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Comment by ogre_codes | Hacker News Reader

The big challenge here is when is someone "Working" and when are they idle. A big part of gig economy profits revolves around not paying drivers for idle time between gigs.

The flip side of this is a lot of drivers want flexibility in hours. It's a tricky problem because the gig companies don't set driver hours. As these laws take effect, it's likely flexibility in shifts will decrease.

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Seattle's policy avoids that complication by setting very high wage requirements for the actual trips with the expectation that idle time and expenses will pull down the "true" compensation. The requirements add up to about $29.90 over an hour of driving, which the city believes will get drivers to the $16.39 hourly minimum for traditional workers. (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/sea...)

I don't think that answers the question at hand. The question is about if the driver is actually working (waiting for a rider) or just sitting with their phone on. I don't think this is a trivially solvable thing. But I'd also imagine Uber/Lyft would be more aggressive in kicking idle people off the platform. But that will get complicated because "rides needed" is not a uniform or homogeneous distribution throughout the day, week, month, or year. I'd imagine someone driving as a 9 to 5er would be idle much more often than someone driving on the weekends and holidays. I'm fairly certain good actors will get kicked in an attempt to rid the platform of bad actors.

The Seattle rule doesn't require Uber to pay drivers while they wait for a trip to be assigned, only once they actually have one. (This might seem intuitively gameable by making drivers wait longer, but there's no reason for Uber to do that, since one way or another they have to pay out the statutory minimum for every ride.)

Does this rule prohibit Uber from simply paying minimum wage for the duration and not allowing the driver to decline rides? Seems this would be a way of demonstrating how shifty the experience could/would be for traditional employment in this realm, especially if Uber just takes the additional revenue from "surge" prices and doesn't pass that on to the driver.

That would put them instantly into regular employee territory, and that's ubers worst fear.

Exactly. That’s exactly what Uber and Lyft want to avoid.

Wait, but does that mean anything changes? One of the criticisms of the high paying study (linked in article) was that it only counted idle time that directly led to a ride and that was much higher than the minimum wage. But what you're saying is even that idle time wouldn't count.

This is where it gets weird. If an Uber driver's idle time between calls is built into their pay, then a driver could use that time to work a second job. Essentially double-dipping.

I'm not against this. It just makes for weird comparisons.

Sure, but that's no different than any other worker being able to work a second job while idle.

It's not double dipping, because there is no compensation for idle time, and you can only take one passenger from one app at a time. So if Uber and Lyft both pay $30/hr for actual driving time, then go ahead and have both apps open. It will increase your paid hours per total hours spent, but it could never create a situation where both companies are paying you for the same exact time spent.

This attempt to avoid the hard question will probably make the policy ineffective. The with-passenger rates are already high enough that drivers make well above minimum wage at 100% utilization. When the effective wage (with-passenger rate times utilization rate) is higher than the market wage, drivers enter the market, driving down the utilization rate until the effective wage equals the market wage. If the policy is only changing the with-passenger rate, the utilization rate will just drop until the effective wage equals the market wage.

The rule establishes regular reviews to adjust minimum fares accounting for utilization rates, so Uber will have to try and keep utilization high. (They're expected to impose driver caps the same as what they have in NYC.)

It's actually not. Every other business in the world has to manage their workforce such that they have employees to do the work when they need them. It's genuinely impressive that these companies have just gone "Well, we're just not going to manage our staffing" and rather than that being a complete showstopper, it's seen as some brilliant loophole. Call centre employees don't stop getting paid in between the calls they receive- but maybe they should. Maybe every employee should stop being paid whilst they're not physically serving a customer - shop empty? Don't get paid. AWS services running smoothly? Let's make those Site Reliability Engineers clock out.

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