To me this closes a loophole. As you say these people drive for Uber, uber is doing the employing. This is not like if a contracted a builder to renovate my kitchen. That is the class of employment that are real contractors.
If they have to pay a full-time employee, they can schedule the employee and force them to drive to a certain location, and do a certain number of trips, otherwise they would just fire them. They can squeeze out more efficiency from a single driver rather than hope that there's enough random drivers to fulfill all the demand.
Hiring people to just sit around and do nothing doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
Where does it say this?
Why not?
Or more specifically: the law doesn't require this, so why would it have to change?
The bill merely states, "hey, this flexible way you've been working, that's not independent contracting, that's employment and the employer have to abide by all these other regulations." Those regulations in no way require Uber to make workers work for specific hours, pay them hourly, or schedule their work differently. In fact, it just says, "the way you're already working, that's employment." So why do you think they'd have to change how they work?
I think most of planet earth only wants to work 1 gig or at most 2 for somewhere between 20 and 40 hours. I doubt people who want to work a tiny number of hours make up a meaningful proportion of the workforce. In other words much ado about nothing.
The benefits being discussed are health insurance.
I'm not too familiar with employment law, but in most governments, employees have rights and benefits that cost a company a fixed amount that a contractor doesn't.
Most probably it would be machine learning that would decide that
> when it gives no benifit to Uber?
An employee works for an hourly rates. It would benefit them in the sense that they wouldn't have to pay someone for an hour where he does nothing.
Why do your job give you a schedule?
> This is not like if a contracted a builder to renovate my kitchen.
I don't know for where you live, but here in Quebec you would usually contract a general contractor for that. Would that means that guy is now employing people and he should pay them benefits too and pay their taxes for them?
Uber is between you and the contractor, sure, but he is still a contractor, he is contracted for a single job (taking you to your destination) and the amount paid cover that job.
The contractor is free to decide when, where and for how much he works.
If someone posts a classified ad for a handyman to fix their stairs and offers $50, I can take it or not. But taking it and then whining that I didn't get benefits... and being abetted in that whining by clueless politicians... is disgraceful.
I think a lot of people have no idea how the old taxi business worked.. it was far worse than Uber — it was more of a monopoly as well because you were required to drive a specifically-branded car purchased or leased from the taxi company. You couldn’t use the same car to drive for other companies. Damage had to be repaired at the specifically designated repair shop (owned by the taxi company of course,) and you had to pay for insurance from the specific taxi company “vendor” (also owned by the taxi company.)
And.. you were an independent contractor; you were the customer of the taxi company. You got to pay your own self-employment taxes, but your own health insurance and if you got sick, you still had to pay the taxi company the lease fee for the car. While you did collect your own cash fares, you had to pay a very high percentage (8-10%) on credit card fares and you were paid those fares weekly. If you lost the charge slip paper, you lost the fare, however the taxi company still had the swipe, so they’d still collect the money but just not pay any of it to you.
The taxi business is and was an incredibly corrupt and nasty business. There is a reason that job was popular with fresh off the boat immigrants — anyone who had done the job more than a minute knew how much of a rip-off it was (unless you were willing to sleep in your car and drive 16+ hour days in order to save up money to start your own limo business or convenience store which was a common goal among many of the south Asian immigrants I drove with.)
The kids hating on Uber really have no idea what they are talking about. Unless someone has actually worked in the towing, taxi, limousine, hot shot, or trucking businesses (all extremely nasty and tough businesses,) it’s pretty hard to have much credibility when complaining about the gig economy, Uber, etc. Uber/Lift/Doordash is a dream compared to the bad old days. You can have one car and pretty much drive and deliver as much as you want and make money proportional to how hard you are willing to work. It isn’t easy-street, but nobody plans on being a career Uber driver — it’s a stopgap, a transition, or a supplement. Anyone thinking that this is some kind of full time career is either of low-IQ and has no prospects of doing anything better, or just lacks ambition. Being a McDonald’s cashier ought not be a career either, but there are people working in that position for 15+ years. At that point, that failure is on them. We shouldn’t be optimizing society around making low wage service jobs into some kind of permanent career. Even a high school kid gets promoted at McDonalds if they stick around for more than a few minutes, yet there are literally people who have been making minimum wage for years. At some point people ought to be treated as adults and not like exploited children. A person chooses to drive for Uber/a taxi/whatever. They aren’t Shanghaied or otherwise indentured. If people don’t want to do those jobs, then that ought to motivate them to find something slightly better — or start at the bottom washing dishes somewhere and move up through a restaurant’s ranks. But that requires hard work and dedication— traits in very short supply in an era where people that literally sweep floors think that work is worth $15 per hour.
Source: I drove for Yellow Cab Houston in the summer of 2001. I also drove hot shot deliveries in Houston in 2008 and a good friend of mine owned a bike courier business. I also worked a string of shitty restaurant and bar jobs, lived on the street a short time and now I work as a software engineering project manager for one of those FANG companies.
- Pays low, doesn't pay benefits, yadda yadda. All the stuff I assume people generally mean when they talk about "the kids hating on Uber"
- Went into towns and actively broke the law (bypassing the current taxi system). Sure, "civil disobedience" and all that, but the people that actually paid any real price for that disobedience (https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/No-fair-say-Ube...)
- Uber is burning money in order to corner the market. Eventually they're going to either go under or change their entire pricing structure. Nobody is going to win when that happens. There's a reason countries wield financial weapons when other countries start dumping like that; it's bad for everyone involved but the dumper.
The move to increase the minimum wage to 15 is presented by the uninformed as a cash grab by the lazy. The truth is 15 dollars just isn't much nowadays. The old often have a hard time forgetting about the nominal value and considering the actual buying power.
Lets ignore the fact that minimum wage workers can't actually buy houses and compare the minimum wage of $1 in 1960 to the cost of a median house at 11,900. So 11,900 hours of work 1.35 years of labor hours worth.
In 2018 it was 210k divided by 7.25 is 3.3 years of labor hours. Divide by 10 and its 2.4 years of labor hours. Divide by 15 and its 1.6 years worth of labor hours.
Alternatively we could discuss tuition at a 4 year public university where our 1965 counterpart now making 1.25 could expect to pay 240 labor hours for a year of instruction vs 1380 hours to pay the 10k it costs now at 7.25 1000 at 10 or 667.
How about a loaf of bread 22c or 13 minutes of work at 1960s $1. Now 2.50 vs 7.25 about 21 minutes of work at 10 its 15 minutes at 15 its now 10 minutes.
In real terms people wanting $15 to sweep the floor want $15 to sweep the floor because that is what it now costs to have a barely acceptable life. Not a good or a healthy one but one which is spent sleeping indoors and eating decent food.
In fact the fact is those agitating hardest for a better minimum wage are overwhelmingly have a disproportionate share of the jobs AND above average rent.
Essentially if this minimum wage looks too high you might just be too old.
Not everyone has the same options as everyone else. Some of us are just stuck trying to get by.