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Comment by gpmcadam | Hacker News Reader

Every Uber driver I speak to tells me how they prefer Uber to their previous job of a cabbie for a firm, they get flexibility, set their own hours and choose when to work

Now they’re all permanent employees of Uber will they lose this flexibility?

If some drivers weren’t happy with the status quo, why not take their skills and work for another firm?

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> Now they’re all permanent employees of Uber will they lose this flexibility?

Nothing in employment law mandates an inflexible work schedule. You can have perfect flexibility while being an employee.

In practice, employers have a business need for having employees with regular work hours.

No, lots of jurisdictions have predictive scheduling laws for employees.

Predictive scheduling is an obligation of the employer, not the employee.

> Every Uber driver I speak to tells me how they prefer Uber to their previous job

Of course they do - they're not going to get many five-star reviews if passengers leave the car feeling bad or complicit in exploitation.

What's a rating have to do with them complaining about the job? If someone gives them a low rating because of their thoughts on how they work, that person is a jerk.

You have obviously never driven rideshare or talked much with drivers when they're not working.

Passengers will give low ratings for all kinds of insane things, from the cost of the trip (which the driver has no control over), to not agreeing with some random opinion they had, to refusing to do something illegal and/or dangerous. It's nuts. The rideshare companies side with passengers in these cases by default, and there is usually no way to dispute them.

I've driven for Uber.

The fact they're a jerk for rating you low doesn't erase the low rating.

You may well have enough presence of mind that a driver can tell you a bunch of upsetting things and you can get out the car feeling upset and still rate it as a great ride. Alas, many people in the service industry seem to have learned not to expect such insight from their customers.

Do you really get the full story though? Are you biased? Compared to what? Do you believe that most drivers would choose flexibility over the other benefits?

You need to consider the full picture. If somebody gets hired to do my job for half my salary, no job security and worse working conditions and they say they're happy to do so, I'd still want the courts to decide whether those are acceptable terms.

Otherwise it's just a race to the bottom. See how many on HN seemed very happy that the USA made it harder for foreigners to get a work Visa in the USA because it undercut the local workforce. Unfettered capitalism will gladly let workers eat other for scraps.

i'm confident the only thing that needs changing now is uber paying more tax.

Flex time is a common concept in workplaces since antiquity.

Day work (you pick up jobs as available) is also a common concept since antiquity.

> If some drivers weren’t happy with the status quo, why not take their skills and work for another firm?

They did, and that firm also tried to act like they weren't employees.

Uber is in the wrong here. We've set laws on how to treat employees. Their attempt to say "but they aren't employees" is only an attempt to skirt these obligations. They don't have some moral, hypothetical, capitalistic high ground here. They are just one of many scummy employers that necessitate more employment laws.

This is astute. Employment law in England and Wales has a long history of regulation taking a while to catch up with 'new' ways of operating, but effectively covers everything at issue here.

Flexible hours? Absolutely fine. Flexible hours at the employer's sole discretion (zero-hour contracts)? Also absolutely fine; although there is some political pushback, it's fully legal.

Temporary employment, from one day upwards? Absolutely fine. If it consists of a series of 'temporary' contracts which in reality make up a multi-year contract, it might get deemed as permanent - but if it's genuinely temporary no problem at all.

Not actually employment, but some kind of dependent contractor status? We even have that, which was the case at issue here: some provisions (e.g. minimum wage laws) apply, but others (particularly unfair dismissal rights) don't.

We've also got caselaw covering piecework (work in my factory and get paid £1/widget), home working, working for a business you also own, and a bunch of other unusual cases.

What you can't reliably do is say 'I've found a magic form of contract wording that means that workers' rights don't apply to me'. People have tried to do that for hundreds of years and the loopholes get closed for the obvious reason.

This is probably a politically fuelled ruling. Boris Johnson wants to 'appeal to the masses' by making high-visibility rules like these, which sound good on paper but probably do more harm than good.

What's Boris has to do with this? It's the Supreme Court's decision, not Cabinet's. The same Supreme court who ruled that Boris Johnson broke the law by suspending the parliament.

I would argue judicial independence would only exist in a scenario if the judge is not human, but a rule-based bot.

The judges are definitely human, but their biases are very strongly those of the judicial system, not those of the executive. They're all well-off lawyers, and mostly privately educated, white, and male - so there is an 'establishment' tinge to their viewpoints (though individual judges vary widely). But as far as politics goes, the predominant view is that justice is (and judges are) important, not that the government should have any particular influence.

For a small example, there was a recent case where an MP of the governing party (Charlie Elphicke) was convicted of sexual assault. As part of the sentencing process, defendants can submit character references ("He's a hugely charitable, reliable, all round good person and this offence is entirely out of character", that kind of thing) and several Conservative MPs sent them on his behalf, but asked for them to be kept confidential (presumably to avoid political damage at the upcoming election).

The judiciary were having none of it. The trial judge released the letters anyway, and the Lord Chief Justice (head of the criminal courts) rebuked the MPs for trying to influence the decision of a judge.[0] And this for something (character references) which are pretty mundane.

They really do not like bowing to political whims.

[0]: https://www.doughtystreet.co.uk/news/character-references-cr...

Boris had nothing to do with this ruling. Why crowbar politics into this discussion?

That is a somewhat remarkable reading of recent events.

The UK government has been on something of an anti-judicial kick for the last year or so since the decision in Miller II/Cherry, the prorogations case (and a few other cases that haven't had as much press attention such as the Privacy International case on ouster clauses).

They've been talking about "reforming" or "scaling back" the Supreme Court—perhaps simply by renaming it—and talking about how judges have too much power, and are too "political", which somehow they propose to fix by replacing the independent appointment process with a more explicitly political one.

Also, if Johnson and the Conservatives wished to bring about the same result, they don't need a Supreme Court decision to do so—they have an 80 seat majority, a large chunk of which come from disaffected Labour voters in the so-called "Northern heartlands" who are perfectly happy to have employment rights improved. The Conservatives could, if they wished, quite easily pass primary legislation to specifically make gig economy or app-based workers have the status of workers under employment law - they'd probably get cross-party support for it.

See:

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2020/nov/15/supreme-court-pl...

https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/law/government-urged-to-rename-...

I agree, the UK is on a fast track to a judiciary corrupted by useless politicians like Johnson. But I have a little more faith than you in the system as it stands currently. There is even a chance of saving it with a little more push back against the behaviour of Johnson and his fellow Conservative party members.

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