If you're an employee on the clock, you can't be on the clock for two different organizations at the same time.
We often think of "on the clock" employment in terms of shift work, where the worker has a scheduled, fixed-length shift with a single employer, and whether they're actively working during that time or waiting around for the employer to tell them what to do next, they're paid for the hours on the clock.
But it is possible for ridesharing companies to employ workers in "micro-shifts" that last the duration of a single ride.
So, Driver X has two part-time jobs: as a part-time employee of Lyft and a part-time employee of Uber. Driver X is ready to work, so checks the apps, and sees there's a Lyft assignment available. Driver X accepts the ride, and for the duration of that ride, he is working exclusively for Lyft, and Lyft pays him for the time worked. Once that ride ends, his micro-shift with Lyft ends, and he's now available to work for either of his part-time jobs again.
The idea of micro-shifts may seem, at first blush, more like a contractor relationship than an employee relationship. And in the past, gigs that used this model were more likely to involve a contractor relationship -- but they also gave the contractor much more freedom in terms of HOW they accomplished the work.
In contrast, if you look at Uber and Lyft, ignoring the micro-shift aspect, there is very little difference between how those jobs work and how other service-oriented part-time jobs work, in terms of the power the employer has to dictate HOW the work gets done.
What the word "employee" means within the context of California labor laws is probably quite different from what we understand it to mean in everyday conversation. What one can imagine might work in an abstract sense may not be even remotely possible within California's legal framework. What is known to already happen and work well in other states isn't necessarily possible in California, either. (At least not without getting the legislature involved.)
Your freelance tutoring is not employer/employee work. You're a freelancer. You set your own hours and rates.
Lawyers do not work for multiple law firms, choosing which firm to work for as they see fit. Whereas drivers very often work for both Lyft and Uber (and Postmates or Grubhub, etc) at the same time.
But to go back to the tutoring example: if I was working for a tutoring company, agreed to take clients between lets say 1-5 PM, and the rate was set by the company, would that be similar enough?
That said, there is certainly a good reason for minimum-length shifts and on-call payments in other industries, so I'm willing to acknowledge that striking the right balance that protects workers across the board might be difficult.
I mean, I don't see why not. Would create some inefficiencies. But I don't think there is a law against that.
Until one time there was a problem with one of the jobs (which meant other jobs could not be run) and no one had their data in the morning. He was asked why he didn’t contact one of us for help and didn’t really have an answer.
The boss checked the cameras to figure out what this guy was doing. Turns out the guy came in, started as many of the jobs as could be run in parallel, then left to work his shift at another place, came back on his lunch break and fired off another round of jobs, left and finished his shift at the other place, then came back and finished his shift at our place (our shifts were 10-17 hours long). He was confronted and admitted it. I don’t recall if he was fired or if he quit.
You can absolutely argue that the job was stupid and should be automated (it should've been) - you can absolutely argue about whether that person was feeling societal pressures to work two jobs and felt like this was the only way to make ends meet. Both of those points are tangential, though - a lot of folks face them.
He still either fraudulently reported hours (if paid hourly) or failed to meet the expectations of his employment contract. And, in the end, it actually caused other people to likely do overtime to cover up for his skimping.
> You can absolutely argue that the job was stupid and should be automated (it should've been)...
Yes. See my reply to another reply.
> you can absolutely argue about whether that person was feeling societal pressures to work two jobs and felt like this was the only way to make ends meet.
In this time and place, I worked three jobs (separately, and with my employers' full knowledge) and had all my bills paid off the first week of each month. With only (and any) one of those three jobs paying my bills off would have taken about 2.5 weeks. Each job was technically unskilled (although skills helped) and required only a high school diploma.) It was a very prosperous time with low unemployment. I've never been one for societal pressures, but this guy didn't have kids (neither did I at the time); which I think would have been the strongest defense.
> And, in the end, it actually caused other people to likely do overtime to cover up for his skimping.
It definitely had some downstream consequences... possibly overtime but I can't be sure, and although most of the people involved were salaried, on a personal level, they ended up staying later than they otherwise would have.
It's the same reason that an employer can't make all their employees clock out when the factory production line stops to fix a problem.
I don't see why that would not be possible.
Of course these companies prefer not to, because their business model is now based on exploiting workers.
Assume the employers did not collude for an employee on shift at both employers during a given time period (say 9am-1pm):
- Uber says to idle near LAX, because that fits what Uber needs at that time.
- Lyft says to idle near BUR, because that fits what Lyft needs at that time.
Those locations are approximately 37 minutes away as I write this, despite both being quite logically in the same metro area. It's eminently reasonable to expect an employee to serve an area that encompasses (even much more than) the area between those two points, so an employee would not reasonably get a routine say in where inside the region she is asked to idle.
QED the only way to routinely guarantee that Uber and Lyft ask an employee to idle in the same location is for Uber and Lyft to collude on staffing decisions. This opens up other legal concerns (and may be illegal).