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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

Well... many people work more than one job. IANAL, but I don't think your employer can forbid you from working more than one job.

But Uber and Lyft are direct competitors. I have a clause in my contract that forbids me working for a direct competitor, but I'm a software engineer and I have knowledge of trade secrets. A driver? Not so much.

So I think that a court would find a restriction that you couldn't work for both to be an unreasonable exclusion... but I don't know.

But let's say it was legal. Uber still might not be able to do it. They need onboarding to be as frictionless as possible. Tying their hands by saying they can't also drive for Lyft might make people think twice.

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> many people work more than one job. IANAL, but I don't think your employer can forbid you from working more than one job.

Sure. But employers can prevent you from working for someone else at the same time as you are working for them.

So if you wanted to do a 6 hour shift for Uber and then after that do another 4 hours for Lyft. That would almost certainly be legal.

But the common practice today is to run both apps at the same time and pick up clients on both networks as requests come in. This is what people are talking about, and will almost certainly be banned.

I think Uber can also 'terminate' you if you choose to work for a competitor. IANAL, but if I work for Google, Google most certainly wouldn't let me work at Facebook as well even if I was spending 8 hours a day working for each.

I don't see why. Currently, drivers are being paid by the ride, not by the hour. If they aren't available for a ride, they don't get paid for the ride.

If Uber wants that kind of exclusivity, they're probably going to have to pay drivers for idle time.

> If Uber wants that kind of exclusivity, they're probably going to have to pay drivers for idle time.

I don't think that's true. There are many sales employees who are compensated almost exclusively on a commission - per sale - basis. None of them can work for multiple companies concurrently.

It gets complicated. See [1]. Basically, if Uber wanted to prevent employees from also taking rides for Lyft it would have to provide several minimum guarantees that would significantly increase driver costs. Namely, total comp regardless of rides provided needs to meet or exceed minimum wage and worked overtime would need to be paid as such. In other words, to prevent a driver from accepting Lyft rides for 8 hours, Uber would either have to pay the driver for any time they are not driving fares around during those 8 hours or increase payment until the drivers get the equivalent of minimum wage.

If this were to happen in practice, you would most certainly see a drop in the number of drivers and an increase in per-mile costs to customers.

[1] https://sbshrs.adpinfo.com/blog/pay-rules-commissioned-tippe...

Those sales positions are generally not remote/distributed. They don't work for multiple companies concurrently because it's impossible.

They can't forbid you from working in your off time but now you're their employee -- you work 8 hours straight during which you're not allowed to work for a competitor or you're fired. If you want to work for Lyft for another 8 hours after that, go ahead. But Lyft isn't going to let you work for 2 hours and pay you benefits.

Most part-time employees do not get any benefits. So no big change there.

That wasn’t the point. The point is you won’t be able to work for Lyft because they won’t take someone on to work 2 hours a day because it costs too much. So you will work for one or the other and you will have zero flexibility in the matter.

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