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Comment by AstralStorm | Hacker News Reader

This is not quite an exclusive or.

The service is not outside of business standard variety. Other cab companies have client driven matchmaking systems too now... They also employ office workers. The workplace for a cab driver is his car.

Therefore, what Uber does would make them a cab company that abuses contractors instead of employing employees.

However, the key point here is the test A. If Uber is specifically telling the drivers to pick up specific fares or otherwise forcing them to pick up fares beyond the number and/or time, they are actually employees not contractors. Fudging with scoring system to fire those who do not follow such orders indirectly could be construed as such as well.

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Considering the actual text posted by jaggederest in another comment, it does seem to be an exclusive or:

"the services provided were either outside the usual course of business or performed outside of all the places of business of the enterprise"

Regarding other cab companies, most cab drivers have been traditionally classified as contractors. The idea that Uber introduced this practice is propaganda.

That isn't an exclusive or; the English language lets that be interpreted as either an xor or or, and the reasoning of the context shows it to be an or.

To iterate; the statement sets out two conditions, either of which are sufficient independent of the other, and claims that each of a number of services met one of those conditions.

Thanks, I'm not a native speaker, and I thought either/or was a xor.

I think there is valid confusion to be had in interpreting this statement.

Usually, when a statement of "choose either x or y" is made, then the only valid options are exclusively x or exclusively y (None and Both are not valid).

Though, when the statement of "if either x or y then do action" is made, then the action is done with any of three valid options: x, y, or x and y (only None is not valid).

To change the second statement to mean the first, you could say "if only x or only y then do action." The "only" cancel Both as being an option.

Native speaker here.

Either-or does imply exclusive-or, but it is often used less formally, so you will sometimes see it made explicit as "either x or y, but not both."

> Fudging with scoring system to fire those who do not follow such orders indirectly could be construed as such as well.

Surely companies must be allowed some method to ensure the quality of work they desire.

No one's saying they can't be allowed such a method. But it may be the case that for persistent business relationships doing so may mean an employee/employer relationship rather than the relationship between a business and an independent contractor.

A scoring system of the resulting work is fine. A scoring system that effectively encodes how they did the work is problematic because it means they company is now dictating how work be done, which is an employee relationship.

E.g. It's the difference between: a scoring system that uses a coding style standard and unit tests on the resulting code to build a score; and a scoring system that uses hours logged into the computer manipulating the IDE and lines of code written per hour to build a score (the contractor could use that as a way to score himself and for billing, but not the company).

I believe the distinction lies in describing the final work product vs. describing means and methods. If you have an outsourcing contract with an independent contractor, you're allowed to specify (usually via specifications that are appended to the contract) performance objectives and quality of the work, and what the final work-product looks like. If you stray too far or too often over into specifying the means and methods by which they're supposed to achieve those results, then you're treating the contractors like employees, which actually come to think of it, is already sort of a no-no under most current contracting arrangements I'm aware of. Although there are always gray areas... for example what if you're turning over source code at the end of a project? Then your writing of the code is both a method and a final work-product. Some attorney needs to earn their keep and make sure everything is all laid out nice and kosher in the contract so things don't get murky.

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