The problem is their morals when it comes to how they treat their drivers.
Does Uber check that their drivers have such insurance?
Also the US insurance (and legal) system is a very unique one which other countries don't actually have. So not sure what you are worried about from that perspective.
Outside the US drivers are responsible for their own insurance.
How do you know the Uber you get into has suitable insurance? Any commercial passenger carrying driver needs more insurance than a normal car driver.
Perhaps I'm missing something as a non-US citizen.
In, for example, England the insurance is part of the regulatory burden. I know that a taxi in England has valid insurance. I don't know if an English Uber car has valid insurance.
Uber avoids the regulation, and under-insured cars is one risk of that.
> What difference could it make to you?
The car crashes and you lose a hand. This puts you out of work for a few months; makes it much harder for you to get new jobs; reduces your productivity. You'll need some modifications to your home. You'll need money. A properly insured car makes it easier to get that money.
I think Uber should want to obey laws in the territories that it is trying to operate in. To not do so is just picking the wrong kind of fight.
England has public health care, but you're going to want a better prosthetic and you're going to want money to make adaptations to your home over what will be available. And you're going to want money to cover your reduced income while you're off work.
The issue is they also must have insurance that covers them for business use when they are using their car for business. Every personal insurance policy I've read says it isn't in effect when the car is being used for business purposes. If I tried to file a claim under my personal automobile policy it would go something like this
"...and you were driving for Uber at the time? Yeah...lol."
It looks more like you are clinging to some edge case potential for something thats most likely not going to happen in any meaningful way.
Again. Europe is very different than the US in that regard.
(Example off the cuff, was on tv a while ago: girl gets ankle damaged in accident at car show. Yes the foot gets the plaster 'for free', but here are some other costs that aren't covered by national insurance: travel costs, time off for parents, adaptation to the house to accommodate reduced mobility, wheelchair-accessible car, ...) Please tell me if I'm wrong, but I know of no social healthcare system that covers such costs).
The only reason I mention the US is because Uber takes care of the insurance for Uber drivers in the US, but they don't do that anywhere else. Everywhere else the drivers are expected to buy the insurance. In some places you know that Uber are regulated as part of the taxi system and so you know the drivers will have bought insurance as part of that regulation. But that's not everywhere.
Properly insured cars are really important, even when you live in an area with public health care and welfare systems. There are many costs involved in severe injury that are only minimally covered by public welfare.
This is not a super rare event! About 1,700 people die each year in road traffic accidents in Great Britain. (And that's the lowest it's been since records began). Very many more are severely injured.
In England you'll get minimal help from public welfare systems - you'll get a prosthetic limb but you'll want a better one, and that will cost. You'll want to make adaptations to your home - you'll get some help, but you'll want more and better adaptations. Depending how you're employed you'll get some statutory sick pay or disability benefit, but these are likely to be much less than you were earning. (Statutory sick pay is £88.25 per week for 28 weeks.)
My original point was that Uber because of it's use of technology have solved the problems that would normally require licenses. I.e. it's as safe to drive as any other service.
Insurance is a minor problem which 1) can easily be fixed, 2) isn't really a problem with the uber model.
Does public healthcare help you if you need to install a wheelchair ramp in your home? Or other lifestyle modifications that are a result of injury? Such as increased costs of transportation? Lost wages?
In England I have no way of knowing whether my Uber has valid insurance for carrying passengers.
It's not a problem of legislation but a problem with Uber.
The normal insurance a car driver has does not cover them if they take paying passengers.
I don't see the issue. Most european countries have insurance either via the wellfare state or through legislation or insurances. What do the passenger care about drivers insurance for? If anything Uber is not going to leave just an inch of potential room for critique so of course they are insured as you need to be just in order to own a car.
In the US Uber buys this extra insurance for all their drivers. Outside the US Uber does not buy this extra insurance. It tells drivers that they have to buy their own extra insurance. Remember, this is extra insurance on top of the regular insurance that all car drivers must have.
In some countries Uber drivers are regulated just as normal minicabs, and the regulators will check that the uber driver has this extra insurance. But in some other countries Uber is aggressively resisting that regulation, and there are concerns that the cars are not properly insured.
Imagine if you lost an arm tomorrow, or had a brain injury. You may get all your hospital treatment for free. You may get all the prosthetic limbs for free. You might get some paid leave from work. But even so, you are going to be left with large costs. Those costs are covered by insurance. But if you were a paying passenger in a car, and the car driver did not have the extra insurance, you would not be covered by their insurance. You would not get the money you need. You could try to sue the driver, but if the driver is poor you're unlikely to get the money.
Think about this.. In a normal taxi, how do you know the driver has insurance? Perhaps it has expired. It's no different than any other kind of business. Relying upon someone else to be insured is just foolish.
Regardless, the way insurers generally work is that they will try to recover the cost of damage for the responsible party. So, for example, if you have homeowner's insurance and somebody drives into your house, your insurer will pay you and then try to recover the costs from the the driver's insurance company.
I do not need to fear that nobody is going to pay my healthcare after an accident. However, that is paid by the public at large instead of the one responsible (so Uber shifts liability away from them to society). Additionally, nobody is going to reimburse my other damages, such as loss of earnings if the driver can't pay.
This is shifting the burden to society, in the name of unnecessary high premiums for those who insured themselves.
Again sure you can blow it up to be a big problem but it's easily fixable and doesn't in itself take anything away from the original point which started this weird insurance thread.
Even if you picked up a hitchhiker and they gave you $20 for your troubles that hitchhiker is not your customer and you don't regularly drive around looking for hitchhikers to make a profit.
It's actually pretty straightforward. That's why the term "sharing economy" is so disingenuous; nothing but doublespeak.
I couldn't find a price quote, but I imagine it's not cheap.
Your current policy holder is not required to offer this special insurance. They can cancel you if they feel you are driving for Uber without telling them.
No beefs with Uber, other than stop fooling with vechicle requirements, and fees. You're hiring independent contractors?
Oh yea, whatever you do don't go into debt over Uber. Buying a new Prius to work for this company seems rediculious.
In Germany people who want to transport others for profit need a special drivers license. Say bus drivers, taxi drivers, chauffeurs, etc.
If Uber drivers are willing to get this license, they can operate completely legally.
You can make the "Personenbeförderugsschein" which allows to do "shuttle services" but compared to taxis they can't randomly pick up passengers but I.e. have to return to their base before picking up the next passenger, no waiting at a "strategically" good position etc.
And a Personenbeförderungsschein is the only thing you need for that.
In some cities even the only differences between a hired service like Uber or a Taxi is that Uber may NOT use Taxi-only spaces, and may only pick up people who have arranged the journey before pickup.
Which is exactly what uber wants.
Secondly, under current regulations unless you are a taxi you need to return to a designated premise after every trip. Every chauffeur needs to do that as well.
There is already a meaningful distinction in the law. The second restriction might be a bit harsh, but often Uber isn't even abiding by the first which is a pretty basic requirement.
Scheinselbstständigkeit is what Uber is doing, and it means Uber is responsible for the insurance.
Exposing itself to "license" means exposing themselves to arbitrary government control and has nothing to do with being responsible. On the contrary focusing on making good profits is the best way to help both drivers and passengers without compromising interests of both.
You know, "arbitrary" things like insurance, anti-discrimination provisions, etc.
I'll bite. What's immoral about how they treat their drivers? Their drivers choose their hours, choose which rides to take, and can work for as many uber-like services at the same time as they want.
You hire people as self-employed but rip them of the opportunity to work as self-employed by.
1) Not allowing them to set their own fees 2) Not allowing them to hire people to drive for them 3) Discouraging tips 4) Deciding what types of cars they can drive in.
All things you would normally do to people who where hired because they would trade that potential upside of being selv-employed by for instance having access to ex. healthcare and vacation.
In other words. Uber takes away all the good things about being self-employed and replace them with restrictions that would normally only apply for someone who was employed. While at the same time not giving them access to those things that are actually advantageous about being employed.
Uber isn't a technology disrupter it's a legislation disrupter.
Is Uber responsible for the generally poor opportunities in the economy? Does their offering of these positions disrupt a solution to some public goods problem? (A good heuristic for whether one should care about a kind of lawbreaking, btw.)
No one forces self-employed independent contractor tradesmen to become self-employed independent contractor tradesmen, and yet when one comes to your house to fix your plumbing or electrical work-there are still requisites under the law that they're entitled to.
The opposite position is like saying, "you are the rightful owner of that apple, therefore you can't trade it for something better even if you want to, because that would be abusive of your rights".
The Uber driver have absolutely no way of building a business or expanding it. No way of making more money. No way of hiring people. No control over which car to use and so on.
This is not the conditions someone who is self-employed work under.
Edit: I'm not trying to be snarky; it's just that this issue comes up a lot, and I always look for such an explanation and yet never get it. Hence why someone came up with the "Copenhagen interpretation of ethics" argument. If you could actually fill this gap in my understanding, I would gladly help spread the insight to those like me who don't see consistent internal logic behind it.
Someone who knows the risks (physical, emotional, mental what have you and furthermore etcetera) of a job shouldn't be afforded certain protections from the government to minimize those risks, if they take a job that opens them up to the possibility of said risks?
They have strictly as much or more opportunity to do all of these things than if Uber didn't exist. Driving for Uber doesn't stop you from doing other drive-for-hire work. And because Uber exists, they can at least make some money when they aren't getting any customers of their own.
will strictly true it's also completely ignoring the reality that we people have needs that forces us to make choices, often choices we don't want to make but have few other choices.
It does address the parents point because if you don't see that I am not sure anything I say will change that.
If you could articulate the collective action problem that such a ban would resolve, that would improve my worldmodel to the point of seeing what insight you're offering here and possibly agreeing. If you can't, then maybe your position doesn't correspond to a better worldmodel than one that I and the original parent hold.
Also, it's not so much that "no one" forces them to work, but that Uber doesn't. My need for satiation "forces" me to buy food, but I hope that doesn't, in your mind, justify a crackdown on all food sellers.
http://www.whosdrivingyou.org/blog/ubers-deleted-rides-of-gl...
I.e. the claims that because uber isn't doing things by the book it's somehow less safe than using regulated taxi's.
This is obviously false since the logging of the drivers and the passengers probably make it one of the most transparent safety protocols out there.
Most studies show that some of the biggest detergents against crimes is the risk of being detected.
So in other words. Uber is as safe for the passgener, if not safer, than any other taxi company out there.
Therefore the question is: How easy is it to track the offender, in both the services?