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Then fix the tax loopholes by making it about sales or revenue rather than employment.



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.




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