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.
