461–470 of 688 posts
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Uber drivers pay taxes on earnings as contractors too. This at least partially covers ACA subsidies (if not fully). And we subsidize employer-provided healthcare also, hence its existence.
Employer-provided healthcare is a byproduct of WWII-era price-fixing that gave employers no way to compete on wages (so they started competing on benefits, including healthcare).
Completely anecdotal but I bring this question up every time I drive in an Uber and overwhelmingly the drivers tell me they want to stay independent. No one is forcing drivers into their jobs. I really struggle to understand why we need bureaucrats imposing their idea of what a market should look like on an fairly efficient market. From my experience the drivers are perfectly aware of the costs that go into driving s…
> overwhelmingly the drivers tell me they want to stay independent. However, I overwhelmingly don't want to pay for their healthcare or food stamps because they aren't earning enough money. I personally think that AB5 doesn't go far enough. If you employ people for more than 40 hours, you should owe healthcare and benefits, period . It doesn't matter whether those 40 hours are one person or 10 people or whether the p…
Why? Why should personal healthcare be coupled to employment? You are responsible for your health, not someone else.
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Uber is arguing that drivers are not their contractors, but contractors of the riders. Therefore, Uber denying some wouldn't be the right of Uber unless they were contractors to Uber, in which case they would be misclassified and actually employees as per AB5.
So Uber isn't allowed to delist drivers from their marketplace?
More so, not accepting to sell your item (labour) at the first price offered becoming a cause for delisting in a marketplace is very shady and stretches the definition of "marketplace" really hard.
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And where does that "enough money to live off of" come from? Unless the company has a lot of fat to trim, it has to come from customers in the form of higher prices, or from investors throwing more cash onto the bonfire. What happens when customers would rather not use your service than pay the amount whatever you're proposing takes? It's very possible that this market only exists at the size that it does at a price…
> Unless the company has a lot of fat to trim, it has to come from customers in the form of higher prices, or from investors throwing more cash onto the bonfire. Nope, there's lots more options than that. Cut executive pay. Tax high earners more and provide social services like healthcare and public transit, to reduce cost and demand on these services. And yes, prices would likely go up, because they're no longer bei…
I must be missing something, how is Uber,Lyft being subsidized?
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> Unless the company has a lot of fat to trim, it has to come from customers in the form of higher prices, or from investors throwing more cash onto the bonfire. Nope, there's lots more options than that. Cut executive pay. Tax high earners more and provide social services like healthcare and public transit, to reduce cost and demand on these services. And yes, prices would likely go up, because they're no longer bei…
> Cut executive pay This doesn't really work when Uber has something like 3 million drivers worldwide. Distributing the CEO's entire salary among drivers would yield them only a handful of coins worth of extra income per person per year. There's simply no way to translate exec pay into meaningful comp for drivers at this sort of scale. I do, however, believe it's possible for the government to establish better social…
Completely anecdotal but I bring this question up every time I drive in an Uber and overwhelmingly the drivers tell me they want to stay independent. No one is forcing drivers into their jobs. I really struggle to understand why we need bureaucrats imposing their idea of what a market should look like on an fairly efficient market. From my experience the drivers are perfectly aware of the costs that go into driving s…
I'm sure there's a few drivers really want to stay independent, but have you considered that the majority only "want tob stay independent" because the current situation? That doing this full time won't be enough income to feed the family, so they want to stay independent in order to have another job? If doing this full time is enough income, maybe they no longer need to be independent?
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Contracts can be pretty arbitrary. "Independent contractor -- except can't turn down a ride."
Great, next time I take a consulting gig I'll be sure to turn down the jira tickets I don't want to do.
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> are you saying that freelancing and independent contracting [and small business owners] should not be permitted under any circumstances It's a good question and I'm not sure. I think my answer is some weak form of "yes." My goal is to enforce a good work-life balance, I think society benefits from a healthy workforce. So they wouldn't be impermissible per se, but they should meet those same requirements. However, o…
I wouldn't use France as a model for economic regulations. I love the country, but its economy isn't one of its strong areas. Ironically, many companies in France primarily hire contractors now because of the many onerous regulations around employees. One of Macron's big pushes has been to try to make the French economy more competitive by stripping some of that out, but it's obviously been controversial. Also, why s…
Because otherwise it tends to be a race to the bottom.
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Because collections of people organized into corporations have greater bargaining power than individuals in negotiations. Traditionally the answer to that is unions or professional group who can bargain on behalf of all their members, but it's hard to unionize fields with low barriers to entry (and harder when the workers are living paycheck to paycheck and thus can't strike easily), and impossible to unionize indepe…
> impossible to unionize independent contractor drivers based on how the laws are written. What laws, don't you have freedom of association in USA? Just create a group, what is stopping you? Speaking as an ignorant European.
For more of the legal perspective, see page 9 of: https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU05/20191029/110152/HHRG...
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And that is the way it works, in functional countries. And I absolutely agree, divorcing healthcare from employment is the single best thing the US could do to help fix several different issues. But "We could massively restructure the US economy" is only an answer to "how should rideshare employees be classified" if you want to ensure nothing changes.
More specifically we need to totally decouple health insurance from employment. This is not post-ww2 anymore. No more Cadillac plans from FAANG companies either unless your paying for it out of your own pocket. This would immediately solve half of the problems with healthcare in this country if everyone had to use the health insurance exchanges to buy insurance.
It’s not bad, but no better than my jobs before the last one.