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Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

The interesting part of the article for me was the news that the Seattle city council voted to allow Uber drivers to unionize. It was illegal before? I thought the constitution guaranteed freedom of assembly. Do workers need permission to elect representatives to negotiate on their behalf?

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Companies can't unionize -- it's called anti-competitive behaviour.

Depending on who you ask, Uber drivers aren't necessarily workers; they might be independent contractors, i.e., companies.

EDIT: Also, depending on the definition of "allowed to unionize" here, it's possible that this goes beyond allowing collective bargaining to prohibiting Uber from hiring anyone who isn't "blessed" by the union.

california most definitely thinks they're workers, even if they think they're companies.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/18/business/uber-contests-ca...

>california most definitely thinks

California is a state, it doesn't think. Please be more precise with commentary like this (e.g. state judicial rulings vs local laws vs state laws).

In this particular case it's the California Labor Commissioner's office and it's a ruling for one case. From your article:

>The ruling does not apply beyond Ms. Berwick and could be altered if Uber’s appeal succeeds.

So this is a long ways away from being a law in California.

Let me introduce you to a wonderful element of human language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche

I appreciate the condescension, but saying that a state thinks something when referring to an enforcement ruling from a particular office is very misleading. In particular you can say the state both simultaneously thinks that they are contractors (how the rest of the Uber employees are treated) and it thinks that they are not (the ruling outcome of this one case).

So saying a state thinks something when there are many conflicting internal positions is worthless and just ends up being a tool to push a particular political agenda.

why are both your comments greyed out?

That's what happens when comments get a lot of downvotes. You don't see a "karma" score on HN, but comments with negative number of votes get more and more grayed out until they are hardly visible.

very poor content, presumably.

It's not so much the content, it's the tone. People don't like being talked down to, even if the points are relevant.

How about this comment that is both condescending and irrelevant in response to mine? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13856422

People actually think lots of apparently conflicting ideas - a common one being believing in religion and understanding science - and in fact the person you originally responded to pointed out the supposed "conflict" here - that individual contractors, despite being "independent" companies, may have collective bargaining rights.

The comment I replied to made it sound as if the state had some kind of position on the matter, but the linked evidence was only that a particular office ruled on one single case.

>california most definitely thinks they're workers,

This is blatantly wrong.

Or the reification fallacy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)

It's not really depending on who you ask and it's very surprising for me to read comments like yours on HN of all places, the law is very clearly laid out and some protest signs in Sillicon Valley do not change the reality. You can check the IRS website if you're confused about what the distinction is between a contractor and a worker.

Sorry, I was unclear. I should have said "depending on the context and which law applies". The IRS definitions apply when you're dealing with the IRS (unless they don't, e.g., if you convince a court that the IRS is incorrectly applying the law) but they're not necessarily the same as the definitions which are legally relevant for antitrust purposes or for the purpose of Labour relations regulations.

Actually the worker / employee distinction is complex and not as cut and dried as you think.

This is a big part of the Uber/Delivered style of companies business model that is dodging the employer social security taxes.

The taxes are never dodged. Either Uber pays them (W2) or the independent contractor does (1040). The bigger issue, st least under Obamacare, was if they were elegiabke for group health insurance if they worked more than 30 hours.

Depends on country often self employed get better tax breaks in return for less benefits - this is "real" self employed contractors not faux self employment like Uber et al

Ya, depends on the country. In the USA, self employed kind of sucks because group health insurance is way cheaper than individual market insurance.

I disagree. It's not clear at all.

I was also confused by that part of the article, so I looked up the relevant legislation [1]. It seems that taxicab drivers are classified as independent operators, and so aren't subject to the same sorts of collective bargaining protections that traditional employees posess. This legislation appears (IANAL) to say that Uber (and other entities that contract with for-hire drivers) cannot include provisions in their contracts that prohibit collective bargaining.

As a result, since Uber can't prohibit unionization through its contracts with drivers, it's now trying to prevent unionization through propaganda efforts.

[1]: http://clerk.seattle.gov/~legislativeItems/Ordinances/Ord_12...

Laws to "allow" unions do not grant additional rights. In fact they take away rights. Specifically they make it illegal to do certain jobs without being a member of the union, creating a government-sanctioned monopoly. Union advocates say that people are better off without the right to work outside the union.

While this can definitely be true, note that that "laws that allow union" can also take the form of lifting restrictions against anti-competitive behavior (i.e., restrictions against monopolies on the supply side of labor). Therefore, such laws really can be a reduction in regulation rather than a misleading way to describe increased regulation. Indeed, the "right to work" laws usually take the form of restrictions on the sorts of free contracts that employers and groups of employees can enter into.

This is all depressingly similar to the choice of whether to call something a "subsidy", "tax cut", "welfare", or "entitlement". Although those terms can be given distinct objective definitions made with respect to either the status quo or an idealized laissez faire world, in practice the choice of terminology is political.

> note that that "laws that allow union" can also take the form of lifting restrictions against competitive behavior (i.e., restrictions against monopolies on the supply side of labor)

This wording doesn't make sense to me. Can you give an example?

Sorry, that should be "anti-competitive behavior". (Edited.) Thank you.

In many places, there are laws against collusion by market participants, e.g., doctors can't talk with each other about their prices, the CEOs of GM and Toyota can't coordinate on whether to have a sale, and the CEOs of Apple and Google can't agree not to hire each other's employees (heh). These laws often impede the formations of unions, which are collective groups of employees who coordinate on wages, benefits, etc. By repealing anti-competitive laws, or paring them back so they do not apply to unions, this can allow unions to form where they would not. The argument is that allowing monopolies (or at least oligopolies) in the supply of labor is a way to balance the negotiating advantage that businesses have on account of natural monopolies/oligopolies in the demand for labor.

It might have been just a gesture of solidarity rather than anything having legal standing

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