Uber and Lyft drivers are employees, California regulatory agency finds
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
Uber/Lyft and the rest of the gig economy have helped to improve the 'liquidity' of jobs. This is generally a positive for society as it allows for more rapid wage price discovery.
Government policies have continually eroded this liquidity. For example a tax subsidy for employer-provided health insurance may sound like a benefit, but for many it raises the barrier to switching jobs. The new company may not offer the same insurance thereby not allowing you to keep your doctor. Companies know that these barriers exist and it allows them to underpay employees.
The other problem is by tying all of these benefits to gainful employment, we make losing a job an unrecoverable event for too many. Not only does someone now have the stress of finding a new job, but they also lose health insurance, disability, retirement benefits, etc. We should be adopting policies that make it easier for people to switch jobs, not harder.
The result is that currently you basically fall either into "Yes 9-5 job, employee protections, healthcare, regulation etc" or "Not an employee, no protections, no unemployment insurance etc.". The thing is, when these jobs were considered like the latter case, they worked great for gig economy companies since it makes their workforce weak, and gives the companies as much leverage as they could possibly want and shifts liabilities off their balance sheets. The problem is that it's very difficult to get that regulatory scheme changed by workers, because that's not who has power in this system.
Now that workers are in the "employee" camp we've now got a bunch of highly motivated companies that are going to lobby for reform, and if we're careful to do it right, we could actually see the reforms that should have been made earlier anyway where there's no longer this massive chasm around the term "employee".
200k drivers. $25k for the kit (car, phone, misc). That's $5,000,000,000 of costs Uber & Lyft ducked.
What other employment requires you to front the boss $25k for the privilege of earning starvation wages?
For years, both Lyft and Uber have said that if they are forced to reclassify gig workers as employees that such a change would have an adverse effect on their profitability...
No doubt.
Well, traditional taxi driver, for one.
Of course now that COVID is a thing much of this has stopped.
This is not that common but some people do. Now if it is a Prius with tinted windows on the other hand that’s someone doing it as a job.
Even if you are technically correct that your startup isn't within guidelines, you'll need hundreds of thousands (millions?) of dollars of budget to fight a neverending series of lawsuits.
Transportation industry is but only one example.