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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

#381

Post by lhorie »

yawaworht1978 wrote: post #373
lhorie wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber is about as close to a ship of theseus as it gets. All this stuff you're talking about is ancient news from like 4 years ago. Since then, the entire C-suite left, including Kalanick and Thuan (Singhal spent virtually no time at Uber), not to mention crazy high attrition rates at all levels, and several rounds of layoffs to top it all off. Since then, greyball and its ilk got shutdown, the CSO got fired for hidin…

Nope, this excuse does not fly. First they do things clandestinely, then try to prevent any court case, then drag the court case out as long as possible and then it's supposed to be ancient? So you are saying the new c level are something like angels and saints? https://lawstreetmedia.com/tech/uber-officers-and-board-memb...

You're the one clearly pushing an agenda, I'm just stating facts. IIRC the discussion here at the time about the lawsuit you linked characterized it as "frivolous" and "sour grapes", and other words to that effect.

If I wanted to make claims about saintness, I wouldn't bring up Tempe, I would've brought up the stuff about the CLO leading equality efforts (him being a black person), or the stuff about Afghanistan relief donation matching and other similar initiatives. But like said, I'm not interested in playing good-guy-bad-guy games, and I'm perfectly content w/ characterizing Uber as a company seeking profits just like Microsoft, Google or FB or whoever else is getting a stink eye these days.

You're free to be cynical, but doing so by cherrypicking only stuff that supports "your" side is kinda intellectually dishonest.

Re: Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch court rules

#382

Post by Closi »

lhorie wrote: post #342
Scarblac wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can employ drivers and still give them the freedom to accept or decline tides as they wish.

I think the conundrum is that either Uber pays for downtime (employee model) or it doesn't (contractor model). It's literally impossible to be actively driving passengers for a solid 40 hours a week while maintaining reasonable work hours. For the model that pays for downtime, it needs to make it up somehow since it wouldn't be able to afford people just sitting around doing nothing in the middle of nowhere. Typicall…

I think there are quite a few options. It took me about a minute to think of the below, so I'm sure with the resources of Uber they can come up with something better:

- Driver 'clocks in' when they are in the app and ready to receive rides.

- They get paid as normal, however there is a guaranteed minimum which means that they will get paid the minimum wage.

- Driver can decline rides, but there is a % threshold at which point they can be performance managed if required (i.e. warnings for declining too many rides and then removed if required).

- Driver clocks out when they are no longer wanting to receive rides. 3 declines in a row or something similar automatically ends shift. Shift can also be ended due to low demand, unless the driver has signed up for a particular shift ahead of time.

That's not particularly great, and I'm sure some people will have builds/other suggestions, but Uber is a 76 billion dollar company, I'm sure they can come up with something better and a way of operating within labour laws.

Re: Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch court rules

#383

Post by jimkleiber »

lhorie wrote: post #342
Scarblac wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can employ drivers and still give them the freedom to accept or decline tides as they wish.

I think the conundrum is that either Uber pays for downtime (employee model) or it doesn't (contractor model). It's literally impossible to be actively driving passengers for a solid 40 hours a week while maintaining reasonable work hours. For the model that pays for downtime, it needs to make it up somehow since it wouldn't be able to afford people just sitting around doing nothing in the middle of nowhere. Typicall…

At least how I see it, many of the problems are that the company is not giving the protections that they've historically supposed to have given. I think one option is to extricate those protections from the employers and bring them to a different level. It could be a union, it could be a local/regional/national/(dare I say global) government, it could be some other org that provides those services. Then the employer could still give the flexibility and not have to worry about providing those extra benefits.

Re: Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch court rules

#384

Post by dml2135 »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #354

If this ever happens in the U.S. I won't bother with driving Uber anymore and this would probably put them out of business. The Taxi industry will win back from the disruption that Uber caused. This has nothing to do with worker's rights. No one gave a crap about Taxi driver's work standards and they are/were treated worse than Uber drivers. This is all about the Taxi industry fighting back. 75% of all ride share dri…

Do you mind if I ask your methodology for the $42/hour number? Do you take your vehicle's depreciation into account?

Re: Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch court rules

#385

Post by dahfizz »

Volundr wrote: post #351
adventured wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plenty of people working in restaurants work for multiple companies, they're still employees. And do they cook one food order at a restaurant they work for, then 15 minutes later walk across the street and cook for a competing restaurant for 30 minutes, and then immediately walk back across the street and cook a food order for the other restaurant? No, of course that's not normal. This will ultimately accelerate th…

> They can easily kill off competition using this by eating the labor supply. I'm not at all sure they can. You haven't really explained here why Uber is apparently capable of hiring all drivers and starving the labor pool, yet Applebees can't use the same strategy for cooks, or Amazon the same strategy for warehouse workers or software engineers. Calling them "moronic regulators" without explaining why the same mode…

There are meaningful alternatives for your examples. If you didn't want to work at Applebees, you could work at Chilis.

Right now, I would be willing to bet that a large majority of Lyft drivers also drive for Uber. Uber is so much larger that there is no real alternative. If the law makes it so that drivers can choose only one rideshare app, they will all choose Uber because its bigger.

Re: Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch court rules

#386

Post by delusional »

lhorie wrote: post #342
Scarblac wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can employ drivers and still give them the freedom to accept or decline tides as they wish.

I think the conundrum is that either Uber pays for downtime (employee model) or it doesn't (contractor model). It's literally impossible to be actively driving passengers for a solid 40 hours a week while maintaining reasonable work hours. For the model that pays for downtime, it needs to make it up somehow since it wouldn't be able to afford people just sitting around doing nothing in the middle of nowhere. Typicall…

What's blocking them from doing metrics based payment, but with employee like protections? Pay people for the time they mark themselves "available" (regardless of if there's any rides), and require that drivers take anything you give them while they are available. I imagine you could put in a cap and a floor if you really wanted to. You could even allow drivers to reject a certain percentage of rides if you felt like it.

The point wouldn't be to control the drivers, but for uber to assume some of the risk.

Re: Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch court rules

#387

Post by jhrmnn »

mattmanser wrote: post #362
devcpp wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why aren't these payments taken from the employee then? In my country retirement and social security appear right in my paycheck. Why isn't it the same for freelancers (when they declare taxes)? If their wage is too low as you claim, this isn't something that will change when they become employees, so this solves nothing. If this is about a minimum wage, then the real solution is forcing freelancers to work a minimum…

Not sure what country you are, but most also have the Employer pay on top of that too. So you might pay a 10% social security tax, and the employer might be paying an additional 15% that doesn't appear on your payslip. That's what Amazon, etc. are talking about when they say they pay a load of employment taxes. That's also why a lot of countries are eying the gig economy with skepticism, it's actually often just a ma…

I never understood why this distinction is made and why it’s not just obfuscation. The real numbers are the cost of an employee to the employer and the amount the employee gets, the difference is what the state took as a tax, and the way that cut is divided to different state budget chapters is inconsequential to both the employee and the employer

Re: Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch court rules

#388

Post by delusional »

Closi wrote: post #382
lhorie wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the conundrum is that either Uber pays for downtime (employee model) or it doesn't (contractor model). It's literally impossible to be actively driving passengers for a solid 40 hours a week while maintaining reasonable work hours. For the model that pays for downtime, it needs to make it up somehow since it wouldn't be able to afford people just sitting around doing nothing in the middle of nowhere. Typicall…

I think there are quite a few options. It took me about a minute to think of the below, so I'm sure with the resources of Uber they can come up with something better: - Driver 'clocks in' when they are in the app and ready to receive rides. - They get paid as normal, however there is a guaranteed minimum which means that they will get paid the minimum wage. - Driver can decline rides, but there is a % threshold at wh…

> but Uber is a 76 billion dollar company, I'm sure they can come up with something better and a way of operating within labour laws.

That's a good point. If those 10x engineers can't figure out a way to make it legal and ethical, maybe it's not good.

Re: Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch court rules

#389

Post by villasv »

kwonkicker wrote: post #305

I am torn on this issue, maybe I don't see the whole picture. Uber was never meant to be a taxi company. It was a means for people with cars to share their gas expenses. I don't know how could they ever prevent this gig from becoming a full-time job for most drivers, but I think forcing employment is not a solution.

> I don't know how could they ever prevent this gig from becoming a full-time job for most drivers

Pricing (and marketing, and UX, and features) that transparently informs that offering rides it is not long-term profitable, it only makes sense as cost savings for inevitable drives, similar to BlaBlaCar or Waze Carpool.

But this would have hampered their growth, so they didn’t. Ride-sharing (fake proposition) isn’t really that big of a market as urban mobility in general (target proposition)

Re: Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch court rules

#390

Post by st1ck »

bko wrote: post #315
goodpoint wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they really are freelancers/entrepreneurs not employees Taxi drivers are not knowledge workers, or artists and clearly not entrepreneurs. They are easily replaceable "cogs in the machine", like many non-specialised factory workers, office clerks, retail employees and so on. There's a reason why humanity introduced protections for vulnerable workers in almost every society.

> Taxi drivers are not knowledge workers, or artists and clearly not entrepreneurs. Of course they're entrepreneurs. They have to own or finance a car. They choose when and where to work and for what company to drive for. They can also work for black car in addition to ride share and can even manage private rides. They have some ability to accept or reject fares. > There's a reason why humanity introduced protections…

I'd expect entrepreneur to have a freedom to set own rate and market own brand, for example.
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