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There is no such thing as "society is not willing to pay the higher prices for drivers to be treated as employees." Society isn't a brain which thinks. There is emergent behavior.

* I am glad to be forced to pay more to have Uber/Lyft drivers treated well. I think we should have worker's right protections.

* I am unwilling to pay more myself as a one-off (e.g. through tipping). It's a Prisoner's Dilemma. That's what regulations are for.

If everyone were like me, we'd end up exactly where we are. Do I think everyone is exactly like me? No. But I think it's a similar model.

That said, the concept of treating gig workers as employees is dumb as rocks. It's reusing in 1920 mechanism to accomplish a 2020 goal. My goal is for gig workers to have health care, vacations, and so on, not that they be employees; they're not. The gig workers I know appreciate being able to jump from Uber to Instacart to other life constraints. A half-dozen 1/12th time jobs is just a bad system.

And the medallion cab system was far more abusive of drivers than Uber/Lyft ever was. The power there sits with the medallion investors. The drivers were getting shafted.

> There is no such thing as "society is not willing to pay the higher prices for drivers to be treated as employees." Society isn't a brain which thinks. There is emergent behavior.

I don't see this argument made enough, especially on HN.

I think because a lot of people realize that "brains which think" are themselves emergent behavior of a complex system, which is ultimately not really different.

I did Uber eats for a few months after I got injured.

Between that and renting out a room on airbnb, It kept us from going homeless while I recovered enough to work again.

Turns out Disability insurance is nearly worthless for any complicated injuries.

There is nothing in California employment law that prevents open schedules. Uber can have employees with exactly the same working agreement. The main difference is that Uber now has to pay into things like unemployment insurance and workers compensation.

Nope. They can't.

If I am doing 8 hours Instacart, 8 hours Uber, 16 hours part-time work, and 16 hours part-time study towards my BS, doing a bit of Amazon Turk while waiting for gigs, who pays for my health insurance? And if I'm injured on the job, while having three ride sharing apps and one delivery app open, what happens to my worker's comp?

Once you dive into detail, employment law just doesn't work here. It's not a question of more right or less rights (I'm all for worker protections). It's a question of how we get there.

> I believe what this really comes down to is that society is not willing to pay the higher prices for drivers to be treated as employees. Same situation as not willing to paying higher prices at hair salons so hair stylists are full employees (instead of being contractors) with healthcare. It does seem like constantly blaming Uber for mis-categorizing employees conveniently shifts the blame from the society/customers. The extra money to pay the drivers comes from the passengers.

Generally I'd argue that society/customers, and in particular employees/'contractors' don't have all that much leverage over big companies, especially ones that capture a market. That's why we have regulation.

Blaming the customers for not keeping track of everything and going for the cheapest option is like blaming climate change on the consumer. It's technically sort of true, but practically speaking it makes no sense.

Consumers will keep buying cigarettes, marketeers will keep marketing them via entertainment channels, and tobacco companies will keep rolling in the money and do everything they can to encourage all this. But taxes, anti-smoking campaigns and government-enforced restrictions on where you can smoke have made a /ton/ of difference over the years.

There seems to be a trend to have 'flex-workers' (contractors) where in practice they all quack like employee ducks, without many of the benefits and guarantees. It mostly feels like a loop-hole and /of course/ the average consumer will go for cheap and convenient when they can. doesn't mean it's a good thing for society (and in particular the workers).

> Blaming the customers for not keeping track of everything and going for the cheapest option is like blaming climate change on the consumer. It's technically sort of true, but practically speaking it makes no sense.

It's part of the current US economical ideology where individual responsibility is taken as a mantra.

I completely agree with you, it's a good soundbite that any simple analysis and some thinking show how stupid it is.

Divide and conquer is very effective when the unit of measurement is the individual. I'd say this is core to what separates the 'left' in the US from the 'liberals' or 'liberal left'. For better and worse.

>There seems to be a trend to have 'flex-workers' (contractors) where in practice they all quack like employee ducks, without many of the benefits and guarantees. It mostly feels like a loop-hole and /of course/ the average consumer will go for cheap and convenient when they can. doesn't mean it's a good thing for society (and in particular the workers).

Well, instead of abstract descriptions about trends of mis-classified flex-workers and abused loopholes such that nobody can argue about it... I was trying to steer the conversation towards concrete cause & effect.

Let's look at another worker-owned driver rideshare -- Local Driver Co-op: https://localdriver.co/

It costs members/drivers $100 to join. They are trying to undercut Uber and excerpt of verbiage from their webpage: "Riders save up to 20% versus competition -- Enjoy unbeatable rates, guaranteeing your money supports the drivers and their families."

Some questions of morals and decency:

- Should a judge (or new legislation) force LDC to treat drivers as employees with minimum hourly wage and unpaid time off? Since LDC contractors are trying to undercut Uber, a proposal to force LDC re-classification to "employees" would cause some drivers to protest this. So bottom line is... should drivers even be allowed to declare themselves as independent contractors and form a platform to chase after passengers?

- If LDC drivers don't get decent pay -- and we can predict they won't because history shows that taxi drivers and rideshare drivers in every country don't get enough dignified pay to put kids through college and save for retirement and cover the wear&tear on their car -- who is to blame for "abusing* them? LDC? (That would mean the drivers are abusing themselves.) Or the customers/passengers?

- Should LDC be completely shut down and that business "should not exist" (as some commenters put it) because it pays too poorly?

Let's talk in concrete terms of how "driver protection" laws would realistically affect outcomes. Let's talk about game theory of economics where customers may not willingly play along with the intentions of well-meaning laws and will just avoid paying higher prices. Some drivers themselves may not want to play along with "drivers must be employees with minimum wage". These are the aspects we don't discuss enough.

It sounds like you're already pointing to one concrete outcome that would come from these "driver protection" laws: the proliferation of driver co-ops that are able to undercut Uber and Lyft. Assuming they aren't regulated as Uber and Lyft are(for argument's sake), this would allow drivers the choice of whether to become an employee of the big corps or remain an independent contractor by using the co-op platform.

I don't think it would be much of a stretch to assume that in this situation you would have sleek, more expensive "luxury" services competing against more humble, but cheaper, community run services. Sounds like a much more equitable arrangement that provides greater choice for both riders and drivers.

> Blaming the customers for not keeping track of everything and going for the cheapest option is like blaming climate change on the consumer.

But that's not quite it, I believe. The point isn't that customers choose the cheaper of two options, it's that non-users don't become users of a service until there's a super cheap option. Taxis/Yellow cabs were a thing before Uber, but they're more expensive than what lots of people were willing to pay.

It's not "do I want to buy X for $5 or $2?", it's "I won't buy X unless it's $2 max".

If you increase Uber's prices to those of Taxis, few people will use them. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's a thing.

I don´t know how is it in all of the world, but in many countries/cities, the problem with Taxi drivers is that there is no control, they treat you like shit, there is no one else to complain, they take you to the longest route, many have their "clocks" (that is what we call the machine they use to charge you the fare) fixed so that they charge more, and there are illegal taxis that steal from you (as in real robbery). Uber is good because you can complain to Uber, you get refunds, if drivers get bad ratings they are no longer part of Uber, and in general, it is safer than taxis. I was some days ago in another country. I didn't know any Taxi phone number, but I had my uber app, so I just requested an uberx, and it came. Problem solved.

It sounds like you'd be happy with a premium service (like Uber originally was). You pay more than a taxi but you get all the other benefits you list. Problem solved.

Taxi´s companies have existed for a while. Compared to Uber the differences are: customer support is shitty, good luck getting a refund, you need to know the phone numbers or have the apps installed of all of the cities in the world. It is more complicated. Uber is uber internationally. It is only one app, only one (relatively good) support. By the way, I don´t "love" Uber, is just that I see the value on it.

Businesses want more profit. Consumers want to pay less. Workers want to earn more. Pretty much always.

This doesn't always result in an optimal outcome. Market power, externalities, information asymmetry, etc.

This is why we have regulations. Forcing the society and Uber to pay for drivers to be treated as employees seems like a very reasonable outcome. If they don't like it they can hire less drivers, but the ones that remain will at least have some minimum standard of living that developed countries pride themselves for.

What does it mean to be "treated like an employee"? I'd like regulation to give everyone healthcare. Are non-employees not worthy?

Here's a quick overview, without getting too much into the minutia or Uber specific differences: https://employment.findlaw.com/employment-discrimination/emp...

tl;dr - "employees" enjoy a lot of benefits & protections, both legally required and provided by their employer, that non-employees (like contractors) simply don't have.

That's the current legal definition. But since we're talking about changing the law, our concepts aren't constrained by current law. I'm asking about the concept, not the law.

> I'd like regulation to give everyone healthcare

From what I understand, that would be unamerican.

The biggest difference in the US is that "treated like an employee" also means being paid a minimum wage. As an employee in the United States, your employer is also responsible for paying a portion of your social security and medicare taxes, and for making sure taxes are properly withheld from your paycheck.

Even before the gig economy became a big deal, businesses like yoga studios would attempt to classify their skilled teachers as independent contractors so they could pay them well below minimum wage, but take away their ability to teach at the location if they taught somewhere else as well. Hair salons and yoga studios sometimes go so far as to charge their independent contractors rent, which would make sense if these people were truly renting the space and could freely take their clients elsewhere, but these businesses also frequently limit the contractors' ability to collect personal contact information.

When I volunteered to help people with their taxes, a large number of Uber/Lyft/DoorDash/etc. drivers were surprised to learn that not only did they have to pay large amounts of income tax that would usually be automatically deducted from their pay check, but they also had to pay double the social security and medicare taxes because they had to pay the employer and the employee portions. Companies that classify their workers as independent contractors in this way are taking advantage of the fact it can take people up to a year to realize that taxes and car maintenance will take what little income they have made.

> Companies that classify their workers as independent contractors in this way are taking advantage of the fact it can take people up to a year to realize that taxes and car maintenance will take what little income they have made.

When I drove pizza delivery, I discovered car maintenance took what little income I made. I was a W2 employee, paid less than minimum wage, because I earned tips. Independent contractor status isn't the only method for surprising people.

I take issue with the paternalistic idea that an employee is more deserving than other types of people. The commenter above said, "This is why we have regulations." I interpreted that as beginning a discussion of what regulations we should have. If that was incorrect, I'm sorry for causing confusion. If that was the intent, then I'll reassert that focusing myopically on the distinction between an employee and a contractor is ignoring much better solutions.

No, it just means that contractors are treated as businesses rather than as people, because that's what contractor status is for.

If you hire a company to fix your car or build you a shack, they are not your employee, they are your contractor. You are not responsible for their healthcare or minimum wage or sick days. They are a business, they provide healthcare and all that stuff to their own employees who actually do the work. And this is perfectly fine, everyone ends up happy.

The problem is when individuals try to be a business, working as independent contractors. There is no "minimum profit" similar to "minimum wage", and you are essentially your own employer. Government can't force you to pay yourself minimum wage as a business owner because you'll be able to fudge it easily if you wanted to, being both the employer and employee.

What the government can do however is disallow corporations from hiring contractors for roles and in situations where in reality the contractors are businesses only on paper, where they actually are functionally just employees, like in Uber's case.

Would it be great if healthcare was paid by income taxes rather than employer? Yes, but since we don't have it yet, and since there are other issues differentiating employees from contractors / businesses, this seems like a decent approach.

Which is a perfectly reasonable position whether or not someone agrees in this particular case. We have lots of laws that, for some combination of good and bad reasons, keep services from being as cheap as they might otherwise be.

I have trouble being upset that fewer people will want to afford higher Uber prices. People managed before Uber and it's mostly a luxury good anyway. To be honest, when Uber's management changed, the sensible thing--VC money notwithstanding--would have been to start pricing the service at what it cost.

>Lyft/Uber can upgrade them to employees but the arithmetic of bottom-up economics means Uber has to raise prices to cover full employment benefits. The raised fares conflict with what passengers are willing to pay

Then the business is not profitable enough to exist. Simple as that.

People still need transportation.

If only there were examples of cities that operate just fine without boatloads of private car based transportation...

Like Manhattan? No one takes taxis/Uber there.

Sure. But they don't need Uber or Lyft.

You can build a robust bus system, government run and not expected to make a profit, for example. You can have registered cabs. You can have rental bikes (bonus if they are electric assisted). If you can make sure scooters don't litter the walkways, that works as well. If you already have the infrastructure in place, perhaps trams or subways are a good thing.

We could expand busses to be able to travel from city to city. Same thing with trains: Make them run on time and expand. Busses, however, use the most extensive existing infrastructure and would likely be more cost-effective in most areas.

Not all "busses" need to be large, though. In some areas or at some times of day, a 15 passenger van might be enough. We could have bonus points if we changed school bus laws so that we don't have a duplicate bus system that leaves busses unused for much of the day.

In the US, one could take a sliver of the military budget (where there is plenty of waste) to pay for it.

> People still need transportation.

Uber left Denmark after they decided that they have no interest in adhering to the relevant regulations. We still have trains, commuter trains, subways, busses, bikes, scooters, taxis and cars. People still can get to places and fairly conveniently.

It’s incredible how many people just start from the assumption that these services must exist and then work backward from that. Obviously you run into serious dissonance when you arrive at the pricing problem, where the solution is quite simple: they shouldn’t exist.

Then you can start thinking about real solutions to urban transit that have existed for more than a century.

The starting assumption is that free and rational adults are choosing to work for the wage and customers are choosing to pay a sufficient price, so it should exist. That's not working backward, or dissonance--it's an acknowledgement of reality.

It's a different unrelated group claiming that it shouldn't exist if it doesn't provide the pay / benefits they think it should.

>The starting assumption is that free and rational adults are choosing to work for the wage

And there are plenty that argue that under capitalism one isn't fully free. There is always the threat of losing the roof over your head.

Of course. It's just not relevant to my or OP's point.

I don't buy that. These rides are only as cheap as they are because of VC money and they aren't profitable. Imagine the cost of rides without VC money and more pro-worker regulations? If they aren't profitable now I don't see this ever being profitable without some radical change to the business model (driverless fleet for example).

There are some rides that are subsidized as loss leaders undoubtedly, but that's not the primary case.

The way I see it, it's already proven that riders will accept paying X dollars and drivers will work for X dollars, minus Y% for Uber's cut. Uber's Y% is likely higher than it needs to be, but at the end of the day, it's a SaaS app. Even municipalities have set up local competitors / clones.

These companies are certainly pouring a ton of money into expanding into new geographic areas, other business models, and more. But as long as riders will pay an amount even a little higher than what drivers will accept, it can be profitable.

Are we willing to allow, even to facilitate that as a society?

See heavy drugs, prostitution and violence market as some examples where two consenting adults is not enough to form a legitimate business.

I think if we're to the point that we're comparing Uber to the violence market, we're not having a meaningful discussion any more.

True: it is not the case that we should fundamentally allow any association between two consenting adults. No, this does not justify preventing it in other cases.

You know the entire purpose of the company that runs this site is to fund businesses that aren’t profitable enough to exist? Only two companies that YC has funded have gone public.

Where is the site guideline which states that I must fellate VCs?

So do you feel that none of the money losing startups deserve to exist either?

This is a straw man argument. Only because other jobs also have issues doesn't mean we shouldn't try to start improving somewhere at some point. Also customers NEVER want to pay more for anything, so that is hardly an argument to treat some people like slaves.

It is the duty of the strong to fight for better treatment of those who can't fight for themselves because they lack financial security or for other practical reasons. Law is exactly doing that.

>Only because other jobs also have issues doesn't mean we shouldn't try to start improving somewhere at some point. Also customers NEVER want to pay more for anything, so that is hardly an argument to treat some people like slaves.

Please don't paint my intention to describe the underlying economics for higher quality focused discussion as me being against humanity's improvement and you being the one with the moral high ground.

I was emphasizing that there's a dynamic interplay between what drivers (whether Uber or non-profit driver co-op) can charge and what customers will willingly pay. Your comment left the dynamics of out of it which can lead to a naive assumption of what law can realistically accomplish. Consider your next statement:

>It is the duty of the strong to fight for better treatment of those who can't fight for themselves because they lack financial security or for other practical reasons. Law is exactly doing that.

The law isn't just exactly that. A law that attempts to add economic advantage to one group will inevitably make another group worse. The other disadvantaged group often becomes the "unseen"[1] group. Instead of talking in feel-good sentiments that nobody can debate (e.g. "duty of strong to fight for the weak")... let's try to discuss via math/probabilities:

Uber has about ~150,000 drivers in California. A law that forces all drivers to become employees does not automatically mean 150000 get minimum hourly wage of $15 and 2 weeks of paid time off. No, what happens is that many (I'm guessing more than 50%) Uber drivers would be removed from the system to comply with the "drivers-must-be-employees" law. The drivers that remain in Uber would be the ones on profitable routes in more affluent regions of the cities than can pay higher prices. The unemployed drivers that lost income from Uber now become the "unseen". Do the unseen who get $0 because Uber can't afford them as employees get also get attention in our moral framework?

[1] Bastiat's essay on "that which is seen and unseen": https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Essays_on_Political_Economy/T...

> Lyft/Uber can upgrade them to employees but the arithmetic of bottom-up economics means Uber has to raise prices to cover full employment benefits

What's the problem with that?

> Also as far as I can tell, there is no worker co-op owned by the drivers anywhere in the world that treats members/drivers as employees with benefits. Why is that?

http://www.unioncabpdx.com/

The world is a big place. I'm sure there are others.

>http://www.unioncabpdx.com/

Are you responding to the actual constraints in this discussion of _employees_ with _benefits_?

As far as I can tell, Union Cab PDX does not provide employee benefits such as:

- minimum hourly wage

- paid time off (e.g. funding 2 weeks vacation)

- unemployment payments if laid off

I don't know if it's related but Unioncabpdx recently left the CWA Local 7901 union as they weren't paying membership dues: https://nwlaborpress.org/2018/12/union-cab-quietly-goes-non-...

Yes, they provide benefits, including healthcare.

I don't know anything about them pulling out of the CWA local.

>Yes, they provide benefits, including healthcare.

But Union Cab Portland does not provide a guaranteed minimum hourly wage (a benefit that real employees are entitled to) and they are exempt like every other taxi company in Portland from the minimum wage law because taxi drivers are treated as contractors.

From http://www.rideaustin.com/faq

> RideAustin is a community driven nonprofit ridesharing company founded by local entrepreneurs. The RideAustin launch team is led by Joe Liemandt, a longtime Austin tech entrepreneur, and Andy Tryba, CEO of Crossover. It is powered by donations, with paid and volunteer hours from both the Austin tech community and the broader Austin community working together.

So it's a non-profit, with volunteers ("volunteers"), who can get a stipend.

Sounds like a legal fiction, but I'd need to know more about how much they pay, how much money the founders make, etc. The cynic in me says it's the same shit but marketed better and not publicly traded, but there may be some genuine benefits.

“ Uber has to raise prices to cover full employment benefits. ”

The question is how much would this be per ride(a few cents?) and do they really? Uber and Lyft are raking in cash.

I mean in a EU country a male haircut costs 6€. In another EU country a male haircut costs at least 30€. People can live on both wages. These number are relatively arbitrary as they make sense in the ecosystem of housing and other prices. California can compensate in many ways for the fact that "people don't want to pay the gig workes more". Free/social healthcare, education and housing via progressive taxing etc. Since people in the USA don't want to be "slaves of communism" or whatever, they are wage slaves

Was society willing to pay for workers when they had slaves?

To think that if only the Confederate states would have made that iron-clad argument back then, the civil war would have been avoided. Imagine how low the prices could be if we still had slaves.

If your business is unsustainable without taking advantage of the workers then it ought not to exist.

Why wouldn’t taxi drivers be forced to become employees as well as truck drivers and other gig economy workers?