. That’s a level of freedom that no other “job” offers.
Unfortunate consequence of a legacy legal system. Uber drivers are clearly neither quite like employees nor are they entrepreneurs, and the law should come up with a fitting category that ensures they are protected from exploitation but continue to enjoy some of the freedoms associated with the gig economy.
And after you define this mid-point employment classification between traditionally employed and self employed, businesses who hold the leverage will look at the segments from traditionally employed to the new mid-point as we as self-employed to the new midpoint.
They'll then choose which classification gymnastics they can perform under the legal language and optimize on to minimize their labor costs. That'll take a couple years and the law change to catchup to this abusive behavior avoiding the intent of the law will take another 10-30 years, and we'll repeat the process.
We need better definitions for the labor relation that make it difficult to play these optimization games created simply to optimize on labor and more significant consequences for that behavior to encourage businesses to innovate in other areas (like, I don't know, technology, new products, improved products, etc.) instead of simply extracting wealth from their own workforces.
To be fair to Uber they did create new value in finding and scheduling rides/taxies and I think that is a valuable service. That infrastructure and convenience has a cost though. No longer do you need to hail a taxi and deal with trying to pass directions, miscommunication of destination and charge rates and so on. But it seems they've passed many of those costs onto the drivers themselves and probably consumers to assure a certain sort of profit margin per transaction.
The regulations in The Netherlands in this regard have recently (May 20160) been updated to prevent fake freelance/independent status.
There are a bunch of guidelines, but the main factors generally boil down to these questions: Is the employee working for a single employer? How much independence do they have? (e.g. holidays, working hours, etc.)
Were the contract details mandated by the employer? etc.
Its not hard to imagine a software engineer who likes to work a part time job on the weekends, gets to set their own hours as long as they complete assigned tickets, and who negotiated their employment contract aggressively. That person would still be an employee.
Possibly a better option is to remove these categories together. What would happen if we struck the whole concept of "Employment" from the law. As a person you just had the chance to get income. We can retarget all of the laws and benefits previously using Employment to be about income instead. If you make an income you can pay into a pension, pay taxes... Everyone is entitled to some number of vacations and sick days that can not be taken away from a contract. (any contract)
I'm sure there are some complexities due to the weaker relationship between the two, but it seems like it would be beneficial to remove this somewhat artificial cliff between self-employed contractors or employees which is almost certainly more of a septum. (For example freelance picking up jobs posted to a public job board, to a contractor in frequent contracts with multiple companies, to a contractor working with a single company, to an employee which works with one company.)
I agree with you in my area it replaces some FB groups for long distance drives/hitchhiking (a hour or more of driving is not unusual), but not taxis/uber, because the driver sets a price, when they will arrive and where they will meet/drop you (usually a gas station), it is also generally true that it is just gas money (cheaper than a uber fare of the same distance). There is a uber-like service where the passenger makes a fare offer and if I'm not mistaken the driver can make a counter offer, it is called indriver, but I don't know if it exists there.
I fully agree but I don't believe Uber has the best interests of society in mind and care more about their investors.
Exploitation of workers would be a feature to them not a bug.
This is also my stance. Everyone debates whether Uber drivers and gig workers are employees or contractors: They are clearly neither. But people love a dichotomy, I guess.
Uber is a unsustainable business built employee exploitation to effectively pay them less than minimum wage while flouting "freedom" to bait the people in the worst situations. This was known from the start. Meanwhile subsidising rides with investor-cash to effectively bait-and-switch society. The recent-ish price hikes are only a start.
Anyone repeating their PR should be ashamed. "gigs" are cancer or wait, this is hackernews so "Gig-economy considered harmful" is the correct nomenclature I guess.
How is the "gig economy" any different from the usual tricks that employers get around benefits?
Walmart, for example, will schedule employees < 30 hours and stack entire stores with part timers.
My confusion is that the gig economy companies get a large share of the hate (justified or unjustified) but much of the criticism seems to boil down to unregulated capitalism.
I don't care that they exist in many places. Corona is in 200+ different ethical and regulatory environments/societies, I think that that is likewise bad for society and hope we get rid of it.
There's enough other comments with the typical "nuance" you can read.
>"Corona is in 200+ different ethical and regulatory environments/societies, I think that that is likewise bad for society and hope we get rid of it."
COVID has killed over four and a half million people; about four million people have driven for Uber (worldwide). Do you really think that doing some driving for Uber and dying of COVID are "likewise bad"?
I feel this is very disingenuous on Uber's part. Either it's just their way of distracting from the actual point, or they really don't understand what is happening. The case wasn't about what driver's prefer, but about the reality of driving for Uber. What small bit of independence drivers had in setting their own hours is not necessarily eroded by this ruling. It just means Uber will have to (gasp!) innovate to deal with a few specific things. I think Uber making cases like these out to require fundamental changes to the business model is absurd.
Yes, also it is to be expected that Uber has a large number of drivers that only do a couple of riders per week while a smaller number of drivers work full time. The larger number of drivers that only do a few rides of course would be in favor of flexibility, but this ruling is as far as I understand mainly about protecting those who work for Uber full time.
I remember quite well some people here claiming that Uber was just about to replace all their drivers with autonomous cars. It was back in 2015... we're in 2021.
Often times an expensive machine with an expensive service contract that requires an expensive technician is often a lot more expensive than just hiring someone for minimum wage and offering zero benefits. It's why McDonalds has had technology to automate burger flipping since the invention of the integrated circuit but prefers to use cheaper part time labor instead to this day, and why car factories only started using more automation and reducing headcounts in factories only after labor unions began demanding better pay and benefits.
Depends on how much more expensive autonomous car is. If such car is 1 million and regular is 100k and lifetime of both is 5 years you can pay more than 20 per hour to driver...
The hardware (ML chips, failsafe systems, LIDAR, radar, cameras, other sensors) isn't cheap. I'd expect an autonomous car to cost at least 5k-10k more if mass produced at a similar scale, and probably more than that in practice due to smaller numbers. Plus R&D of course.
Depends. If the driver is judged to be an employee, the employer can be liable, depending on circumstances.
Extreme ends of the spectrum:
- Company didn’t and couldn’t know that the driver was too drunk/tired to drive
- Employee complained about working hours and traffic conditions; employer threatened employee with dismissal.
> Who's liable if the automated car crashes?
Again, depends. Could be the taxi company, the car owner, the manufacturer, even the driver (if they ignored zillions of warnings from the car, for example)
But does every single way to make money have to provide a living wage with full health benefits, etc.? Seems like you limit types of innovation that could otherwise happen. For example, say you create some kind of trash cleanup/recycling incentive app that pays out some small amount for trash/recyclables picked up and turned in. Soon: everyone is outraged that some poor person can't make a living wage picking up recyclables and they try to force you to hire all users of your app as full time employees with full health benefits, etc. That doesn't seem right.
Can't compare that app to Uber, Uber hasn't innovated much of anything besides a tracking app with a payment integration. Lift forked their product in no time.
They have undercut the competition, skirted laws, pay horrible wages, promised a self driving fleet , this is the funniest to me.
I bet they want that released without too much regulatory friction too.
There was this incident where their fsd fleet car run over 6 red lights consecutively.
The break it ask for forgiveness later approach is generally not welcome in Europe, it's regarded as borderline criminal practice.
And then delay court procedures and are the other slimy practices.
Always easier to make a buck when breaking the law when everyone else is not breaking it.
These companies have compliance departments and lawyers not to see what's legal, but to see how much they can get away with.
Today, a Dutch Judge showed them the demarcation lines.
I agree with this in theory but you have to contend with how people actually engage with these kinds of gig jobs. You can't just legalese "this isn't a full time job" when people are working it as a full time job.
This already exists but without an app. Anyone can collect scrap and sell it to a recycling center. Plenty of homeless people use this as a primary income source. No one has ever tried to classify it as employment.
The other side of this is that many laws do not neatly accommodate advances in technology. There are currently laws in place that predate cars, predate the internet, predate electricity. At some point, in some contexts, they will be a hinderance rather than a benefit.
How were they fooled? In the Netherlands, no one is forced to work anywhere. People drive Ubers out of their own volition, whether we think it's stupid or not. I'm not sure about other countries but in China where the market used to be even less regulated, both drivers and customers switched in droves from traditional taxis to ride hailing apps. For various reasons they just like it better. And it's not exactly difficult to see the advantages even if you have concerns about labor laws.
There's always a case to be made that any form of employment is exploitation. Sararīman, as the corporate slave is known in Japan. The question is how much regulation do we want. And do we want it for regulation's sake, or does it actually benefit the people. There are many labor laws that hinder innovation and keep employment down.
> There are many labor laws that hinder innovation and keep employment down
I think it's fair to say that the huge majority of labor laws actually protect laborers, and have been won through blood and sweat over many generations. To opt on "the safe side" and say "look, yes jobs at Uber are complicated, but if you work there 40 hours per week then it's a fulltime job and we should treat it as such" is quite fair.
This is 100% the case in Sweden. Since Uber is a ride service/taxi they are just like any other taxi company, of which there are hundreds (Taxi has one simple definition and it's to offer rides to the public for money). Since there are no artifical caps on number of taxis such as medallions, all that's required to run a taxi is to have a special drivers' license and a certified vehicle.
So all Uber drivers are taxi drivers and all Uber vehicles are taxi vehicles. Simple.
If Uber tried to somehow do taxi services without their drivers having taxi drivers licenses or their cars being registred taxi cars, they'd be laughed at.
Everything is really really simple once there is no taxi monopoly or medallion system.
For Finland it is same. But it seems removing controls of licenses and pricing lead to worse service availability and higher prices... Who would have thought that operating taxi in country like Finland is pretty expensive...
You're forgiven. I also live in the NL and I almost never see them. The last time I saw an Uber was two years ago when a friend came from the USA and wanted to use their app to call a Uber.
But then again I never take taxis either. For me it's either walk, bike or OV. It might be like that for you as well, which is why you forgot they exist.
Same in Finland, Baltics or central/eastern Europe. Almost everything is within walkable/bike-able distance. Public transportation has good coverage, is affordable and safe. Taking taxis is just not something people normally do. From here, Uber feels like a quintessentially American solution for a quintessentially American problem.
Real world example - taking Uber to my workplace would cost me one-two hours of net pay, and I'm in the top 5% earners. Another one-two hours of net pay to go back home.
For comparison - public transportation costs 3€/day regardless of usage, and only takes about 15% longer to get there.
‘..Baltics’ maybe in Estonia.. in Lithuania Uber (or rather companies that are competing with it) is quite popular and that prices were very low (due to competition between different apps) until quite recently (mass transit is not that great here, though). AFAIK while not used by most people, it is also quite popular in Ukraine. Due huge income inequality the prices are very low but there is still a substantial section of the population which can afford it.
Indeed. I don't own or travel by car. I just remember reading that the "Uber Pop" app was not allowed, but Uber Black(?) was, but it was more expensive and had licensed drivers. That was many years ago.
The so called gig economy was built upon a unsustainable business model that depends of exploitation of workers.
It's not just Uber. All companies in the gig economy work like this. It's not only about paying minimum wage and benefits either, it's also about shifting the costs of doing business to the workers calling them independent contractors.
As independent contractors, drivers need to pay for their car, pay for gas, taxes, insurance and maintenance costs, but if they were employees from the beginning, all these costs would be getting out of the Uber's pockets.
I was thinking a similar thought. As the word for obviously doesn't really apply here, the word over offers a nice "neutral" alternative to against.
Edit: the threads got merged now. At the time that I commented, the title was "Uber Loses Battle Over Drivers’ Rights in the Netherlands" and the link was going to Bloomberg.
What we have here is a unique, unprecedented, real life experiment in Game Theory.
Possible outcomes:
- Uber could pull out from the Netherlands
- Drivers in the Netherlands could organize themselves, but they will need a structure similar to Uber
- Other countries will follow the Netherlands ruling
We could see the implosion of the gig economy (doubt it) or - most probably - some places like the Netherlands will be gig-economy-free zones; and we'll see the impact on their economies.
Uber could pull out from NL, and not be missed, as the country is not super car dependent to start with.
Taxi's (or uber like services) are rarely used here.
People mostly walk, bike or take public transport.
As for the implosion of the gig economy, I doubt it too. We've had a neo-liberal gov for the last 12 years, and they've pushed the gig economy (successfully) within the boundaries of north western EU social democracy (Dutch: ZZP).
What we are witnessing here is the courts pushing back on companies abusing the system. They can't have it both ways; wanting flexible workers with those kinds of wages, with demanding 'contracts' akin to employee contracts.
I think the competitive advantages of Uber will weaken with all these legal challenges. In NYC, as Uber prices increased dramatically after the pandemic began to wane, folks just starting catching cabs again. The cabs use ride hailing apps. I no longer care about the rating system or any of that. It is fine.
And Gett is dependent on the taxi cartel, its excessive price, the black market of taxi medallions, etc. It's a nonsensical market and we're overdue a shared transport option. Good luck getting around on Saturday.
All because it's illegal to take money to transport someone from A to B without an exorbitant license for no specific reason.
When the city of Austin, TX added some minor regulations around ride share companies, Uber and Lyft left the city. About 24 hours later, ten new services started up. Shortly after that, Uber and Lyft came back.
Or Uber could start actually offering the service they claim to offer: providing a marketplace where independent freelance drivers can offer rides and people needing rides can buy them.
The thing that interests me here is company valuation. The base idea is that you predict the future profits of a company and NPV that down to today, and that's how much the total share price should be.
This of course is tricky, but at some point all the big regulatory arbitrage plays (uber, airbnb) etc were obvious for what they were - and I am not sure they got adjusted. In other words short term competition and PR played as big a role it seems in valuation models as did "can airbnb keep renting out against local laws"
I have not dug into their IPO documents but it must be in there.
But once you are worth a gazillion dollars regulators have an uphill struggle.
The thing is short selling is such a poor way to signal criticism of the company. Investing is a default optimistic thing.
And I am not sure there is an alternative. Some kind of anti-investment?
But that's not the point - I mean if everyone did then the company would get the point. But look at Climate change. FOr decades its been "ignore the tree huggers" - but imagine there was an investment vehicle that was "anti-Exxon" - its hard to stand up at the AGM and say "just tree huggers" when there is a Trillion dollars of bets against you.
I don't think there is any possible such vehicle.
I just kind of wish there was.
A way of allowing the market to take care of externalities.
All we have is regulation, and as a fan of markets, that kind of annoys me. (or rather, I recognise that markets are after all dependant on the existence of government (as opposed to the right-wing style if only governments did not exist markets would take over). And am annoyed that this market has not been created.)
One thing I've noticed with food delivery companies here is the obvious fraudulent identities of the delivery people. The photo shows a completely different person than the one showing up with the delivery leading me to think there is some sort of trade of delivery accounts happening to allow undocumented workers to pretend working legally with someone taking a cut of the earnings.
Legitimate question, will Uber shut down it's Dutch operations now? Will this cost them more money than it's worth to operate there, and would they shutdown to send a message to other nations about there intent should similar rulings be made?
Uber's margins have always been super thin, I would imagine this makes them squarely unprofitable in the Dutch market.
This is what is likely to happen to Uber almost everywhere eventually. Courts will slowly re-impose the workers rights that Uber set out to avoid, the cost of an uber ride will go up, which will shift riders back to more traditional transport - busses, trains, bicycles and cars. Leaving a much smaller, much less powerful Uber. Without the scale and the price making power, Uber will see its value massively massively drop shrinking to the value of a large taxi company (albeit one that's throwing huge amounts of money away on extremely expensive silicon valley engineers)
> Will this cost them more money than it's worth to operate there
But isn't that already the case? I not sure Uber is making a profit anywhere in the world, so maybe they don't care if they lose $0.58 or $0.75 per ride?
I don't know exactly how it works in Holland, but in the UK we're now in a funny situation whereby an Uber is almost more ethical than a taxi - once the employees get proper sick pay, PTO etc, that is.
Bit out of context but I just came back from US (living in Netherlands). Holy flipping hell that place is full of cars. Literally everywhere. I mean I understand using a car upstate New York where things are further apart and everyone has a huge isolated villa. But do you really need 4 lane roads in freaking manhattan?
Seems like regulating "car stuff" in general is always a good thing if you ask me.
There is a great youtube channel called "Not just bikes" which talks about urban planning in the netherlands and how it results in much more livable cities than the US.
Seconded, amazing channel that describes why American cities are a disaster.
I've lived in a walkable area and QoL goes up immensely. No amount of money or luxury in an American suburb will compare. There is nothing like the sheer convenience of being able to get your groceries in a 3 minute walk.
Adding “City Beautiful” to the list of channels if you enjoy “Not Just Bikes”! It talks more generally about city planning/urban design, but satisfies the same itch of content.
Keep in mind, the Netherlands is the flattest country on Earth. If livable == mostly bicycles, it might be a somewhat unique situation. I am from Atlanta, GA, which is literally built on top of the Eastern Continental divide. There are no flat spots.
I'm in Trondheim, Norway. There are few flat spots. It is livable - livable doesn't mean mostly bicycles.
I walk most places: There are walking paths and crosswalks lots of places. I have nearby grocery stores in a short walking distance (10 minutes or less). Lots of folks ride bikes, and an amount of those folks put on studded tires in the winter. I simply do not as it is literally an uphill battle and I didn't grow up in a mountainous region. I can rent a manual bicycle or an electric scooter and be safe while riding.
I can take public transport both across town and out of town. I have choices: There is a small tram line for some parts of town. Busses go both in town and between towns. I can take a train through much of Norway (from up north to Oslo) or over to Sweden if I want. Taxis exist, too, and they are clean. (Illegal taxis are here too, but I've never used them).
And sure, there are cars and they are convenient - and like the US, you probably need one if you live in the countryside. But I can get by just fine without a license, too.
My god, you weren’t kidding! I’ve been watching his videos since seeing your comment. His intro video immediately signals the fantastic quality of the channel. So far the guy did get me excited about sidewalks.
I visited the Netherlands a couple years ago and the convenience and practicality of the public transportation was eye opening. I sure wish we had something like that in the US! But it would cost money, money paid by taxes, which means that rich people would have to pay more than they benefit, so politically it’s impossible. In America we try to push all social costs to the individual, which in practice means the middle class and the poor. Therefore because the public transportation is so bad, only people who can’t afford cars use it, which means you have lots of homeless people using the bus as a dry place to take a nap, and so forth. It’s usually dirty and the bus is always late. So it has a really bad reputation.
I can't understand who would want to drive in Manhattan. Like where are they coming from and where are they going? Where do they intend to park when they get there? It wouldn't occur to me in a million years to attempt to drive into a metropolis like that. I see normal private cars driving through New York and London and can't imagine who is in them and what they're attempting to do that means their best route is through a city.
> I can't understand who would want to drive in Manhattan.
I think the idea is that people will drive if their tolerance level for slowness is satisfied. So the amount of traffic will always be high enough to look acceptable for some people, unacceptable for others.
As for parking, in London there are definitely parking lots scattered around the city - can't speak for New York though.
> Like where are they coming from and where are they going?
Probably going between their homes and family / friends / shops / entertainment venues / restaurants.
There's in excess of 100,000 public off-street parking spaces in Manhattan below 60th St (as of 2009 - Manhattan Core Parking Study). Plus street parking.
It would be interesting to have statistics on the number of cars driving through a city center compared to the number of people living and working there.
My guess is that even if people living there use a car once a year, you end up with a huge number of cars every day.
I dunno, I liked living in Manhattan and driving into nature every other weekend with my dog and wife. Turns out Zipcar is pretty shit overall if you actually like going to places.
Isn't the car proven to be the slowest form of transport in Manhattan anyways? Or at least, not faster than the metro, and not (significantly) faster than a bike? I recall a similar study about London putting the average velocity of a car solidly on-par with the average cycle velocity.
Where is everyone parking? Like you can't just pull up outside a shop on Regent's Street, park your car, pop in to grab something, and then come out again. So who are all these people driving up and down it?
I can't imagine the logic of thinking 'I need to go into central London to do something today... I know I'll drive'. Not even just from an environmental standpoint - even without that the stress of navigating London and parking and then leaving your car in such a busy place.
I need to go into central London to do something today... I know I'll drive
A few years ago I arrived in London at Paddington station and was late for meeting on the other side of the city. I'd been told that taking the Tube could take up to 30 minutes (including changes), so I decided to grab a Taxi. I arrived at my meeting 40 minutes later.
It depends on where you're going to/from and at what time. During rush hour, yeah the subway is faster than taking a cab for my pre-Covid 35 or so block commute. There are some routes that require a bus transfer or a lot of walking that may be faster by car even in rush hour traffic. For example going from East Harlem to Chelsea where you're either transferring a few times or walking quite a bit.
I'm from New Jersey originally and have lot of family out on Long Island. Driving into or through Manhattan is very frequently (although not necessarily at rush hour) the most sensible choice, from both a time and cost perspective.
---------------
High commuter rail costs - If you have 2+ people in the car, it's likely equal cost at worst to drive if your origin point is beyond the reach of the subway. This is especially true if you wish to go across the metro and therefore get to pay per-person fares on more than one commuter rail system. Going from 15mi West of Manhattan (NJ burbs) to 15mi East of Manhattan (Nassau County), will run you about $50 per person round-trip. It's not hard to see why no one would take commuter rail with their family of 4 for that trip even if they live next to a CR station and their family on the other side does as well, $200 is a lot of money.
Parking - There's tons of (typically underground) garages in NYC and particularly Manhattan. While you may get gouged if you just randomly turn in to the first garage you see and pay the walkup rate, some minor research on rates can easily get you somewhere to park for $20-35 for a full day in Manhattan. 2 seconds on Spothero and I could park right next to Penn Station 9am-9pm today for ~$22, and that's not a rare exception. This was the case before those services as well, it just required more knowledge of where to look for deals.
Scheduling - Off-peak/late-night frequencies are limited and service is often much slower. PATH (a subway with limited reach) to NJ runs 24/7, but late night you're looking at 40min between trains and the trip time often gains 5-10min as well between maintenance and a less direct routing. And if you don't live next to it's limited reach, you're still driving after that. On the actual commuter rail last trip is typically ~1AM and the last few trains of the night have 1-1.5hrs between trains on many lines. I could be back home by car before I even get on the train in Penn Station if I'm particularly unlucky on timing for when the concert I'm seeing ends.
Infrastructure - There's 4 roads to get across the Hudson from NJ in the region, and 2 of them go into Manhattan. Not hard for an accident or minor disruption to make going through Manhattan the only way you're getting across to go to the other side in a sane period of time. The limitations of NYC's "ring" roads also mean you can't necessarily easily just go the longer way around the opposite side of the metro.
There's plenty of areas even within NYC that are poorly served by transit services, to say nothing of the suburbs. When the trip takes 4 transfers to get there, it's a lot less appealing to take and a lot more at risk of issues, even if it should work in theory.
-----------------
I am not suggesting cars are the ideal mode of travel, and I'd like to see further investment in broadening both the reach and service levels of transit services, as well as re-examining fare pricing, but with the current systems/infrastructure being what they are.....yes, there are lots of trips where the sensible choice is to drive.
"disruption" is basically newspeak for startups when they are weighting the ability and capacity of an administration or government to sue that startup for violating laws. It's legal arbitrage.
I am torn on this issue, maybe I don't see the whole picture. Uber was never meant to be a taxi company. It was a means for people with cars to share their gas expenses. I don't know how could they ever prevent this gig from becoming a full-time job for most drivers, but I think forcing employment is not a solution.
> I don't know how could they ever prevent this gig from becoming a full-time job for most drivers
Pricing (and marketing, and UX, and features) that transparently informs that offering rides it is not long-term profitable, it only makes sense as cost savings for inevitable drives, similar to BlaBlaCar or Waze Carpool.
But this would have hampered their growth, so they didn’t. Ride-sharing (fake proposition) isn’t really that big of a market as urban mobility in general (target proposition)
I hope über goes bankrupt and we forget about all of this insanity. In Germany where I live the taxi service is amassing, at least in my city can't say for whole country. They are quick clean the drivers are professionals and not some randos who will break rules to get there faster or drive so insanely that you want to puke. They know the city by heart and don't use navigators. Due to being professionals they are compensated more fairly than in other countries and they have benefits like all other employees. Also if you like using apps you can do that with normal taxi as well.
In my home country (Eastern Europe) I took übers that made me think I'm gonna die in them.
They don't waste valuable time asking how do you spell the street and so on. Also it indicates that they are working in the area for a long time, so to me it adds credibility. With uber drivers it's always a gamble. Most people are nice, but that <1% of psychopaths can really ruin your day.
Some taxi drivers in some countries are sole proprietorship, technically companies, but still I would call such driver going bankrupt for failing to pay lease a not a employee.
Yeah, actually, I bring this topic up with almost every uber driver whose car I get into, and they tell me they do NOT want to change the freelance arrangement. My brother in law drives for Uber and tells me virtually no one he knows wants it changed either.
I think Uber might be right here. EU labor laws protect a few but over a certain salary they are not very appealing. In Italy paying a net salary of 2,000 euros will cost the company 6000+. Things included like pension are not worth their cost, a private pension is better and cheaper, same for health services. It’s unfortunate but it’s true.
I have paid the ridiculous charge from Rome's airport to the city, it's interesting how many measures airports like Rome, Madrid, Barcelona have to take to keep Uber out as good as possible.
I still agree with the Dutch court.
First, EU has a goal to somewhat harmonize some laws and taxes.
Europe should not simply allow any company to come along and undermine everything.
If Europe let's this happen, the consequence is very simple, in case the drivers don't make ends meet, they will claim it from social services, making me the guy who pays for that.
So taxpayers are subsidiaries to uebers shenanigans, no thanks.
I support the European tax system and social policies, but I am not gonna pay the SV salaries for some "wise guys", I prefer the taxes invested in infrastructure, health care, the useful things, including pensions.if I would prefer the US model, I would go and live there.
It's probably worth noting that the EU has nothing to do with this. These are policies of individual countries, EU has very little if anything to do with taxes, pensions or health care.
It's true that the EU has no federal executive body, however, no country can simply go and set corporate taxes to 0 without an uproar. the cross border phone network is unified for example.
The were Cyprus and Malta selling passports to the highest bidders without due diligence done,kickbacks and honey traps, you name it, it happened.
https://euobserver.com/justice/149810
There is a limit on how much can and can't be done within the EU, it's not a gravy train buffet.
There is peer pressure and potential, let's call it cascading effect.
Some lawmaker will hear about this and try to get it passed in another country as well.
I struggle to think of one state which would simply accept Uber as some great Enterprise idea, look at the history here
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_ridesharing_comp...
Most places banned and this bit.
In December 2017, the European Court of Justice ruled that Uber is a transport company, subject to local transport regulation in European Union member states, rather than an information society service as Uber had argued.[99]
So at best, tolerated for the time being.
In Europe, working without full compensation is typically called illicit work(instead of side gig), not extremely frowned upon, but the main job has to have proper compensation.
It very normal and expected to get 4 weeks paid holidays or more, sick days covered, insurance in most places, pension contributions etc.
Uber tells you to get a car, petrol, pay insurance and take jobs when available, and get none of the above, who are they kidding.
A bit off-topic, but why would you take a taxi for that trip? A train to the city leaves evert 15 minutes and costs you only €14. By car it's a 30km ride!
This is true for basically every single European city. Public transport is of such high quality that taking a taxi simply doesn't make sense.
Was cold after cross continent flight and just missed the train by a few minutes, was also pretty late, place looked abandoned, had a bit too much luggage and had no idea how to get to my destination.
Any other circumstances, I would take the train.
Why yes let's just remove the ability of people to take a market-priced car ride... Have you considered the private space that a car affords? (albeit shared with the driver)
You say it like they just walk in, ask for money and get it. It's really much harder, practically impossible if you're not on some priority list (with kids, disability, single mother, etc).
I know, it takes time to claim it, and this actually infuriates me even more, because all the cla procedures are handled by expensive government staff, of course this is due to security checks, to exclude fraudulent claims. All paid for by taxpayers so Uber can burn another buck(they're still never profitable are they, tells me everything about the business model).
The good thing is, once it works, it works.
I've never heard anyone here in the EU argue this. Including people over a certain salary. It is, after all, in the interest of the wealthy too that everyone is OK and doesn't need to live in the streets and cause crime, necessitating guns and whatnot as they do in the US.
Paying your tax and premiums is way cheaper and much more pleasant.
Yes this.. We don't want ultracapitalism here. I make more than average but I'm totally fine with paying taxes. The safety net is there for me too. Capitalism is good but there must be a balance.
To an American it may sound communist (though technically it's more socialist) but it's our country, we can choose the system we want. And we've done an OK job IMO (In fact I wish things were a bit more socialist - this abuse of the ZZP concept has been going on for far too long).
Decades of cold war propaganda have confused the issue in the US. When you say socialism, they think you are talking about USSR-style authoritarian communism. It's asurd and exasperating, but it won't go away until the boomer generati on loses political influence. It's also highly partisan, and in today's atmosphere of cultural warfare, that makes it a non-starter. Half the country won’t wear a mask because Donald Trump wanted to deny the pandemic during his reelection campaign. What hope is there for something as radical as changing the entire foundation of society?
For the company it costs more money, but for the employee, you are way better being employed than contractor.
This is not a surprise, this extra money is effectively bringing the employee health insurance, pension, invalidity pension, unemployment benefit, maximum number of hours to work per week, paid vacations, etc.
If you need to pay it out of your pocket, it turns out to be the same.
In the "old" Europe, the net salary is basically 50% of the cost for the company, sometimes a bit more, sometimes less depending of marital status, country, etc. But this is a good rule of thumb.
From the strikes of train driver's unions in Germany, I think that's where it is headed. "You can automate trains if you like, but the whole current workforce still must stay employed."
Well, maybe something more along the lines of a contribution towards UBI, or similar. This is a concept I first heard come out of the US, from Musk maybe?
Please don't take HN threads into political or ideological flamewar, and especially not religious or race flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
Edit: when an account crosses into using HN primarily for ideological battle, that's when we ban it - regardless of which ideology it's battling for or against. So please don't do that. Again: it's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
I don't know much about Italy but should be pretty similar to Germany where we generally say the employer pays double. Example person unmarried, no kids, 35.
What gets neglected in these discussions though is that everything employer pays is counted as a cost he can write off from revenue to decrease his profit taxes (assuming company makes profit!). So, the effective cost on employer side is lower than 7200 PLN - naive calculation, assuming 15% profit taxes, would make it 0.85 * 7200 PLN = 6100 PLN.
Salaries are always considered the cost of doing business, so I'm not sure what your point is here. What is important is that many people can't wrap their head around the fact that this additonal 1200 PLN which is labeled as "employer contribution" to social security is in fact part of their salary. So people do not realize that their tax burden is 40%, they think it is just 29%.
Also, to make it worse, once you get your 4300 PLN salary into your bank account, you pay on average 16% VAT on every purchase (8-23%, depending on the item bought). So in reality your net salary is 4300*0.84 = 3612, making total tax burden almost 50%.
Social security fees are added on top of gross salary (and normally not visible on your payslip) so it's not a tax per se but still a cost for the company.
It isn't (only) about what the actual drivers want. I'm sure they also want more money, but Uber isn't going to give it to them. It's also about fair competition, health and unemployment insurance, pension, etc.
You're protecting your own interests. The state has to protect everyone's interests; and there's always an international aspect, at least in the EU. That goes beyond than what short-sighted and possibly "primed" employees might think they want.
i don't think this is correct. the state only protects their own interests. do these align with the general populace? sometimes they do, other times they don't.
I read an econ paper describing how uber drivers were making much less than they thought after taking into account gas and maintenance costs. I'm usually pretty against paternalism, but they made a really compelling case that uber drivers who were actually making less than minimum wage thought they were making $15-20. I'm not sure they know what's best for them.
We really need to review "employment" as a legal concept. Most of these systems were set up post ww2. They worked ok when everyone was working full time as employees of single large companies, in factories where their time was directed.
It no longer works in on demand economies, with variable hours and self employment and people working multiple jobs.
> It no longer works in on demand economies, with variable hours and self employment and people working multiple jobs.
Why? There are people who work variable hours, self employment and working multiple jobs. They're called freelancers. You can freelance in most countries, and it's not a problem. What is a problem is Uber and gig economy companies saying that the people that work for them are "actually freelancers" as an excuse to offload costs onto the workers, who don't get any of the advantages of being a freelance (they always work under the conditions for these companies, with no power of negotiation.
* In the uk, you and your employer pay national insurance if you earn over a given limit. Thats fine for an uber driver who becomes an employee instead of self employed.
* but your employer only pays if you earn over X. So employers have a big incentive to stop you earning over thst limit. You see this in the US with workers being kept at 1h less than full time to avoid paying for health insurance. So now we're limiting the income of the people we're meant to be helping!?
* plus in the uk, your contributions only count if you do a full year. Thats fine if you're a full time employee, you work 52 weeks (and when you're on holiday you're paid and that includes NI contributions), and your wage is the same every week. But if an uber driver misses a pay period or has a slow month, he paid a lot of NI and gets no credit for it. Nor can he claim it back.
* plus now, as an employee, your expenses are not tax deductable.
Im not being anti-worker. But our current systems arent fit for purpose anymore. We need to review them. Thats benefits, workers rights and the tax code.
Why dont we just charge a percentage of earnings and then base unemployment payout on that?
Because in 1950 someone dreamt up this system and designed it so we could support men working full time in factories and to operate using just pen and paper but cause computers didnt exist. 70 years later, we have the same system with 101 bits of crap bolted on. And it isnt working.
None of the issues you mentioned are fundamental to the employee system. I am not familiar with the issues you mentioned in Spain, for example.
You can see issues in any system. But that doesn't mean it isn't working fundamentally. I'm all for reviewing and improving the system, adapting it for new jobs and ways of working. But those changes cannot be an excuse to slash benefits and worker rights, which is what Uber has been doing for years.
“Drivers don’t want to give up their freedom to choose if, when and where to work.”
Drivers might have the freedom to turn off their phones and choose not to work, but they don't have the freedom to choose which routes/destinations. Seems to me that their argument is one-sided and deceptive.
If you don't have that freedom, you're an employee, which is what this conflict is about. Because if they're an employee, their employer must pay social insurance. The self-employed are exempted from this insurance (although highly encouraged, because, not surprisingly, the vast majority of self-employed people don't become lucky billionaires). Uber wanted to have it both ways, and, not surprisingly, it can't. Self-employed people do whatever they like, including choosing the rides they drive for Uber.
but from what i recall, an uber driver do have the choice to accept or reject a ride.
There's a penalty for rejecting too many rides - but i think that's a fair outcome.
Ideally, uber also allows a driver to set the price, and allow a customer to see price comparisons between all offered drivers (and wait times etc), to truly make it a competitive market place.
They won't be letting drivers set fares until legally obligated. They are a taxi service that cosplays as a "ride sharing" "marketplace" in the legal system.
Uber is all about keeping maximum control of the driver while denying them the rights of employees (or in the UK, "worker" status, which is a halfway house between employee and self employed)
According to the article: "a driver may only refuse a few trips before being logged out by the system", that plus the fact that they can't set their own fares and Uber can retroactively lower drivers fares, was the main reason Uber lost the case.
If Uber let drivers reject as many rides as they wanted and allowed drivers to set their own fares and negotiate directly with their clients, then they may very well have won the case. But then they would also be a very different company.
If I hire a contractor to renovate my home to my exact specifications, by your logic they are my employee because they couldn't choose the "route" or "destination?"
Except for the part that the companies will punish them for rejecting orders, and that they can't negotiate the price of the orders nor set any price themselves.
1. Doordash does not penalize for skipping orders. They give the total payout first to allow people to skip orders in the first place. It’s a feature. 2. Because you see the price before accepting an order, you are effectively negotiating the orders you want to take based on price. You can sit in your car all day declining orders until you see a price you agree with.
Are you saying if I hire a contractor with a price set by me and I would "punish" (i.e. never hire them again) when they don't agree, they are suddenly my employee?
When you are hiring contractor you offer a price the contractor can come back and say I can do it for this higher price. Clearly not employee. On other hand the gig workers can't lets say offer to bring your food for 1000€ this one time. They should be able if they are independent.
If you were to hire contractor from company that was set-up to outsource your work to one of it many sub-contractors which only worked for them and had no deciding power how to do it and for what price, yes they would be employees.
And how many of the uber drivers who said they were making good money were good at math? People think lots of things to convince themselves that they are doing ok, when a more objective look says 'maybe not'.
I recall one uber ride I had in Kentucky, driver was a retired accountant. He said he figured he was earning about $2/hr after costs. He said he liked it because it got him out of the house and gave him something to do.
There seems to be this weird thinking that gig workers are all exploited.
Meanwhile many Deliveroo workers make 2000+/mo in the UK and immigrants in factories get wages withheld for PPE and "damage to equipment" in Germany. Not even speaking about the farm workers.
I don't even care about all this, I was wondering if Uber can make it work legally.
If you do such a thing, then you need to start worrying about local labor laws, vacation time, healthcare in the US, sick leave, etc. The gig economy works by circumventing these things.
It gets expensive when drivers game the system. What happens when a driver just stops driving? You have to fire them. Which can take quite a bit of effort. What if a driver calls in sick? You have to check that.
Obligatory reminder that this isn't saying rideshare drivers must be employees. It is saying the specifics of uber, how it controls its drivers, and how it runs its business is an employment model per their laws. You could almost certainly build a new rideshare business that is not employment based.
Please don't post shallow provocations to HN, and especially don't take HN threads into political or (god help us) nationalistic flamewar. None of that is what this site is for.
Indeed, probably massive delays by Ubers legal team.
The whitelisting principle should apply for such things, this disrupt now, ask later is just a trick to gain market share at the expense of taxpayers and employees and competition which abides by the regulations.
Or if you have enough money to by pass the laws all together.
Take a look at HSBC[1][2]....they got caught laundering money for Mexican cartel and helped NK/Iran circumvent the nuclear sanctions. They were given a slap on the wrist of 2 billion dollars in fines. (Can't find the source but they were also caught transferring money to known terrorist groups)
If anyone is interested there is a Netflix show they covers this. I think it's called Dirty Money. [3]
This isn't mandating that uber has to hire these people, or that these people have to have jobs, it's that if Uber wants them to work an amount of hours equivalant to a full time emlpoyee then they need to not pretend that they're not full time employees.
The amount of time worked has nothing to do with it - contractors in other industries typically work long hours. The reasoning is that contractors should retain some level of independence, like choosing their rides, and setting their own prices, for example. Uber is micromanaging all driver's daily activities, which is antithesis of being independent contractor.
What's that supposed to mean? Dutch people can still be self-employed - this ruling applies to one particular employer that has been pretending it's staff are self-employed.
It's interesting to me that, generally speaking, both Uber and it's drivers are fine with the way things are, entering into a mutually agreed upon contract...
Only to have people who have no skin in the game tell them both what they have to do... because it's 'the right thing'.
That's not the whole picture, though.
You can't bring a bull to a full dance club and do a rodeo, just because you and the bull mutually agree.
There is collateral damage here, taxpayers paying the social expenses meant to be paid by Uber and the unemployment money and services for the taxi drivers pushed into unemployment by the Uber money burning scheme for predatory pricing practices is something that is not mutually agreed upon with the governments.
Uber is dancing on a thin thread on this
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/001985...
So the government imposed a bit of a less radical change, as predatory pricing consists of predating(done) and recoupment(not happened yet). This is the legal term for Microsoft embrace, extend, extinguish practice.
> FNV called the ruling a major victory for drivers' rights.
No, it's a major victory for the administrative arm of the FNV trade union. Look beyond the formal argument here (workers rights) and look at what this actually is about - power. The FNV wants to get their cut so they can collect more dues paying members and further enrich the admins. The workers here will probably not benefit at all.
Ah yes, the war against the free market continues, unabated. Certain tenets of socialist ideology - like the idea that large companies exploit the masses if afforded contract liberty - are so deeply ingrained in the collective psyche, that they are never even questioned.
The beliefs of fringe groups rest on a set of absurd conspiracy theories, like vaccines being harmful to public health, and pushed on the population merely to profit Big Pharma. But the beliefs of the mainstream rest on a set of equally absurd conspiracy theories, and all of them based on socialist class warfare narratives. It is in the interests of a critical mass of special interest groups, who hold political power, for people to believe in these conspiracy theories.
