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I think it's disingenuous of Uber and Lyft to tie working hour flexibility to employee status. Yes many full-time employees don't have that level of flexibility, but being a full-time employee does not de-facto prevent you from having that flexibility. They tie the two issues together in order to get their "contractors" on their side.

Also, you mention twice "these aren't the people they will hire", in the context of Uber/Lyft drivers and teachers, but labour isn't infinite. There aren't millions of highly qualified people sitting around unemployed waiting for these jobs to pay better – those people are employed in other jobs that do pay better. If teachers were paid more it may incentivise many to get better qualifications and training (that they can't currently justify). If the US pays terrible salaries for teachers, no one is going to want to go to an expensive university and rack up large student debt in order to get a teaching job.

The causality may be the other way around from what you're suggesting.

> Also, you mention twice "these aren't the people they will hire", in the context of Uber/Lyft drivers and teachers, but labour isn't infinite.

Neither is the demand for Uber's services.

If prices for rides go up to pay for mandatory drivers' vacation and sick pay and dental insurance, the reality is they will, as a group, have even less money than before because customers will switch back to cabs, public transit, or worse, driving drunk.

If Uber's prices can't pay for reasonable wages for their drivers, then it might well be for the best to remove that competitive pressure on employers that can.

To me it seems like awful public policy to let companies get away with paying too little, as society ends up effectively subsidizing competition against employers that treat their workers better, through benefits and lower taxes. In doing so we're also hiding the real costs of a lot of products and services

Agreed, plus (un)employment is used as a fairly common headline statistic which strongly informs government policy. If you have 2% unemployment but 20% of the workforce without healthcare and working multiple jobs, it's much easier to ignore the problem than if you had 20% unemployment – a figure that would likely trigger a huge and immediate government response as it indicates a crisis, even though those people may not be that much worse off given social security programs (although I don't know much about the US social security programs).

> Yes many full-time employees don't have that level of flexibility, but being a full-time employee does not de-facto prevent you from having that flexibility. They tie the two issues together in order to get their "contractors" on their side.

They are actually tied on the other side, AFAIU. It's being an independent contractor that _requires_ having that flexibility. So if Uber/Lyft want to keep that arrangement, they have the obligation (and, symmetrically, the contractors have the right) to keep their hours flexible. If the drivers become employees, Uber/Lyft no longer have any obligation to maintain that flexibility.

Totally agree. Very often people will analyze a snapshot of a scenario, recognize something they want to change, and campaign for change without considering how the system will change. They fixate on that one variable.

"Uber drivers are not paid as well as they should. Let's mandate that wages go up!"

Expected outcome: wages change and nothing else. The people who are currently underpaid get a big raise.

Real outcome: The market adjusts and Uber only hires professional drivers, who were earning about the same anyway. Previous Uber drivers are unemployed.

https://fs.blog/2016/04/second-order-thinking/

Where is this huge pool of more professional drivers who are unemployed waiting for Uber to add additional benefits before making the leap?

Because if they're not unemployed, then if Uber suddenly starts competing for them, other jobs are being freed up.

While some individuals may be affected, it seems highly unlikely that there is enough slack in the labor supply in that market that the addition of a few benefits will let Uber suddenly make large shifts in who they let work for them.

Especially given that Uber already have a huge amount of hard data on which drivers do best with them anyway, and so it will continue to make far more sense for Uber to manage drivers based on actual performance.

>Something similar goes through the heads of teachers that demand higher salaries. If salaries get really high, existing teachers won't be the ones parents will want to hire. They'll hire really highly skilled people that are currently in other more lucrative careers. If you look at Finland where teaching is a well compensated job, the people teaching are similar to people going into lucrative consulting or programming jobs. It's not the bottom performers from third tier universities, as in the US.

Like there are a lot of skilled teachers working in other domains. There may be exceptions for match, programming and some other discipline that are working in a better paid job, Also to be a teacher you also need the teaching skill and to like working with children, so you will not see a programmer that hates teaching go and work in a school because of his greed.

If teaching software engineering taught me as much as I do as a software engineer, I'd make that leap. Wouldn't be a bad thing for the education system either since my AP Computer Science teacher in high school was a terrible teacher and caused me to give up the idea of doing CS as my major in college.

So what you're saying is that when workers have leverage to negotiate high salaries this leads to competent workers being well compensated and high quality of services, at the expense of companies that run on price dumping models?

Not sure you're making the point you're trying to make

He's saying that the average person working Uber/Lyft right now aren't the "competent workers" they would hire if you have to pay a higher salary with benefits.

So yeah if all this stuff changes a Uber/Lyft drivers would be better off the people currently driving for Uber/Lyft wouldn't have a job.

which I think is perfectly fine, we shouldn't treat companies like uber like some employer of last resort because people are struggling to make ends meet and are pushed into the gig economy. It was never advertised as an alternative to regular employment by the sharing businesses themselves.

There's something more deeply wrong about the state of affairs if that's the case.

So you're saying that these people that wouldn't have a job don't deserve the opportunity to do any job? Eliminating such employment opportunities means that they will only have the choice of welfare because they've been priced out of the labor market by well meaning progressives.

So you are saying if we pay teachers more money we get better teachers and our children (and fellow citizens) get better educations?

Why aren't we paying teachers more money already!

Their union won’t let you pay a new hire more than a less competitive teacher with more seniority. Therefore almost nobody with the capacity to work at a FAANG will choose to become a high school CS or Math teacher earning poverty wages.

Texas doesn't have a teachers union and they still don't pay them all that well. Blaming unions for such things doesn't appear to be a well researched argument.

Taxpayers vote for candidates that keep taxes low seems like a bigger factor. We don’t have the political will to pay teachers $200k.

> a less competitive teacher

whats that supposed to mean?

Someone who doesn't have or is unable to obtain a job offer with much higher compensation in industry.

For example, hiring a CS or Math grad as a HS CS teacher is more competitive than hiring a French Literature grad as a HS French teacher. The CS grads have a lot of other options and at any fixed compensation you will get much better French teachers than CS teachers.

It's called private schools.

Generally private school teachers make way less than public school ones though do.

> Generally private school teachers make way less than public school ones though do.

Private schools have looser licensing requirements and fewer overall positions to fill, so there's a greater supply of labor competing for a lower demand. That already would lead to lower pay in itself.

They are also able to offer benefits that private schools typically cannot (such as a reduced responsibility for administrative work). Teachers who come from industry or higher education are oftentimes willing to trade a lower salary for the additional flexibility (which they can oftentimes use to pursue other adjacent work in their field.

That's why private school teachers are more likely than public schools to have teachers who old PhDs, despite the pay being higher at private schools, and despite the licensing requirements being less strict for private schools.