781–790 of 887 posts
Could this be posturing to get the state to back down on the enforcement of its decision? And does anyone have a guess if Uber is making money in California right now? Given the state is still in lock down.
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DeBlasio is a clown and is ruining NYC.
That's a legitimate point of view but that in no way or case justified what Uber did. For context[1], when NYC passed legislation that would have adversely affected the business, they put a "de Blasio's Uber" button into the app encouraging people to contact the mayor's office, basically spamming the office with mail. And before you think that's because they're staunch believers of civic protest, as the article point…
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That's pretty interesting! In my view, the set your own fare part and penalty removal definitely moves them from the "employee" zone to "self-employed" in the everyday definition. I guess AB5 is much more strict.
AB5 imposes an ABC test on businesses after the precedent set by Dynamex [1]. The specific point of contention the judge has is the B of the ABC - that is whether drivers 'perform work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business'. Uber argues it is a technology company first, and drives/delivers second, whereas the judge argues the opposite. Convincing arguments can be made for both sides. The mo…
Uber is a mess.
It clearly needs to be a franchise.
You have Mother Uber that develops the app and sells the franchise and Uber SF, Uber LA, Uber Seattle etc that hires the drivers. It's utterly unclear to me what efficiencies can be found for having one company doing all that.
Full-time driving jobs already exist. Shuttles, buses, taxis, limos, etc. Uber Black is mostly private transport employees. It was a choice for drivers to willingly work for Uber instead. The lawsuit was backed by a handful of people who went against the 99.9% of drivers who wanted freedom and flexibility to work above all.
It's a tyranny of using a tiny minority to unlock massive tax potential. If protecting workers was really the goal then they should've created a 3rd option instead of shoving everyone into the W2 extreme, and it's affecting all kinds of freelance workers.
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How is removing upfront pricing friendly to customers? It's horrible UX.
getting charged exactly for what you use is great
Upfront pricing is still calculated based on usage, but it sets a fair amount without giving up control and the potential for overages.
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part time employees?
Do they set my hours then?
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Isn't that only the case in certain metropolitan areas? It is a huge problem indeed, but the problem there is the medallion system having degraded to become a shady get-rich-quick investment scheme. This is unrelated to the way in which the drivers are operating. They just lease their car and medallion from someone, paying that guy a fixed rate per day for that lease, but that does make them neither a contractor nor…
Absolutely false. Most taxi drivers don’t own the medallion, and in fact when they start their shift they owe the taxi cab company $80-100, so they need to work for a few hours just to get to break even. Your mental gymnastics to try to justify why taxi drivers aren’t employees but Uber drivers are is showing.
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Yes, Apple is absolutely a music publishing company (among other things) because it runs iTunes.
It's a music publishing company as much as DoorDash is a restaurant. You use DoorDash to get food, but DoorDash is not the person actually making the food. Likewise Apple sells music, but said music is actually recorded and published by some other entity.
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I don't get the aristocratic supremacist thing, the person hailing the ride is the one who is coming from or going to the "dangerous" area, clearly they are not a beneficiary of the aristocracy.
Why should a driver put themselves at risk? Especially without risk adjusted compensation.
Also nobody is forced to do so. You can decline rides. There might be penalties after too many cancellations but it was a much better system than taxis, which were mandated by law but had no oversight and so pretty much always declined for the slightest of reasons.
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Or an opportunity for a new ride-share company that doesn't claim their employees are contractors.
Even taxis claim their drivers as contractors.
There has been considerable ink spilled about AB5 changing that, with the taxi industry lobbying unsuccessfully while it was in the legislature for a specific exemption; the B prong of the ABC test, which seems to be the critical and likely insurmountable one in the Uber/Lyft case, seems like it would likely apply to them in a similar way.
Taxi companies are individually smaller and, for that reason alone, probably lower on the direct, self-initiated enforcement priority list for the State, but there's both private action and complaint-based state action that workers can initiate, as well.