231–240 of 303 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not accepting a ride until an agreed (the rider can always cancel the ride) price is met is entirely different than taking a longer route after a job has started.
You're avoiding the point, which is the collusion and artificial price increase. That's fraudulent. Edit: Whether this is a "regulated market" is a red herring and irrelevant.
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The thing about contracting is you don't have to take the job if they aren't willing to negotiate. If no one wants to build your website for $5, then the client is either going to have to pay more, or not make a website. All of the drivers around that airport incur roughly the same costs for gas, wear and tear, rent, etc. So while you might find someone halfway across the world to build your website for $5, you won't…
Drivers are free to stop accepting rides whenever they want.
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I think you can make an argument that it’s bid rigging. Uber/Lyft pricing can be viewed as an auction where the surge price is the market clearing price. Conspiring with others to not accept bids below a floor could probably be prosecuted as a bid rigging conspiracy.
I don't see how it could be bid rigging, when the drivers are not even able to bid . Short of what the article discusses, they must take whatever Uber / Lyft give them. If anything, this seems more akin to actual negotiation / refusal to work at the proposed price. Which, if they are contractors, is perfectly acceptable, no?
No, they don't. No one is putting a gun to their head and forcing them to work. Uber/Lyft's offer is take-it-or-leave-it, but leaving it is always an option.
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So go drive a cab instead. I hear that’s a great life. They agreed to drive for a service for x. They can’t then complain that they are making x or manipulate the system to earn more than x.
No, they did not agree to "drive for a service for X". They entertain offers to drive at a given rate. They can choose to take those offers or not. That's the whole point of the on-demand, contractor-but-not-really relationship (see also the way that Lyft and Uber punish drivers to don't take absolutely every ride that pops up on the app) that underpins Lyft and Uber's business model. They're refusing to entertain of…
Grouping together to drop off and artificially increase prices when a flight lands sounds great because these are “the little guys”. If Google were doing it you would lose your shit.
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We need a new word for "taxi companies with cute apps, unsustainable pricing/wages and lots of Silicon Valley venture capital propping them up" to distinguish them from old-school taxi companies if we're gonna quit saying "rideshare". Any suggestions?
I prefer unlicensed taxis.
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And suddenly Uber/Lyft are like any other Taxi company just with a massive valuation.
> And suddenly Uber/Lyft are like any other Taxi company just with a massive valuation. What taxi companies have drivers as actual employees and not independent contractors?
--edit--
Never mind, read that backwards...
This seems like it could also torpedo their Contractor vs. Employee argument. Contractors get to set rates, employees don't. So you can't say they're contractors AND accuse them of committing fraud when they try to set their own rates. Now if only someone would develop an app that does this for entire cities. The app could be their version of a union.
Under the theory that Uber/Lyft employees are contractors and allowed to set prices, wouldn't coordinating ("conspiring") to do so en masse be considered price fixing? Personally I think they should be considered employees, but a pro-management federal prosecutor could make some trouble for them.
In the end I don't think it will matter, Uber and Lyft could probably code around this pretty easily if it started to affect their bottom line. When they see 100+ drivers in the same place go offline within X seconds of each other, it's a pretty clear indication that there's coordinated action taking place. They probably have enough data from drivers' phones to see that they're sitting still waiting to go back online.
I just hope they don't decide to make an example out of these drivers by banning them...
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I don't see how it could be bid rigging, when the drivers are not even able to bid . Short of what the article discusses, they must take whatever Uber / Lyft give them. If anything, this seems more akin to actual negotiation / refusal to work at the proposed price. Which, if they are contractors, is perfectly acceptable, no?
> they must take whatever Uber / Lyft give them No, they don't. No one is putting a gun to their head and forcing them to work. Uber/Lyft's offer is take-it-or-leave-it, but leaving it is always an option.
The part of parent comment that you quoted is just about how the take-it-or-leave-it nature leaves no middle ground (bidding).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, they did not agree to "drive for a service for X". They entertain offers to drive at a given rate. They can choose to take those offers or not. That's the whole point of the on-demand, contractor-but-not-really relationship (see also the way that Lyft and Uber punish drivers to don't take absolutely every ride that pops up on the app) that underpins Lyft and Uber's business model. They're refusing to entertain of…
Ok, so they agreed to entertain offers. They can always say no. They have accepted those rides, so there is no possible argument to be made. Grouping together to drop off and artificially increase prices when a flight lands sounds great because these are “the little guys”. If Google were doing it you would lose your shit.
Google doing it would be different, certainly. Companies are less important than people and poor people trying to survive get significantly more leash than multi-billion-dollar companies. If ride-on-demand companies operated with a transparent bid-ask system (see something like Taskrabbit for an example) instead of the opaque and intermediated market that they do, I don't think we'd be having this discussion. But they want to set prices and they want labor to shut up and take it, and that's not acceptable. To that end, yes, this is a fundamentally different thing than a multi-billion-dollar company controlling a market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they must take whatever Uber / Lyft give them No, they don't. No one is putting a gun to their head and forcing them to work. Uber/Lyft's offer is take-it-or-leave-it, but leaving it is always an option.
That leaving is an option is what the parent comment is saying ("refusal to work at the proposed price"). The drivers in the article are refusing to drive at the non-surge price, and when the price surges, they find the price acceptable and so take the rides. The part of parent comment that you quoted is just about how the take-it-or-leave-it nature leaves no middle ground (bidding).
What the drivers are doing is not bidding, it is colluding to hide the true market price, i.e. what the lowest bidder would actually be willing to accept. That is illegal.
Please note that my sympathies are very much with the drivers. Their situation sucks and needs to be improved. But breaking the law is not the way to improve it.