DPD courier who was fined for day off to see doctor dies from diabetes
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
This is why I'm happy Germany banned Uber from operating here. I'd love to have more competition in the taxi market (which is ridiculously expensive here). But not at the cost of millions of workers.
We need regulation against Bogus self-employment to be enforced. A person who can only work for one company is not self-employed. At the very least we need gig economy companies to compete for the labor force to ensure that market rates go up.
I use my own equipment, set my own hours, perform tasks with autonomy (I can choose whatever route I or the rider wants) and have no supervision. I can also work for Lyft simultaneously if I want.
Is that so different from, say, an unskilled landscaper asking for $50/h and being passed over for the long line of other landscapers willing to work for $10/h? I don't think the definition of being self-employed or being a contractor includes pricing power.
An Uber driver has no such opportunity to interact with the client in that manner.
Are you functionally able to set your rates or is this only a theoretical thing? If you can’t functionally set your rates you aren’t really self-employed.
Likewise I can contact Uber and tell them I want $5/mile and they will say no and then tell me I can continue to accept rides at the bid or stay home.
Finally I can work for Juno, or by getting my own insurance and coding my own app, or for Lyft, or a mixture of the above. This is absolutely distinct from any real employment I've ever had.
Furthermore, your examples are pretty dumb -- what if you want to work for less to have more rides to make it up in volume? You couldn't do that either. The fact that you cannot set prices means you're not self employed. The fact that you can set your own hours and use an app is irrelevant.
The fact of the matter is that you cannot dictate your own price using Uber or Lyft. Uber drivers are employees, and Britain agrees [1].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/10/uber-lose...
Also, as noted in your article, regular taxi drivers in the UK have always been considered self employed contractors despite also having no ability to change the regulated meter rate. So this whole pricing argument is invalid and inconsistent with historical interpretations.
Another example is doctors here in Canada who bill out to the government at a fixed price schedule. Are they not self employed either? After all, they all bill the same entity and are not allowed to set their own prices.
Yes, you have no commitment to them except following the very stringent rules and regulations set by them, without exception, when you decide to work for them.
> So this whole pricing argument is invalid and inconsistent with historical interpretations.
Merely being not being able to set your own price is not what makes you an employee. The distinction is a tax one, concerning benefits among other things. All "historical interpretations" are ultimately arbitrary like the very distinction between self-employed vs. employed. In the case of Britain, their opinion is pretty clear on this in respect to Uber.
> Another example is doctors here in Canada who bill out to the government at a fixed price schedule. Are they not self employed either? After all, they all bill the same entity and are not allowed to set their own prices.
I know nothing of Canadian doctors to say one way or another. Regardless, the distinction between being an independent contractor vs. an employee and being "self employed" or not are two different conversations. You can be legally an employee and be self employed, e.g. an entrepreneur. You can also be self-employed yet not be an employee, e.g. an independent contractor.
Uber is attempting to argue that its workers are both self employed and independent contractors, yet lack the full autonomy that someone in that position would have, notably, being able to set one's own prices and work environment.
A hypothetical service where you set your own price and profile, ala eBay + Thumbtack and are chosen would be the scenario that Uber supposes its drivers are already in.
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This pretty much summarizes it: https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=4a493c30-578d...
However, regular taxi drivers in the UK and elsewhere are subject to almost all the same “suggestive of employee” points and have been uncontroversially classified as self-employed contractors for decades. Especially if you consider Uber to be the modern equivalent of a combination of the old system of taxi regulator, dispatcher, and payment processor. This despite regular taxi drivers also generally not using their own equipment or having as much control over their working hours.
For this reason the EAT decision smells like politically motivated bias again Uber.
Heh, no doubt about that. The decision actually had a bit of controversy for that reason.
But otherwise, if you take jobs from both Uber and Lyft, you should be fine.
This sounds stupid. Wasn't the whole point of gig economy to setting personal time, working and getting paid only when the work is done?
That's the gig companies' marketing, not their intention. The intention was to get cheap, disposable labor. In the US and other developed countries, an employee has a lot of rights and an employer has lots of responsibilities, so under-paying and firing employees is pretty difficult to do.
If a business model only works if you under-pay and mistreat workers, someone (e.g. Fedex, Uber, US govt, and even Microsoft) will fin a way around it by misclassifying employees as contractors.
The only thing that will help for sure is, I am afraid, massive amounts of riots.
Also be aware that most polical riots do not get organized as riots, rather they are political demonstrations which turn into riots. Also know that rioters in the state of rioting are not hoping for something better.
In the same way as a strike is the last resort and an indication that negotiations in business has failed, so a riot is a failure. Never want one.
Going back to the 19th-20th century labour movements, rioting sometimes had a leading role in the creation of labour laws, the ones being skirted here.
But I disagree with the OP. I think better standards will emerge. Some level of organised political action would probably do it, but I think Uber drivers and gig-couriers don't identify enough as a group to organise and make political demands.
What we actually need in most places is better categories for on-demand, casual and piecemeal work. Employers are often willing to pay a premium for low commitment employment terms, via 3rd party HR firms/contracts. Put that money towards regulated protections instead, pension and unemployment insurance.
Gig arrangements aren't inherently bad, they are just not regulated/legislated well.
The problem is: Once the gig workers go to strike, the employing companies will either cut their hours/parcels/whatever or terminate them outright on the spot and take the next desperate person into their racket as replacement. And as long as there is a large enough pool of desperate people willing to do any kind of job for virtually no pay this race to the bottom will continue.
Another type is just lobbying/advocacy.
I think the gig-employers (uber etc.) would be pretty happy with clearer legislation. Costs they would shoulder just fine. They can’t/don’t want to (a) have to manage their HR via a HR department and (b) deal with anything short of extreme at-will employment clauses.
IMO (again) there is a ruleset that works for most parties. Define some categories. (EG piecemeal like uber). The definition needs to include restrictions, like “employees control their own hours.” You need to ban certain abusive contracts. Then you need to set aside enough money (more than regular employees) for things like medical insurance, income protection, pensions and everything else that gets left out.
I think most employers would gladly spend a little more money if they get to maintain their flexibility. I think it’s also societally valuable to do this. (a) Uber is a good case study. They expanded a global workforce much faster than would be possible under traditional employment. (b) Also, a lot of gigs are very low barrier to entry, with very little gatekeeping. This helps get employment to people that otherwise struggle to get it for whatever reason.
This is not an unsolvable problem, even the political 3rd order interests and horse trading is not that bad. It just hasn’t been done yet because (a) the gig economy is new (b) a lot of traditional labour advocates are opposed to its existence and (c) our political systems are not doing too well right now.
Where are they advocating for it? I only see a prediction, not an endorsement.
> The only thing that will help for sure is, I am afraid, massive amounts of riots.
> There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!
Violence is still by far the most effective way of preventing the machine (whatever the machine in question happens to be) from working. Peaceful protesting has achieved absolutely nothing for the last 50 years, it's a lie told to keep the masses in line.
Not just that, or even mainly that, I don’t think, it’s the impact on the employment figures.
Seems ironic that a company owned by a government with strong social welfare and laws preventing long work hours would act in such a hostile way towards staff in pursuit of profits.
As has been remarked, the long-term effect of privatisation in the UK has been that much of the economy is still government-owned. It's just not the UK government that owns it any more.
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
Hate to break it to you about Fedex...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-fedex-settlement/fedex-to...
Obviously, DPD could change to employees and offer sick leave.
But I think the bigger opportunity would be for DPD to add more requirements on their independent contractors to require that they offer sick leave or participate in health savings accounts that can cover these types of fines. The tragedy here is that the company that employed this driver wasn’t able to pay 150 pounds and instead worked the driver into a grave. I’m not sure if the company is just the driver himself as a one person company (pretty common in the US, not sure about UK).
A big risk in contracting is not setting enough aside to pay for benefits and taxes. In the programming space I’ve ran into people who were happy as well as stressed out based on how they structured their cash flow management and set asides for benefits. I had two peers with the same rate ($70/hour x 40/week). One worked out a salary, set aside IRA, healthcare, taxes, vacation. The other just paid out the gross amount and was very stressed about company holidays, vacation and even routine healthcare expenses. It was curious how they functioned like an employee and didn’t have an advisor to help them structure their company. We all sat in the same room and were all 30 year old single people.
Yeah, DPD could raise their requirements (or the government could force them to) but they would have to raise their prices, and capitalism says they mustn't do that.
In the UK we've decided nobody should have to choose between seeing a doctor and paying their rent, hence Statutory Sick Pay. An employer can't fine you for sickness. Unfortunately DPD found a way around it with some legal fiction.
Capitalism infers markets with competitors trying to maximize efficiencies.
The US, UPS is the largest and most profitable delivery service. And they have high benefit payouts and a strong employee union. They have higher costs and are more profitable than their closest competitor that uses contract labor. I think it’s overly simple to say capitalism says this is the way it should be. But it’s certainly not pushing UPS to cut employee benefits, mainly because employee benefits from-improved by those benefits- are a competitive advantage.
Really, this is a solved problem. It's called employment and has a bunch of rules and regulations around it to mitigate the extreme power imbalance between the two parties involved (which is vastly lessened in the case of contracting programmers/in demand experts). Technology has given companies the ability to skirt these laws, the laws need to catch up. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/10/uber-lose...
Either way, DPD contractor agreements sound more like employee agreement. They just know the right to substituting (getting someone else to do the work without having to inform employer) is one of HMRC key checks for the contractor/employee relationship.
Do you really believe the solution is to create a complicated bureaucratic way of saving up money for lower income workers to pay punitive fines to corporations who wish to avoid following longtstanding employment law?
I’m not sure what the income is for the subject of this story, so unsure if they are low income.
Ugh.