Hacker News Reader

Comment by 650REDHAIR | Hacker News Reader

The problem is we aren’t actual contractors. We are penalized for not accepting every ride. Accounts are suspended for repeatedly not driving to dangerous areas.

There is no rate card based on time/miles so every ride is an arbitrary payout based on a black box algorithm. With Lyft you’re incentivized with streak bonuses for 3 consecutive rides. The 3rd ride is always an awful fare that will lose money and if you decline you lose the bonus for the first two rides. Ride cost has stayed the same for the passenger and payouts have plummeted for drivers.

Anecdotal, but I’ve started gathering data to suggest that Uber/Lyft are capping wages to <$30/hr. When I have high tip passengers I am seemingly throttled with fewer requests and lower fares.

View on HN

How is that different than a legimate contractor?

If I offer a electrican contractor to fix a property in a dangerous area and they refuse, I might stop calling them in the future.

If contractor rates are high today, I might choose not to hire one today.

Hell, I might even make sure to split my contracts between different contractors to make sure they all stay in business.

It's not losing one customer, it's losing many customers for reasons that those customers wouldn't normally be concerned about. Refusing to accept fares at some locations isn't something that would make other customers decide not to accept a ride from you.

We do care about reliable service, though. That's something the ride share companies create incentives for with their games. But they are artificial games compared to a more free market situation where you can cherry-pick.

Drivers are contractors to Uber and Lyft, not the General Public. Uber is their customer.

> Accounts are suspended for repeatedly not driving to dangerous areas.

Do you not see why this is a policy? If you're in SF for example and drivers refuse to pick up anyone from the Tenderloin, and the Tenderloin is predominately one race, it's easy to label Uber as perpetuating racism etc.

It's easy for us to comment on this, it's not us that need to go in there...

I lived next to it and had to walk through there all the time at night, so I'm pretty aware of the risks there, as well as the demographic. Uber would 100% get labeled racist if drivers never went there.

> Do you not see why this is a policy?

Yes, but the existence of policies like that are why folks say rideshare isn't a contracting scenario.

https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...

"You are not an independent contractor if you perform services that can be controlled by an employer (what will be done and how it will be done)."

> existence of policies like that are why folks say rideshare isn't a contracting scenario

I’ve been a contractor. I didn’t have the ability to randomly reject assignments as the contract was for a term of time, not job to job.

a ride share driver’s contract is for a length of time too. the time it takes to go from point a to point b

> a ride share driver’s contract is for a length of time too. the time it takes to go from point a to point b

Is this true? Or is the driver contracted from the time they sign on to the time they sign off, with nondiscretionary jobs given to them in that interval?

The driver is only paid by the trips they decide to take within the timeframe they are logged in. They have full flexibility to log in and not take any trips…and not get paid a dime.

Except the drivers can reject trips. Uber can just choose not to use them for future assignments, e.g what they're doing with suspending accounts for rejecting too many rides.

They're basically saying they don't want to work with unreliable contractors.

You can also reject part of your job as a salaried employee, ie if you feel unsafe, but your company also may decide that it doesn’t want unreliable employees.

I don’t see how that’s any argument in favor of being a contractor

If you're not able to choose and reject tasks (rides), then that would make Uber an employer. The reality is they can (and do), so it goes against this whole quote.

"You are not an independent contractor if you perform services that can be controlled by an employer (what will be done and how it will be done)."

They tell you "Hey, Joe wants a ride from A to B and we will pay out $X for that, do you accept this job?". They're not telling you "Hey, Joe wants a ride from A to B, you must take it and you must perform it within 15 minutes and you must do x y z"

Well the “must” is implied.

“Do you accept this job? If you don’t take this job we won’t give you any jobs in the future” — contractor

“If you don’t take this job you’re fired” - employee

It’s identical. Nobody is forcing you to do it in either case, but the result is exactly the same. Whether you’re an employee or contractor makes no difference in the result, even if the wording is different.

So in your opinion contractors don't exist? Because what you're telling me is if I want to hire a contractor and they say no, and I decide I won't use them again in the future, then I'm all of a sudden an employer.

Maybe I should tell that to half the HVAC guys in my area so they can start collecting health insurance from me

Well definitely not that they don’t exist, just that maybe they don’t exist if there’s a company that acts as a middleman between the customer and the contractor.

The issue is where the middleman determines all of the terms for both the contractor and the end-customer.

If I as a customer can reach out directly to a bunch of contractors independently, then that’s a fair free market, and the contractors can compete for my business or not accept it at all if they don’t like the terms, without harming any of their other customer relationships.

But if I as a customer can only reach out to a middleman, and that middleman decides who works for me. And the contractor also doesn’t get to pick their individual customers. Then it’s clearly not a fair free market at all.

If there were a company called SanFranciscoHVAC and I reached out to them to fix my heater. They send someone out to fix it. But I don’t get to pick who comes to work on my house, and they don’t get to pick who their customers are. And they can’t refuse a job or else SFHVAC stop giving them jobs. Can you really call them contractors?

I think it’s fair when you are working with companies like Uber when they first started. They worked with limo agencies.

If you put out an offer, and a company consistently rejects it, then it’s fair to say you don’t want to waste your time with them anymore.

Big or small, companies are at least knowledge and serious about analyzing their situation. Individual people can’t do that and once you start using them you have to treat them as employees, no matter how lenient you are about punishing them when they don’t follow orders.

I don't think the theory that an intermediary contract creates an employee is well thought through.

Consider a property owner who contracts a property management company that has a lease (contract) with a tenant, who complains about broken AC so the management company contracts an HVAC contractor to replace the AC, and the HVAC contractor in turn contracts a drywall guy because they needed to open walls for their install.

Who is the employer of the drywall guy in your theory and why?

>You are not an independent contractor if you perform services that can be controlled by an employer (what will be done and how it will be done)."

I never understood what this means exactly, and I think a lot of other people are confused.

It clearly doesn't mean that a contractor decide to install a sink when I asked them to install a toilet. It doesnt mean that if I pay them to do it to code, they can decide to disregard the codes.

This already happens all the time with delivery services for the Bayview and Hunters Point neighborhoods of SF. The wording is usually something about avoiding the area "east of Interstate 280", e.g. https://www.purplestarmd.com/delivery/

East of 280 doesn't really denote anything about danger to me, as I don't recall those areas being any more dangerous than the rest of SF. If they deliver to Tenderloin and not there I highly doubt it's for the reason you're alluding to

> If they deliver to Tenderloin and not there I highly doubt it's for the reason you're alluding to

http://radicalcartography.net/bayarea_race.jpg

I mean this proves my point? If you're trying to point out the one part that's blue on that map to the right of 280, I'll point you to the multiple pockets of blue inside their delivery zones

Feel free to provide a different explanation :)

Your explanation is trying to insinuate that it’s because they’re black, but they deliver to black neighborhoods inside SF limits, therefore you can’t just say “oh they’re racist”.

If my original example is what we went with, you could because tenderloin is smack dab in SF, and it would be clearly discriminatory to pick up passengers from everywhere in SF except that one neighborhood.

Problem is there is no oversight or recourse.

I have tons of rides that originate in the TL/Mission that are unaccompanied minors or small children (toddlers or actual babies) without car seats. Lyft/Uber don’t care why I canceled. Only that I canceled and now I am penalized for following the law.

Would you say the situation would be better if the market were self-driving cars and chartered chauffeurs only? (Counterfactual: we have Revel [1] in New York, where I understand drivers are employees.)

[1] https://gorevel.com/rideshare/drivers

Do you have any statistics about how many Uber drivers have actually been a victim of crime in these “dangerous areas”?