Why not let the market decide? If drivers are so unhappy why not just seek some alternative form of work? Uber/Lyft do not force anyone to hop online.
Traditionally the answer to that is unions or professional group who can bargain on behalf of all their members, but it's hard to unionize fields with low barriers to entry (and harder when the workers are living paycheck to paycheck and thus can't strike easily), and impossible to unionize independent contractor drivers based on how the laws are written.
What laws, don't you have freedom of association in USA? Just create a group, what is stopping you?
Speaking as an ignorant European.
I don't believe that at all, mandatory unions are illegal in Europe yet unions are stronger here. It wouldn't surprise me if making them mandatory actually makes them weaker since workers are so afraid of creating unions that could potentially harm them, while I can always ignore an optional union so they aren't a problem.
I don't think requiring unions is the only way to do it, but the countries that have a high rate of unionization seem to have other incentives in place, such as Sweden and Denmark where unemployment insurance is generally provided through unions in contrast with Norway or France, where this is not the case. The latter countries perhaps consequently have much lower rates of membership, closer to that of the US.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/17/15290674/u...
For more of the legal perspective, see page 9 of: https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU05/20191029/110152/HHRG...
If the costs increase dramatically, demand goes down and thus fewer drivers needed, as people look at alternatives like getting their own car, public transportation, bikes, etc.
This is microeconomics 101.
If you have a competitive equilibrium, you can't improve the situation for consumers and producers by just regulating prices.
How is:
"I was so poor I had to sell my body so as to not starve to death but selling my body made me depressed and so I spent all my money on drugs leaving no money for food, throwing me into a life of starvation."
...better than:
"I was so poor I could not buy food."
...really?
fixed that for you to make the two sentences equal. Making prostitution illegal doesn't prevent the men and women who sell their bodies from starving to death after they lost their source of income. I'm all for social programs preventing people from starving to death though, that seems like a much better solution than banning prostution.
Both sides believe the net benefit backs up their stated position and there's very little compelling data one way or another.
If we did things like abandon employer-subsidized healthcare for a modern single payer system, then maybe it wouldn't be so disadvantageous for drivers to be classified as contractors.
I don't see why anyone other than the person doing the work gets to define what "reasonable" or "adequate" is. It also seems completely heartless to me to put people out of work in order to push a political agenda.
What's your definition of "fair"?
Having said that, Uber drivers exist because it does provide enough money to have people show up and provide a service. If it didn’t, no one would do the driving. Not to mention most drivers don’t want to be considered employees.
Or they already have another job (or several) that does not pay enough. However, they can't find yet another job with flexible enough hours.
When the job market is garbage, "just let the market solve it" doesn't really cut it.
Instead of the government playing court for something nobody wants, maybe they can do their job: set an an appropriate minimum wage, ensure better safety nets so people don’t need 3 jobs, provide better options to employers so jobs aren’t lost, etc.
- no healthcare means you're a slave of whatever you can find,
- tipping culture means your employer can pay you shit
> Uber/Lyft do not force anyone to hop online.
Yeah, let the drivers eat cake, hmm?
Because we're not monsters.
The market is great at optimizing certain imbalances, but a large scale imbalance of power between actors is not one of those imbalances.
The majority is not high tech types, nor does it need to aspire to be.
How do you separate this all from physical reality so easily?
Economics is not physics. The math is defined by biologically biased humans. Physical reality works how it do regardless of the syntax you want to emit about sound economics.
You really are just asking questions that have been debated forever. The answers haven’t changed. The narrative you would choose to recite isn’t the same as many others. And westerners aren’t a literal majority
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Remember that the free market didn't end child labor, create weekends, or the minimum wage.