631–640 of 754 posts
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Wouldn't a way to "work around" this be to incorporate or form a sole proprietorship for your own services?
Incidentally, you'd be crazy not to do this, as having a business, even a sole proprietorship, makes taxes a lot easier.
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Well, other than the minor hassle that they need to know how to issue a W2 and get enrolled for workers comp insurance and pay their estimated taxes for them. None are super hard, but they are barriers for people who aren't used to hiring people, which is the case for I think a lot of self-employed people. I only finally bothered to learn how to do it all last year when I needed some extra help with projects for my c…
This, 100% this. It makes the move from a single person company to a 2 person company terrifyingly complex, particularly for those of us without a background in business. It’s a literal chilling action on small business.
Well, I’m super libertarian and generally opposed to any and all government regulation, but… if labor laws are stifling small businesses, why have labor laws in the first place? The reason for this law is explicitly, specifically, stop businesses (small and large alike) from doing business this way; it’s not an unintended consequence, it’s entirely the point.
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I drive Lyft and Uber in the SF Bay Area. I'm a retired computer programmer and I need to supplement my income to have spending money. I'm on MediCal which is a great health insurance program and easy to get on if you are low income. I'm actually making really good money driving. When I am smart about knowing when and where to be I can make a too much money even working part time, by which I mean I will disqualify my…
What is the additional cost of having an insurance rider to cover when you're rideshare driving? I haven't pulled a quote, but I imagine that could be expensive due to increased liability.
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> This is why I don't understand why people take gig jobs. Sometimes Compared to what? is the most important question. I've been driving for a few years. Before this I was making minimum wage with no benefits. Before that I had a difficult stretch of unemployment. One of my least favorite questions passengers ask me is What did you do before this? because I don't really like to talk about it. It is a rough job - you…
So, you'd rather drive without a guaranteed minimum wage, possibility for unemployment benefits, or health care benefits? I fail to see how that leaves the driver in a better position.
> a guaranteed minimum wage
A min-wage guarantee implies Uber and Lyft will tell you when and where to drive because it would demolish the fundamental mechanism we drivers use to allocate ourselves. Otherwise we would all clump up in a parking lot somewhere trying to insulate ourselves from the costs of driving people around while collecting $10/hr.
> possibility for unemployment benefits
I haven't had this option in a decade or more. If you increase the cost of firing somebody, which is exactly what this is, you increase the cost of hiring as well. See above: this is a bottom rung job, the most important thing is to be on the ladder. If you make the bottom four rungs of the ladder illegal it doesn't mean people can magically start jumping to the fifth rung, they just get left out.
> health care benefits
Life's rough. Hopefully I solve this problem with a better job in the near future.
Don't get me wrong, I really dislike the Uber/Lyft model, I cringe every time somebody says "Oh but Lyft treats drivers so much better than Uber, right?" and I would love to see a better competitor prove the flaws of the Uber/Lyft model in the marketplace. I just don't think that minimum wage, employee status, and benefits packages are going to be that great for drivers or passengers. It's probably a mixed bag for both, but not a very good mixed bag.
As an aside, there's part of me that wants to figure out what a slide-deck is, make one, and be that competitor. So don't think I've been drinking the company Kool-Aid or anything, because I would love to put both of them out of business largely because I don't like how they treat drivers. But I'm still extremely thankful that I've had this job and I don't want to see it taken away from others who may value it in the way I have.
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I drive Lyft and Uber in the SF Bay Area. I'm a retired computer programmer and I need to supplement my income to have spending money. I'm on MediCal which is a great health insurance program and easy to get on if you are low income. I'm actually making really good money driving. When I am smart about knowing when and where to be I can make a too much money even working part time, by which I mean I will disqualify my…
Off topic but is your last sentence a nod to Vonnegut by any chance? Just curious
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He's just talking about a legal reorganization. "Uber Drivers LLC" contracts the employees which is wholly owned by Uber. I don't see how this would actually help them though. Under the new law, Amazon Flex drivers are also categorized as full time employees and the child company would still bear the costs of that
They’re actually talking about Amazon’s delivery service partner program. It’s where Amazon helps people setup independently owned delivery businesses. https://logistics.amazon.com/
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US public would yell an enthusiastic "hell yes!" if you ask them do they want free healthcare forever but then when you ask - ok, so how we pay for all that actually, that's where "hmmmm" comes in. "Government" means taxes, and US public is not super hot on paying more taxes, and not on US government (BTW, which one? there's federal government, state government, local governments... US has literally thousands of gove…
> to rebuild US healthcare system to look like Canadian or any of the European ones would not be as easy as just public agreeing on something Why not? Canada didn't always have their healthcare system. Canadians just agreed on something and suddenly they had it.
The premise was pretty much: take a question that might sensibly appear on a GED test (highschool graduation equivalency, without the class credits), that probably at least 50% of the viewers (so adults that could afford a TV and stay awake until midnight / had just finished watching the news) would probably, if not know, have a good enough idea to say if an answer was obviously wrong. Then go out and film until you got enough bad answers to fill the segment.
I'm under no illusions that the bad examples were cherry picked, but I am also strongly inclined to believe that a "large percent" of the population isn't informed, and doesn't want to be informed, and literally just isn't fit to actually vote.
The US believes everyone should have the right to vote; and I agree with that. However I believe that every voter should be an informed voter that can at least understand the basic impact of their actions and should at least be able to pass an ECON101 test. I would really prefer a local, national, geo-political, basic law, and economics (including some light math) test as a pre-requisite for being able to vote; BUT if the test isn't passed that person would qualify for employment (lit paid) as a student, where attendance in class and academic progress would be part of the pay. If there are medical issues/etc impeding learning that should already be covered by universal health coverage (in a non-broken country).
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It doesn't matter how you call it - they will be unable to earn extra money by driving, that is the issue. If they relied on that money to make ends meet, they may not be happy anymore.
> "It doesn't matter how you call it - they will be unable to earn extra money by driving, that is the issue. If they relied on that money to make ends meet, they may not be happy anymore." Your post makes zero sense, so I'll keep it short for you. Uber was the middleman, and without it - both individual drivers as-well as taxi companies have significantly more leverage over the consumers, and can now start charging…
So how does a driver get clients without Uber? If they can get clients without Uber, why did they use Uber?
How do clients know they can trust a driver? Taxi, OK - a taxi driver has to shell out serious money to get a license. Sometimes they must show proof of training. That makes them somewhat trustworthy, especially since their license can be revoked after a transgression.
For Uber, I suppose they tried to replace that with a rating system.
Without Uber, how do you propose making it work? I suspect simply becoming taxi drivers is not a viable option for many Uber drivers - because of the time and money commitment.
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>When I personally worked as a contractor, the other contractors I worked with mostly bounced from short gig to short gig. That would probably meet (B). (A) was a bit more subjective. I'm confused. You seem to be applying (B) to the contractor somehow, where my reading is that it applies to the company doing the contracting. It doesn't matter what the contractor is doing; if a company makes widgets, they can't hire a…
> You seem to be applying (B) to the contractor somehow, where my reading is that it applies to the company doing the contracting Yes and no. A company that hires contractors who bounce from gig to gig meets (B) assuming that the software in the other gigs applies to different businesses. Assume I make websites on contracts. If I make a website for a butcher, a baker, and a candlestick maker; the butcher, the baker,…
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>The US public does not want this I don't think this is true. I think what the US public doesn't want is the higher taxes to pay for it. We are already swimming in debt and wages haven't kept up with inflation. My daughter is making exactly the same wages now that I made when I was her age 25 years ago, in comparable jobs.
I'm Canadian and I don't pay substantially more income tax that Americans do in high tax states such as California. So what do you get for your high taxes? Not health care thats for sure. I guess what you mostly get is a very expensive military.