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

701–710 of 781 posts

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

#701

Post by dfxm12 »

xapata wrote: post #640
clusterfish wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Businesses want more profit. Consumers want to pay less. Workers want to earn more. Pretty much always. This doesn't always result in an optimal outcome. Market power, externalities, information asymmetry, etc. This is why we have regulations. Forcing the society and Uber to pay for drivers to be treated as employees seems like a very reasonable outcome. If they don't like it they can hire less drivers, but the ones…

What does it mean to be "treated like an employee"? I'd like regulation to give everyone healthcare. Are non-employees not worthy?

Here's a quick overview, without getting too much into the minutia or Uber specific differences: https://employment.findlaw.com/employment-discrimination/emp...

tl;dr - "employees" enjoy a lot of benefits & protections, both legally required and provided by their employer, that non-employees (like contractors) simply don't have.

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

#702

Post by TheGeminon »

LatteLazy wrote: post #649
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.

Uber owns no cars and has no existing employees who work as drivers though. Uber only really hires tech people, not cab drivers...

So your argument is that since Uber was classifying them as contractors, they should always be able to?

According to a quick search, they have 900,000 drivers and 27,000 employees. At most 3-ish% of the people that they pay to work for them are tech employees (and we can probably safely assume most of those 27,000 are not tech).

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

#703

Post by TheGeminon »

shkkmo wrote: post #184
tick_tock_tick wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other than the spirt of the law being drafted to explicitly target Uber/Lyft the letter explicitly clears them.

The law was drafted to formalize a set of legal criteria that was established and enforced by Californian courts. The spirit of the law was not to target Uber/Lyft. The letter of the law, according to the courts so far does not appear to clear Uber in anyway. We will see how the appeal goes. Edit: I don't see how you think the letter of the law clears Uber, Uber sea to fail every part of the test. A) Uber does exert…

I think his argument is that the ABC test was crafted to ensure that Uber/Lyft failed the test, as it was only made effective January 1.

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

#704

Post by momokoko »

pseudalopex wrote: post #629
ehsankia wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can I ask where you found this wildly false information? Do you happen to live outside the US? I worked in California for a few years but I'm not longer there. And those were questions, they weren't meant to be stated as facts. > Nowhere in California labor law does it prevent people from taking vacations Hmm, maybe I understood my rights wrong, but from my understanding I wasn't free to take an arbitrary number of…

Employers are allowed to limit vacation and prohibit working for competitors. California doesn't force them to.

In California employers are absolutely not allowed to prevent workers from working for competitors outside of their working hours.

You are correct that they can limit vacation time, but Uber could also limit vacation time for contractors. There is nothing specific in California employment law that does not allow employers and employees to mutually agree to open vacation time.

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

#705

Post by LatteLazy »

TheGeminon wrote: post #702
LatteLazy wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber owns no cars and has no existing employees who work as drivers though. Uber only really hires tech people, not cab drivers...

So your argument is that since Uber was classifying them as contractors, they should always be able to? According to a quick search, they have 900,000 drivers and 27,000 employees. At most 3-ish% of the people that they pay to work for them are tech employees (and we can probably safely assume most of those 27,000 are not tech).

My argument is actually the inverse: currently uber has no driver employees, the only way to change that under this law is to assume they do, then you can use that to argue any new driver is an employee. You need a first set of driver-employees to argue others are now employees. But there has never been a first set of driver-employees. Its actually a little confusing that that is required as it seems to allow Uber etc to skirt this definition (unless they have been taking on drivers as full employees without my knowledge?)

I'd be interested to know how many creators YouTube "employs" or how many retail workers Ebay has and what their percentages are. This is where this whole thing confuses me: If Uber drivers are employees (and maybe they are?) then basically every major tech company has millions on employees they have been misclassifying. Paying them all minimum wage with benefits and taxes deducted etc will be a massive massive change for these companies.

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

#706

Post by jkinudsjknds »

momokoko wrote: post #223
rdgthree wrote: post #7

It strikes me that these articles are always biased in the direction of the benefits of being an employee. I have several friends that actively choose to be contractors because they prefer the (legally protected) flexibility to decide their own hours, among other things. It's a personal decision, and there are upsides and downsides in both directions. Sure - some (non-insignificant) portion of Uber and Lyft drivers w…

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…

This is the best stated argument I've seen on the issue. In general society suffers from workers. Even if health insurance were covered by the state and not the employer (removing the bulk of the burden from having employees), I would still want many of these points to be addressed.

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

#707

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

jasode wrote: post #589
dustinmoris wrote: post #577

Lots of HN comments are here like "I know people who prefer to be contractors", "My sister's neighbours little brother actually doesn't want to be treated with respect by Uber", blah This is utter nonsense. Being a contractor means being self employed. You don't get paid leave or sick pay. It's a risk taking and doesn't make any sense in the gig economy where the wages are close to minimum rates. If you are truly sel…

>All gig workers are slaves and we should treat each other with more dignity and upgrade them to employees. It's our bloody duty as a decent human being. Lyft/Uber can upgrade them to employees but the arithmetic of bottom-up economics means Uber has to raise prices to cover full employment benefits. The raised fares conflict with what passengers are willing to pay . E.g. even though yellow medallion taxis often cost…

> Also as far as I can tell, there is no worker co-op owned by the drivers anywhere in the world that treats members/drivers as employees with benefits. Why is that?

http://www.unioncabpdx.com/

The world is a big place. I'm sure there are others.

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

#708

Post by momokoko »

murgindrag wrote: post #634
jasode wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>All gig workers are slaves and we should treat each other with more dignity and upgrade them to employees. It's our bloody duty as a decent human being. Lyft/Uber can upgrade them to employees but the arithmetic of bottom-up economics means Uber has to raise prices to cover full employment benefits. The raised fares conflict with what passengers are willing to pay . E.g. even though yellow medallion taxis often cost…

There is no such thing as "society is not willing to pay the higher prices for drivers to be treated as employees." Society isn't a brain which thinks. There is emergent behavior. * I am glad to be forced to pay more to have Uber/Lyft drivers treated well. I think we should have worker's right protections. * I am unwilling to pay more myself as a one-off (e.g. through tipping). It's a Prisoner's Dilemma. That's what…

There is nothing in California employment law that prevents open schedules. Uber can have employees with exactly the same working agreement. The main difference is that Uber now has to pay into things like unemployment insurance and workers compensation.

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

#709

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #610
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Were all those companies breaking the law? This is actually a really good thread, because most people are surprised to discover that yes , those companies probably were "breaking the law". As other posters pointed out, AB5 is relatively new, so the test is relatively stricter now, and only relevant in California. More importantly though, employment classification is only challenged when a plaintiff files a lawsuit.…

> AB5 is relatively new, so the test is relatively stricter now AB5 is looser than preexisting law, since it adopted the preexisting ABC test from the Dynamex decision, but added new exceptions.

Fair enough, but this is a bit splitting hairs. AB5 codified the standard put forth in Dynamex (which was decided in mid 2018), which was much stricter than the previous standard, the Borello test, decided in 1989, and that test more or less followed a common law interpretation that had been the standard.

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

#710

Post by mongol »

mercer wrote: post #590
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Were all those companies breaking the law? This is actually a really good thread, because most people are surprised to discover that yes , those companies probably were "breaking the law". As other posters pointed out, AB5 is relatively new, so the test is relatively stricter now, and only relevant in California. More importantly though, employment classification is only challenged when a plaintiff files a lawsuit.…

This is fascinating, although I still feel there's too much disagreement for me to have a clear picture of how this works in California. I'll give a Dutch perspective (which perhaps applies to some degree to other parts of Europe): Until 2016, clients had to proactively ask for a 'Verklaring Arbeidsrelatie (VAR)'. An 'explanation of the work relationship'. If I understand correctly, the contractor/freelancer had to p…

Does this apply also for incorporated /limited liability corporations owned by the contractor, in the Netherlands?

In Sweden, if you want to become contractor, you have two options - start a limited liability company of which you owns all shares (Aktiebolag). Or you can start a business in your own name (Enskild firma), which legally is not separate from your own liabilities.

In the first case, you are making yourself employed by the corporation you own. I do not know if there is any legislation that prevents that business from having just a single customer. But I know that in my own case, my business have had a single customer the entire time it has existed.

Post reply on HN