Comment by muse900 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by muse900 | Hacker News Reader

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Yes a lot of them, although you have to sign a proper employment form. And you can't turn off your phone whenever or work for other companies as well. You have a proper schedule.

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.

Uber is no cheaper than normal taxis in the UK, so the prices won't be going up by a lot. We already had pretty great, cheap, taxi coverage in the UK.

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.

That might depend on the city but in London I've found a black cab is normally a minimum 30% more than an uber. For longer journeys it can jump to double the price. Uber surge could equalise it.

Black cabs are always more expensive than callable taxis, that's the way it works in the UK. You're comparing limes to lemons. Similar, but different and differently priced.

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.

They don't have to give people schedules, that's not part of the status "worker". In fact, if they did, the drivers would likely be classed as employees instead.

You can be a worker, turn down work whenever you want and work for multiple companies. That's all fine.

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