California has essentially told them "You're doing an illegal thing". They're response is essentially "Oh yeah? Well then, we'll stop doing the illegal thing!"
Thank you? That's what you were asked to do in the first place?
If they aren't interested in operating legally, then pivot or disband the company.
It's just that he contracts with the individual riders, not any higher-up monopolistic business entity that sets arbitrary business-driven rules that all taxi drivers have to follow.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/08/23/tax...
They just lease their car and medallion from someone, paying that guy a fixed rate per day for that lease, but that does make them neither a contractor nor an employee of the guy who owns car and medallion.
If they also were to lease the clothes they wear while working from a tailor instead of buying them, that wouldn't make the drivers in any way into contractors or employees of that tailor.
Your mental gymnastics to try to justify why taxi drivers aren’t employees but Uber drivers are is showing.
There has been considerable ink spilled about AB5 changing that, with the taxi industry lobbying unsuccessfully while it was in the legislature for a specific exemption; the B prong of the ABC test, which seems to be the critical and likely insurmountable one in the Uber/Lyft case, seems like it would likely apply to them in a similar way.
Taxi companies are individually smaller and, for that reason alone, probably lower on the direct, self-initiated enforcement priority list for the State, but there's both private action and complaint-based state action that workers can initiate, as well.
But at least now there's some actual room for improvement without the air already being sucked out of the market by one big player. Forcing market players to actually abide by the laws means someone (and this might well be Uber, but it's fine if it's someone else) can now come up with a solution that is both usable and follows local legislation, without being killed right out of the gates by an overfunded competitor that draws much of its market power from disregarding said legislation.
Uber was a local optimum. They have a choice to keep searching, but it seems they were too comfortable with things as they were.
Great, thank you for following the policy.
Uber isn't shutting down to comply with the law, they're shutting down in CA in protest of the law.
Doesn't Uber still work elsewhere?
By my calculations, the world is 57,510,000 sq miles of land, california is 163,696 sq miles, and that leaves 57,346,304 (99.715%) of the world available to uber.