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California passes bill that classifies gig economy workers as employees

nytimes.com

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Re: California passes bill that classifies gig economy workers as employees

#421

Post by IG_Semmelweiss »

mlindner wrote: post #408
Tiktaalik wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no workers will make a reasonable income!

No, workers lose their jobs. 2-3x increase in prices is not sustainable for such services except for a minority of rides. UberX will disappear and it will become only UberBlack.

Indeed.

No one in hacker news is a senior or retirée knowing how uber changed their austere lives, for the better.

Or riders for that matter. To my 80yr old mother, using uber has been a godsend. Its the only app she uses in her mobile. I dont even have uber on my phone. Somehow she figured out how to instal it and run it.

She does not drive due to her age and she cant wait outside due to the cold at bus stops.

Now thanks to this, either pricing will skyrocket, or availability will fall.

No one in HN is a senior, so they are oblivious to it all.

And this is 1 example. I'm sure there are others of families not having to do transportation juggling to move kids around, all of which is helped by ubers.

But to the wage justice warriors of HN, it matters little that less people are earning, and less customers benefit. Or that elderly people that qualify for Medicaid like my mother , can free themselves from the chain of lack of transport... What matters to the wage warrior is that they can show "liveable wages" for the limited few.

Disgusting

Re: California passes bill that classifies gig economy workers as employees

#422

Post by logfromblammo »

PorterDuff wrote: post #314
sk5t wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and directing them as to how they should do they job This is, to me, a very puzzling take. If you hire a contractor, you don't direct how they do the job, only what the job output is like. Hourly contractors are certainly a thing.

I'm still confused how you can avoid tell someone how to do their job. A SW contractor can't be told which language to use or be connected to company source control or use existing company software libraries? A carpenter can't be directed in some fashion beyond: 'YOU, GO BUILD HOUSE FRAME'.

You can tell someone to "do this work". You can only tell an employee to "do this work, at this desk, using this computer, for 8 hours between 8 AM and 6 PM every weekday".

You can tell someone to "get it done by the first of the month or suffer a penalty". You can only tell an employee to "get 5% of it done every workday and send me your status metrics by 10AM every morning or you're fired".

You can tell the carpenter what the work is that must be done, and provide detailed specifications, but if there are multiple ways to get that work done, you can only mandate those details for an employee. To some extent, building codes establish a minimum standard that everyone should be satisfied with, and you could tell an employee to do the minimum amount of work required by the building codes to get the job done, but you can't stop a contractor from carving Mayan-inspired engravings into every stud if they feel like that's what the job requires, or from using glue and joinery where most people would just put framing nails. As long as the work meets the specs, the contractor can get there by any route they please, no matter how much or how little actual effort is required.

Uber can tell its driver to "to collect this fare, get this passenger to this location". When they start saying what kind of vehicle they have to use to do that, they are starting to move into employee territory. Clearly, a passenger can be moved from A to B by a restored and retrofitted tie-dye-painted 1970 VW minibus as effectively as a nearly-new factory-stock black 2018 Toyota Corolla, so when Uber is making requirements that speak more to their company's brand identity than to the reasonable requirements of the job, those are employee-like requirements.

It isn't always clear whether a requirement is directed more towards the means or the ends, because specifying an end result precisely enough may dictate that the only practical means to that end be used. So California has decided to resolve this exploitable ambiguity in favor of assuming certain types of worker are employees unless a minimum degree of autonomy can be demonstrated.

Re: California passes bill that classifies gig economy workers as employees

#423

Post by poilcn »

chongli wrote: post #400
whiddershins wrote: post #246

All these people making Uber money on the side ... the whole thing was possible in part due to the low friction in (and also complete disregard for) the regulatory environment. I’m in NYC and honestly can’t figure out how to legally hire a studio assistant for a few hours a week without being at risk for any of a number of lawsuit vectors. So I just coil my own cables. And I don’t mentor people who want to learn some…

The way to protect workers is to shift the burden of health care and other costly benefits onto the government, supported by taxes. Then there is no risk to hiring a new employee beyond the wages you pay them. The US public does not want this, though, and the war of words over universal health care has led to incredibly deep entrenchment on the side of those opposed. All this despite the mountain of evidence from oth…

When an individual creates an enterprise it's expected to fail in 2 years. It does not mean death of the individual, but often it makes 'em go broke. Only one company in a hundred is successful. Other are doomed. Government-run projects do not live in alternative dimension. It is affected by the same things any private organization is affected. It is expected that a country would exist longer than an individual company. But want to bind the whole country to some huge bureaucratic organizations. Say, the one managing healthcare and the one managing pension founds. You won't stop at that, of course, but let's simplify to just that. There would be only two ways for them to survive in a long run. Bloating their budget, eating all other parts of the gov budget. After there is no where to "expand" (keeping the same quality of services), they would had to cut out some of their "clients". For a pension fund it would be to increase the age when people would be able to retire. For healthcare it would be to limit free services reject people who would be able to have certain services for free in certain cases, decrease quality of services. Then it would be inevitable death. As people are not immortal, organizations are not as well. If you had several private companies, the death of one of them would make others stronger. It would get rid of the weakest companies, keeping the strongest alive and in addition they would have opportunity to learn on errors of others. But you have one single company for each sector that manage the whole country. It results in country's collapse. There is no "mountain of evidence from other countries, showing the greatly reduced total costs and improved life expectancy as well as a lack of bankruptcy and financial ruin for those caught in an emergency". The idea of universal health care hasn't been tested by time yet (and in principal it will fail due to things I described above), so it's very reasonable that the US public rejects it.

Re: California passes bill that classifies gig economy workers as employees

#424

Post by balfirevic »

C1sc0cat wrote: post #413
balfirevic wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If workers in this field want to call themselves "software engineers" and gain the benefits of a professional title What are those benefits?

Quite I looked at going down the CENG route when I worked at BT via the BCS. 1 they kept changing the requirements 2 what are the benefits ironically as I started on the mech Engineering route I am more an "Engineer" than many other developers

Thanks for the answer, but I'm afraid I didn't understand anything of what you said.

Re: California passes bill that classifies gig economy workers as employees

#425

Post by chroma »

PorterDuff wrote: post #331
pishpash wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software "engineer" is not a (licensed) engineer, for the hundredth time.

It's a shame that doesn't exist. I've always thought you could make an especially strong argument for licensing for embedded software people, for many of the same reasons that a PE is licensed. It wouldn't be a requirement for a job necessarily, but not a bad thing to have.

I doubt such a certification would have any correlation with ability. Maybe the platonic ideal of training and testing that you're thinking of, but not a certification written by the US government. Even competent parts of the government like NIST take forever to update their standards. It would be worse for a licensing bureau with practically no in-house software expertise.

Re: California passes bill that classifies gig economy workers as employees

#426

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

djsumdog wrote: post #418
chongli wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way to protect workers is to shift the burden of health care and other costly benefits onto the government, supported by taxes. Then there is no risk to hiring a new employee beyond the wages you pay them. The US public does not want this, though, and the war of words over universal health care has led to incredibly deep entrenchment on the side of those opposed. All this despite the mountain of evidence from oth…

In America, you have to work until you die. The major thing the gig economy takes from people is health care. It's insanely expensive, and the Affordable Care Act is a terrible shamble of broken policy. I spent time outside of the US and came back to find health care worse than when I left it: https://fightthefuture.org/article/returning-to-america-and-... I have a friend who has been fighting brain cancer for over a…

This is why I don't understand why people take gig jobs. Think of the opportunity costs. First off, Uber drivers don't make that much. Then you have vehicle depreciation and maintenance costs. You need to carry an insurance rider that covers rideshare driving. You also need to pay for your own health care. When you add up all these expenses, plus the desire for a living wage, there is no way drivers can be making enough with current rates. When people say you're essentially borrowing against the cost of the vehicle, I don't think they're being gratuitous. There may be low friction to entering the rideshare space by being a driver, but there are plenty of hidden costs.

Re: California passes bill that classifies gig economy workers as employees

#427

Post by woah »

wool_gather wrote: post #371
swalsh wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just not convinced that's a straightforward question to answer. I once worked for a hardware company that outsourced new hardware development to a contractor. We had a guy in house for maintenance, and the occasional hardware bug that propped up, but we only designed a new box once every 5 years or so... it just didn't make sense to have the team in house. We did manufacturing in house, and we had a huge software…

Sure; there are always edge cases. Non-straightforward situations like this are exactly the reason judges exist, if it comes down to it.

What a huge drag on people’s livelihoods, making a broad swath of mutually beneficial business relationships illegal until someone goes through a multi year legal battle with the state.

Re: California passes bill that classifies gig economy workers as employees

#428

Post by dahdum »

farisjarrah wrote: post #381
EpicEng wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Experts said that there is nothing in the bill that requires employees to work set shifts, and that Uber and Lyft are legally entitled to continue allowing drivers to make their own scheduling decisions. Well yeah, it doesn't force them to. Who are these "experts"? If Uber takes on 100,000 new employees and all of the costs that go along with them, why wouldn't they also manage them like... employees? You can't have…

There are plenty of companies who have successfully figured out the whole part-time flexible employee thing. I quit my last company, but they didn't want to lose me, so they wanted to keep me on as a flexible-part-timer and I didn't even have a set amount of hours I needed to work every week. As long as I was working less then something like 30 hours a week then they didn't need to provide me additional benefits like…

Every single business uses the roads or benefits from them, and we pay for them mostly through gas/diesel tax, tolls, property taxes, and vehicle registration fees.

You aren’t subsidizing Uber/Lyft just by letting them use the roads like everyone else.

Re: California passes bill that classifies gig economy workers as employees

#429

Post by zaarn »

thrav wrote: post #204
zaarn wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it works remotely similar to how fake self-employment works in germany then as a freelancer it's sufficient to show that you work for more than 1 company. If you exclusively work for 1 company, AND ONLY THAT COMPANY, as a freelancer in germany, you and the company you work for are at risk.

I mean, most drivers work for both Uber and Lyft...

Doesn't really matter, it concerns WHILE you work for Uber. OR for Lyft. People can have multiple jobs.

Re: California passes bill that classifies gig economy workers as employees

#430

Post by prepend »

PorterDuff wrote: post #314
sk5t wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and directing them as to how they should do they job This is, to me, a very puzzling take. If you hire a contractor, you don't direct how they do the job, only what the job output is like. Hourly contractors are certainly a thing.

I'm still confused how you can avoid tell someone how to do their job. A SW contractor can't be told which language to use or be connected to company source control or use existing company software libraries? A carpenter can't be directed in some fashion beyond: 'YOU, GO BUILD HOUSE FRAME'.

I did software contracting for a while. It’s certainly appropriate to define parameters like “use language x, code these features, by this deadline and keep a synchronized copy of the code in this repo.”

You can’t set hours and direct particular tasks day to day.

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