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.
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.