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.
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)."
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.
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?
They're basically saying they don't want to work with unreliable contractors.
I don’t see how that’s any argument in favor of being a contractor
"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"
“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.
Maybe I should tell that to half the HVAC guys in my area so they can start collecting health insurance from me
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.