It's frightening to see people just lap that up because it happens to coincide with their day job. But nothing in labor law prevents a company like Uber from "disrupting work" and offering that flexibility to employees.
I agree with the OP, and I am not just "repeating the Uber party line". I believe 3 categories of work are needed:
1. Employee (e.g. current W2), where you have a single full-time employer who is primarily responsible for your wages and benefits.
2. Independent Contractor, where the IC has full control over their rates, where they do the work, their tools, etc.
3. "Flexible" employee, where the employee has full control over their hours and availability, and to work for multiple employers, but doesn't have control over rates or how the work is done.
Focusing on wall clock hours doesn’t make sense for these kinds of jobs.
1. It's not like it would be difficult to track all of the little chunks of time worked and add them all up. Everything is automated anyway, and nobody is filing time cards.
2. In the end, the wall clock is how workers experience time when they're out doing work for these companies. They get their bike out and go deliver food for a few hours, or get in their car and drive around the city picking up and dropping off passengers. It's not clear to me that the interstitial minutes between gigs should be considered free time for the workers that goes uncompensated. If they drop off a passenger and pick up a new one within five or ten minutes, they've been working continuously. They haven't had a chance to go home and take their socks off and relax. They're working. It seems like a step backwards for everyone's mental well-being to use technology to clock the exact minutes that they produce value for the company, and cut off their pay the instant they stop producing. It's like a widget assembly line monitored by cameras where workers get automatically clocked in only when they're physically touching the widgets, so that if they sit up to stretch, or walk over to the cabinet to grab a different tool, or even if the conveyor belt is sending the next widget over to be worked on, they stop getting paid. I wouldn't want to work like that.
3. The fact that someone can be doing work for multiple companies at the same time doesn't seem like such a big problem to me. If they're on a segment of a route in which they're simultaneously delivering a passenger and someone's lunch, they should get paid for both. And the same contiguous-time rules I mentioned in #2 above can apply - as long as they're continuously picking up lunches and passengers within a certain interval, they're working two jobs.
No, it doesn't; multiple W-2 employees is a common thing and the law has no assumptions that conflict with it.
(Multiple full-time W-2 employers, maybe, are something of an issue, but not merely multiple W-2 employers.)
> "Flexible" employee, where the employee has full control over their hours and availability, and to work for multiple employers, but doesn't have control over rates or how the work is done.
This seems like regular on-demand temp work, where pretty much every feature of that is routine, and has always been W-2. Sure, technology including platforms like Uber, et al., make it practical to have more rapid offer/accept cycles and finer-grained work assignments, but they don't fundamentally change the nature of on-demand temp work in a way which requires any different treatment legally than such work has historically been given.