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.