Uber drivers are workers not self employed, Supreme Court rules

Many of the local restaurants will deliver

For your comparison to contracting, I've contracted quite a lot, and I have always had the ability to state my rate, and the client have had the ability to state theirs, and we arrive at something that may be mine, or theirs or something in between, but there has always been actual discussion.

With Uber you're presented with a price, and you take it or leave it, and if you leave it Uber never comes back with a higher price - on the contrary, if you keep leaving it they may penalise you.

That alone would not necessarily have caused it to be deemed employment, but combined with the other element that all points to drivers having very little control demonstrates that this is not a contract entered into by equals, but one were drivers are subservient, and that points very strongly to an employee relationship under UK law.

That there may be similar elements in your IT contracting does not mean Uber drivers are not employees, but that you might be.

E.g. when I did contracting:

* I always negotiated a rate, whether or not there was a middleman in the process.

* There was always a defined end to the contract (but it could be extended)

* I had marketing costs.

* I paid for my own equipment, and the costs were amortised over my contracts.

* I had more than one client at a time a lot of the time, but certainly more than one per year.

* I decided when I worked, and how to do the work, and where to work and it was not ordinarily in their offices.

Each one of those pointed towards me being a genuine contractor outside of IR35. Each one of them going the other way would not individually mean I was suddenly inside IR35 or in a deemed employment, but each additional one would increase the likelihood the relationship is an employment relationship.

EDIT: To make it clear, IR35 is the tax treatment only, but it's often a useful proxy to indicate whether or not you have a claim to be an employee, because the tests that indicate if you're within IR35 are much the same things a court or tribunal would consider if you were to ask them to rule on whether or not you're an employee.

EDIT2: Also, if you're a contractor in the UK but not resident that points to a short term contract. That does suggest you'd not be considered an employee, certainly.

The restaurant owner even discovered that, because of some inconsistency between his prices and the third-party ones, he could cause the delivering company to pay him by simply placing orders to himself.

The reason is that it ends up not being a choice of the worker at all, incentives align in such a way that these are no longer an "option" but instead a replacement of existing work/choice that had much better outcomes for the worker than the replacement. A great example of this would be "voluntary" exemptions from overtime protections in the UK. There is a default limit on the maximum amount of overtime most workers can undertake. The employee can optionally agree to lift this limit. In practice every employee is given a form to sign along with their employment contract that agrees to lift this limit. It no longer becomes a choice of the worker but one of management.

The same thing happened with "zero hours" contracts. Theoretically they allow employees to be more flexible in how much they work. In reality they remove the ability for workers to plan time or budget due to uncertainty in how often and when management decides they will be working. The key thing is that this replaced the existing, more reliable, system of work not because employees chose it as an option, but because employers unilaterally switched to it.

I'd argue further that the gig economy itself is both a cause and a symptom of economic instability in the lower working class. It emerged from the inability of this group to find to find enough stable, well paying work. It accelerates that economic instability by forcing workers into an even more precarious position. With a zero hours contract the economic uncertainty came from the fact that you didn't know when you'd be working. With gig work you know when you'll be working but you won't know what you'll be paid. This is a fundamental shift in the social contract of employment, in that the risk of loss is born by the employer and in exchange the employer keeps any profit. In the gig economy the employer shifts that burden onto the employees without a corresponding shift in control/profit.