Gig economy companies spent more than $200M to bankroll Proposition 22
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
He drives the way Uber was originally envisioned. He goes out some nights if there’s a surge, and in the morning on the way to work he points the app toward our stores and grabs a person (pre-pandemic) or a food delivery (today) on his way in.
It pays for gas money, car maintenance, and then some. Some months he makes a few hundred dollars. Some months over $1000. He can work when he wants, and make as much or as little money as he needs.
I feel strongly like this law was pushed by people who want Uber to be a full-time job. It’s not. I understand that some people want it to be full-time, but I wish they would stop trying to make Uber something it’s not. Had the law passed, people like my husband would have had to quit working for Uber. It would have unfairly punished the part-time and “free time” drivers in favor of full-time drivers.
I still think we need a third class of employment, but that’s not what was on the table here.
I don't really see why we need a third category, it should just be that some drivers are full time and some are not. I don't believe that Uber could sufficiently fulfill even half the rides with only the true part timers short of driver incentives also going way up (which would benefit people like your husband).
In Houston almost everyone I talked to were - retired, raising kids, had another jobs, going to school, or had some health issues that prevented full time employment.
The vast majority of the economy is made up of jobs where a company tells you when to show up, when to go home, and tries to schedule you for 38 hrs. Why can't we have just one job for people who have life circumstances that require flexibility.
Note that I've also had a lot of responses that they are "retired" but also say they drive >30 hours per week, which I'd personally consider "switched careers" or "unretired" but it's somewhat a matter of perspective.
71% of drivers work 30 or more hours, and 50% work 40 or more.
More troubling, 53% relied on gig work for all of their income. Another 10% said gig work accounted for at least 75% of their income.
[0] https://transform.ucsc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/OnDema...
Key goal: Representative sample of on-demand _work_ being done in the city, not of all on-demand _workers_. (emphasis not mine)
The team making the study has selected parameters to examine basically exactly to produce a number where the majority of rideshare is full-time. So is it clear that most rideshare workers are full time? Definitely not. And the fact that the team has weighted their sampling in such a way makes me even more skeptical about the veracity of that fact when taken across the whole population of drivers.
As far as the distinction between work and workers, it’s who is doing the work. If most people with an driver app are idle, they’ve removed themselves from the candidate pool. They’re irrelevant. It’s no different than talking about active users versus total accounts made. In other words, if you want to know how policies affect people, you look at who is affected.
1) low sample size (219 responses)
2) usage of $10 gift cards as incentives. as an online survey, this opened up opportunities for gaming
3) targeting appears to have been geared towards members of Gig Workers Rising, a union-backed group
I think Uber's study of all of its drivers [2] in California provides a more measured picture:
74% of drivers work < 25h/week, but only account for 42% of trips
So, no, the majority of rideshare drivers aren't full-time, but rideshare companies do rely heavily on drivers who are online >25hours/week.
[1] https://workercenters.com/special-report-ca-labor-groups-fla...
[2] https://medium.com/uber-under-the-hood/which-drivers-do-the-...
Then again this is a while ago so maybe things have shifted with time.
It may seem heartless but I’m not sure whom to blame for the problems that come from treating rideshare as a full time job except the drivers who chose to do that themselves. Despite the gross advertising budget it seems like the gig economy companies were in the right.
Really, the issue is further up. It’s a universal loss of low skill labor. These people should have more real employment opportunities in society. If it was easier to get a basic job with benefits it would be way easier to accept whatever arrangement Uber was offering without legislating them. And Uber would inherently have to treat them more fairly as well.
Your 2nd paragraph is exactly what prop22 added. Now full-time drivers enjoy some benefits.
To make this a concrete example, consider a DoorDash driver. They get an order to drive to a restaurant. Clock starts, they get 15 minutes. The order isn’t ready, so they’re waiting for another 15 minutes, but the clock is stopped. Then they drive to your house, which takes another 15. A 45 minute task, but only 30 minutes counts. “But they’re not working when they’re waiting!” DoorDash cries. But they’re not free to leave, because then they’d lose the entire payout and get blackballed. It’s just a process inefficiency. If the driver worked for the restaurant, they’d still get paid while waiting.
The original law that Prop 22 replaced, addressed this down time, and because of this, Prop 22 was written.
While there maybe reasonable arguments to be made about how gig work is different from full time and traditional contractor work, the most damning part of Prop 22 for me was the 7/8s majority needed to amend the new law. That’s just bullshit.
What you are describing is completely wrong. It's incredible how short sighted people get when they want to go all out and lash at the "evil" gig economy companies. Like really, the wording is publicly available for you to read.
Engaged time is time from accepting the gig, to the time the gig ends. Waiting is included. That's it.
While I wouldn't expect anything like full-time pay, Uber/Lyft et. al. still get a benefit of having drivers on call (lower wait times for their customers). I personally would have liked to see some compensation (within reason) for time spent on call but not on a ride. Not sure how easy it would be to make both a fair and reasonably un-cheatable system, but its something that should have been considered.
Does the app give him the contact info for each of his passengers after every ride so that he can own the business relationship with them? If not then he's an employee, not an independent contractor. The number of hours worked per month is a complete red herring.
Moreover, how is this not available to the driver? They're in the car with the passenger already. The driver and passenger could exchange contact info if they wanted to, how is Uber going to stop them? This doesn't happen not because Uber is preventing it but because the passenger is. The next time they need a ride they don't want to have to call five drivers to find one who is in the area and available, they want to open the app and have it find one for them.
Uber doesn't claim to be a transportation company.
It claims to be a marketplace, putting transportation consumers in touch with providers. Except it "owns" the customer relationship and dictates many aspects of the provider activity and equipment.
No, you put your brand on the chairs and if the customer likes them they can buy from you again.
And I imagine Uber does forbid selling other services during rides. If not, I feel like Uber rides would be full of people pushing multi-level marketing.
If Uber wants to crack down on this, it's openly happening in Vegas.
In what way is this different than putting your phone number inside your car where the passenger can take it down if they want it?
> And I imagine Uber does forbid selling other services during rides. If not, I feel like Uber rides would be full of people pushing multi-level marketing.
I can't actually find the Uber driver agreement on the internet, but pyramid schemes are illegal, and drivers who peddle scummy garbage to passengers are liable to get bad reviews, so there is no reason to expect that a lack of this would have to be because Uber prohibits it.
Happens all the time, see the equate brand at Walmart or the Kroger brand at Kroger
Sure those are larger scale but there is nothing stopping Acme Furniture from contacting with Joe Woodworker to make them some chairs branded Acme Furniture where the customer has no idea who Joe Woodworker is nor is Joe Woodworker an employee of Acme Furniture
This is not uncommon in the Services industry as well, hell Software development is full of Subcontracting where Company A will contract development to Company B who will hire Freelancer C to do the work, Company A may never know who Freelance C is, and to the extend they do they may not know the contractual relationship between Company B and freelance C (i.e are they an employee or a contractor)
This happens in alot of industries and has since the dawn of employment, Uber just has a different scale
When I go to a new city, I make note of great Uber drivers. I then hire them directly. Often, they become a porter of sorts. I pay them to drive but also e.g. for taking out laundry and recommending places of interest.
It's like not updating your horse carriage road laws to accommodate automobiles; because everything is either a pedestrian or a horse carriage. If there's no horse, a car isn't a vehicle; it's a pedestrian.
Makes no sense.
If you think Uber drives deserve more than 120% of min wage, then you can argue that, but I don't see why you have to argue employee vs IC.
P.S. Most Uber drivers, when independently polled, are for Prop 22. It's the unions that were pushing this, so they can collect union dues and grow their revenues.
The auto industry successfully lobbied local legislatures and shifted public opinion through a massive marketing campaign in order to create the crime of "jaywalking". This is how our city streets went from shared spaces to the exclusive territory of drivers (much to the benefit of the auto industry).
Same thing is happening here. Perhaps a new class of labor does need to be created, but in a just world that would be happening on the terms of the workers, not the corporations.
If things would have naturally been different if only it weren't for some lobbyists, how come things aren't that way at least somewhere?
But let's not fall into these simplistic black and white anti-establishment narratives. The automobile massively expanded personal liberty and employment options. Some of these effects were very pro-worker, like reducing the power of the dominant employers of localities, by letting workers more easily pull up stakes and find a new home in a different locality, or simply commute to a more distant employer.
No conversation about the impact of the car is complete without mentioning the benefits it provided to society.
I wonder if this would remain true if you weighted by the number of drives given, there certainly seems to be a distinction between part time and full time drivers. The former could be more numerous while Uber depends on the latter to provide the bulk of their supply.
The $200 million being discussed feels relevant to this claim. Didn't some companies even spread their take to their "employees" through their job apps and other direct communication? I bet even the "blame the union" came from information those companies paid for.
Whoever pays you is the entity you have a relation with.
The driver is an employee of Uber, so it would be creepy for them to have your info. If they were someone you hired, that's not weird.
You could be an employee or contractor for uber. In either case driving someone is a service you provide to Uber customers.
The "glass half full" way to think of it is that Uber bought work flexibility; and as it turns out the labor market values this flexibility with slightly lower wages.
If you think we should out-regulate that, should we ban part time jobs too? How about we ban unpaid time off?
Any barriers to work (i.e. regulation) just accelerates AI taking over all the jobs. Anything that drives up the cost of labour, just means more automation like self-serve kiosks or robo security guards today; and who knows what tomorrow.
If you want to solve societal inequality and provide a safety net, which is something I 100% back, do that through taxation + a universal basic income.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_work#Guild_system
Sure they did, we called them “cottage industries”. You’ve always been able to buy from a farmer’s market or small general stores (who source a lot of their merchandise from random craftsmen). Craigslist pre-dates Uber, and classified ads pre-dates Craigslist. There are stores around the world specializing in hand-made and home-made items. Independent contractors have existed since the beginning of civilization, and any city in the world will have a generic handyman service for work around the house.
My wife just sold four candles, Uber wasn’t involved with that. My grandmother knits dishclothes and sells them to a local shop for distribution whenever she decides to go into town, Uber didn’t invent that.
The lease for the cab was high enough ($600+/wk) that I had to drive ~30 hours to break even, and the rest was profit, usually another 20 hours over the weekend.
Unless you were sharing a lease with another driver, it would've been impossible to work it as part time.
So I would see a benefit to uber over that arrangement except for uber if your car breaks you're out of luck. With a cab, i'd take it to the shop and get another one. Granted they were all pretty beat up crown vics.
The real winners were the owners of the cab company. Like you said, they held the medallions and thus most of the leverage.
It makes sense in the comment above, as the cab driver actually has work expenses that they pay for out of pocket and are not reimbursed for.
Uber drivers can rent their car by the week.
We do pay into unemployment, as we are both salaried workers of our own business.
He did not take unemployment during Covid. Our stores were considered essential, so they stayed open.
That is pretty much the point of part-time driving. You have a full-time job or business that pays the bills and you just want some extra cash.
The extra cash from Uber enabled him to pay off his car quickly and continues to provide extra money for our family. It is not a full-time income, nor do we ever expect it to be.
This is our situation, and I understand that others are different. However, you specifically asked about him, so I replied with our details.
There are many others, but these two are the most egregious.
Obviously some of us net positive into the government. That's how society works.
Her husband and Uber are gaming the system to avoid that responsibility.
Businesses got billions in forgivable loans to simply not fire the people they'd hired, it seems reasonable that self-employed people get some help.
And this is the case… why? I could just as easily say “I understand that some people want Uber to be part-time, but I wish they would stop trying to make it something it’s not.”
Lots of labor laws exist that prevent people from working jobs they could work without those laws. This individuals will likely be against those laws. It doesn't mean those laws are bad for society.
If not, then the problem with Uber isn't the part-time-ness, and forcing the job to be full time is a very awkward way to try to fix the exploitation.
Just like we need to protect the 12 year old who voluntary enters a coal mine, we might need to protect the Uber driver who voluntary gets into their car.
The big problem I see is that it is perfectly clear that the decision factor was money put into political campaign done not by politicians, which are sort of accountable for what they do (they might not just get elected), but by people who simply had enough money.
Democracy sort of worked because elected representatives were supposed to make law based on justice and ethics and common interest. Right now law is made because someone was able to pull out enough money to buy particular regulation.
There is some democratic ceremony around all this, but this is just a ceremony. The ancient Rome citizens also thought that they have democracy in the times of triumvirate, but this was also a show.
The ballot initiative failed around 55%-45%, despite a massive difference in fundraising (and presumably associated spending).
Your belief on that is based on reporting bias, reporters never talk about when an initiative's that went counter to the HUGE amounts of money poured in (for or against), for example the Right to repair in MA which has huge money from all the major auto manufacturers, and an ad campaign claiming that if you voted for right to repair rapists would get your garage codes...
It is click bait to talk about how "company X bought regulation" but it is rarely true, even in CA there were a few ballot measures this year that failed even with massive amounts of money being spent on supporting them.
Money in politics if often used as a scapegoat to explain away why some issue failed, or some issue succeed with out having to accept the fact that majority disagreed with you, as it often hard to admit that the majority rejects your world view
According to you. It's clearly a full time job for most drivers. The fact that you think it shouldn't be doesn't change that.
What do you expect full time taxi drivers to do exactly? Go back to working for local taxi companies and get zero customers?
Depreciation is a real cost. If at the time you sell your car your car, you get $X, but driving for Uber caused you to have more miles and thus sell for $X-$Y, then Y is real cost. Even if you don't sell your car and instead drive your it into the ground, the extra miles you're driving for Uber cause your car to fail faster.
I get the sense that many part time drivers think they're making money when instead they're losing it (or maybe making less than minimum wage after expenses).
Prius, probably the most common ride sharing car, has a total cost, including fuel, depreciation, and maintenance, of about $0.39 cents per mile.
That seems to be sorta missing the point. People don't want "Uber to BE a full-time job", they just want it to be possible for it to replace one.
> I still think we need a third class of employment, but that’s not what was on the table here.
Really what this is proof of is that employer benefits are a fundamentally broken idea. Employers will always, ALWAYS find ways to cheat their way around providing them when they can. Regulation will always be catching up.
Back in 2009, I thought the hippies were crazy to be staking so much on their failed quest for a public option in the ACA. Now? Sign me up as a M4A proponent. The system's just broken.
Especially in terms of congestion and efficiency, the "piggyback" model solves many problems and is complementary to clean air campaigns that governments spend millions on.
HN isn't a California local's site.
Yes, according to Boomer legend, fast food joints used to be exclusively staffed by high school students for whom $8.25 is more than enough for an adequate weed supply.
But that's just not true anymore, is it? And yet, its used as argument to deny full protection (for Uber) or not raise minimum wage (my fast food example).
At the very least, it should be uncontroversial to include these assumptions in legislation: require full benefits, but only for drivers driving > 15h per week. If your assumptions hold, Uber shouldn't need to oppose this, considering they have few drivers it would apply to.
Which is why all such regulations are ridiculous. You "help" someone by requiring higher pay for overtime, the employer responds by prohibiting overtime. The worker still wants more than 40 hours, so they take a second job, still don't get any overtime, but now they have the expense of a second commute and get paid less because the second job has to duplicate all of the employment benefits the first job was already providing instead of paying that money as wages.
A lot of the 'employee choice' arguments depend on an illusion of free association when the employer has almost all the power to set work conditions and can let the employee go at will with no compensation.
Most of those regulations were written in blood, toil, and tears - they deserve more respect than that. You are correct - regulations often limit an individual's ability to maximize their own gains in order to lift the overall floor. If you want to maximize your income, start a private car service and build your own clientele like an actual independent operator.
Alternatively, we could offer public healthcare, social housing, and food guarantees, decoupling work from survival. Then the regulations would be ridiculous.
Most importantly, you don't want others get the protection they deserve because it works fine for your husband.
Just to illustrate the point with fake numbers..
If 90% of drivers are doing the gig thing, maybe they’ll be driving Uber an hour a day on average. Then if 10% of drivers are doing 12 hours a day, most rides will be from the small minority of full time drivers.
It’s exactly the same as the experience most people have that flights tend to be overflowing with people, when the airlines claim many flights are totally empty.
Students, retired people, and my favorite was a guy who would take 1-2 trips on the way home from his job to put into a travel savings so he and his family upgrade their vacations.
Every market is different though, I can definitely believe that the situation could be very different in California.
I'm sure there are tons of fulltime Uber drivers, especially if you live in a city where cab drivers have made the switch. I live in the suburbs, and I've never met a fulltimer.
One of the Uber drivers I had when visiting New York rolled up in a expensive German SUV (Mercedes IIRC) and was very well dressed.
Chatted and found out he was a lawyer by day, but drove Uber in the evenings when he was bored.
He didn't _need_ the $10-12 bucks we paid for the trip to the restaurant, but he did appreciate the chat.
Why is someone's beer money more important than someone else's full time subsistence?
Should it be illegal for me to offer that service?
* do not allow them unlimited flexibility into when and where they work
* do not allow them to take days off, without notice, for any reason, for as long as they want
* do not allow them to choose which jobs to do and not do (see: trip destination filters)
but most importantly:
* do not allow them to work for a competitor at the same time.
If Uber is too driver-unfriendly, drivers can switch to Lyft. Or maybe Amazon Flex. There's a very, very real choice that you do not get with a traditional employer-employee relationship.
Uber is in between an employee, and an IC. I believe the appropriate treatment is also somewhere in between.
Gig jobs are all that kept family off the street while I recovered.
Starting and stopping anytime as my body could tolerate. Or renting out rooms on Airbnb. Sometimes it took me 4 hours to change sheets and tidy up, but it made the difference.
Not saying their good companies. But gigs was crazy valuable to me.
Fortunately no one was injured. I was on my way to pick up a passenger, but it was only me in the vehicle.
When I went to make my insurance claim to fix several thousand dollars worth of damage to my car, I discovered that despite having done a lot of research when trying to buy the right insurance with a rideshare rider and which was compatible with Lyft's own insurance, I wasn't covered. I had to eat the bill.
Fortunately, I was a software engineer moonlighting and I had savings to take care of it, rather than a typical Lyft driver living with far less cushion.
This sort of thing doesn't happen when you're an employee. The essence of the gig economy is doing away with hard-won labor protections and increasing profitability by offloading risk onto workers, creating the statistical certainty that a fraction of your workforce will experience circumstances far more tragic than mine.
You can make the argument, "Well, they should know better, and if not it doesn't matter." I find that weak. The legal system is amazingly complex around business and fault during accidents. It's so complex, that there are attorneys that spend their entire career focusing on things like this. When dealing with insurance there is no, "Well it's ok, I'm insured." It's, "I'm insured if I can prove I didn't break any of the insurance contract rules," and the people on the other side, they're all better at this than you are. Most people who drive for Uber, etc. have no idea this is how it really is. The driving companies have pushed all this off to individuals, because they know the consequences of them getting involved, and this is why there needs to be laws surrounding things like this.
So the problem was the insurance company, not the gig economy itself.
Making drivers employees isn’t the only solution. There are any number of profession that are required to have appropriate insurances
Either you are a platform that connects you to a potential client (like a powerful yellow page), or you are an employer.
If you use Stripe API for examples, if you follow the law, and their T&C of services, they can't force you to sell to some clients, etc.
Buy a two person bike and be the pedal power for a bike courier?
Healthcare industry is currently a mess. I have excellent coverage. Even still I couldn’t get anyone to take me seriously.
Only when organ failure started up in earnest did doctors realize I wasn’t making it up.
Put another way:
"Thank God purdue pharma is now manufacturing the cure[1] for the opioid epidemic that purdue pharma started"
1. https://apnews.com/article/6751b84767e8a1ebbaea6cb628ac2a11
No one will help me, especially progressive leaning people. You don't get political or social brownie points for helping disabled people the way you would for other minority groups who are struggling. We are constantly ignored and forgotten.
I was in a situation where I needed money for healthcare that will never be covered by insurance, especially government sponsored universal insurance (EDIT: it will be covered eventually, maybe in 10 years). Gig jobs played a key role in my ability to purchase that healthcare and survive.
Regular employers will never hire me. Unions will never let me join them, because I can't meet their requirements and make life harder for their able bodied employees. Gig work is the only option.
Healthy people aren't nearly as caring as they'd like to believe, especially progressives.
By your account, the problem is a for-profit healthcare system. Gig work might have helped you purchase a highly inflated healthcare plan, but it doesn't address the underlying issue: that people shouldn't be forced into that situation in the first place.
You mentioned you are disabled, did you not qualify for disability insurance/SSI?
I do qualify for disability, but I can't afford the legal fees to convince a judge. My illness is very controversial and would require paying a very expensive doctor to support my case. It's cheaper for me to just pay for healthcare out of pocket. Fortunately my condition is reversible.
Progressives, especially in 2020, don't look kindly on people who lack faith in medical institutions. A lot of people with chronic illness have found themselves in this category after being failed by these institutions.
What you did to me is evil.
Europeans are just as fucked as Americans when they have this illness.
Uber and Airbnb didn't have to take a loss to employ you. You got paid because you provided value to people willing to pay for it, just like the rest of us.
That's not to say we don't need social safety nets, or that it'd work for any disability (obviously). But there is something to be said when it becomes outlawed "for your own good."
Oh really? Has Uber turned a profit yet?
Social safety nets only work for people who are believed to be oppressed. So what happens is the oppressed groups just end up being the people no one believes are actually suffering.
I have no idea what this is about but there was very strong activist push to get the ADA in 1990 and similarly the ACA in 2011 but I guess that doesn't count
> I was in a situation where I needed money for healthcare that will never be covered by insurance, especially government sponsored universal insurance
No clue what this means or how you could possibly even know that.
>You healthy people aren't nearly as caring as you'd like to believe.
Bold of you to assume that I'm healthy and don't have a vested interest in universal healthcare getting passed
"No clue what this means or how you could possibly even know that."
I know this because I have the illness and have been to 40 doctors who all denied me healthcare based on this fact.
"Bold of you to assume that I'm healthy and don't have a vested interest in universal healthcare getting passed"
I edited my post to remove the "you" part so as to not make that assumption. Apologies.
As an aside: all these anecdotes about people using Uber as a sidejob and enjoying it are missing the point: Uber might be a good sidejob for you/your friends but that's only because either they don't get a fulltime job or their fulltime job doesnt pay enough. They don't do it because they want to, they do it because they need to.
I can agree with your former point but not sure about this.
Who are you to say they need to or not?
Some here have provided examples of driving a few times a month to supplement their vacation savings or pay for discretionary spending like lattes or whatever.
Hardly something necessary.
I think unskilled would be a more apt term.
I wonder, why does the author think they're entitled to wages and benefits beyond what they agreed to?
I'd understand the sentiment a little more if Uber was wildly profitable, but it isn't. If Uber isn't treating the drivers right, they don't have to drive for Uber. Or they can go and try to change the laws and regulations to be more fair. But no one is entitled to anything.
This statement is derived from a particular understanding of the individual, society, and the state, and is by no means universally taken as true among all political philosophers. In fact, even many economists aren't sold on this idea. As it turns out, if I subscribe to a philosophy in which people are entitled to various things, as a matter of distributive justice, then you can be sure I'll vote for it.
Perhaps my gripe was with that particular statement, it just seemed like unhelpful attitude.
If you start from "I subscribe to a philosophy" and from there reach the conclusion "hence people are entitled to xyz", that's quite different than starting from "I'm entitled to xyz".
Wasn’t that the whole point of AB5? To change the law so Uber/Lyft drivers are paid what they deserve?
The author, in addition to being generously funded by the AFL-CIO, astutely granted an exception to professions that had the means to sue the state (doctors, lawyers, realty agents) and crushed over 400 other professions from freelance coder to hair stylist to forensic nurse to actors and stagehands receiving a stipend to perform in community theater.
AB5 is strongly anti-woman, more specifically, anti-mother, as many mothers choose to be yoga or pilates instructors or work a nail salon to gain extra revenue while having the flexibility time wise to shuttle their children to school and extracurriculars.
Not the least of which, people like us, if we live in California, we can’t be hired on a freelance basis to code or be cybersecurity tiger teams for tech companies because we would have a hand in the finished product. And thanks to a last minute amendment, changing “worker” to “person” (and Citizens United), we can’t even legally do it if incorporated. The FTB will come a knockin’ for the fines legislated by AB5, you can count on that.
AB5 is so convoluted, attorneys have only the one choice in advising clients: don’t hire freelancers from California. Because the law is so convoluted it will be necessarily refined in the court system. And lawyers need to defend their malpractice insurance, so they can only advise their clients to play it safe.
One final point. The core of AB5 is about 300 words. And thousands of words about who is exempt. What does that say about any law written in such a fashion. IMO, it means the law is specifically designed to choose winners and losers.
The lawmakers who wrote and voted for AB5 all had strong union connections.
I support private-sector unions. But don’t forget: unions are high-margin and effective get-out-the-vote operations.
The exempted professions have one thing in common: they aren’t union. The covered professions are either already unionised or a target market for conglomerate unions like the AFL-CIO.
The value of money relative to a product or service is subjective. If Bob agrees to mow a lawn for $10, Joe doesn't have the right to object and demand that Bob be paid $20. That's immoral and not how markets should work.
And Joe absolutely does have the right to object to it. If I see someone paying someone a $1 to mow a lawn, I can say they deserve more.
> some people are desperate and don’t think about the choices they make
Some people can't choose because they're in a desperate situation. And some people are in a desperate situation because they made many wrong choices. It's not easy to distinguish between the two. And it's certainly non-binary, but rather a spectrum. I think there can be a large difference between the two extremes of the spectrum.
Subversively slipping in the term 'wages' is not arguing in good faith.
how does one know what they actually deserve? Is there a number tattooed on their left arm, or something like that?
For the same reason a minimum wage exists.
>But no one is entitled to anything.
Workers are entitled to a minimum wage should they seek/accept a job.
There's a very progressive and pro-business case to be made for decoupling benefits from the employer-employee or contract-gig relationship and making those benefits universal instead.
Progressives get the social safety net they want and businesses gets the fewer regulations they want.
This isn't a fair characterization of how people cast their ballots. They see the ad and it has some non-zero effect. If running ads was ineffective in swaying public opinion, there wouldn't have been a $200m persuasion campaign.
Like any endeavor, ads & marketing can be dishonest. If you actually thought any part of Uber's campaign was dishonest, I encourage you to say what you mean rather than cast vague aspersions.
Or $1B on a 3 month primary campaign: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/bloomberg-spe...
You may have missed this if you don't use it.
I had no idea Californians would vote for something like this. Kind of makes you wonder how large the disconnect is between what we see in the media and what people actually think.
How many states have legalized personal marijuana usage due to action initiated in their legislatures? How many have done so due to ballot initiatives?
Perhaps this article should start with "California has chose the gig economy. The Californian people have disavowed the fascist overreach of AB-5"
The driver's that are for AB5 tend to be newer one's who have yet to figure out their market and how to be profitable.
If you had an upcoming vote on abolishing penal slavery, and prisoners were threatened with being gunned down if it passed, they might well oppose it.
"A change to the law would require a seven-eighths majority in the California legislature."
I realize that we don't want laws on the books that are continually changed, but that's an extremely steep climb, should the majority of the legislature feel that this law is problematic. They need virtual total agreement.
"The California State Legislature may not amend or repeal an approved measure without submitting the change to voters. However, a ballot measure may include a clause waiving this protection either entirely or conditionally."
https://ballotpedia.org/Laws_governing_the_initiative_proces...
Also, the level of civics knowledge among Californians is near rock bottom and this thing has revealed that. 7/8ths in the legislature cannot 'overturn' this law. That's not how it works.
Yet if ridesharing companies spend money to advertise their position that, if the new ride-sharing rules were upheld, they would be forced to leave California, depriving thousands of people of work, that's somehow "buying a law"?
It was a referendum. People voted. The facts were on the side of Uber and Lyft, and they were able to persuade the public to see that.
The law was being pushed knowing full well that it would have killed Uber and Lyft. It was strongly supported by the unions who see Uber and Lyft as an existential threat. The unions can't compete with them, so they tried using the politicians they've bought to effectively outlaw them. Fortunately, it didn't work.
Uber and Lyft provide a service millions of people voluntarily use, with drivers who voluntarily chose to work. That's how our society should work. Government shouldn't be interfering with voluntary transactions.
Dara (Uber CEO) did advocate for a third category in a New York Times op-ed in August. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/10/opinion/uber-ceo-dara-kho...
Also, it seems like the far more reliability successful path to improve ones lot in life would be to work to personally improve your skill set instead of focusing on legal changes in the hands of millions of people you don’t know and don’t control.
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Fake-progressive-mai... https://www.reddit.com/r/Sacramento/comments/j8a8hx/i_just_g...
I was really shocked when I got one in the mail in Los Angeles.
I voted no on this because Uber can deal with it. I bet the costs to them from following through would have been less than 200 million...
TBH I think it's a moot point. How many human drivers will there be in 5 years? Or 10?
They wouldn't have had to treat them all as full-time employees, only as employees.
As an European is fascinating and mind numbing how much you guys are squezeeing the ones in need through crazy lobbying and sophisticated mechanisms. You keep inventing new ways of paying people less than the legal hourly rate just because you got them by the .....
Then you have a principled, transparent, democratic approach in your congress trying to fix social injustice.
This article was on the first page of HN today with this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25083315
The same step by step, slow moving ratched applied not to systematic genocide but to corporate benefits and squeezing whomever you can for one extra penny. Well done you. Surely you have already forgotten how you ended up with Prop 22 in the first place.
Software engineering isn't something everybody in the country can do at the drop of a hat.
If somebody wants to be a full time driver-employee, there are taxi firms/limousine companies/bus driving companies/courier companies.
They don't want that though.
They want the freedom that comes with picking your own hours using a low effort/common & widespread skill(driving a non-commercial vehicle).
Also, the site fiverr and similar sites already exists(as well as entire outsourcing industries) if somebody does want to have their software developed by transient programmers.
Is it possible that the market forces set the floor on engineer wages, not the legal system?
So it's true that if you're sitting outside an airport at 3am when no one is there you won't be getting paid. But as soon as a plane lands and you accept a passenger, you'll get paid for the time you spend driving to pick them up AND the time after you pick them up.
Similarly, if you accept a food delivery in the app but the food isn't ready when you get to the restaurant, you'll get 120% minimum wage while waiting for the cook to finish
https://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/the-uber-lyft-ballot-initia...
That link contradicts your claim that drivers are only compensated for the time spent with passengers
That link is attempting to calculate take-home pay after taxes, health insurance, etc. Minimum wage is pretax, so even regular employees aren't making minimum wage once they've paid for their income taxes, social security, Medicare, disability insurance and health insurance. Imo its nonsensical to compare gross against net pay
Money gets you into the game, it doesn’t get you over the finish line.
Back to Prop 22, Uber didn’t buy a law, Californian voters bought this law with their votes, and punched a hole in an even worse law that screwed over 1099s with exceptions for the legislature’s preferred constituents. Now the California State legislature faces a choice: repeal what’s left of AB5 or let the gimped version stand without hitting their prized targets. A total repeal of AB5 would have been even better, but this will do for now.
This is incorrect. Bloomberg spent $100 million to help Biden in Florida, not Texas. They may hope to flip Florida, but the main goal was to force Trump to defend there, and therefore unable to focus elsewhere, notably Pennsylvania, as they explained in the article below back in September. From that perspective they did very well.
"In a statement issued Sunday, Mr. Sheekey said Mr. Bloomberg’s latest commitments “will mean Democrats and the Biden campaign can invest even more heavily in other key states like Pennsylvania, which will be critical to a Biden victory.”
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/us/politics/bloomberg-flo...
Trump carried all three States, all three will walk into 2021 as Republican trifectas during redistricting season, and all three will be sending a majority Republican delegation to the House.
Texas walks out of the 116th Congress with 22 Republicans of 36 House seats and will walk into the 117th without losing a single seat. However my original claim of a shrunken Democratic delegation was incorrect, garbage in, garbage out. My apologies.
Kudos to you, you forced me to re-evaluate both my claims and my sources, however you haven’t come back at my main point in that paragraph: money doesn’t buy elections. Beyond this $100M spent in support of Democrats in three States they did abysmally in, Bloomberg spent $1B on his own Primary run which failed almost the moment voting started. $1B bought him 49 delegates and American Samoa in the very first batch of States and Territories he was on the ballot for in the Democratic Primary.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/04/bloomberg-sees-losses-after-...
"Uber may have bought itself a law, but it has not bought itself reprieve. All labor has dignity, and driving for Uber or Lyft should be no different."
Cherri Murphy is a social justice minister and Lyft driver based in Oakland, California. She is also an organizer with Gig Workers Rising.
Oh ok, that makes sense.
1. You may have cause and effect wrong. The conditions this person lived through, especially as a gig worker, may have moved them to be a social justice minister; not the other way around.
2. You are not judging the article from the quality of the writing or the persuasiveness of the arguments, but instead by the background of the writer. Certainly it's important to note that this article is written from the experience of a _gig worker_, but IMO that only adds to the persuasiveness.
Propaganda comes from both sides of an issue.
Does the article mention how long she has been a gig worker for? Because her bio would suggest she has potentially multiple income streams and also has had full time positions which I'm sure have equivalents in the area she resides in now.
The bio at https://www.netrootsnation.org/profile/cherri-murphy/ just mentions:
> Minister Cherri Murphy is currently the Founder of Speak Life Ministries and a Doctoral student at the Graduate Theological Union/Berkeley Theology in Berkeley. Her focus is on liturgical direct actions, specifically how participants combine public worship, art and ritual protests to intimately engage and invoke social change for those who have historically been de-centered. She is also a member and a licensed Spiritual Practitioner at Heart and Soul Center of Light, in Oakland California.
Do you disagree that a job should mean that someone is able to afford rent and pay your bills? Because that sounds entirely reasonable to me.
Could we focus down on this question. Ignoring what led to this question being raised, I would like to better capture what is being asked here.
Is the idea that any job should be able to provide for any rent and any bills? I think that is an entirely unreasonable interpretation, but I want to make sure we are in agreement that there are some combinations of jobs, rents, and bills that aren't reasonable to be included.
If we can agree on that point, then how should we determine what pairings of job/rent/bills should be covered and should not? For example, maybe we should say that for any job, there should exist rent within 30 minutes of the job and bills that include X amenities which is affordable working that job. (For the moment let's ignore the complexities of deciding what should be included in X, especially given that people can acquire some very large bills in numerous ways.)
If for the moment we agree to the above standards for jobs, how should part time jobs work? Should it be that any part time job whose total pay when accounting for hours worked dips below the threshold we agreed to shouldn't exist? Say there was a job where working 25 hours was enough to meet the threshold, should we say that it would be illegal for the job to offer 24 hours or less a week (there would be a number of ways to enforce this, potentially having a minimum wage monthly in combination with an hourly minimum wage, but other options exist)?
I'm not trying to disagree with the sentiment. Instead, I want to better understand the details of the sentiment beyond the trivial case (all jobs, all rents, all bills) which has trivial counters, trivial to the extent that bringing them up almost seems like a bad faith strawman.
> Is the idea that any job should be able to provide for any rent and any bills?
No. We live a society of free will and choices. It's not reasonable for me to expect that _any_ job will allow me to live _any_ kind of lifestyle. I am firmly in the middle-class. I expect my job will allow me to pay my housing costs, but I don't expect it to pay for a brand new car every year and especially not if I spend all of my discresionary income on... something else!
It is reasonable for me to expect that a full-time job should allow me to have a roof over my head, food to eat, etc. I should make a living wage. There are examples of independent organisations that calculate what a living wage is and what constitues a living wage. (https://www.livingwage.org.uk/ in the UK for example) So I'm keen not to get in to an argument about what constitues a living wage, because people smarter than me have spent much longer than me considering it.
I am also not an expert. But I do know that europeans like myself look at the world of work in the US with abject horror, even when things here are not perfect.
I think reasonable can agree on this. The difficulty is deciding where to draw the line at, now that we have established there exists some line.
>It is reasonable for me to expect that a full-time job should allow me to have a roof over my head, food to eat, etc. I should make a living wage. There are examples of independent organisations that calculate what a living wage is and what constitues a living wage.
But these have certain assumptions built in. A living wage for a single adult with no kids is quite different than a living wage for an adult with 2 kids. So how many kids should be calculated in? Aren't we saying that if a person has greater than what ever number of kids we allow for, aren't we condemning them to being forced to live at an unlivable wage? We could define it to take into account something like number of kids, but then we have now officially begun discriminated on family status and will likely have a number of unintended consequences.
I'm not asking for an answer to this question, but instead a way to justify an answer. A method of proving instead of a specific proof.
The "living wage" bakes in a variety of assumptions. First of all is the assumption that people shouldn't work if they're not out to earn a full-time living from that work. This view is typical of posh Americans who went to nice universities, had snazzy internships, and are now happily working full time.
It gleefully ignores those who need to start lower, and get entry level experience. Indeed, it is actively hostile to entire classes of people working.
A retiree who wants a little extra money. A high school kid from some gang-afflicted neighborhood, one who isn't going to college, but could benefit some low-key job in a restaurant, one that would keep him out of trouble, and get him a start for when he graduates. An ex-convict who's just spent five years in prison under one of Biden's drug laws, who could use a steady job to show his next employer he's hard working and didn't steal from work. An immigrant with marginal English language skills. That one girl I knew in school whose entire family was afflicted by a serious case of lead poisoning.
Now there's sure to be some sort of whining to the effect that some of these people need to be supported directly, but suppose they are -- why would that deny them the right to work?
Of course the cynical part of the political apparatus has absolutely no use for these people, since they don't vote, they don't campaign, they compete with the labor unions, and they're not always interested in sitting around and doing nothing on the government dime. They're useless in the revolution.
Oh, and of course the other thing! is that it helps draw attention away from the other big problem: a broken housing policy that has produced sky-high rents in so many major cities. Why fix that problem when you can make a new set of problems instead? One is hard work, and the other earns you praise as compassionate.
What you're suggesting is to set those people in a race to the bottom along with the high school kid and retiree looking for "a little extra money". The point of setting a living wage is to set a bare minimum standard for employment.
You'd also find that the same politicians pushing a for a minimum wage are the ones trying to address broken housing policies, but you'd have to do research instead of just complaining.
Yes you have correctly detected that.
It quite simply doesn't, and if you truly believe it does I'd genuinely love to understand why you think that.
Nearly 75% of all Uber drivers in CA drive <25 hours per week. More than 40% of all trips in CA are driven by those drivers.
It's great that the HN crowd is primarily privileged from an income point of view, but I find it hard to fathom that people lose sight of the fact that not everyone is this fortunate, and those less fortunate also deserve to live a life without fear of getting sick.
It does feel wrong to deny people the possibility of seeing a doctor.
It does feel wrong that some people can't afford basic necessities.
Why do you insist on drawing a line around people who have found employment and saying that they deserve these things, but if they don't have employment they deserve a second, lesser system?
If people don't have healthcare and you think they should - provide healthcare, don't try to make someone else do so.
If people don't have money and you think they should - give them money, don't require others to pay more to those people who can get a job.
Maybe tying benefits to employment and subsistence levels of cash to employment are a bad way to solve the problems you claim to care about.
In context of the system that Uber drivers are living in right now, Prop22 is a step in the wrong direction: it gives affirmation to companies that actively deprives gig workers of the rights we talk about above.
Of course it'd be better to solve this problem at a higher level, but I'm happy to argue against proponents of steps in the wrong direction (e.g. Prop22).
I feel that prop 22 is often incorrectly characterized as either an attempt at maintaining the status quo or a step backwards, but it's neither.
It's easy to say "well I support everyone making more money", but that is an idealistic position that ignores the basic fact that there's a limited amount of money that needs to be distributed among a lot of people. If you were in charge, you might be of the opinion that only some stakeholders should get that money and others get nothing in order to allow at least some people to meet some arbitrary minimum threshold (the "no" in prop 22), or you could choose to distribute evenly across all existing stakeholder even if it doesn't meet the threshold for anyone (the "yes").
I don't think there's necessarily a right/wrong stance here; they're just different philosophies, and it makes sense to then vote on which people prefer. The people voted, and I imagine they did so with understanding of the propositions.
I think it's dangerous to insinuate that people can easily be manipulated to vote one way or another. If that were indeed the case, then what exactly is the merit of a democracy over a dictatorship? I'd rather believe that people do indeed take their civic responsibility seriously and vote in an informed manner.
https://www.reddit.com/r/uberdrivers/comments/i9awkm/my_fell...
Sure, reddit comments are anecdotes, but have you asked Uber drivers what they want? Do you think it's fair to deprive someone the right to work?
(I drive for Uber part time and I am happy being an IC. I do not want to be an employee. I drive for Uber because of the flexibility).
If I could drive 25 hours per week and get a better-than-ramen wage plus full health benefits then sigh me up. I’m sure there are millions like me.
Also please provide sources if you make such claims :)
I think a lot of those people wouldn't have jobs otherwise, is something better than nothing?
Also it's not just the poor, I've had many friends use uber as a stop gap between jobs. One of my drivers had a masters in Finance - I don't see anything wrong with gig work as long as both sides know what they are signing up for.
That initial condition (your education is not in demand) definitely represents a tough position, but it's not clear that it's ride-sharing's "fault" in any way. Instead, it seems to me like ride-sharing is providing them with a better alternative than whatever their next-best alternative is; in other words, it's helping them not harming them.
In most (maybe all) markets, there is not enough consumer demand at the prices that would be required to support a living wage for everyone for whom flexible ride-share driving is the most lucrative work readily available. Now, iff that's true, what should the legislature do? Prevent that work from being done at all? Ration the supply (medallions or companies refusing to let drivers choose when/if to work)? The people said no, including a lot of current ride-share drivers.
e.g. it is probably the case that loading garbage onto a truck doesn't require more skill/specialization than driving a car for hire
However, the overwhelmingly vast amount of people prefer to do the job that they can do while sitting down, in an air-conditioned vehicle, vs. the one they have to do surrounded by stinking detritus, outside in all weathers.
Based on my own prejudices, driving a car for hire sits in a relative sweet-spot of low skill, low physical demand, low discomfort. I agree there are undoubtedly personal safety factors that you're more exposed to than, say, flipping burgers at McDonalds.
Or more simply, why is California one of the wealthiest economies? Is it because a typical California resident is one of the wealthiest people (on certain scales I wouldn't be surprised if this were actually true)? Or are there several subsets of people who are very wealthy due to California's unusually successful industries with global reach (I can think of two obvious giants.)? And how large are these subsets? If we answer all of these questions, we should answer your original question or at least come close.
Edit: Changed "every California resident" to "a typical"
I don’t want want to go back for many reasons, but man I miss the mild temperatures.
You could argue against the dramatic period after the word "law," but why would you?
We all understand her meaning and the dashes emphasize her point without bold or italic letters.
1. https://writingessentialsbyellen.com/when-to-use-the-ellipsi...
I didn't understand the meaning until I clicked through to the article. In fact, trying to understand the weird punctuation is the only reason I took any interest in this story. I don't think dashes can work as emphasis for that part of a sentence.
And yes, here, the purpose was ellipsis: the original text was "Uber bought itself a law. Here's why that's dangerous for struggling drivers like me" and the submission was eliding portions of that.
Your link and criticism are entirely inapt. The title was not using the dash for emphasis, and even if it were, it would have been inappropriate. The examples in the article you link are of a dash making a break in the chain of thought more emphatic. Dashes are not used to emphasize enclosed text itself.