Highest French court reclassifies Uber drivers as employees

You do get paychecks issued regularly every two weeks (or whatever), it's just that the amount per paycheck is variable based on hours worked over the preceding 2 week period. This is common for much more than just Uber drivers (e.g. retail workers), and it still works out. The paid vacation amount is the average amount that employee earns.

Worker protections exist to ensure that employers don't exploit their position of power to take advantage of their workers. Full stop. Obviously that doesn't apply to the plumber you hired to fix your toilet or the painters the company hired to paint the walls but anytime you have a continuing open ended relationship when you alone provide at least a substantial fraction of the employees total income I have to wonder how on earth the same protections don't apply.

The situations where a contractor relationship applies are plain and obvious. Any time you have to ask if someone is an employee you are probably exploiting the fine line to avoid having to follow the law. Kind of like if you have to ask if you are actually committing fraud you probably are. Depending on which side of the fine line a judge comes down on you may or may not be punished for it but you aren't a better person for it.

> There's no law that a company can't offer employees flexible hours, and nobody's arguing that there should be. If Uber decides employee drivers can't have flexible hours, then that's on them. This argument is a non-sequitor with regard to employee/contractor status.

The flexible hours come in exchange for contractor status. If they paid employee benefits they could attract employees who don't need flexible hours. Which means if you force them to pay employee benefits either way, they take those workers instead of the ones who need flexible hours and the ones who need flexible hours are out of work.

> Is it "Uber or unemployment", though? Are unskilled workers without a car just completely screwed? No, because those aren't the only two choices. Do you know of an actual case where a person has had no other choices than Uber and unemployment? It's a red herring.

It's one of the two possibilities. The other is that they had the option of working for someone else as an employee but willingly chose Uber, e.g. because of flexible hours. Or maybe they like driving a car better than cleaning toilets. Whatever the reason, you're taking away that option.

> I can't speak to France, but in the United States the difference has a lot more to do with taxes and social security than it does with any immediate, direct benefits to the employee.

In the US the employee and employer each pay half of social security. Contractors are "self-employed" so they pay both halves. But everybody knows this, so you have to pay a contractor that much more (or provide some other valuable consideration like flexible hours) to get them to work for you instead of somewhere they're an employee. If you make Uber drivers employees, more people want the job and by supply and demand the wages go down.

> Again, I don't know about France, but in the United States "employee benefits" have almost nothing to do with employee/contractor status.

There are a bunch of rules and incentives with respect to employer-provided health insurance, unemployment insurance etc. that apply to employees and not contractors. If there was no difference then why would anybody care about how the drivers are classified?

In general you could expect a reclassification to negatively impact everyone involved, because being an employee involves a lot more paperwork and bureaucracy but the value in any advantage from it should then get reflected in correspondingly lower compensation (or loss of employment if that level of compensation falls below minimum wage).

"Workers rights" are things like the right not to be refused a job because you're a woman. I don't think anybody is accusing Uber of doing this, nor would doing it give anyone any apparent competitive advantage in modern markets.

Classifying things like unemployment insurance under that banner is silly, because anybody who wants it can go buy it with money, so it makes no sense to require it rather than letting workers and companies negotiate over whether they'd rather have that or some other thing like higher pay. Every company has to convince their workers to work there and not somewhere else, so everything like that which they don't provide requires them to provide something else instead.

Imposing those requirements hurt workers by taking their options away -- somebody who knows they're only going to be a driver for four years as they work their way through college may very well be better off to have the money that would otherwise be paid to the insurance carrier than to have the unemployment insurance, which they'll not use anyway because Uber doesn't do "layoffs" of contractors and it's very unlikely demand for rides is going to disappear in the next four years.

They're not free to choose the method of fulfillment at all. They can't stop at 7-11 on the way, nor can they complete the route with a rickshaw, nor can they subcontract it. They can't pick up additional passengers except by Uber's explicit permission.

That freedom reduces to "they're free to optimize the route to get there quickly" which is a freedom you have at just about any job. I can decide how to code most efficiently, but does that really make me more contractor-like?