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Comment by MichaelCrawford | Hacker News Reader

this is important. The law in the US as to whether one is an employee or an independent contractor is quite clear. Look up the "twenty factors"; sometimes they're referred to as the "twenty questions".

Among the factors is who shoulders the financial risk. If it's not possible for you to lose money, that's one of the factors that qualifies you as an employee.

Your title or contractual relationship have nothing to do with it.

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Uber drivers buy a car, pay for insurance, gas, etc, and certainly run the risk of losing money. They also have total control over their time and work. They can switch on or switch off anytime they like, and choose whether to accept each ride request.

There are lots of reasons to criticize uber. Classifying the drivers as contractors isn't a reasonable one.

You are joking right?

There are a mass of articles and discussion about this that shows your 'reasonable' classification is in fact 'highly contentious'.

Whatever else you say about Uber, it's pretty obvious that the contractor/employees are in a grey area where they have some traits of contractors and some traits of employees.

I think you're missing that the poster's adjective 'reasonable' is modifying the word criticism, not the word classification.

I agree that "classifying the drivers as contractors is not a reasonable criticism" of Uber. But strictly in terms of the operation of classification, they are in a somewhat grey area. In my opinion, on balance, Uber drivers are more like ICs than they are employees (and by a very wide margin). The problem is the 20 point test is totally ridiculous and doesn't give clear guidelines as to how much to 'weight' each of the criteria and thus gives great leeway for anyone to make a 'strong' claim in either direction by selectively ignoring the points that don't fit their preconceived opinion.

The federal tax code has to work for literally hundreds of millions of people and billions of situations. The presence of grey areas is a design feature not a bug, IMO.

Yes, it can be annoying and frustrating to not know with a bright line test of executable English law code the outcome, but I can only imagine how much worse it would be if we tried to reduce every situation down to exhaustively testable 0/1 pure-white/pure-black codification.

The disambiguation is lazily evaluated (sometimes at significant expense) by the tax courts, or you can request an evaluation ahead of time in a private letter ruling (at very reasonable expense). I believe this is still better than eager/greedy evaluation of all situations.

Almost irrelevantly, I also think that Uber drivers are significantly more ICs than employees.

That's creative from Uber, offering their car loan plan, so that their drivers have the opportunity to lose money and are no longer classified as employees as far as the tax man is concerned.

> and choose whether to accept each ride request.

No, not if they're on the clock. Too many rejections and they get shown the door. In any case, this particular activity is rife in the taxi industries, with taxi drivers often refusing to pick up crappy fares.

Uber has cleverly saddled their workers with the worst aspects of being employees and few of the benefits of being contractors.

Work as few or as many hours as you like. That's a pretty big benefit of contractors.

Uber are testing out a new scheme where they penalize people for not working full-time hours by charging a much higher commission for the first few rides they take every week: http://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-tests-30-fee-its-highest-ye... They obviously don't want people to work for them part time. Lyft are doing the same.

The article also provides an explanation for this: "Uber, which started its business taking a 20% commission on all rides, has raised and lowered that rate in different cities depending on the supply of drivers and rider demand."

It seems that one way to deal with over-supply of drivers is to lower rate the rate even further, but they probably don't want to screw around with rates too much. Lowering them drastically might discourage drivers long-term, to the point where they find a different full-time job and swear off Uber.

It's super possible to lose money as an Uber driver... Say you drive around in circles in a place where you don't get rides. You will burn gas and lose plenty of money and make none at all.

The problem is that these drivers fall on both sides of the questions. Another question is if Uber drivers are employees of Uber in Florida, are taxi drivers now also employees? Many of them (that do not own their own car) are ICs too.

> It's super possible to lose money as an Uber driver... Say you drive around in circles in a place where you don't get rides. You will burn gas and lose plenty of money and make none at all.

I'm not trying to be contentious but why does your hypothetical Uber Driver have to drive around in circle?

Can't they park somewhere, or do their daily routine and wait for the app to announce a possible passenger? Cause I've met two uber drivers before from what they've talked about they just chill around, do their daily business and if there's a lead they decide if they want to take it.

>> are taxi drivers now also employees? Many of them (that do not own their own car) are ICs too.

I spent a few months as a dispatcher in a taxi shop, and drivers weren't ICs, they were more like part of a b2b transaction. They rented the car and medallion from us for a flat rate for 12 hours, and could pick up whomever they wanted off the streets. When we got calls to arrange pickups, I went down the list contacting drivers until someone would take the fare. We only made money from renting the taxis to drivers.

So the distinction is that Uber handles the money. I see. Since Amazon handles money in a b2b transaction, does that make people putting things up for sale on Amazon ICs or employees?

What value do you expect to get out of demanding that people analyze these random situations? Ultimately, it's the government bureaucrats and legal system that make the decisions, so even if someone gives you some relatively definitive answer, it could still turn out to be wrong.

It's also sort of hostile to take the anecdote based on personal experience and characterize it as "the distinction" (when it is just as easy to read as a description of some differences).

Medallion cab companies don't have a rating system where unpopular drivers are dismissed. Uber spends a lot of effort monitoring and controlling how their drivers do their jobs, which is not something I've ever heard of a cab company doing.

The problem is that the law really isn't very clear. The weighing of the factors is based wholly on context and, in most situations, it's fairly easy to come up with arguments for either side.

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