Uber drivers are workers not self employed, Supreme Court rules
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Deliveroo already totally robs these restaurants. Even for a click and collect order where I get the food myself Deliveroo takes ~20-30%. I assume this will cause Deliveroo to either increase fees or reduce service which may inspire more restuarants to hire their own delivery people again.
Overall I think this is a good thing, especially now. These gig workers have been absolutely essential to society over the past year. People have been able to safely shelter in their home while these guys (it's mostly guys) go out and take all the risks. Let's pay them.
In Germany, if you can't afford a lawyer you are entitled to the government paying legal aid in civil cases [1]. As you are - I just realize - in many countries.
Problem is, that a restaurant owner isn't entitled to that so that even if you are a small company (self employed restaurant owner) you are toast. You could hope to have a legal insurance covering stuff like that, but not sure, if that would be the case for most insurances.
Or rather "collective actions" and "group litigation orders" are a recent thing and haven't become a standard part of the legal system. Not many people on any side who understand how they're supposed to work in practice.
The UK also has a different set of priorities in its litigation culture. You can win a huge payout if you prove unfair dismissal or discrimination, but it's much harder to prove that your work contract is unfair/exploitative or that Service Provider X is operating in a shady way.
Look (listen?) for the cagey answers:
"Is this Restaurant X?"
"I can help you place an order!"
"But is this Restaurant X?"
"I can take your X order when ready!"
They advertise that you'll get food from Restaurant X and that's indeed what you get. It's not fraud to resell product, you don't need permission from the original seller to do it (in fact I think that's a specifically protected right), and it's not fraud or any kind of trademark violation to describe a product as being from Restaurant X if that is a fact.
edit: This got way more discussion than I anticipated. I think that even if there was a massive banner on the top of the site that told you GenericDeliveryCo was operating this website as a front for the restaurant, we are not them, etc, this behavior by GenericDeliveryCo is still damaging to the businesses they are creating websites of because they tend to absolutely bury the real website via better SEO. There’s an argument to be made that some restaurants would enjoy having a website made for them - for business or whatever other reason - but there’s no reason GenericDeliveryCo couldn’t... ask first.
The Resturant gets paid and the customers get food. The delivery service adds value and gets paid for it. If someone doesn’t realize doordash is not the Resturant by now... who cares? As long as the restaurants reputation is not hurt... (here’s were the issues start)
To that end, if I am the Resturant, I see that I can add my own delivery service, undercut doordash by a bit, and make more money, and control my reputation by employing people who have incintives aligned with me, then great! Thanks doordash, for showing me the way.
Ah, but can I? Maybe not without forming a power group with other restaurants (or some other economic structure..?), as the cost of adding a “real employee” may be greater than the margin added by the delivery service. I need a structure that both aligns incentives between delivery service and Resturant, and is cost effective. Since restaurants weren’t already doing this, probably it has to happen at the meta-Resturant level of it can be done while preserving reputation at all. (Of course, the difficulty of it depends on the food being served, so that’s why, e.g. pizza was already being delivered.)
A pro-restaurant argument might be that these alternative websites are interfering with new and extant restaurant-customer relationships, falsely implying a restaurant-delivery co. affiliation, and that the use by the delivery co. of the restaurant trademarks exceeds nominative use. The restaurants might also argue that the distribution of food, how and under what conditions, is part of their product: a delivery company taking too long to deliver an order could harm the quality of their product.
If I created a chase-bank.com website, and allowed users to interact with their actual Chase account through it, but I took a percentage of all transactions, it would be fine?
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24931128
What you should feel bad about are the excessive commission fees charged by those delivery apps.
The restaurant owner even discovered that, because of some inconsistency between his prices and the third-party ones, he could cause the delivering company to pay him by simply placing orders to himself.
This isn't what is happening.
The food still comes from the actual restaurants.
Personally I'm surprised you don't hear of hacker groups that protect websites and social media properties of the downtrodden. GoodFellas meets Social Network.
How does it cost the restaurant any money when they do this? The delivery companies can't unilaterally take a cut of the price, can they. I think you'll find the delivery companies mark up, and get their money that way, in this case where they don't have an agreement with the restaurant. The restaurant gets the price they ask for it.
If they've agreed to it, what's the problem?
The parent comment was complaining about Deliveroo setting up without an agreement. When they do that they have to mark up - they can't take a 30% cut of the restaurant's price as the restaurant charges Deliveroo full price.
They’re in a position where the options are pretty much “agree to this” or “go out of business”
(To which I guess the free-market response is “That’s not a problem - an independent restaurant SHOULD go out of business if they can’t compete with a website company when it comes to websites”?)
Our food arrived TWO HOURS after ordering and cold.
I'd really rather NOT go back to the old way.
I’d rather just go pick it up myself than use restaurant delivery.
I’m sure there may be exceptions somewhere, but even in Manhattan the deliveries that work for the restaurant sucked.
I think it’s that there’s no simple feedback loop.
An example is my local mom and pop pizza place. They used to have a few teenagers who would wait tables and drive deliveries. They meant well and tried hard, but it would take a long time for delivery. I’m a 15 minute walk and it would take two hours for two pizzas. If something was off I could talk to the owner and that took a long time but it was never anything bad enough to fire the poor driver, nor should they be. So the poor delivery lingered on.
They switched to Uber and deliveries went to 15-45 minutes. Not perfect but much better. Also easier to enter the order on my phone than calling it in.
Any time the food is cold or off, it’s easy to rate and get fixed.
It’s like taxis vs Uber rides. Taxis did have some advantages, but it way better now. Generally Uber drivers make more than taxi drivers, but there were some owner operator taxis (super rare at least in NY where almost all cabs are owned by big firms) who are losing out.
So then you add the cost of user aquisition - which is usually giving out £5 - £10 vouchers and for most of those customers to only use the service once. Clearly the first delivery is a massive loss. Then following that lots of orders are done on a free-or-low delivery cost basis (incl. Deliveroo Plus).
These companies are in a land grab still so it's low margin and high competition between them and Uber Eats. Uber Eats is technically a better cost model (i.e. more efficient) than Deliveroo assuming car delivery, as you can interleave deliveries and cab rides.
Still just don't see what's wrong here.
I don't want to mention that I'm blind in every frickin HN post but I'm blind, and Uber Eats and etc. are great. and there are restaurants that I specifically know that are in my neighborhood and they are not available on Uber Eats. And I don't order from them because I can't accessibly, so they lose my business presumably because they have opted out. Then there are other restaurants that are local and on Uber eats, and I order from them and feel absolutely fine that I have given the restaurant a sale it wouldn't have otherwise had and employed someone sitting in a car that otherwise had nothing to do. For a minor marginal cost, the restaurant made an extra sale and I got my food. If the restaurant did not want to make this transaction at all, it would not. So everybody came out ahead? I got food, Uber got money, the restaurant got money. What's wrong here? It's like the old argument so many have made about piracy. Uber eats turned a person who otherwise wouldn't be buying food into a sale. Who lost here?
Also, let's say that registering bobs-pizza-chicago.com is wrong. If so, this applies just as much to JebBush.com redirecting to Trump's website, and all the permutations you can think of there. We either solve domain squatting in the general case, or admit that it's shitty but just as okay when done to a restaurant as when done to your least favorite website or political figure.
There are of course some site builders restaurant owners can use to improve this, but since, as others have said, they are not always tech savvy they probably don't know, best thing to improve accessibility I can think of is that local commerce boards create some sort of recommendation or guidelines on how to setup a business website following best practices with a list of easy to use builders for such.
What sucks about the domain squatting is that those large corps will have much better SEO capabilities, so even if someone owns register bobs-pizza-chicago.com and make sure it works they could just make chicago-bobs-pizza.com or some variant and beat them in SEO and steal their traffic, even if they were required to provide some banner saying "this is a doordash website" most people wouldn't care and order anyway.
I have friends who own medium-sized restaurants in a couple different major EU cities.
They all have domain names, and web sites sort-of, but none of them thinks anything matters besides Facebook and to a lesser extent Instagram. The web sites are rarely, if ever, updated. Of course right now they are all forced to close anyway; but pre-Covid at least one of them tried to take the web site seriously and gave up after a while, everybody used Facebook anyway.
One of these owners is my age, the others are younger. I even know a guy who owns a catering company and doesn't bother with a web site.
I understand your friends think a social media website is enough. This doesn't mean they need to accept having a website created for them. It sucks that they have to opt out of local delivery services, but it also sucks I have to opt out of junk mail. I still don't understand where the evil is here? It's legal for people to create websites that look and feel similar to existing websites. If this is a problem let's fix it! if it's not, let's not focus on restaurants?
EDIT: Note, the comment I’m replying to grew by about 300% after I posted this.
If a delivery company gets the domain freds-diner-restaurant.com, then they're competing for your traffic.
And their domain might end up higher in Google search results, leading customers to order there. So I don't think it's necessarily the case that they're getting customers they otherwise wouldn't have.
Customers that are only willing to order from Uber Eats etc. aren't going to look for the restaurant's website anyway, they'll just go through the delivery company's website.
The consequences would be union negotiated salaries are applicable as well as other perks of being employed (sick leave, vacation, etc.) and time spent waiting at a restaurants is counted as work.
Dude I don't know what you think business is, but restaurants aren't slaves: they mark whatever price they're comfortable with on their menu, generate margin, and if they don't like it, they close the door, or heh, refuse service to Deliveroo. It's not robbery if the client would never even have heard of you without it, and god the indian restaurant two streets away I discovered after 5 years missing it thanks to Deliveroo knows who they owe this new addicted client to :)
However, in the last year or so, that's all changed (in Berlin at least) with the introduction of the Finnish "Wolt" (which everyone here is pronouncing like "volt", but come to think of it, perhaps should be pronounced the English way). Like lieferando, they have salaried employees, but the app is much more akin to the deliveroo experience, with people who are on-time and great pictures/food etc. Prices are comparable with what deliveroo had before.
I'm sure VC money has something to do with the ability to execute, but assuming that deliveroo had the same, it doesn't seem impossible to run a food delivery service with real employees without huge price hikes.
That and them handling the order process.
Which means they might order less food than they would have with lower prices. Or that they might decide it's too expensive, and order from another restaurant.
Ok so if that's an option then what's the problem?! I don't get the fury here.
Restaurants are free to partner with delivery companies.
Restaurants are free to not partner with delivery companies.
Delivery companies are free to buy and resell product from restaurants and add their own markup.
Restaurants are free to decline to sell product to delivery companies who add their own markup.
Everyone can do what they want here.
Which is fine. I think the problem is that they are representing themselves as if they are the restaurant, not a reseller. Customers might go to the website the delivery company setup (restaurant-name-location.com instead of restaurant-name.com or whatever their pattern is) instead of the restaurant's website, see the high prices, and decide to try a cheaper place.
Option A - 100% for a dining area at a trendy location
Option B - 80% w/o dining area at a trendy location
There are many cases where people say it is Option B but Option A doesn't exist.
Preparing food for takeaway actually saves a lot and that's why restaurants that traditionally offer takeaway in addition to on-premises service often offer 10-15% discount for takeway as a matter of course.
Deliveroo is not "robbing" restaurants if they charge 20%...
Anyway, at least in the UK and some other EU countries there is no obligation to lower the price because tax is lower (since prices to consumers are inclusive of all taxes) so if tax is indeed lower it can be a bonus for the restaurant (on top of cost savings), which makes Deliveroo's fee even less of a "robbery".
The other factor here is the absurd losses these players are chasing. The capital being pumped in to prop them up feels like a hugely distorting factor that is hiding the actual costs of the sector and preventing new entrants/alternatives from entering the market.
The upside is convenience. I definitely prefer paying by card/web based ordering but I wonder if there's a way of providing the benefits of these services without handing control over to that middleman.
That's not my impression, but the pandemic has had a radical effect.
> I wonder if there's a way of providing the benefits of these services without handing control over to that middleman.
There is but again this has a cost and if you're an independent restaurant it may make more sense to outsource all of this by using a platform. Some platforms allow you to only use them for handling online order taking and payments (Just Eat?) if you think handling delivery in-house makes sense (but I think it often does not).
Before Deliveroo (and similar services) restaurants (in UK/Europe since you discuss London) did not offer delivery at all.
Handling the whole order (which these days means online/through an app) and delivery in-house is costly and restaurants use Deliveroo because it makes commercial sense.
Generally the issue is that, on the one hand I don't think that people are willing to pay much for delivery while, on the other hand, delivery is very low productivity and it's not viable to pay delivery drivers much for this.
As someone else commented 20-30% of an order is not crazy compared to the cost of serving on-premises. Moreover, Deliveroo can only charge this to restaurants if they have a deal with them.
Low productivity and cost pressures are also why "dark kitchens" are developing: They save on the cost of having a full-blown restaurant geared for on-premises service and they cut travel times for drivers (they can go to a single location and collect from multiple collocated kitchens).
This is far from universally true, especially Asian takeaways typically hired their own driver, but the practice was also commonplace for many actual restaurants too
Many of the local restaurants will deliver
I think perhaps many commenters here are very young, so when I say restaurants did not deliver they cannot remember how it was 20 years ago. Order over the phone for delivery was limited to a few types of food places (mostly pizza and fast food made by the same establishments).
As an online platform Deliveroo was perhaps not the first (Just Eat is older, though not as focussed on delivery) but in the UK (and perhaps Europe) they really made that service explode. Note, though that I did mention Deliveroo and similar services in my original comment, not only Deliveroo. I think this is also linked with the rise of smartphone and apps, which, really exploded in 2007 with the first iPhone. The same goes with Uber.
Even takeaway in a restaurant was not really a thing and asking for a doggy-bag would only get you a sneer (and often still does).
When I was in Uni in both France and UK (up to early 2000s), if you wanted food delivered it was pizza, kebabs (in UK), or perhap Chinese.
This really changed over the last 10 years or so. Deliveroo was founded in 2013 and they are the ones who really made that explode.
Delivery for traditional restaurants has become a thing in the last 10 years or so when online services popped up.
It's strange to argue about this...
Gig economy companies like Deliveroo are particularly hostile to their labour force. Without fixed wages for employees they're directly incentivised to flood the pool of workers with as many people as possible. The consequence of this is that delivery times are lower, but the compensation available to each employee is greatly reduced compared to traditional delivery models.
The reason is that it ends up not being a choice of the worker at all, incentives align in such a way that these are no longer an "option" but instead a replacement of existing work/choice that had much better outcomes for the worker than the replacement. A great example of this would be "voluntary" exemptions from overtime protections in the UK. There is a default limit on the maximum amount of overtime most workers can undertake. The employee can optionally agree to lift this limit. In practice every employee is given a form to sign along with their employment contract that agrees to lift this limit. It no longer becomes a choice of the worker but one of management.
The same thing happened with "zero hours" contracts. Theoretically they allow employees to be more flexible in how much they work. In reality they remove the ability for workers to plan time or budget due to uncertainty in how often and when management decides they will be working. The key thing is that this replaced the existing, more reliable, system of work not because employees chose it as an option, but because employers unilaterally switched to it.
I'd argue further that the gig economy itself is both a cause and a symptom of economic instability in the lower working class. It emerged from the inability of this group to find to find enough stable, well paying work. It accelerates that economic instability by forcing workers into an even more precarious position. With a zero hours contract the economic uncertainty came from the fact that you didn't know when you'd be working. With gig work you know when you'll be working but you won't know what you'll be paid. This is a fundamental shift in the social contract of employment, in that the risk of loss is born by the employer and in exchange the employer keeps any profit. In the gig economy the employer shifts that burden onto the employees without a corresponding shift in control/profit.
In that sense, having some companies with shitty conditions offers an important safety valve to learn that regulations were misguided.
Is this what's actually happening here? Are there delivery/cab companies paying a fair wage that's being out-competed by uber? To my knowledge delivery/cab companies don't pay a fair wage in general.
The reason the smaller ones haven't faced more attention is that these actions usually require the person who wants employment status themselves to raise the issue and be prepared to take their employer to tribunal or court.
is it really normal for a CEO to earn a thousand times more than a normal employee? a hundred times?
1. Uber set the fare which meant that they dictated how much drivers could earn 2. Uber set the contract terms and drivers had no say in them 3. Request for rides is constrained by Uber who can penalise drivers if they reject too many rides 4. Uber monitors a driver's service through the star rating and has the capacity to terminate the relationship if after repeated warnings this does not improve
Even if this does hurt Uber short-term, it sounds like the gig economy will be just fine, as long as companies change their behaviour with respect to the above points.
This is a fair judgement. I support zero-hours contracts in a balanced and non-exploitative relationship where the "self-employed" label is not just lip-service.
This was clearly not the case according to the first 3 of those observations.
1. The company set the hourly rate which meant they dictated how much I could earn
2. The company set the contract terms
3. The company told me what features to build and could penalize me if I decided not to build some
4. The company could evaluate my performance any way they wanted and terminate the contract at any time for no cause
If this company could do all of these things, which I think are pretty standard, why can't Uber?
2. I also negotiate contract terms. Uber drivers cannot do this.
3. Uber drivers are penalized for not taking rides, which is more akin to refusing a paid opportunity than building a feature. Again as a contractor I do negotiate the work I can and want to do.
4. For this point I agree with you. I can also terminate the contract on my end.
The main difference I see is the imbalance of power. As a self-employed software engineer I can decide who I work with and negotiate almost everything with them. I have my business, they have theirs, and we discuss to try to reach agreements or not. Uber drivers are not in this position. Uber can dictate everything they want, drivers can only decide to stay or leave.
For #3, drivers may be penalized for being logged in and rejecting rides (though even that may have changed recently). But that is more akin to missing a deadline or not being available at an agreed upon time, something which any contractor might be penalized for. Uber drivers are always free to just decide not to log in and work at all and aren't penalized for that.
Is there a 3rd party coming in and deciding what their rates are going to be? Or is it between them and the client?
I still have no power to negotiate contract terms though, as the only other company I could contract with is Lyft, and their terms are basically the same.
Nevertheless, driving for Uber is much much more profitable than it was in the early days. Increase in ride demand is the main reason. Tips can also put you to $30/hour pure profit if you know how to be entertaining.
Except now the pandemic has destroyed the market.
company: Our payment terms are ABC.
contractor: Can we do XYZ instead?
company: Sorry, but we are not willing to do XYZ. It will need to be ABC, can you accept that?
contractor: OK
You are mistaking the right of the contractor to negotiate with an obligation on the company to concede, which does not exist in any situation.
2. Eh kind of. You could also look at it as Uber simply doesn’t negotiate their contract. It’s like a company hiring a freeelancer and just not negotiating.
3. If a company called you up and you said yes once and then no the next 10 times I bet they’d stop calling and you’d be penalized. They might not even have an Excel sheet with notes or a rating.
https://www.hiscox.co.uk/business-blog/what-is-ir35-and-what...
There's a questionnaire you can do here:
https://www.tax.service.gov.uk/check-employment-status-for-t...
It seems more likely to come down to setting your own hours, can you pay other people to do work for you, can you have other clients, are you using your own equipment, etc.
This sounds much more like what I would think the definition of contractor is, except for maybe you can subcontract the work. That would be something I would think could go either way in a contract.
https://www.freelancermap.de/blog/aktuelle-rechtslage-zur-sc...
No holidays, no sick pay, no minimum notice term, no overtime, no bonus, no 20% time, no paid lunches or benefits.
A few years ago this was common in many London investment banking dev jobs - it appealed to both the companies and certain developers. Often those who had other business interests.
I had a colleague whose contracting company was paying his wife in gold via an offshore company to further reduce tax paid (I only remember that from a drunken discussion so can't swear to its truthfulness)
They seem to have died down a lot now.
Dividends only save NI rather than tax as only first 2K is tax free, then its' 7.5% to the end of the lower rate band, and then something else in the higher one (andahdn as they come from profits corporation tax has already been paid on them)
Real savings come from avoiding NI, and having partners as co-employees / directors / shareholders so the 'income' can be split between two people rather than one
Offshore companies and gold bars is ripe for HMRC taking a closer look
This rate would have been negotiated by you. You then agreed to a specific rate.
The price of Uber rides varies based on demand so the driver doesn't know the price in advance + even if they did they are not allowed to refuse the ride.
That Uber exercises control of the relationship is what is indicating that Uber is an employer here.
1. I negotiate a rate. Sometimes I negotiate a higher rate after a few months.
2. I have frequently asked for changes to contract terms, usually after a legal review, and had those changes put in place.
3.... kinda agree with you, not sure it's exactly the same as the uber situation
4. The client company can't evaluate my performance in any way they want, at least officially, they get no say over how or when I do the work, how much I am available to work etc.
Practically speaking, point 4 is usually something of a compromise, as the client needs me to deliver the work in a timely fashion, and me signing a contract then disappearing for a month wouldn't go down well! But neither would it be good business practice for me.
Large companies obviously don't negotiate as much as small companies. In the US, contracting for engineering has been outlawed to a large degree, so large companies avoid doing it because the penalties are retroactive taxes and fines. And perhaps class action suits from former contractors as well. So it's mainly small companies without "by the book" behavior doing it in software. In other fields, it is completely common however.
> The converse doesn't work. Maybe your experience is with companies who like to do legally-unnecessary things.
It's not legally necessary to negotiate a pay rate, but it is something that often happens, usually informally. The point is not that it is necessary but that it is possible - an uber driver cannot negotiate. I can and do.
> In the US, contracting for engineering has been outlawed to a large degree
Thankfully that's not the case here!
For your contract to be legal it would have to pass other tests, but for you it was an objectively much stronger position (your agreed a rate you thought your time was worth when you signed the contract, not whatever your client thought they could hire you out to their next customer for)
It's hard to tell from the information you have given us, but it sounds like it could be an employer-employee type relationship.
You can take an online test here: https://www.tax.service.gov.uk/check-employment-status-for-t...
In other words, you're not working for these platforms, it's just a marketplace. With Uber, drivers are working for Uber, not for the passengers. However, Uber is pretending to be a marketplace, and it isn't. This sentence just proves that.
The issue is whether you can pay someone way less than what they'd otherwise be paid for the same work, just by saying they're contractors. A lot of software contractors get paid quite a lot more than comparable salaried employees, so they don't complain.
2. As above.
3. Not equivalent with plenty of other drivers in the area to take the call - if the driver was dropping the passenger off halfway it would be equivalent.
4. This is fair - and the only argument in the judgement I thought weak.
So, maybe it is not exactly the same.
What are you trying to say? Did you take the company to court?
Because Uber "could" as well, until a court said they don't.
Uber isn't actually going to reclassify their drivers after this ruling because the case was about its policies as of 2016. For example, they have since removed the penalties for rejecting too many rides. Labor activists would have to go back to court for current drivers.
I sure hope they'll declare all taxi drivers "employees of the cities they get the medallions from". With the city being equally on hook for all the insurances and other benefits for its taxi drivers.
How is the relationship, as described, any different from relationship between a city-managed tax driver? Aside of the star rating system - cities, having local monopoly, have literally no interest in maintaining high quality.
This is the UK supreme court (the one where the judges have real world experience)
Does the city auction the permits every year?
Uber was absolutely great in the US because it replaced the medallion system that was more of less a pyramid scheme. That's one of the big reason, I think, it worked so well.
In no cases do we have a medallion system, though. Licences are not transferable and have no monetary value.
Nobody is saying that Uber can't apply whatever terms they want to the relationship if they're in international waters and not under any particular flag.
edit: the city can require that people who live in it must work under the exact same terms as Uber, and will not be treated as employees of the city (if they can get this enacted in legislation and it has been found not to conflict with higher laws or treaties.) Uber doesn't get to require anything of local law.
Obviously different points could be raised and argued - as per other posts in this thread. However the specific points on which the court decision was based do match the relationship between cities and (regular) taxi drivers. If UK was a nation of laws, this ruling would also change the relationship between cities and taxi drivers.
But we know that won't happen - because public entities get an extra leeway with laws.
The government gets to determine whether you are an employee, because Uber is subject to laws. The government is also subject to its own laws, but there's no requirement that a government be subject to the same rules that it applies to a company that operates within its jurisdiction. Otherwise, why would we even try this in court? If Uber is entitled to identical treatment as the government, this case could have been tried in Uber's own court.'
I'm not misrepresenting you, I'm disagreeing with a false statement. The government's medallion system is not the same as Uber's structure with respect to drivers because drivers are considered citizens in their relation to the government, while they are considered employees in their relationship to Uber. The medallion holders are not entering into either an independent contractor or employee relationship with the government, they're following the law as all citizens (and companies) are required to.
- they aren’t working (eg they’re going home, this isn’t a general excuse that can always be used)
- they’re going to pick up a prearranged passenger
- they’re eating their lunch (this exemption was introduced by Churchill, hence ‘Churchill’ is cabbie slang for one’s lunch break)
Let's do it for you > 1) cities indeed in somec countries set the fare regulating taxis like a utility. it's pricy for consumers but transparent and stable for everyone. drivers can earn more money by reducing cost compared to their competition. Seems fair. 2) well, it's a public utility. So people can actually go and vote for or against taxi laws. You can't do that with uber... 3) I am not aware that a self-employed taxi-driver has to transport people? 4) as I'm not aware that cities monitor rides?
1. If the drivers set the fair, then customers have no idea what a trip will cost or if uber shows the drivers fair then why would the customer not always choose the cheapest causing a rush to the the bottom for pricing.
2. This one is open ended and I am not knowledgeable enough to comment on it.
3. If a driver is constantly rejecting rides this is going to affect the algorithm and negatively affect customers. You cant be on the clock and open to rides but consistently reject them when they are assigned.
4. It just makes sense to be able to let poor performers go.
From the article "This is a win-win-win for drivers, passengers and cities. It means Uber now has the correct economic incentives not to oversupply the market with too many vehicles and too many drivers", Mr Aslam, president of the App Drivers & Couriers Union
What he is saying but maybe does not realize is that this is actually the death of the gig economy at least as it relates to Uber. If there is now a forced reduction in drivers, its a regression to taxi cabs and it reduces the ability of someone to just grab a quick shift here and there and reduces Uber's incentive to allow them too.
What will stop drivers is simply that they won't be able to drive forever if they lose money on rides. That sets a minimal price.
If there is actual value in the service, they should be able to adjust to the decision.
Uber is currently very much a loss generating company, adding additional cost to their business plan will accelerate that. If they go out of business, even if just in specific markets, then that helps no one.
If it makes more economic sense for Uber to have a pool of full-time drivers to send to jobs, then that's a model they can move to. If not (because demand is inconsistent, or not evenly spread throughout the day, or whatever) then I have no doubt they'll continue with flexible rostering (perhaps taking more control as to timetabling).
And the UK is not in any way short of private hire companies or drivers. Many of them have apps, and Uber is not consistently cheaper than other cab companies. Frankly from a customer point of view it doesn't make a lot of difference whether they go out of business or not in England.
When Uber claims that they do not employ the drivers they're also saying that the drivers (as independent businesses) are responsible for charging VAT and paying that to HMRC. You only have to register for VAT if your vattable income exceeds £85,000 per year, so most drivers haven't registered for or charged VAT.
A safe driver who knows the area well and has an immaculate vehicle should be allowed to set their own rate. You talk about "customers having no idea what a trip will cost" like that isn't a supremely easily fixed problem.
You simply filter out by cost per mile, no different than filtering results on eBay or another website. You tell the Uber app you're only willing to pay $0.80 per mile, or whatever that number is. Maybe you end up in 2012 Honda Civic on your ride back... or you crank it up to $2.00 per mile and you end up in an Audi A6.
Power to the people?
There is a whole separate question around tax status, but that's not implicated by this ruling as it's based on a separate set of caselaw.
If I worked in the UK, I would presume this ruling makes my kind of work illegal, and there’s very little difference between this ruling and something like AB 5, which very explicitly make my line of work illegal. Luckily my jurisdiction has very few anti-contractor laws. The only one I run into is some case law around how long and independent contractor can work for before they become a de facto employee. Which is occasionally frustrating, but not on the same level as something like this. But any time I see this sort of thing I do get concerned that my jurisdiction will eventually get around to “saving” me from the working arrangement that has been massively beneficial to me over the past 10 or so years.
Have you ever met an Uber driver who didn't give the impression that this was what he did all the time? I haven't, though I imagine not everyone is full time. It's quite a way from the idea that anyone with a car can give someone else a ride. For instance, I've never met a driver who happened to be going where I was going, or someone who thought they'd just make few extra bucks on their day off. They must exist but it seems to not be the norm.
At the same time, we're shoehorning old ideas of what's work into a modern setting, because it's reasonably quick to become a driver, and communications with the employer are minimal. Uber doesn't seem like the kind of firm where drivers might have a teambuilding excursion, though perhaps I'm wrong.
Uber seems like the kind of firm that would actively discourage drivers from speaking to each other.
Plenty of contractors work all day long.
In the case of Uber, it's very clear that the contractors work for Uber, as it's Uber the one that sets the conditions of the job.
They were paid by the placement agency and the contractor was responsible for all self-employment taxes.
I actually think that a big multinational is more likely to commit these kinds of frauds. In fact, a full time employee that works only for one company and who's sent by a placement agency sounds a lot like fake self-employment.
This allows them to argue that, for example, they shouldn't have to pay for health insurance or unemployment or sick pay or vehicle depreciation for someone who only works 4 hours a week.
In the UK Uber hasn't made this argument much, as their drivers all have to be licensed minicab drivers - most of whom have driving as their primary source of income.
This was in Montreal, maybe it’s different in the US. Though most of the drivers I talked to there delivered for Lyft too.
My impression is that every Uber driver I have met, in the UK, was also working for a more traditional driver agency.
I believe it's contractual that Uber drivers are not allowed to give this impression?
Yes, most of the Uber drivers I’ve had over the years were doing it part time, or to fill in between jobs. I’ve only met one driver who considered driving his only job, and he was retired from his 40 year tech career and drove to get out of the house.
It’s interesting the level of control that Uber has (i.e. rejecting a driver application based on the make and model of car, renting smartphones to run the app).
Now they’re all permanent employees of Uber will they lose this flexibility?
If some drivers weren’t happy with the status quo, why not take their skills and work for another firm?
Nothing in employment law mandates an inflexible work schedule. You can have perfect flexibility while being an employee.
Of course they do - they're not going to get many five-star reviews if passengers leave the car feeling bad or complicit in exploitation.
You may well have enough presence of mind that a driver can tell you a bunch of upsetting things and you can get out the car feeling upset and still rate it as a great ride. Alas, many people in the service industry seem to have learned not to expect such insight from their customers.
Passengers will give low ratings for all kinds of insane things, from the cost of the trip (which the driver has no control over), to not agreeing with some random opinion they had, to refusing to do something illegal and/or dangerous. It's nuts. The rideshare companies side with passengers in these cases by default, and there is usually no way to dispute them.
Otherwise it's just a race to the bottom. See how many on HN seemed very happy that the USA made it harder for foreigners to get a work Visa in the USA because it undercut the local workforce. Unfettered capitalism will gladly let workers eat other for scraps.
Day work (you pick up jobs as available) is also a common concept since antiquity.
> If some drivers weren’t happy with the status quo, why not take their skills and work for another firm?
They did, and that firm also tried to act like they weren't employees.
Uber is in the wrong here. We've set laws on how to treat employees. Their attempt to say "but they aren't employees" is only an attempt to skirt these obligations. They don't have some moral, hypothetical, capitalistic high ground here. They are just one of many scummy employers that necessitate more employment laws.
Flexible hours? Absolutely fine. Flexible hours at the employer's sole discretion (zero-hour contracts)? Also absolutely fine; although there is some political pushback, it's fully legal.
Temporary employment, from one day upwards? Absolutely fine. If it consists of a series of 'temporary' contracts which in reality make up a multi-year contract, it might get deemed as permanent - but if it's genuinely temporary no problem at all.
Not actually employment, but some kind of dependent contractor status? We even have that, which was the case at issue here: some provisions (e.g. minimum wage laws) apply, but others (particularly unfair dismissal rights) don't.
We've also got caselaw covering piecework (work in my factory and get paid £1/widget), home working, working for a business you also own, and a bunch of other unusual cases.
What you can't reliably do is say 'I've found a magic form of contract wording that means that workers' rights don't apply to me'. People have tried to do that for hundreds of years and the loopholes get closed for the obvious reason.
For a small example, there was a recent case where an MP of the governing party (Charlie Elphicke) was convicted of sexual assault. As part of the sentencing process, defendants can submit character references ("He's a hugely charitable, reliable, all round good person and this offence is entirely out of character", that kind of thing) and several Conservative MPs sent them on his behalf, but asked for them to be kept confidential (presumably to avoid political damage at the upcoming election).
The judiciary were having none of it. The trial judge released the letters anyway, and the Lord Chief Justice (head of the criminal courts) rebuked the MPs for trying to influence the decision of a judge.[0] And this for something (character references) which are pretty mundane.
They really do not like bowing to political whims.
[0]: https://www.doughtystreet.co.uk/news/character-references-cr...
The UK government has been on something of an anti-judicial kick for the last year or so since the decision in Miller II/Cherry, the prorogations case (and a few other cases that haven't had as much press attention such as the Privacy International case on ouster clauses).
They've been talking about "reforming" or "scaling back" the Supreme Court—perhaps simply by renaming it—and talking about how judges have too much power, and are too "political", which somehow they propose to fix by replacing the independent appointment process with a more explicitly political one.
Also, if Johnson and the Conservatives wished to bring about the same result, they don't need a Supreme Court decision to do so—they have an 80 seat majority, a large chunk of which come from disaffected Labour voters in the so-called "Northern heartlands" who are perfectly happy to have employment rights improved. The Conservatives could, if they wished, quite easily pass primary legislation to specifically make gig economy or app-based workers have the status of workers under employment law - they'd probably get cross-party support for it.
See:
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2020/nov/15/supreme-court-pl...
https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/law/government-urged-to-rename-...
Doesn't "oversupply" lower the prices for passengers?
I myself often check the Uber price, and decide if I want to take it, or use public transport if Uber's too expensive.
Uber has been a very good thing for consumers through their own service and because they have forced taxis to improve to compete.
Taxis are fighting for their own interests that do not necessarily align with consumers' but of course it's not good for PR so they try to spin it in a different way.
If oversupply means drivers have to work very long hours to make a living, they're more likely to be tired and thus get in to an accident with me in the car.
It was a six nil unanimous decision. It back dates to 2016.
They may be liable for millions in compensation.
Workers are not employees but have more rights than independent contractors.
Declaration: i hate uber and refuse to use them for myself, I've never run the app. I have nothing against the drivers who seem nice people. The company is a scofflaw, and sucks income and driver renumeration into a Californian VC suck hole.
I know the taxi industry was broken before Uber.
Somebody then asked "how does it suck money, its never been in profit" to which i want to reply, its valued at $100b, it has $25b of assets and 11b of revenue, and its using transfer pricing and intellectual property law to suck money out of every economy worldwide. The VCs and principals must be laughing themselves sick because by the time it falls over their WORST outcome is billions, not tens of billions, of retained value, to them. They won.
To me, this is a nail in the coffin of the gig economy. Its fundamentally flawed. It's bad, it marginalised people, killed people, and broke the law.
There is little doubt in my mind that a different court, and most of all a court whose members have different political leanings, would have settled the semantics debate differently given the exact same letter of the law.
One thing worth noting is that the UK is already a little different from the US, because Uber drivers are required to have a private hire license issued by the city where you're operating.
For example, in London you'd be required to have a full criminal background check, a medical examination, and pass a "topographical skills check" (basic route planning and map reading).
So it wasn't like you could just apply to Uber and be up and running within a few days to begin with.
From the way some of the drivers manage some trips I've been on, I'd say that was definitely the case ahaha
I would be happy for such innovation in contract law if the provisions to protect citizens were less tied to employment.
I too will be interested to see how this plays out, as I think Uber would still need to stay to maintain market position, lest they end up losing UK to a competitor. But as you point out, it will certainly make them likely to be more picky in "hiring" new drivers.
I wonder if it will be a net positive for workers or not in the short and long term.
A few years back I came across a site that was looking for technical writers. They'd be editors, and you'd have to rework bits that they weren't pleased with. You'd give them the copyright, too. Yeah, right, like I'm going to write a book for a grand and let them have exclusive rights to it. I felt like writing back to these clowns telling me that they were insulting my intelligence.
I would rather write documentation and give away for free than accept their terms. (I do do the odd bit of tech writing, strictly small-scale amateur stuff, of course).
> That remains to be seen, but it could potentially happen.
It's weird that they answered it that way, even ignoring the double weasel words in use. The answer is clearly yes.
Just like minimum wage laws are put in with good intent but will backfire, so will this decision.
The only significant "blow" to the free market i can think of happened in 2008 with the proof that millionaire bankers have no accountability and will have their jobs saved by the state, no matter the cost.
1. Officially your employer can't make you opt out.
They don't pay VAT (revenue under 80k). They are self-employed, so corporate tax does not apply. They pay a 10% in National insurance.
And on income they pay for the 10k to 30k tier, at 20%.
Compare this with a normal company hiring staff. Tax burden doubles just with addition of VAT.
VAT is taken from customer and going to government directly.
I don't know the economic details of it for Uber, but it works and they've been using that model for a long time now.
I hope it's extended to bigger companies and elsewhere. I know for example in Ireland lots of big companies like Facebook, Google etc have staff on 11 month contracts through third party firms in order to dodge employment law and taxes...it's ridiculous when those roles are assigned to those companies and have been the same roles for yeara
When "self employed" lawyers can work on the same case for years.
Note that ir35 is not uniformly applied - unfortunately its bad employers like Uber et all that fuck it up for professionals like us.
But in the UK if say came in and did a 1 year engagement to sort out a major brands web presence - I would be considered inside ir35 (unless of course I was mate of Dominic Cummings)
That being said, if Uber truly can only be profitable by breaking the law, or by creating its own laws (Prop 22), perhaps it doesn't deserve to do so.
If their business is unprofitable even with their exploitation of workers, then it was never a viable business to begin with.
There are endless potential businesses that would become equally VC cash-vacuum-viable with specific worker deregulations and affordances. We do not do so simply because we see those values and protections as more important to societal good than those businesses (and their jobs) existing. If Uber ends up joining that set then so be it.
And in that environment it is not viable. Or, not viable to SF standards, in that it cannot sit on their arse and print money while their devs churn out fancy looking apps. They're competing with the local taxi company with a dozen cars and a phone number.
Let's not forget that in that world uber drivers are unemployed while taxi drivers make more money.
It's not like Uber is the only app like this in London. I have at least four different ones on my app, and Uber is rarely the cheapest as it is.
Uber has captured market share by being visible, and covering the whole city so you don't need to care which companies cover where you are. There are a few others that covers all of London and aim for the same over-supply of drivers, and most of them are not cheaper.
Overly simplified solution: Raise prices to cover a decent wage.
To be clear, if Uber are unprofitable, that's a business model problem, not a worker problem.