Basically every other taxi driver firm also employees self-employed drivers.
Uber works differently. The driver chooses when and how many hours he wants to work and when to pick a ride. If what was decided above applies for every uber employee its not gonna go down pretty well cause :
Uber is going to become one more minicab agency, where it employees people with a schedule and its price is going to go up by a lot.
Customers won't benefit and drivers won't either.
Most of the drivers I've spoken to and I use Uber a lot have told me that the job is not as great or the pay depending on the amount of time they work and if they are actually renting a car or having a car on lease or own it, the thing that everyone told me is that they get to work whenever they want and thats awesome about it.
Apply rules to the Uber is gonna force rules to be applied to drivers as well and thats not gonna go well.
Not sure where you got that impression.
For me, in the UK, the selling points are that it's easy to use the app, you don't have to muck around with cash and the cars, at the moment, are new.
Oh, and that I can abuse the fact that I'm relatively rich compared to the plebs to jump the queue with surge pricing. Very un-british of me.
There's different rules between the two, that's why the black cabs tried to get a ruling saying that booking an uber was like hailing a taxi rather than booking it.
Many other taxi companies in the UK now have apps too and are pretty much the same price as Uber as far as I can tell in all the trips I've taken in Nottingham.
You can be a worker, turn down work whenever you want and work for multiple companies. That's all fine.