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Comment by paulmd | Hacker News Reader

Now if only the courts would apply the same "sanity" to, say, Uber threatening to fire all its drivers if they're subject to regulation. Not just in california, it's been a repeated thing, they used their employees as leverage when they were threatening to take their ball and go home if Dallas made them do background checks too.

The sad part is that Epic's tactics are nothing out of the ordinary for these silicon valley giants, they love using innocent parties as emotional leverage in a fight to pad their profit margins by another couple percent.

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> Uber threatening to fire all its drivers if they're subject to regulation.

Do you mean Uber threating not to hire all it's drivers? Right not they're not employees and they all have become them that's a very different process.

What exactly is sane about figuring out how to make 200,000 contractors full-time employees inside of a week? I don't think there's a company in the world that could pull that off.

If a company says, "hey, we're a marketplace" and a court says, "actually, you're not" then the company has to figure out how to adapt. There's change and an emotional toll to the drivers in that scenario whether they become employees or not.

Their job is to plan for this kind of thing in advance. Just like Epic did with their weird video.

> inside of a week

California Assembly Bill 5 was signed into law last September and was clearly a "Going to Happen" event for at least a year prior.

There's no surprise here. Uber had plenty of time to figure out how to deal with this. And they did: they aren't dummies, this was their plan. Their considered decision was that it was in the best interests of their shareholders to play brinksmanship games with their employees' livelihoods instead of make a good faith effort to comply with state law.

Rulebreaking is, after all, part of the corporate culture at Uber, and it always has been.

> California Assembly Bill 5 was signed into law last September and was clearly a "Going to Happen" event for at least a year prior.

And, on top of that, merely (as relevant to Uber and Lyft; it also added some exceptions that aren't relevant to them) codified the rule the California Supreme Court handed down in Dynamex on April 30, 2018; so the “one week” is off by about 121 weeks or so.

It’s no game. Uber didn’t like the rules of the state - it’s leaving the state. That’s a perfectly logical thing to do.

If Uber shareholders thought that they were walking away from all revenue in the state of California their shares would tank. We all know this is brinksmanship. I know it. You know it. They aren't leaving CA. The goal here is to get the "other side" to blink and adjust the rules so they can continue to operate. But at the end of the day Uber isn't abandoning the California ride share market to its competitors. Be real.

It’s still a negotiation tactic. Would shareholders be happy if the entire business model changed? There are other freelancers that aren’t happy with the laws.

> It’s still a negotiation tactic.

Which is exactly what I said it was, and not consistent with your framing of departure as a "perfectly logical thing to do".

I'm happy we agree.

Why isn’t negotiating a perfectly logically thing to do? You use the weapons you have.

In the sentence to which I replied, the antecedent to "that" (in "That’s a perfectly logical thing to do") was not "negotiating" it was "leaving the state".

I genuinely can't follow your point. These goalposts are moving too fast, sorry.

Uber is using their weight to get what they want, because they know we want them to continue offering service. This is actually quite a bit like having a raise negotiation at work. I don't see their goals as evil, either, simply at odds with the state.

Their shareholders likely suspect California will capitulate. Though it is hard to do research over whether their drivers actually want this, generally the information I see indicates they'd prefer to remain contractors. Yes, some of this is paid for by Uber. I imagine some of the content I read was also paid for by the opposition. But it seems like no matter how you cut it, the drivers generally want to remain contractors, and definitely do not want ~their livelihood~ an income source threatened either way in the midst of a pandemic.

> What exactly is sane about figuring out how to make 200,000 contractors full-time employees

There is no requirement for them to be made full-time employees, just employees, and even if the law was unclear before the Dynamex decision, they've had the requirement under that decision for almost 2.5 years. And they've known about it, because they've been actively lobbying to change it, lobbying for Dynamex to be legislatively reversed, lobbying for an exception when it was clear that instead of reversing it the legislature planned to codify it in AB5 and also lobbying against AB5, and finally funding a ballot referendum to repeal AB5. All of that says that they understood the rule, and how it applied to them, for quite a long time.

And now because of the laws making freelance harder, truck drivers who want to stay freelance are having to move out of California and some writers who are doing freelance writing are also finding it difficult.

Companies shouldn’t be in the position of offering “benefits” to employees. No sane first world company ties health insurance to your employer.

Companies shouldn’t be in the position of offering “benefits” to employees. No sane first world company ties health insurance to your employer.

It's inexplicable to me that both employers and employees seem mostly fine with the current insanity. Do business owners enjoy having to be health insurance brokers? Do employees enjoy having their insurance provider change every few years and having very little choice in policies?

unfortunately any time anyone brings up medicare for all there's a huge pushback from half the country, so yes, people do mostly "like their current insurance" in practice. Or at least like it enough to not want to change the system.

(and no, "just have everybody buy their own policy" is not a realistic answer, virtually every society addresses this on a public policy level because individual purchasers simply don't work well.)

So, if you want your weird gig economy "independent contractor" nonsense, push for medicare for all, it's pretty much that simple. That's the only way having wage slaves be independent contractors isn't going to result in an immediate and massive drop in the quality and availability of health care. But oops lolbertarians don't like that either, they just want to be able to pay someone $0.50 per hour because "free markets are better".

I’m actually also against raising the minimum wage for the same reason. Businesses shouldn’t be responsible for providing a “livable wage”. A livable wage for my son staying at home isn’t the same as a single mom with three. The company should only be responsible for following the law and paying people what the market demands and paying taxes. Both the tax laws need to be changed to make sure that all companies pay “enough” and the Earned Income Tax Credit needs to be increased and easier to get throughout the year.

Until the current administration, both Republicans and Democrats supported increasing the EITC.

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