Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Uber and Lyft ordered by California judge to classify drivers as employees

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 781 posts

Re: Uber and Lyft ordered by California judge to classify drivers as employees

#511

Post by eru »

nl wrote: post #476
saurik wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I pay PayPal to process payments for me: I don't work for them. Hell: I pay Apple to publish apps to the App Store on my behalf, and they even decide whether my app is "OK" or not: when they tell me to make a change to my app, I must do that or I lose my ability to collect revenue. They even require I use certain tools that I have to purchase from the company store to do my work. I have no direct relationship w…

You set the price that the customer pays (via Apple) though. That isn't the case for Uber drivers.

You think, if Uber let drivers bid on customer fares, they could classify the drivers as contractors again?

Re: Uber and Lyft ordered by California judge to classify drivers as employees

#512

Post by sudosysgen »

tomerico wrote: post #501
sudosysgen wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to pretty conclusively result in Uber drivers being employees, then. Specifically, in B. It's going to be hard for Uber to argue that driving cars is outside of the usual course of Uber's business.

I actually don’t think that point B is the ones they failed off. They claim that they are in the business of facilitating a connection between drivers and riders, in the same way that Youtube connects creators to viewers without employing them. The main thing they failed on is that the court thinks that they exert too much control on the drivers. For example, they don’t allow users to choose their own drivers. They a…

>They claim that they are in the business of facilitating a connection between drivers and riders, in the same way that Youtube connects creators to viewers without employing them.

This doesn't stand. If YouTube hired every single YouTuber as a contractor it would be forced to reclassify them as employees. Because Uber doesn't facilitate connections between two third parties, it facilitates connections between clients and their contractors. If drivers on Uber were neither contractors nor clients and if contractual obligations were between drivers and riders then it would make sense.

Re: Uber and Lyft ordered by California judge to classify drivers as employees

#513

Post by 40four »

So if Uber & Lyft lose their appeals, I’m taking bets on how long it will take before they cease operations in California. I’ll set the over/ under starting at 65 days.

In all seriousness, I’m not sure they will stop operating completely, but I have a hard time imagining this will be good for a large number of drivers who do it part time, or for consumers.

If they have to be employees, then I imagine Uber/Lyft will only want to keep the most productive drivers around. The ones who do already do it full time. They will likely have to enforce real working hours/ actual schedules, based around demand.

This means any of the fringe drivers, who do it part time for supplementary income will be out. They might not have the option anymore of just turning on the app and working a little bit when they decide. This will mean less choice and higher prices for riders.

Re: Uber and Lyft ordered by California judge to classify drivers as employees

#514

Post by eru »

kangaroozach wrote: post #264
dnautics wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having been a driver for 1.5 years my questions for you are these: 1. If Uber and Lyft allow their drivers to choose, would it be reasonable for them to make "having the other app on at the same time" cause for dismissal? I know of no other employee that is allowed to simultaneously bill time on a competitor. Contractors, absolutely. Employees, no. 2. What if Uber, instead, charged $1.00/mo for the drivers to use the…

1. Makes sense. CA is wrong to outlaw voluntary working relationships between two parties. 2. Interesting idea, but then all companies could just do this and make the same claim that their employees/contractors/vendors are just customers too! Not gonna fly.

> 1. Makes sense. CA is wrong to outlaw voluntary working relationships between two parties.

Wrong in what sense? In a moral sense I might agree with you. In a legal sense, governments around the world do that all the time, and get away with it.

Re: Uber and Lyft ordered by California judge to classify drivers as employees

#515

Post by theptip »

mullingitover wrote: post #409
cwhiz wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber has never made money. They haven’t even come close to making money. It’s hard for me to have any sympathy for investors who keep funneling money into a company that defines “success” by lowering their quarterly loss to a mere billion. It’s not as if this information isn’t public. Everyone can see that Uber can’t make money.

Amazon has gone very long stretches without making money, too. They're still a trillion-plus dollar company and nobody seems to care. I was under the impression that the markets that are mature for Uber were profitable, and they've been plowing capital into growth, hence the losses. Feel free to correct me if you have sources that show otherwise.

You’re being downvoted because this is a commonly quoted and false claim about Amazon; here’s some reading on free cash flow vs. profits that will explain it better than I can:

https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/8/21/20826405/amazons-profit...

Bezos has been clear from the start that he’s optimizing for FCF instead of profitability, you can read his early shareholder letters to see this.

In summary though, Amazon has been “making money” for ages, they just reinvest it in R&D so it doesn’t make it down to the bottom line.

Re: Uber and Lyft ordered by California judge to classify drivers as employees

#516

Post by eru »

dnautics wrote: post #384
gamblor956 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) if they forced that requirement on drivers, that would 100% indicate an employment relationship. But note that it is generally regarded as fraud to double bill multiple clients for the same unit of time. 2) irrelevant to the employee/contractor determination. It is possible for an employee to also be a contractor, see for example restaurants...

Ok, so we are saying #1, If you pick to be in a contractor relationship you can do whatever with regards to having both apps on simultaneously. #2 If you pick to be in an employee relationship, uber and lyft have a right to exclusivity during all phases of the ride. Of course a driver can choose to work for both, but lyft can terminate a driver if they find that a driver is online for uber, and vice versa. Or #3, the…

What's wrong with #2, but Uber and Lyft decide not to use that right, and also to cede that right in the employment contract?

Re: Uber and Lyft ordered by California judge to classify drivers as employees

#517

Post by xnyan »

logicchains wrote: post #467
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) In Victorian Britain, child labour provided a great many public goods. 2) After it was outlawed, many of businesses that relied on it became unsustainable. I don't think it is sensible to justify exploitation with "but the public benefits from it' and 'without it the business might go under'. By that logic we'd still have Victorian workhouses, 12-hour workdays, and there'd be no health & safety.

>I don't think it is sensible to justify exploitation with "but the public benefits from it' and 'without it the business might go under'. It's absurd to compare providing a service that hooks drivers up with clients to child labour.

Driving for a living is hard on a person. Truck drivers have bad health and quite high divorce/problematic relationship rates. Taxi driving is relatively dangerous. Driving is the most dangerous activity we commonly perform today and the risk corresponds to miles driven.

Re: Uber and Lyft ordered by California judge to classify drivers as employees

#518

Post by sytelus »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #329
aeturnum wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "it is important to understand that you never really get to 'choose' whether you're a contractor or an employee, it's determined solely as a function of the type or work you do and the nature of your relationship to the employer" I don't understand what you're trying to say here. In my experience, on both sides of this, a good deal of thought is put into what kind of position to seek / offer. I think employers and…

> I can imagine Uber offering jobs v.s. contractor positions with differing levels of support, remuneration, and expectations. Legally, in California, they can't do that. As outlined in the article, the 'ABC test' is the legal test for determining whether someone is an employee or a contractor. The 'B' part of that test is "The worker performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity's business." If…

You are interpreting it all wrong. Staff augmentation happens all the time who do same work as employees. The fundamental difference is amount of time you are hiring the person for. If you say I need person to augment my existing staff only for 6 months then they need not be employee. This is why many contractors are forced on leave after certain number of months. A contractor may also chose to work, say, 20hr per week.

Being a contractor is not fundamentally bad if US hadn’t tied medical insurance and companies hadn’t tied stock bonuses with employment. Technically there is no such need for “employment”. You go work for the time and you get paid equitably without an artificial status called “employment”. Unfortunately this status has became part of many arcane laws and difficult to get rid of.

Re: Uber and Lyft ordered by California judge to classify drivers as employees

#519

Post by heavyset_go »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #291
momokoko wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize there are tons of jobs with employees that allow employees to chose their own hours. There is nothing in this ruling that prevents Uber from allowing people to chose rides _exactly_ as they are doing it now. The changes are: 1. Uber needs to pay into unemployment insurance. 2. Uber needs to pay into workers compensation. 3. Uber needs to pay into social security. 4. Uber needs to collect payroll taxes in…

Current employment law really isn't well suited for cases where someone can be an "employee" of 4 or 5 companies at a time, and stop and start on a whim as they see fit. I mean, just look at unemployment insurance. When the nature of the job is essentially a bid out to people willing to do the work, what does it mean for someone to be unemployed in the first place if there is just less work to go around? Flexibility…

> Current employment law really isn't well suited for cases where someone can be an "employee" of 4 or 5 companies at a time

There are plenty of people working more than one job in the US where they're classified as an employee at all of them.

Re: Uber and Lyft ordered by California judge to classify drivers as employees

#520

Post by eru »

manfredo wrote: post #258
threepio wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid you're repeating Uber's favorite talking point, which is that everyone should respect the worker's decision to be an employee or contractor. Nobody disputes that Uber can have employees or contractors (or both), or that drivers should, in principle, be able to choose what status they hold. The problem is that Uber currently exerts so much control over its "independent contractor" relationships that they ha…

The fact that it's Uber's talking point doesn't make it any less true. If rideshare drivers are employees, then there's going to be fixed overhead costs of hiring employees and drivers will not be able to set their own hours. The rideshare company would not recoup the costs of benefits for drivers that drive less than a certain number of hours per month, and so drivers would have to be required to work at least that…

Of course, 'employees' vs 'contractors' are purely terms made up by the legal system. So the people in charge of the legal system, both on the law making side and the law interpreting side, can over time change what they mean, and the meanings don't have to be particularly sensible nor consistent.
Post reply on HN