Uber drivers consider legal action | Hacker News Reader

Uber drivers consider legal action

bbc.co.uk

28 pointsrb2e68 comments

Always with the employee/contractor issue...

It has always been my prediction that there is a legal action lurking in the shadows that will ultimately be the undoing of the ~$50B unicorn, but employee/contractor is not it (these can be resolved moving forward with jurisdiction specific revisions to driver agreements and tweaks to the actual process to ensure compliance on a jurisdictional basis).

However, the legal action to ruin the company? My guess is a class action of drivers who have been arrested/criminally charged while serving as UBER drivers. Moreover, I believe such a case would open up a can of worms including: 1. UBER recruiting/paying bonuses to drivers to leave counties where ride sharing is legal to drive in counties where ride sharing is illegal, subsequently resulting in criminal charges; and 2. UBER's payment of criminal defense counsel for said drivers (which on its face may not seem problematic, but I would be willing to bet not a single lawyer paid by UBER to represent the drivers ever once advised the drivers they may have civil causes of action against UBER).

Does anyone else consider 20% (soon 25%) cut excessive?

Personally i think driving for Uber is nearly pointless - the costs of operating a vehicle make this occupation very unattractive. But i think the 20% rent makes it even worse.

Many of legal problems Uber faces could be avoided if they simply charged drivers a fixed subscription fee to be "listed" with the service. 100$/month? 10$/day? I don't know, but i can't shake the feeling that this service is crap work and it has a lot to do with greed.

I actually think that it will be the size of the cut that they take that will be a factor in determining if they are employer or not. As you say if they charged a flat daily fee (as hackney cabs (licensed taxi service in the uk) do) then they would not have this issue. But as they are taking a cut of every fare, or another way is that they pay the driver a cut of every fare, it seems much closer to employer/employee relationship, at least in UK law.

If I was thinking about working for them, I would only consider my own income. As some London drivers are saying that they make less than minimum wage after costs, they may be better off in a different job. I think it may even be a genuine choice here as there are lots of service sector jobs with variable hours. I'm not, however, saying that it is nice to be in a position of choosing between a rock and a hard place.

I know a few poor working class people who looked to Uber as their lifeline. Instead what they experienced is yet another form of legal exploitation of vulnerable population. Same as payday loans etc...

Can you explain why you think they experienced "legal exploitation of vulnerable population'? Ie it's not something that's intuitive to me and I'd like to know more.

Paying sub-minimal wages to population in desperate need of income. Taking advantage of the the situation that working poor find themselves in by appearing to act as a benefactor while obscuring the fact that enployment with them is likely to make situation even worse.

Why is sweatshop labor considered bad? Dont those people need money?

Why is predatory lending is bad? I thought they willingly borrowed?

Etc. Taking advantage of desperate and uninformed.

It's not excessive compared to how much most taxi drivers have to pay, every day, to lease their cars...

it is if you look at the UK market, in the UK most drivers own their own cars and they hire a radio from the taxi company at a daily rate. They then keep the fares themselves. As with UBER you have to provide your own vehicle, there is no radio so you have to provide your own smartphone too.

And as their pricing indicates they will take a greater cut from new drivers. That will continue to increase if they are successful in putting other taxi firms out of business. i.e once they remove the competition (or minimise the sufficiently) there will be no alternative but for drivers to pay uber a 45% fee for each ride.

Uh, no. You don't have to provide your own smartphone.

Ah, relative good deed! "The other guys are even worse" value offering :) Like the mob "protection" racket.

To expand on this thought - i have thought exactly the same when reading another post on HN about HomeJoy folding - most of the comments discussed how cleaning contractors were cutting out the middleman by offering a discount to the homeowner to cancel the transaction with HomeJoy and deal with the contractor directly. And back then i thought exactly the same thing - why don't they offer the service as referral subscription? Then there would be no reason for contractors to try to cut out the middleman. It seems so obvious, what am i missing?

The drivers who would rather be employees--which Uber claims are a small minority--might be better off finding a traditional job with a livery service. The whole point of Uber and its ilk, or so I thought, was to "crowd-source" transportation using ride sharing. It's not "sharing" if they're employees.

Amazon Flex is going to crowd-source deliveries by engaging tens of thousands of individuals to drop off packages in their neighborhoods. Does that mean Amazon must automatically hire tens of thousands of employees, with all the paperwork and overhead, even if some of them only deliver an occasional package?

This whole approach probably needs to be hashed out in the courts, but my gut feeling is that some people are wanting to have their cake and eat it too--the ease and flexibility of self-employment combined with the benefits of full time employment.

This is simply not what Uber does. Uber has never actually been a ride sharing service. A carpooling service is a ride sharing service. A real ride sharing service doesn't have drivers and riders where the riders pay the drivers.

Don't drink the kool-aid, all of Uber's "ride sharing" and "crowd sourcing" and "sharing economy" nonsense is just marketing and legal stunts. They are essentially an online sweatshop a la mechanical turk for driving.

I don't hate Uber, I think that on an ethical level it's probably superior to traditional taxi companies who entrap their drivers by paying for their taxi license (they lobby to make these very expensive) and then paying the drivers poorly until it's time to renw the license.

But Uber is not a magical wonderful silicon valley company that's going to fix all the problems with taxis by disrupting it with some sharing economy. Uber is a company that found a loophole in the law that would allow it to create a global taxi service that isn't legally a taxi service, and this loophole involves drivers giving up a lot of legal protections.

Your explanation strikes a nerve and certainly makes me "hate Uber".

uber drivers are not meaningfully self employed, but its of great advantage to uber to pretend they are.

It is uber that is trying to "have its cake and eat it".

At least in NYC, most of the drivers I talk to drive for multiple services (e.g. Via during rush hour, Uber on weekends). This is probably less the case in cities where Uber is more dominant though.

people can hold more than one job and still be employees

Uber drivers can hold more than one job doing exactly the same thing. They are free to pick up rides or not on whatever schedule they want. They bring their own equipment to the job.

They've always seemed to meet the definition of contractor to me (I know a certain court in California disagrees).

* edit: Having just now read the article, it seems like Uber has some sort of minimum hour requirement, which would definitely change the equation quite a bit.

IRS: "You are not an independent contractor if you perform services that can be controlled by an employer (what will be done and how it will be done). This applies even if you are given freedom of action. What matters is that the employer has the legal right to control the details of how the services are performed."

How could you expect every company they drive for (concurrently) to simultaneously pay them the same hourly ( > minimum) wage?

I can't see any outcome with "employee" status that would let drivers continue to drive for two services at the same time. This would add a HUGE barrier to entry for new companies in this market -- I would argue it's hugely anti-competitive, given the critical-mass you need for a ridesharing service to work. And could easily result in lower effective hourly wages for drivers, if they spend more time idling around.

You can't effectively work for anyone else while you are "on call" with uber because that would mean you would eventually have to decline too many ride requests, which would result in uber banning you.

Combine that with the fact uber has on-call-hours minimums, and one can see although the hours may be more flexible, the workers are very much not independant.

A critical component of being an (actual) contractor is the peicemeal basis of it, without further, unconnected obligation.

I see drivers doing this all the time, and here's a guide for drivers to doing it: http://therideshareguy.com/how-to-drive-for-uber-and-lyft-at...

"Once that is complete, you will be back online with Uber. Switch to the Lyft app to go back online with Lyft."

Most companies don't allow employees to moonlight for direct competitors.

It's not sharing anyway you look at it. Carpooling networks do exist but Uber is not one of them.

What's the difference between a carpooling network with a high amount of usage versus Uber?

It's literally not "carpooling" unless the driver was already headed in that direction. Nobody "carpools" all day for money. That's just someone being paid to drive a car.

the issue in play seems to be the right to paid time off, these workers say they are working 60-70 hours per week for UBER and should therefore accrue paid time off. This appears to be the crux of the matter. If they are successful the only solution for UBER will be to reduce driver hours so their accrued time off is not too much. Of course this means needing more drivers to cover the hours not being worked.

They existed and fed themselves before Uber existed; they freely chose to join Uber as contractors; now they want to break the contract they have and be employees. How does this seem right?

> They existed and fed themselves before Uber existed; they freely chose to join Uber as contractors; now they want to break the contract they have and be employees. How does this seem right?

What's wrong with fighting for ones rights and interests ? corporations do that all the time. It's not like people should just submit and shut their mouth. If they feel Uber is cheating them well, they should sue Uber.

What caused you to characterize anyone as opposing "fighting for one's interests"?

The issue here is that someone is claiming that it violates their rights but keep doing it. Is there a case of a corporation that thinks a certain deal is bad but keeps making it?

"Doctor, it hurts when I do this ..."

> The issue here is that someone is claiming that it violates their rights but keep doing it.

Keep doing what? drivers have the right to sue , period. And they should do exactly that if it benefits them, they owe no servitude to Uber which wouldn't exist if not for these drivers that do all the actual work.

Because it's illegal for companies like Uber to treat contractors like employees and then not classify them that way.

> He added that the ways in which Uber controlled its drivers - including the provision of initial training, guides as to which routes to take and requirements for minimum hours - meant they were not just self-employed.

UBERs business model is the same the world over, it doesn't consider drivers employees. That is regardless of local laws it doesn't consider drivers employees. If the requirements of the role match what a local/national law says is an employee, then it doesn't matter what UBER thinks of their model. Perhaps these drivers have found that things operate differently or the requirements from UBER are getting more onerous, in which case they may feel they are being treated by employees now and wish to protect themselves as such.

It's not about a contract, it's about their rights. Rights can't be signed away by just clicking "Accept".

Obviously, some rights can. Every transaction involves signing away a right. (A simple trade of money for goods involves one party signing away their rights to the money and the other to the goods.)

Why are these particular rights deservedly unwaivable? And why is the remedy "work and sue" rather then "stop doing it" or "don't take the offer"?

Can someone articulate the worldmodel that leads to this distinction?

You're still confusing a contract with rights. Contracts are about an exchange of obligations but they don't override one's rights. Shylock v Antonio does not set a precedent.

You can give up certain rights under certain circumstances. For example, a compromise agreement involves giving up certain rights under employment law in exchange for money. However, you must receive advice from a suitably qualified and independent adviser, or the compromise agreement is invalid - see http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1996/18/section/203

ObIANAL

Every taking on of an obligation is equivalently expressible as the waiver of a right.

As before, trading $1 for an apple can be expressed as "Alice waives the right to the apple and Bob te right to the $1."

It would make no sense to say "Alice's rights are being violated because she was denied use of her apple!"

What I think is happening is that you're only calling some rights waivers as rights waivers, which makes it hard to isolate which transactions you find unacceptable and why. Could you maybe flesh that out? I've tried to get satisfactory answers on this when it comes up, but to no avail.

UK employment law doesn't grant anyone rights to apples.

If you buy apples, UK law recognizes you as having a right to those apples. If you then trade the rights to those apples away, you don't get a bunch of judges tut-tutting the person who received them, lecturing him about how you have the right to those apples.

If you have a right, you should be able to trade that right. A right you cannot trade should more properly be called an obligation.

If there are good reasons not to allow trading away a right, you should articulate those reasons, as I asked originally. It is not sufficient to simply cite their existence.

> If you buy apples, UK law recognizes you as having a right to those apples.

In that case, please link to the relevant legislation.

You need a link to prove that the UK has property rights?

To avoid dancing around the point: What you're calling a right, I'm calling a (legally) inalienable right. But let's abstract away from the terminology:

There are cases where the law says, "people can't legally do X to you". I call those "rights". In some cases, "A", that's followed by "... unless you consent." In some cases, "B", that's followed by "... irrespective of any expression of consent you give [1]".

If a right is infringed on, it matters greatly whether it's type A or B (and whether consent was given). Simply telling me they had the right, does not resolve it. But even if it's in B, you need to justify why type B rights ("inalienable") should exist at all, which I'm not convinced of. All the purported benefits of B rights would better be solved by transparency or waiting periods, not simply demonizing people who make the transaction as if "everyone understands why that's bad ... right?" [2]

Remember, a justification for why B should exist needs to explain why it's bad even though this is what both parties ostensibly want. (It's kinda scary that everyone I pose the question to, can't give an answer in their own words, or misunderstands the question.)

[1] "and if you get some material benefit in return for expressing such consent, the person who gave you that is a moron who deserves to be taken advantage of".

[2] If you want to know what my confusion feels like, imagine that your friend were all writing a sob story about how sympathetic character Bob had all his apples taken from him, "which he earned for himself". You then find out that Bob actually sold the apples and get a stern lecture that "no, his apples are an inalienable right: he can't sell them".

> You need a link to prove that the UK has property rights?

Hey, you're the one who brought it up!

In the UK, your contract of employment cannot take away rights you have by law. So if, for example, you have a contract which states you are only entitled to two weeks' paid holiday per year when, by law, all full-time employees are entitled to 28 days' paid holiday per year, this part of your contract is void and does not apply. The right you have under law (to 28 days' holiday in this case) applies instead.

The rights are unwaivable because the power ballance in an employee/employer relationship is almost without exception massively tilted in the favour of the employer.

If these rights could be waived, you can be certain that virtually every single employment contract would waive them.

Except perhaps in the case of unionized workshops, where the employers and employees can negotiate on actual equal terms.

>The rights are unwaivable because the power ballance in an employee/employer relationship is almost without exception massively tilted in the favour of the employer.

Appealing to a power imbalance as invalidating any rights waiver, would likewise prove that workers shouldn't be able to transact with employers at all. As before, all transactions are going to involve giving up some rights.

> As before, all transactions are going to involve giving up some rights.

But no transaction involves giving up the right to contest the nature of the transaction and its lawfulness.

I could sign a contract saying I have to work 100 hours a week tomorrow it wouldn't matter, that's illegal. If my employer fires me for not working 100 hours a week effectively well, too bad, he's going to bleed a lot of money in a court of law, because what he made me sign was illegal at first place.

A contract isn't a holy paper that superseeds the law.

>But no transaction involves giving up the right to contest the nature of the transaction and its lawfulness.

Is that the right Uber drivers were force to give up? I can't tell what this is referring to.

that really does not follow at all, unless you make the assumption that all rights are equally important, which is nonsense.

Giving up my "right" to unemployed free time is a lot less important than giving up my right to not be sold into slavery.

It would still involve an articulation and justification of the distinction between waivable and unwaivable rights, which you didn't previously provide.

Could you help improve my worldmodel to the point that it contains this distinction?

its a vast topic by itself, but its usually based around the idea that violating unwaivable rights would be grossly unfair or abusive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscionability is a closely related concept.

Unfortunately for the people that like to think about the law in terms of hard logical equation evaluations, this is one area that is quite "fuzzy", simply because of the massive amount of circumstance surronding individual issues.

For someone wanting to start an on-demand service, what would be the correct way to design their app so that you could meaningfully link requester to providers?

I think if you have a bidding model where the requester can select bids from providers then your 100% safe.

However, that being said this is ridiculous! Having employees would completely change what Uber is about. Uber is a platform not a taxi company.

Uber drivers right now can:

* choose their own schedules

* turn down customers they don't want

* just stop working with Uber with no notice

All things that most employees can't do.

Doesn't UBER also:

1. Finance cars for their drivers; 2. Provide the legal interpretation of federal/state/county/local laws and regulations to its drivers; 3. Provide the actual tools (except the car) to complete the work; 4. Provide training for drivers; 5. Pay bonuses to drive specific hours and/or in specific locations/jurisdictions

All things that most companies can't do with independent contractors?

> turn down customers they don't want

Actually, they can't. If you reject more than a certain percentage of customers, Uber bans you from the platform.

Some Uber drivers have taken to getting around this by accepting the request and then fraudulently cancelling with "rider requested cancel" as the reason.

When Uber started cracking down on that, a bunch of entitled fraudsters threw a fit and claimed Uber was using "intimidation tactics": http://therideshareguy.com/uber-deactivated-a-bunch-of-drive...

That was the moment when I learned how many drivers are actively out to screw over everyone else: both Uber and the customers. So whenever I see Uber drivers protesting or threatening legal action, I laugh at them.

> Uber is a platform not a taxi company

Uber doesn't get to decide what it is and what it isn't. That's not how laws and regulations work. Uber markets itself as something , it is just marketing, it doesn't influence Uber legal status or Uber drivers status. If a judge decides Uber drivers are employees then the latest will be entitled to there rights as employees, Uber can do nothing about it.

At least in the US, most employees can do the latter two. Turning down customers will probably get you fired though, which is pretty much the same as will happen with Uber.

The third one is true of any job in the US as far as I know.

Do you think that Uber will even agree to those terms?

It is not a one size fits all solution to be solved by tech. The distinction between employee/contractor is a legal distinction and varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

For example, if you engage an independent contractor in CA, State law mandates certain provisions to be included in the agreement. Moreover, if these independent contractor provisions not included in the agreement then there is a presumption of employer/employee relationship.

Obviously the distinction is not limited to what is in the agreement, but also the practical relationship, including, but not limited to things like: control; payment of taxes; setting of hours; providing tools; etc... Unfortunately, most people will simply look to federal or IRS rules, but that is not enough, again each state/jurisdiction will have distinctions that if not complied with will result in unfavorable rulings on the issue.

We need a third class of employment, the employee-contractor. It is one thing for independent contractors to provide a service for a company without necessarily being employed by the company, like a software consultant, but when a business cannot exist without so-called independent contractors (unless they're hired outright), then they ought to be responsible for some of the cost, such as gasoline or repairs, but at the same time, their contract can be canceled at any time by the employer. That gives the employer flexibility and the employer-contractors stability.

I'm not sure about "paid time off". It's not a salaried job in the first place -- you work as little or as much as you want, and take vacation whenever and however much you want. However, give them a time/distance-wise wage increase to get to an equilibrium point where most drivers are generally happy in life with the amount of unpaid time they can feasibly take off.

BBC headline is a little misleading. According to the article, legal action has already been taken. Cases have been submitted to the London Central Employment Tribunal.

That clearly is the future of employment.

Better get used to it now.

That's both a humorous and short sighted statement. Uber isn't a magical "unicorn". It could be gutted by regulation overnight.

I made no claim about the "magic unicorn"-ness of Uber.

I simply despise regulation and entitlement.

> I simply despise regulation and entitlement.

And I like civilization, which has a foundation partially of regulation and entitlements. Perhaps Somalia is more to you're liking?

Most taxi drivers were already independent contractors / self-employed. Uber didn't bring anything new in this matter.

I'm glad you're aware.

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