> Brazil's labor laws treat the "workers" as stupid people
This has nothing to do with stupidity, intelligence or anything like that. This has to do with leverage. A multi-national giant corporation like Uber has a lot of leverage over Brazilian workers. If Uber treats them like figurative slaves and gives them too little money, workers have very little they can do against this. It is government's responsibility to protect people from this power imbalance. Yes Uber should have a freedom to charge/pay whatever market accepts and workers should have freedom to negotiate their own benefits. But at the same time Uber needs to implement a minimum care for their workers, and if not government should be able to enforce them to do so.
If people continue to drive for Uber, doesn't that mean the app is still a net positive for them, or do you believe people would pay to work?
Your comment is a great example of what the parent comment is saying, the belief that people are too damn dumb and they need protection.
This is by definition the opposite of what "outcompeted" means.
If the drivers get together, they might be able to negotiate 15$ per ride, leaving 5$ per ride for Uber. However, it might be hard for the people to do that, so the government can step in to improve conditions for riders by negotiating for them as a block.
The primary way they could pay drivers more is by charging higher fares. But then there is lower demand for rides, so they need fewer drivers, so some of the drivers lose their jobs. If you think that's a good trade off then take it now -- quit and go do something else. It will cause the remaining drivers to be able to command higher compensation.
Everybody wants to be the one to get paid more and not the one who loses their job, but some of them will necessarily be wrong.
Given that people fall for scams that take money in return for a fake promise of employment, yes, I do.
Aside from that, what is your limiting principle? Where is the power imbalance line between an employer and employee too much for this principle to bear?
Of course, people born in those places can theoretically vote with their feet, although most people seem to find that much easier said than done.
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/pag...
This is likely where the comment of laws treating the workers as stupid people comes from - Brazilian labour laws are very rigid with an amazing amount of restrictions around negotiating different benefits, working hours, etc. If, however, you earn a higher salary then you fit into a different category of labour laws and are allowed more flexibility. The thinking seems to be "if you earn under this amount you probably didn't receive a good enough education to know what is good for you". Sometimes that may be true, but it is a very dangerous line of thinking.
What the GP is criticizing is that they see this as a power move to increase government income through taxes. The underbrush is that this money is then stolen by corrupt government officials (it's common perception in brazil that that's just the way the brazilian government works).
In this light, Uber is just the sucker-du-jour who gets to be "screwed over" in the latest corruption ploy.
Uber's perspective in this type of matter is that there are a large number of drivers who don't do ridesharing full time or even on a consistent part time basis (for example, one's free to do it once or twice ever). An apt comparison might be someone who sells stuff on craigslist - yes you can do it full time, but people often do it for just extra cash, without considering it a "job" per se. So you can see why Uber might not like to restrict driving opportunities only to those who are willing to commit to a full-time employment arrangement.
With all this said, I'm all for having drivers who are effectively working full time hours to be able to earn a reasonable income. I'm not too familiar w/ the state of lobbying in Brazil, but my understanding is that Uber is going to be lobbying in the US for a third employment category and one of the talking points of that proposal is to work towards income improvements for drivers. The position that drivers are not employees goes both ways: if they are considered Uber's clients, it behooves that Uber should do its darn best to provide the platform with the best payouts in the industry, lest drivers would flock to a better paying competitor.
[1] OECD numbers are available from OECD's Taxing Wages 2020 report: https://www.oecd.org/tax/taxing-wages-20725124.htm
As for retirement, inflation will probably eat that.
I'm sure the commenter above was including something else, which is what I'm curious about, given that as far as I can tell the highest marginal federal tax rate I can find is only 27.5%, and average effective rates far lower, but I don't know what other costs people might incur.
If Brazil is in fact a higher tax country than most of the wealthiest countries in the world, I'd love to know more.
Universities are also free.
When your family is very poor, this situation makes it impossible for the student to keep on trying. Sometimes parents can't keep paying for the preparatory course, or worse, the student may have to forfeit it's dreams of studying in favor of working and helping with household expenses.
As seen in [0], most people studying in free universities are actually in a pretty good financial situation.
Sometimes, people from very poor families manage to study for free, but this is rare and often newsworthy [2].
In my humble opinion, I don't think universities are really free. There are many financial costs associated with studying in a public university.
[0] http://www.brasil-economia-governo.org.br/2016/06/15/como-as... [1] https://g1.globo.com/pb/paraiba/noticia/2020/01/29/paraibano... [2] https://diariodonordeste.verdesmares.com.br/metro/estudante-...
Source: http://www.guiatrabalhista.com.br/tematicas/custostrabalhist...
> and then pay 50% of everything that you make in taxes for this wonderful protection
For non-salary labour costs to make up a large amount relative to salary is a very, very different argument.
Total taxes paid by the employee for an average Swede is closer to 25%.
The highest marginal rate for someone on an average salary in Sweden is around 48% for the total tax wedge, but someone on the average is not paying that marginal rate.
For the same categories the total tax wedge for the US is 24%, and the total tax ~18% (for comparison the marginal rate for an average earner in the US in the same category is 40.8%)
Source: OECD Taxing Wages 2020
The 95% figure is for hourly employees and counts worst-case expenses over their raw hourly rate. In every other country vacations (including weekends!) are just counted as employee income and in that spreadsheet it's accounted as some sort of tax. Every country's overhead rate would go up if you accounted things in this absurd way.
The FGTS is a really stupid scheme that should die but ultimately goes into the employee's pocket, so it's also a form of income and not a tax. (It's a kind of mandatory savings account.)
Income taxes disproportionately hit labor in a world were capital is becoming more and more concentrated.
> and then pay 50% of everything that you make in taxes for this wonderful protection
about employees.
I don't see how corporation tax is relevant to that.
Strange, I'm from Europe and I'm proud of this decision.
>Brazil's labor laws treat the "workers" as stupid people, unable to negotiate good terms by themselves.
No, it just treats them as regular people that deserve the same rights as everyone, but which (as poor people in need of work and individuals) don't have the same negotiating power as a multionational employer to enforce them...
The unions keep wanting stronger labor laws, but these tend to apply in practice only to high-class workers in very unionized professions, while everyone else is lucky to even get a job at all, because the obligations our labor laws create are so insane that most smaller employers need to use legal loopholes just to be able to pay the bills at the end of the month (one of the most common ones is asking workers to open a personal company and paying their company for "services rendered" instead of the worker - labor courts hate this, but they know if they closed the loophole half of the country would be out of a job the next week)
The corporations keep trying to make labor laws weaker, but they tend to do so in ways that screw over the lower-class workers while the high-class, unionized workers are able to maintain most of their privileges.
It's a terrible situation. To make it worse, our legislative representatives and a large part of the electorate are very much infatuated with the (false) idea that our labor laws actually "protect" all workers, which makes it very hard to reform them. They are kind of a sacred cow to a lot of Brazilians. I don't see it getting better any time soon.
(I'm a US-raised Brazilian who currently lives in Brazil, by the way)
"You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it."
About our labor laws: They were created by a populist and fascist (I mean in the literal meaning, guy admired Mussolini) government, they are very, VERY, VEEEERY rigid and extreme, to the point Brazil has more "informal" workers than "formal", thing is, "informal" is just euphemism for illegal, basically the labor laws are so bad that most of the population work illegally.
I am 33, and I NEVER, had legal work, never found one, and thus for example I can't get unemployment benefits and many other rights.
Reason for that is these jobs are extremely rare, because it is ludicrously expensive to offer them, in some fields of all money a company spend in personel, 95% go to government (usually it is around 60%).
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Now the second subject, is Uber relationship with Brazil, basically government so far been very hostile to Uber, and tries everything to screw with them, thing is, Uber (and competitors) here been a blessing, not just because it meant "cheaper cabs", but because it was only thing that could rid of Taxi Mafia.
Here in Brazil we have not only strong medallion laws, but often there are corrupt politicians in the Taxi Mafia, where they find excuses to not grant medallions legally, so they can sell them in exchange of bribes and favors, before Uber existed this got to a point where Taxi drivers would kill competitors on the street for some reasons, for example picking up passengers in an certain area without permission from the Taxi Mafia was a reason for that person to be killed.
We were the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, only 60 years before Vargas created the framework to our current labour laws. Before that there were laws but they were seldom followed.
Of course the laws could use a reform (they are often confusing) but we have many good worker rights that we shouldn't give up.
Brazil has tons of structural economic problems since its inception ever since the Portuguese came over. Saying the labor laws are to blame is completely wrong.
Most of our labor laws are there for middle-class people to look at them and think "wow, aren't our labor laws great?" while most actual lower-class people can't get jobs that actually follow the labor laws because most people who employ them aren't able to both pay the bills and deal with all the financial obligations and regulatory uncertainty our labor laws create.
There's a massive power asymmetry between a mega international corporation and an individual.
It has nothing to do with 'intelligence' or 'competence'.
Surpluses go to the power. If employees had power, they'd be able to 'negotiate' better terms on their own, they never well.
At the 'low end' of the labour market, we have to have some kind of regulations or else they would get paid the 'bare minimum to survive' and an entire economy of accommodation, food, services would pop up around that system. Maybe like favelas?
So the issue is: 'where do we draw the line?' - which is really hard.
Hmm, ok that's quite a view. I would say that nearly all works are certainly unable to negotiate good terms by themselves.
The only workers that can negotiate their own terms are the small minority that are very highly skilled and in demand... laws like this are trying to help the vast vast majority who have NO power because the employer can just replace them with anyone else at the drop of a hat.
I would love to see a single cite of a successful negotiation by a driver with ride-sharing services regarding matters of pay or pricing. Negotiation is not possible in contracts of adhesion.
Employers typically have way more financial and legal ability to negotiate themselves a better position versus one individual employee.