Ridiculous that it takes a legal battle for Uber to offer these customer and driver friendly features
I'll focus on one particular point: allowing drivers to see where riders are going before they accept the trip. Uber, at least when I worked there, was heavily against this functionality as it allows drivers to discriminate against riders who are going to poor neighborhoods or from cities to suburbs where they may have difficulty in getting another rider. That feature is bad for the overall ecosystem. Because of it, you may not be able to get a ride to the airport during rush hour, or home from the bar when you live 30 minutes away from downtown. The overall service becomes less useful if there's doubt as to your ability to be able to use it when you need it.
This is exactly what being a contractor is though. Accepting contract work you'd like, and turning down work you don't. Otherwise you are an employee.
Where's the "sharing" in the "ride share" if the driver is forced to take any ride?
People need to get real and start calling it what it is. It's a taxi service. This is not ride sharing. The driver was not already going somewhere. The driver was waiting around for a call to pick someone up, and was going to take them where they wanted to go. Nothing is being shared. This is a Taxi service and the Uber app is the dispatcher.
If I was already going to work, and I picked someone up along the way, that's sharing a ride.
The only thing the driver is sharing is the money they are giving to their mechanic when all the around town driving wears out their car.
A true contractor in the rideshare space would have an individual contract with each rider, and could of course reject riders based on the terms of the contract (of which the target location is one). However, once a customer is accepted based on the agreed-upon terms (fare, target, number of passengers etc.) he wouldn't be able to throw the passenger out in the middle of the ride for no good reason.
If you now want to say that a rideshare contractor should not be able to reject a customer based upon the terms of the ride, I ask you: why shouldn't he? With whom does he have a contract that binds him? And you say: with Uber. And I say: yeah, and that's why your analogy is fundamentally flawed, why he isn't an individual contractor for each customer but simply an employee of Uber, with whom he has a contract that mandates him to accept all customers that Uber deems acceptable. Exactly like a plumber working at a plumbing company who also has to do plumbing work at any customer his boss sends him to, while his individually contracting plumber colleague can decide to decline or accept customers at his own discretion.
When the driver activates uber driver mode, they are initiating a contract which states they will work within the bounds of the app. The driver is able to terminate that contract at will and at any time, and reactivate it at will and at his leisure. When the contract is active, the driver has committed to operate within the pricing, pickup and dropoff structure of the platform - as in the driver has committed to minimize discrimination of their rides and accept the platform's rider oriented pricing structure.
I would doubt that, and I would also doubt that you can simply define opening an app as the beginning of a legally binding, entirely new contract with as many implications as Uber's driver contracts have. I am pretty sure that in reality, Uber signs a contract once with a new driver, after checking his background, driver license and everything, and that contract is active from that point in time until explicitly terminated by either party. Just closing the app does not terminate it, neither does opening the app create a new contract. Closing the app just amounts to the driver leaving his "workplace", opening it again amounts to the driver entering his "workplace", but the contract under which that work takes place is the same and active all the time, it just gives the driver a lot of leeway with regard to how many hours he wants to work.
That is a generous employment, but it is an employment nevertheless in nature.
If all your money comes via a single company, even if you phisically work at a different place each day, you should be an employee of that company.
...which is a positive feedback loop that should encourage them to pick up those previously declined routes. Or charge higher rates that better reflect their reluctance for those routes. Isn't that how supply & demand is supposed to work?
WRT to drivers not going to neighborhood I have a solution for you: let passengers offer higher pricers. This is not a new idea BTW
Society as a whole needs to answer the question "is it moral to roll a dice and offer a worse service to people who get an odd number?"
In my view, it is. As far as that person is concerned, they can pretend your company doesn't exist and go to another company (and maybe roll another dice)
Some other people would say "all businesses must treat all customers equally and fairly". In many ways, I don't see how this can be universally true - there is always the superstore that has run out of a product - why should Mrs Smith who picked up apples at 9am get some, when Mr Jones who tried to buy some at 9:15am finds the shelf empty? Thats unfair.
Instead I'd like to see a list of characteristics a business is not allowed to discriminate on (religion, race, etc.), and explicitly allow discrimination based on another list (random number, position in queue, length of service as a customer, etc.). Any other factor, judges can decide which list it falls into.
Companies have ALWAYS had test products that they offer to a subset of customers.
There's no legal test to be applied here.
I suspect that it will be in some cases. Does Uber have IRBs? What about other big tech companies?
If you work in a company and see them doing something immoral and possibly illegal, you should speak up or report the behavior.
1. https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/decision-cha...
That just indicates Uber is undercharging for these type of rides.
Incentives are not aligned.
I find it laughable to hear that Uber, the arch-enemy of the taxi business, attempts to (secretly, because obviously the customer isn't informed about drivers not seeing the target locations beforehand) rebuild this particular property of the system it aims to replace. And it's doubly laughable that they now stumble over that exact attempt, which they now can't actually continue, because in order to have the necessary authority over drivers they would need to make them official employees.
No one wants to go to airports anyway, they're a nightmare normally and are typically far from city centers and potentially further to a rider - so the fare goes up and you have surge pricing.
It's rather abusive and tyrannical to force people to do things against their will or safety. But I am guessing you live in a dangerous neighborhood because you did not "discriminate" and are paying really low rents since you don't discriminate. Right? … exactly!
But in a normal employer-employee relationship, this is totally typical. You can't sign up to be a firefighter but then refuse to go into burning buildings that you find too scary. You can't get a job as a developer and then refuse JIRA tickets you find boring, claiming that's your "human right."
In those cases, and with Uber as well, your free agency is that you can quit the job if you don't like it. But you have no fundamental right to be retained as an employee or contractor while refusing to do parts of the job you'd signed onto. The employer has their own right to terminate you if so.
Then, Uber can decide that they no longer want you to be a driver on their platform.
>should be compensated by Uber if they want that feature. Do you really think Uber has not gone through these thoughts millions of time in the past? I can personally tell you that these are things that are constantly discussed and evluated, with the primer driver of everything being the growth of the service.
In other words: Uber wants the service to be worse so they don't have to give drivers with health insurance. If people complain, that's to Ubers benefit, because they want to keep their indentured workers.
In the pay as you go system, you are at the mercy of the driver, and they are actually incentivized to take a longer route.
I've definitely had drivers take longer routes under the pay as you go system. I would complain to Uber and they would refund the money, but it was still a hassle to complain.
Upfront pricing is still calculated based on usage, but it sets a fair amount without giving up control and the potential for overages.