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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

> Uber pays below minimum wage in California? How?

By falsely classifying its drivers as independent contractors (and bamboozling the courts).

They also bamboozled the voters. In 2019 the CA legislature passed AB5 in reaction to Uber being independent contractors. AB5 applies to tons of other industries too, including software development. It's extremely difficult to write software on contract in California now. Uber then created Proposition 22 and managed to get it passed, which exempted the original target of AB5, themselves, but left all sorts of other independent contractors still covered by AB5.

AB5 codified in statute and created exceptions to the existing case-law rule on classification, from the 2018 Dynamex v. Operations West ruling of the Supreme Court of California. It is more accurately a response to that ruling, not Uber’s status prior to the ruling.

Falsely?? How about a source for that bs?

Here's an example of a sane court ruling, with a detailed explanation for why: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56123668 . Unfortunately US courts seem to pay too much attention to the form of of their business arrangements and not enough to the substance.

That is in the UK.. in the US, no one considers driving for Uber or Door Dash a job. It is side income, or better known as contract work. I don’t see how going onto an app and choosing gigs for people can be confused as doing work for a company.

> in the US, no one considers driving for Uber or Door Dash a job.

I've seen plenty of posts to the contrary.

> I don’t see how going onto an app and choosing gigs for people can be confused as doing work for a company.

Well, there is a detailed explanation for why what Uber does constitutes employment in the article I linked.

I used to use Uber a lot more than I do now, and so many drivers I met were contract drivers for various transport and delivery app as their entire source of income.

More recently the ride share drivers I’ve gotten have been older folks who report that they’re just supplementing income. A lot of the delivery drivers (Uber, DoorDash, Postmates, Amazon Flex, Instacart, etc) I see are younger and seem to be doing it full time.

For one, uber drivers can't set their own rates.

That’s old news. Uber responded to that ruling by changing the specific things the Supreme Court based their decision on. They did not switch to employing people for set hours.

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