Seattle's Uber union law set to go into effect
geekwire.com
geekwire.com
> only to drivers who have been with a company for the past 90 days and who have made at least 52 trips to or from Seattle during any three-month period in the past 12 months.
Lyft and Uber fought against this, under the logic that more part-time drivers are less likely to support unionization.
Meanwhile:
> Teamsters Local 117 and other drivers have pushed for stricter criteria
[1] http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/city-unvei...
>"One tried and true union tactic is to negotiate with an employer to take money from non-powerful-union-members and give it to union members."
What exactly is negotiated directly between the employer? How does this redistribution work in practice? Thanks.
Edit: it looks like this practice is not legal in right-to-work states in the US. This article seems to explain "Union security agreements" pretty well if anyone is interested:
http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/employee-r...
I wonder are non-union workers in union shops ever pressured to join?
Basic worker benefits and protection can happen regardless of the number of voting members...
If a driver drives once:
1. they have less knowledge about working conditions
2. the trip was more of a fling with being an Uber driver and not a source of income.
3. It is easier for Uber or Lyft to stack the deck with drivers who are less informed on the issues
My point is that while unions benefit some workers, they don't benefit all workers. It's not a black and white situation.
This will only apply to the top 10% of Union workers. The workers who came late (or the majority of Uber drivers) will receive less pay, have less power, work longer hours, and fewer benefits than the "senior" drivers. Do you really think unions will help everyone? They, just like everything else in this world, are designed to benefit the top.
You get pay by seniority as a compromise because it's an objective measure, it correlates with performance and it can't be gamed by either side.
"Results suggest that, contrary to common beliefs, job tenure is largely unrelated to job performance."
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001879113...
Paywalled.
However, the abstract ("citizenship behavior" / "creativity"... meaning what exactly?) hints that the measures are largely subjective and somewhat bullshitty.
Here's another, unpaywalled study:
http://www.people.vcu.edu/~mamcdani/Publications/McDaniel,%2...
"Results indicate that for all levels of job experience and for both low- and high-complexity jobs, the correlation between job experience and job performance is positive. "
(up to 12 yrs)
That's how you end up with pay by seniority rather than performance
Yes the union is the one _forcing_ the employer to enact such policies but _why_ does the union exist? Because the employer treated their employees unfairly.
Unions are a bandage on a gaping wound, yes you can say the bandage isn't doing the best job. But why do you have the gaping wound to start with?
Leaders are incentivised to minimise the number of key supporters they need to stay in power [1]. Having a large pool of potential supporters is a plus.
* People who are new to Uber.
* People who don't work at Uber very much.
These are people who know less about what it's like to work at Uber or don't have very much skin in the game. In any voting system, if you let people vote who don't know very much about the environment they are voting in or don't have much at stake, it makes fair representation difficult (unless you have fractional votes). To take an extreme example: people who visit Louisiana or have family there are certainly affected by state laws but that does not necessarily mean it is fair for them to vote on the same footing as Louisiana residents.
A more insidious way for this to work is that Uber could slightly favor candidates who are likely to vote their way during the on-boarding process -- varying their strategy on a month by month basis, depending on what issues are coming up for vote. You don't need a crushing margin -- and maybe don't want one -- just a good solid 3-4%.
The city didn't want a bunch of part-time or brand new drivers killing a union for the larger "full-time" group over union dues. Its a smart and relatively fair play by the authors of the law. The reason Uber/Lyft want these folks to vote is that they're likely to opt out just because of the dues.
The union is going to hire an attorney to represent them in negotiations right?
And yes dues are a huge issue for new unions where members don't know what the benefits are yet - particularly for part-timers. My wife who's a management side labor attorney actually raised this point and said it was significant - and the law was written smartly to address this.
If Uber drivers want to organize, why do they need the Seattle City Council to pass a law first allowing it?
For example striking independent contractors are not protected under the National Labor Relations Act. My understanding is that this law is meant to bridge some of the gaps in the labor laws by the drivers being independent contractors.
Anyone can organize at any time, and the employer is free to tell you to pound sand and hire someone else. Seattle's trying to change that. Expect rates to go up and availability to go down.
This is not correct. Independent Contractors can organize but they have no right's covered by the National Labor Relations Act - which means they have little power or protections of a traditional union including collective bargaining rights. Organizing groups (who are covered by the NLRA) can not be fired by the employers for organizing.
Well, they don't have the normal protections that employees have, either, because they're independent contractors and not employees. That has nothing to do with the NLRA or collective bargaining rights.
Part of the point of independent contracting is that the relationship isn't an employment relationship, so the same rights aren't relevant. If you're saying that this is something that should be protected for Uber drivers, the real answer is that they should be classified as employees, not to blur the responsibilities of an independent contracting relationship.
The reason why governments have historically enacted laws that regulate unions and their interaction with employees - and this is not the first such law by a long shot - is because, even with collective bargaining, unions are often simply not powerful enough to meaningfully negotiate, and so the power imbalance remains.
Whether that's good for companies or the public is a whole other question.
(where "my" is some very effective local resident)
Or is it only okay when Uber is disrupting the law and labor rights?
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/09/nyregion/driving-a-taxi-di...
Maybe we should set the fines according to company assets.
I live in an European country myself, and there was a large campaign by the taxi associations against Uber (though unsuccessful), yet I've never seen that accusation, only regarding other kinds of laws.
800,000 € fine
http://www.leparisien.fr/economie/uber-condamne-a-800-000-eu...
1.2 million € fine
http://www.lefigaro.fr/societes/2016/10/12/20005-20161012ART...
So yes, uber breaks plenty of laws in European countries.
(Yes, Uber does break other laws, I never disputed that)
If these miners chose to become farmers instead, would you still say that they were "voluntarily" farmers? Or that mother nature was oppressing them by forcing them into hard labor..
I'm also absolutely sure you can be whatever you want to be. I.E. an immigrant arriving in the shores of the USA in the 19th century could just build his own cattle ranch. Boy if he accepted to work 18h a day 400m bellow the surface of the Earth, receive a ridiculously small wage for the job and die in his 30's from it, I'm absolutely sure it was because that was actually the miner's life long dream.
Damn unions, destroying those nice miner's dreams of having a miserable life since the 1900's...
Because, the brilliance (terrible?) part about Uber is that its so easy for them to get new drivers. The barriers to entry are soo very low. Almost every American that is able to work, is trained to drive, the large majority of them have cars, a decently large set of those people would like extra money, and they have the spare time.
If there was a strike, 1. Surge pricing would kick in, tempting a lot of people to forgo the strike. 2. Within days/weeks there will be a new set of drivers willing to work at the current price.
This whole notion of a "strike" only works if you get 100% of the able bodied men/women to cooperate. The larger the working pool of people, the lower the chances of a successful strike.
I don't know what that means in actual practice - as companies have certainly proven adept at NOT doing so.
I'm discussing the underlying problem why the union formed you are still attacking the fundamental existence of unions.
As I stated
Unions are a bandage on a gaping wound,
yes you can say the bandage isn't doing the best job.
But why do you have the gaping wound to start with?
That they're disenfranchising some of their own members should be a big red flag.
Unions aren't a solution to the underlying problem. I agree with you.
Why are you still attacking a temporary solution to a much larger problem? Do you just hate unions that much?
:.:.:
Whatever the historical reasons for power structures,
once enacted they tend to serve their own ends.
That they're disenfranchising some of their own members
should be a big red flag.
Every single organization in modern society experiences this. Either you truly are on some next level Max Strirner individualism or you don't really realize what you insinuating (which is every single human organization is a fundamental oppression again humanity, this is what Strirner wrote about).
There might be disageeement on how "temporary" this will be.
The employer can correct this anytime they want. They refuse too and fuel employees will to unionize.
The problem is as temporary as the employer wishes for it to be. This is no different then any other management driven mistake.
Why is it okay our site crashes every 48 hours? Management won't allocate money to fix it.
Why are our workers striking for better pay? Management won't allocate money to fix it.
You may argue the money doesn't exist to fix that issue. Which is really just stating the company is going out of business at a rather slow rate...
>> the problem is as temporary as [Uber] wishes for it to be
My point was that the solution chosen, binding unionization voted on by a minority of drivers, is not temporary.
So what other solution is there? Choice implies options. What are the other options?
Also you are attacking democratic rule by a minority of voters... Except that is the very legal system we have here in America. There are far more non-voters then voters. What right do their laws have to apply to us? This is your logic.
To be entirely clear, I am not making any claims about the desirability or lack thereof of unionization whatsoever. I'm just saying the thing I just said.
> you are still attacking the fundamental
> existence of unions.
I don't see how any reading of my one comment here could indicate that I'm attacking the fundamental existence of unions, which to clarify, I have nothing against.
> Why are you still attacking a temporary
> solution to a much larger problem?
Which is not to say that unions can't be a net positive for workers employed as part of the union, that obviously depends.
But if you're being made part of a union's purview and they've structured their rules in such a way that you can't vote, then it should be fairly obvious that they're structurally not interested in representing you, and will in fact represent the interests of voting members at your expense.
My one paragraph comment was simply pointing out,
something you failed to address in the grandparent's
comment, that power structures once enacted tend to stick
But this isn't just true of a union.
It is true of any government, company, VC firm, bank, school, sports team, etc. This isn't an attack on a unions. It is a condemnation of the entire system of organization the human race uses. Which I point out by relating this to the work of Max Strirner as he does levy this full criticism in a logically consistent fashion.
I am addressing the point the parent-N poster is making. Their point is moot.
Either they're stating there is a fundamental issue with all human organizations. Or they're just being biased towards unions making a No True Scotsman logical fallacy to support their argument. As are you as well.
:.:.:
they've structured their rules in such a way that you can't vote, then
it should be fairly obvious that they're structurally not interested in
representing you
It can be applied to any representational democracy where the majority of members do not vote (USA for example).
This is the exact same logic the DNC uses to explain why the RNC is racist (it suppresses the voting rights of minorities, QED it is not structurally interested in representing them).
I literally addressed this issue in my unions are flawed statement. Yes I admit they aren't prefect. They aren't always interested in representing all of their members. But the company is interested in far less.
You are also refusing to qualify all members.
The main restriction is to prevent part time uber drivers (those who Uber driving isn't their sole source of income). And very new Uber drivers (if Uber paid people to manipulate union voting).
This makes complete sense. Why would a full time person who depends on Uber be interested in helping a guy who only drives 2-3 hours a month?
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