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.
