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Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch court rules

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Re: Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch court rules

#131
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autonomous cars are more expensive than drivers; the only reason they dislike having real drivers is that they have a voice.

Over the long run there is no way that autonomous cars are more expensive

Depends on how much more expensive autonomous car is. If such car is 1 million and regular is 100k and lifetime of both is 5 years you can pay more than 20 per hour to driver...

Re: Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch court rules

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if I legitimacy want to be a freelancer? Lifestyle reasons, freedom, whatever. I should have a choice.

I'm a consultant in The Netherlands and for this purpose I control my own BV. Similar to an LLC in the USA. But I don't drive a taxi, I do computer stuff. If you want to legitimately be independent in NL you can. I have a few friends in the construction industy(plumbers, carpenters, electricians, etc) who are ZZP'ers. There are a few options open to people who legitimately want to be independent in their work, and th…

Just to point out, that a BV and an LLC are very different, in that anyone can have an LLC in the USA but the tax reporting requirements and overhead for a BV in NL are quite high and don't make much sense to anyone with an income less then.. well, quite high, by most standards. I know a lot of freelance software engineers in the netherlands, but none have a BV.

Re: Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch court rules

#133
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Uber might be right here. EU labor laws protect a few but over a certain salary they are not very appealing. In Italy paying a net salary of 2,000 euros will cost the company 6000+. Things included like pension are not worth their cost, a private pension is better and cheaper, same for health services. It’s unfortunate but it’s true.

> In Italy paying a net salary of 2,000 euros will cost the company 6000+. I dispute this number. Do you have a source for this?

I don't know much about Italy but should be pretty similar to Germany where we generally say the employer pays double. Example person unmarried, no kids, 35.

- net: 2000€

- gross: 3100€

- company cost: 3850€

Re: Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch court rules

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if I legitimacy want to be a freelancer? Lifestyle reasons, freedom, whatever. I should have a choice.

You can be a freelancer just fine, nothing stops you from doing that. But not within the Uber framework because you aren' a freelancer within that framework. So this is pretty specific: the Uber framework does not check enough of the boxes that would allow their pseudo employees to claim they are freelancers, which effectively makes it just another tax dodge, which it always was.

Taxi businesses in the U.S. played this cat-and-mouse game for a long time, and generally 'won' the right to offload liabilities to drivers without much pay. Why anyone thought or thinks Uber is 'different' is hard to understand.

Re: Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch court rules

#135
post #3

Interesting wording of this headline, you would almost think Uber were fighting for the rights of their drivers if you read it out of context.

The headline I see is " Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch court rules".

I don't see how you can read that any other way than the Dutch court is forcing Uber to employ its drivers.

Re: Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch court rules

#136
post #75

I hope über goes bankrupt and we forget about all of this insanity. In Germany where I live the taxi service is amassing, at least in my city can't say for whole country. They are quick clean the drivers are professionals and not some randos who will break rules to get there faster or drive so insanely that you want to puke. They know the city by heart and don't use navigators. Due to being professionals they are com…

I hope all the taxi drivers in Germany go bankrupt and we forget they ever existed.

Why? Also Taxi Driver can't really go bankrupt since they are employees. Taxi companies however can.

Re: Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch court rules

#137

Rightly so. The 'gig economy' is abused by quite a few companies to create employment like situations without the required trappings (social security payments, employee protection, hourly minimums and so on). This was long overdue, let's hope it has precedent effect for other companies that abuse the ZZP construct.

'Employment' is abused by the government to provide social benefits that it doesn't want to pay for. A job should trade work for cash and no more.

Re: Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch court rules

#138
post #80

> "We know that the vast majority of drivers would like to remain independent," said Maurits Schonfeld, general manager of Uber in Northern Europe That's funny, because the court's reasoning was that drivers in their daily work are almost completely dependent on Uber, which calls all the shots.

I feel this is very disingenuous on Uber's part. Either it's just their way of distracting from the actual point, or they really don't understand what is happening. The case wasn't about what driver's prefer, but about the reality of driving for Uber. What small bit of independence drivers had in setting their own hours is not necessarily eroded by this ruling. It just means Uber will have to (gasp!) innovate to deal with a few specific things. I think Uber making cases like these out to require fundamental changes to the business model is absurd.

Re: Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch court rules

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if I legitimacy want to be a freelancer? Lifestyle reasons, freedom, whatever. I should have a choice.

You should also have a choice to not use Uber; besides customer discovery, what does Uber offer you that's worth their bad pay and commission? Plenty of old fashioned taxi companies that operate via a phone number or text messages. You don't need Uber if you want to be a freelancer. And as a court ruled, you're not actually a freelancer if you work for Uber.

How does that work out for a single taxi driver and customers calling them directly? They may be on the other side of town and get 5 calls at the same time, leaving most of their customers without service. Or more likely, customers will want to call one number and have a local cab dispatched to them from whoever is available.

Now what would be nice is if someone would start a service, say a mobile-web-first service, that a bunch of independent cab drivers could sign up for. Then that service would act as a dispatcher (taking a cut of the fare), and send a dispatch message to whichever independent cab driver is closest by. Of course that sounds a lot like what Uber is doing. Which then goes back to, are these drivers independent, or are they working for that dispatch service?

To make it truly independent, they would need to have more than one dispatch service that they could work at the same time (say both Uber and Lyft). And have a protocol so that dispatches from both services don't step on each other. Plus the ability for a customer to flag them down at random. Now they really are a self-employed contractor using these services as customer discovery / dispatch services.

Re: Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch court rules

#140

Rightly so. The 'gig economy' is abused by quite a few companies to create employment like situations without the required trappings (social security payments, employee protection, hourly minimums and so on). This was long overdue, let's hope it has precedent effect for other companies that abuse the ZZP construct.

'Employment' is abused by the government to provide social benefits that it doesn't want to pay for. A job should trade work for cash and no more.

What a nonsense. This article is about NL and social benefits are working just fine here.

Jobs as trade work for cash went out the window around the middle of the previous century.

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