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Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

And will will answer you.

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.

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To be fair, taxi drivers are also self employed, usually don't get health insurance or vacation either. Uber isn't "changing that game" in the private car-for-hire business.

But they can hire people to work for themselves and build a business around that. Uber drivers can't. This is one of the core principles of being able to run an actual company. the ability to delegate work out to others.

That doesn't seem to address the parent's point that no one is forcing them to take the job, and they find it to be better than their other options. How, then, would banning them help?

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.)

That doesn't seem to address the parent's point that no one is forcing them to take the job,

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.

That's simply repeating the situation, not addressing the criticism. The same argument applies there as well.

The criticism makes no sense...just because one isn't "forced" to work doesn't mean protections from employer abuse or misconduct suddenly don't matter if someone decides to take the work.

But this isn't some random abuse with "take it or leave it". It's something they knew about all along and went into with open eyes. What doesn't make sense is this dogmatic insistence that no right should be waivable under any circumstance. In what sense is it actually misconduct. As I said initially (and which I didn't see a response to), if you legitimately believe a case of lawbreaking is harmful and the kind of thing we should care about, that should translate into "here is a public goods problem whose solution that disrupts". So how does this lawbreaking do that? And why not just spell that out the first time around?

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".

I have already explained the issue. Uber takes the best of having them self-employed and give them all the worst things about being employed as working conditions.

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.

And that's still not responding to the criticism: even with those downsides, it's better than all the government-endorsed options. Whose fault is that, and what does arresting them accomplish with respect to their welfare? (Which I believe was your motivation for objecting to the practice.)

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.

So I just want to make sure I understand the criticism, as I feel we may have inadvertently drifted here:

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 should be afforded those protections, but they should be waivable by informed parties (barring some dynamic that would explain why this is a bad idea and which no one in the thread has articulated). Is there a reason to believe the drivers aren't informed of such tradeoffs or did not become informed very soon?

>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.

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.

I refuse to buy the premise of "no one is forcing them"

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.

You don't understand the logic of "this is a better option than all others and removing it doesn't help unless that's part of some [effective] collective action strategy to a problem"? If so, that's a strike against your model of the problem, not in favor of your criticism.

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.

Tipping is a terrible societal habit, though. Pay them a living wage, fine. Just don't force people to waste time on a another, entirely separate payment.

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