Comment by anexprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anexprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

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If the site exercised enough direction and control so they specified you must do the work at their desk in their working hours. If they deny you the right to substitute an acceptable alternative person, or work for others, then the relationship would start to seem of employment. There's quite a lot of other pointers.

Uber seem to fail most of these "in business" points for their drivers with their heavily one sided agreement.

Going back to IT contractors and IR35 in the early '00s it's been a constant "discussion" of where the line is. For contractors we had to get quite good at amending contracts, and satisfy other aspects to be able to remain unaffected. In that case the govt wanted us to be employees, contractors didn't!

I'll think you find that Uber drivers also want to be self employed.

There is only 2 drivers who led this case, and they currently work for some private taxi cab association.

And all people on zero-hours contracts love that and all children who worked in factories were violently against being sent to school.

There's a whole class of workers want the flexibility. Students, people who can only work a few hours. Etc

And this ruling won't in any way affect that. There's nothing in the definition of worker that has regular hours.

Certainly not the impression I've got from media reports of demos and Uber Eat strike days etc. The reality is probably somewhere in the middle.

For drivers I don't understand the appeal of being self employed there's nothing to gain by it.

If they still want to show they're operating as self employed they can with a b2b relationship with Uber, website and advertising, exercising right of substitution, and all the other HMRC indicators of being in business.

The two drivers are test plaintiffs. It's the British legal system's alternative to the class action, where a few representative claimants are chosen for a full trial, and the parties agree that the legal result controls the other cases.

I don't know how many are in the '& others' in this case.

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