What now? Does this mean Uber can't afford to operate in France anymore?
That's not really true though. Their pay is higher to make up the difference.
No, the main thing is that Uber doesn't have to guarantee them fulltime work, or at least any kind of minimum amount of work.
i.e. Uber can say "No work today, too bad".
I thought part of the problem was that it isn't, in general.
If Uber paid their Social Security and Medicare taxes, then Uber would just lower their base pay, and the net would stay the same. Or in other words the pay is higher because the driver has to pay those taxes.
Generally people do not act as fully rational economic actors, so we can't assume that this is not true based on the fact that people still choose to do it.
Which isn't to say they shouldn't have that option.
Citation needed. Please include costs of owning, operating, and maintaining an automobile in your calculations.
2) Regular taxi companies generally also treat drivers as contractors
I don’t think those two things are exclusive are they?
They also typically lose around $1 billion per quarter. Unless they figure out how to be profitable, they will eventually run out of money. So really, they are still burning cash on the roughly $20 billion of VC capital they raised, plus the money they raised during IPO.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/8/20793793/uber-5-billion-qu...
What?! How on earth do you burn through $1B a quarter on a ride sharing app?
Isn't the whole point of an employee that there is an expectation of regular work?
https://theculturetrip.com/europe/france/articles/what-to-kn...
Service industry in general of course, but tourists vary even more depending on the weather and whatnot.
And at a second thought, AFAIK Uber does even expect drivers to perform "regular" work - not "regular" as in "we write 9-to-5 every day into the contract", but "regular" as in "of course you can work as much as you like, BUT if we see you driving too little time for Uber, below a certain threshold that we set at our discretion, don't tell anyone and change as often as we want, our magic algorithm will start disadvantaging you when it comes to handing out rides, oh and actually we aren't acknowledging that this mechanism exists at all, so let's just say this sentence really ended at 'as much as you like'".
They want to have their cake and eat it, too.
It's not a problem to implement at all, I was the manager for many youths hired as such in a company I worked for 20 years ago.
The hourly wage for the 16-18 year old crowd was about $12-13 before tax and benefits (+12ish% employer tax that the worker never see).
As any junior employee in retail or the service industry will tell you, yes.
Their hours are random, unpredictable, up to the caprice of their manager and are assigned with very little notice. They also rarely add up to 40h/week.
During a labour shortage, this goes the other way, where managers end up scrambling to staff their store/restaurant, because their less-reliable employees decided to not show up to work, with very little notice.