Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch court rules
nltimes.nl
nltimes.nl
Honestly, it's pretty annoying that some people decide what others can do or can't do with their free time and their car.
The only one harming them is the tax collector. Taxes are the harm here; Uber is providing a means for some to avoid being harmed. It's just too bad that they can't help everyone else the same way.
More specifically, it's blind to the fact that the parent comment is about existing regulation which is being abused.
It's like arguing with someone saying "you can't drive at 100 km/h in a residential area" with "well I am a CAN person myself, and I don' think we should say CAN'T".
Most people wouldn’t think that a person earning a high hourly/daily rate working in some big enterprise, or a freelancer that takes home a respectable annual income is being exploited. But lots of people think that lower income gig contractors are definitely being exploited. I think the truth is actually a bit more complicated than that, but in any case, the law in most countries is that a person must not be allowed to enter into any arrangement that resembles employment if a set of minimum entitlements aren’t provided.
One way of looking at contracting arrangements is that they’re simply a way of bypassing these requirements. This never used to be a contentious issue, because contractors used to be primarily high income earners. But now that there’s a new class of lower income contractors, they must be protected, and the regulatory response has generally been to outlaw elements of contracting agreements in general.
A more sensible approach, if you wanted to achieve this outcome, would be to apply these regulations only to contractors that bill below a particular rate. But that would require making legislative concessions for high income earners, and nobody cares about doing that. I’ve been a contractor for years, and I can guarantee you that nobody is being exploited when I bill some huge bank an especially high hourly rate for months on end, but anti-contractor regulations routinely interfere with my ability to do so.
Who looks after you then? Hospitals paid for by taxation? Or are you just left on the street to die?
I can't fathom why so many people on this thread think it's a good thing for workers to depend on their employer for essentials like healthcare.
Choice is real only when you have options. Here, the option of having a fixed-income, fixed-time taxi driver job will get out-competed in the long term because it is more expensive, so the other option will be to have no job. Not paying into social security and pension funds saves a lot of money! It may even seem beneficial to the driver in the short term. But it offloads the costs further down the line to society or the driver personally (when reaching pension age or getting sick).
Maybe that type of innovation is simply not good for society and better avoided.
Just because you can pick your own hours/work schedule, that doesn’t make you an independent contractor. At least it’s not determinative in the US under federal law nor any state that I am aware, but maybe that is the Dutch law and the court just got it wrong here
When I was freelancing, clients could not tell me at what time I had to be in the office, when I could live, or on which days I had to go, to avoid me being considered an employee.
To determine if they are contractors we look for ways the user/driver relationship is different from other businesses using the employee model.
If no other businesses allow employees to set their number of hours with such flexibility then that is evidence the relationship doesn't fall under the employee model.
This need not be all or nothing but it is (obviously) a factor.
Under Dutch law, to be classified as an independent contractor you also need to be able to set your own prices and have a "significant" (the law is fairly specific but it is too long for a HN comment) say in exactly how you provide your services. The court ruled that Uber drivers do not meet this bar and are therefore not independent contractors. TBH, the "ZZP" construction used has always been a fairly transparent attempt by Uber and the other gig companies to evade labor regulations for their own profits and I'm glad that the court has issued a clear statement about it.
https://www.tax-consultants-international.com/read/Changes_D...
Are some of these drivers not working for other companies also? In that case they really are freelancers/entrepreneurs not employees...I think the decision will be appealed.
That's a pretty bad test on it's own. Plenty of people working in restaurants work for multiple companies, they're still employees.
And do they cook one food order at a restaurant they work for, then 15 minutes later walk across the street and cook for a competing restaurant for 30 minutes, and then immediately walk back across the street and cook a food order for the other restaurant? No, of course that's not normal.
This will ultimately accelerate the ability of the strongest companies to destroy their competition and potential competition. If Uber doesn't bleed to death financially first, that will be Uber due to their global scale.
Uber may not realize it because they're stupid, but this bolsters survival of the strongest in the segment. They can easily kill off competition using this by eating the labor supply. Someone that would have previously worked for multiple companies - trivially flipping between services as it was most ideal for the driver to grab a fare - will no longer be available for multiple companies at the same time. They'll now largely hold a normal job and will not want to work for multiple companies, pulling two shifts per day. Sure, there may be exceptions of drivers that want to pull a weekend job with another service or work two jobs per day, but exceptions is all they'll be. This will narrow the market winners dramatically and quickly.
Monopolize the market, consume the labor supply, raise passenger fees, lean in to killing off the competition. It's super simple.
If I were Uber I'd abuse the stock market for funding to pay artificially high wages to the labor supply (get all the best drivers), and I'd hire more drivers than I absolutely need (deprive the competition), and begin this killing process immediately. I'd go one market to the next, using Uber's market cap as the funding base to monopolize each market. This type of ruling makes labor supply a competitive advantage to whichever company can acquire the most and best drivers. A global ride hailing app will be advantaged over the smaller local/regional competition accordingly.
The next ride hailing app in the market that wants to get started will find no available labor supply to compete with. Welcome to competition stagnation.
And of course then the moronic regulators will come back around, having created a monster, and they'll have to pursue anti-trust (or the equivalent) against the market winner they helped to cause.
As a former Lyft/uber driver this is absolutely correct. It gets even hairier: suppose you are sitting on both apps (or even more) waiting for a ride. Do you get to double-bill two companies for minimum wage hours?
I think what is going happen is if Uber and Lyft are forced to recategorize as employees, they get to do something like "compel drivers to wear a uniform", so like a polo with the brand on it, and prohibit wearing of competitors logo. Or prohibit displaying competitor logo on the car (displaying is a legal requirement in many jurisdictions). In the end the take-home for the driver is going to be worse.
I'm quite frankly surprised that Uber didn't preempt the legislation by creating a class of driver that is an employee, putting these sorts of onerous restrictions on the driver, plus other ones like "you must start and end at central processing center, drive an uber-owned car", "requiring shifts on ADA-compliant vehicles", "being required to comply with an uber-generated shift schedule", in exchange for bare minimum wage and benefits.
IMO this is a no-brainer, the answer is yes, double-bill. The same applies if you get two remote jobs, you bill both.
That's definitely illegal.
Maybe fraud and breach of contract if, in the full-time contract, it says "you affirm you do not have another full-time job that will interfere with this job".
Additionally, it's a pretty obvious opening to a lawsuit in at least most jurisdictions for breach of fiduciary duty (under the duty of loyalty -- Google this + your own jurisdiction for more details on what it covers where you are) and breach of contract.
Now, the employer probably won't sue or prosecute in most circumstances, so you may get away with it. But that's some high-stakes roulette, especially since you're not going to get UI if you get fired for gross misconduct and you're not going to get a good recommendation.
Again, I don't do it because I can't handle the stress of two jobs, but I don't begrudge those who can
Here in the UK Uber drivers have Uber stickers on their cars. I rarely get picked up by a driver without them.
What imaginary other company are they working for that would tolerate that?
It might not be the case in America, but over here it certainly seems most drivers are working for one company.
I'm not at all sure they can. You haven't really explained here why Uber is apparently capable of hiring all drivers and starving the labor pool, yet Applebees can't use the same strategy for cooks, or Amazon the same strategy for warehouse workers or software engineers.
Calling them "moronic regulators" without explaining why the same model that works in other markets can't work in this one isn't all that compelling.
Right now, I would be willing to bet that a large majority of Lyft drivers also drive for Uber. Uber is so much larger that there is no real alternative. If the law makes it so that drivers can choose only one rideshare app, they will all choose Uber because its bigger.
The idea that Uber would pay drivers so much to have extra drivers just sitting around doing nothing is absurd. The idea that there would be no suitable drivers left to other firms to hire is absurd.
If any of this claim made sence, then this would have happened 50 years ago, we've had drivers around for a while.
Yet it does not happen in haulage where drivers are actual professionals, it does not happen for solicitors where labour supply is way more constrained. What do you have to backup your claim?
This _has_ been the case in major cities around the world before Uber took over. NYC has the yellow cab monopoly. London had the black cab monopoly. These companies grew large enough to buy up all available labor (this was made easier by the medallion system).
Uber is no different. It _already_ has a dominant market position. Other rideshare companies _already_ share their drivers. The amount of drivers who drive for Lyft only is vanishingly small. If you force all those drivers to choose, they will choose Uber and Lyft will die.
Exactly, legislative monopoly - they didn't run out of people with cars willing to drive. You are talking about labour shortage, that's a completely different argument
It's a number of companies, and a huge number of individual operators, competing with dozens of private hire companies.
So I don't think painting "London's black cabs" as a monopoly holds water.
What does "lean in to killing off the competition" mean? I don't understand what you mean by lean in.
The Netherlands Trade Union Confederation (FNV) has around 1 million members, is both a trade union federation and a trade union and launched the lawsuit.
The FNV's pleading notes for this lawsuit can be found here: https://www.fnv.nl/getattachment/Nieuwsbericht/Algemeen-nieu...
The fact sheet is here:
https://www.fnv.nl/getattachment/Nieuwsbericht/Algemeen-nieu...
Court statement:
https://www.rechtspraak.nl/Organisatie-en-contact/Organisati...
The court veredict:
https://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/inziendocument?id=ECLI:NL:...
( you can access the original PDF from the drop down menu on the right or the link below)
https://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/InzienDocument/GetPdf?ecli...
Taxi drivers are not knowledge workers, or artists and clearly not entrepreneurs.
They are easily replaceable "cogs in the machine", like many non-specialised factory workers, office clerks, retail employees and so on.
There's a reason why humanity introduced protections for vulnerable workers in almost every society.
> They are easily replaceable "cogs in the machine", like many non-specialised factory workers, office clerks, retail employees and so on.
> There's a reason why humanity introduced protections for vulnerable workers in almost every society.
I appreciate the point you're making, but I also think you are grossly undervaluing the specialisation of cab drivers.
In the UK, the Knowledge [1] is a notoriously arduous exam which certainly makes cab drivers anything but "replaceable 'cogs in the machine'".
In fact, I think the fact that people view these jobs as being replaceable is what leads to their deterioration. Someone who has a GPS but no innate and learned knowledge of the terrain does not provide a service comparable to someone who has a thorough understanding of the domain. And the more people rely on the former, the more they think that that's all there is to it, and so it becomes a race to the bottom of sorts.
I'm not sure if I'm articulating this fully, but basically: jobs such as cab driving require specialisation and skill to be done well, but are often replaced by those without that skill doing freelance driving, which leads to a deterioration of expected service, and people ultimately thinking that the workers are all interchangeable.
[1] https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/taxis-and-private-hire/licensing...
>In fact, I think the fact that people view these jobs as being replaceable is what leads to their deterioration.
Uber and the online routing within the app made this obsolete. The jobs that gig economy jobs may be skilled, but these gigs now aren't. The platform took the skill away from the job. The workers are just drones now.
What extra services does a black cab driver provide over an Uber driver in London?
- Better knowledge of traffic patterns?
- Ability to recommend places, give you local knowledge
Aside from solving the trust/scam problem, that's one of the reason why people like Uber - it made 'car as a service' affordable. Without Uber, I might have bought a car, because a factor of 2 completely changes the picture.
Only applies in London.
Of course they're entrepreneurs. They have to own or finance a car. They choose when and where to work and for what company to drive for. They can also work for black car in addition to ride share and can even manage private rides. They have some ability to accept or reject fares.
> There's a reason why humanity introduced protections for vulnerable workers in almost every society.
No one is restricting "knowledge workers" from being able to strike a contract. Why can't we afford the same dignity and respect to "cogs in the machine"? You ever thing these "protections" that "humanity" places on "cogs" can end up hurting them? Like how immigrant taxi drivers in NYC were encouraged to rack up 100k debt to buy medallions
That's such a broad definition of entrepreneur that includes 99% of freelancers and self-employed.
> No one is restricting "knowledge workers" from being able to strike a contract.
The job market does, unfortunately.
When we were taught business in school, it was about setting the price, hiring staff, choosing a target market. You know, thigs that make a business a business.
I am willing to bet my house that there isn't a single business or economics testbook where maintaining a car is even a consideration.
You have a very narrow understanding of business and entrepreneurship. Not all businesses have employees. Every business book will tell you almost all businesses are price takers, not price setters. You can't wave a wand and say "I want to charge X".
The target market could be Uber, Lyft, black car, limo or personal. Maintaining equipment and accounting for depreciation is very important
Of course you can! Whether anyone pays is another matter.
"The target market could be Uber"
1 company is a customer, not a market. You are perverting the term to the point where it looses all meaning. It's like Agile - everything is agile now.
"Maintaining equipment and accounting for depreciation is very important"
So is a regular exercise routine, but neither of them defines a business. Are half the country are 'entrepreneurs' now because they have to drive kids to school? This is absurd!
You don't like my criteria, fine, but the only criteria you put forward aren't even relevant to lawyers, accountant and hundreds of other kinds of Real businesses that do have employees, set the price, run their marketing, etc.
Looking back, the only reason employers started getting involved in Healthcare was because the 1942 Stabilization Act restricted them from raising wages and they had to come up with a more creative way of competing for talent.
Now the ACA forces companies to privide insurance by law. Under Biden's Covid plan they're now going to be the execution arm for vaccine mandates. It's crazy to think that to start a business you need to almost immediately be prepared to be a federal government franchisee.
If you want to encourage business, then remove barriers. Governments should be taking care of healthcare, not businesses.
Businesses should be focused on the core work they do: Running their business. Not on providing health care.
(Same goes, really, for childcare, transportation, and similar benefits that large employers sometimes offer, often because these things are not effectively provided by the government.)
[1] - https://www.ncsl.org/research/health/employer-and-individual...
Not at all, look up the history of health insurance in America, companies providing it was not by design, it was in fact done to get around government laws on wage caps during the great depression.
Now days the system is entrenched, there are a large # of corrupt players who leech of the healthcare ecosystem in America, and they pay good $ to lobbyists and PR firms to keep things that way.
Right now 1/3rd of health care costs go to working out billing. That type of insane inefficiency would not be tolerated in a true capitalist marketplace. Imagine if Visa charged 33% commission on every sale and then had a law passed saying all purchases had to be done with a Visa card! That'd be an insane drag on the economy, America's GDP would plummet.
But we literally accept that exact scenario with health care costs. (Except for cosmetic procedures, which have a competitive market that has driven technology forward and prices down!)
I said it was the most efficient way to enforce the laws.
As a ZZP you're meant to provide for your own pension, sick leave, disability insurance. No way what Uber pays is going to cover that.
This is why they're doing it of course, to avoid having to provide those things. But those are statutory rights in the Netherlands. And for good reason, otherwise if someone becomes disabled it ends up on the state's plate. We don't leave people by the side of the road if we can help it.
This assumes the meaning of freelancers is being able to join and leave an employer when you want, and not being able to fix your own prices and refuse gigs like others are saying. I think you should be able to open a freelance provider with restrictions, as Uber is doing. I see no reason to outlaw that.
What country is that? US, the only country that its politicians actively lobbies against universal healthcare, healthcare that is successfully implemented in every! f*ing! other! Western country?!! (and quite a few other countries that are not Western, such as my full of corruption Eastern Europe one)
You see it that way, but the Dutch law doesn't. If the freelancer has no real choice and cannot dictate his/her own terms they are not a freelancer but an employee without the benefits of an employee. Social programs should be displayed these days on your paycheck if you are an employee. Not every (administration) company is doing it properly though.
Forcing freelancers to work more hours for less than a sustainable minimum pay solves nothing as the minimum wage is calculated on a full workweek.
I'm sure Uber is allowed to offer freelance work, but not with the current way of doing business. As soon as they let the freelancer dictate the pay (or at least properly negotiate) it looks they will be fine.
So you might pay a 10% social security tax, and the employer might be paying an additional 15% that doesn't appear on your payslip.
That's what Amazon, etc. are talking about when they say they pay a load of employment taxes.
That's also why a lot of countries are eying the gig economy with skepticism, it's actually often just a massive tax dodge for the company to not pay employment taxes.
Then, ah... who's driving the Ubers in the Netherlands and why? Is there some credible evidence of coercion at hand?
Whatever the reason, good on the Dutch and the union not letting them trample on their values by these "honorable" folks and their values, here is the hall of shame: Wednesday February 22: Cocaine and groping. Thursday February 23: Investor betrayal and accusations of stolen technology.
Fowler, a former engineer at the company, alleged in a blog post that she was sexually harassed at Uber and experienced gender bias during her time at the company. She claimed that one manager propositioned her and asked for sex, but her complaints to HR were dismissed because the manager was a high performer. She said Uber continued to ignore her complaints to HR, and then her manager threatened to fire her for reporting things to HR.
Isolated incident? Not so Employees did cocaine during a company retreat and a manager had to be fired after groping multiple women, according to the report. Former employees said they'd notified Uber's leadership, including Kalanick and CTO Thuan Pham, of the workplace harassment.
Google, another Uber investor(!!!!), sued the company for intellectual property theft.
Uber's SVP of engineering stepped down over sexual-harassment allegations at his former job at Google.Singhal went through the standard background checks before his employment at Uber and that the sexual-harassment allegations during Singhal's time at Google never came up.
The New York Times revealed that Uber has been secretively deceiving authorities for years with a tool called 'Greyball'
Escort karaoke bar visit in Seoul, After the evening, a female Uber employee told HR that the trip made her uncomfortable.
Uber delays the investigation into workplace harrasment after information pours in from "hundreds" of its employees
Apple CEO had threatened to yank Uber from the App Store if it continued to violate the App Store's terms and conditions. As an act of fraud prevention, Uber had affixed a small piece of code that could tell if someone was using the same phone over and over again and then wiping it to take advantage of promo codes
Waymo accuses Uber of creating a shell company to bring on a former Google engineer.
Disruptive business practices, eh?
All this stuff you're talking about is ancient news from like 4 years ago. Since then, the entire C-suite left, including Kalanick and Thuan (Singhal spent virtually no time at Uber), not to mention crazy high attrition rates at all levels, and several rounds of layoffs to top it all off.
Since then, greyball and its ilk got shutdown, the CSO got fired for hiding a leak, HR ramped up from its comically understaffed numbers, and Uber even "fired" a board member for making a sexist joke.
The only high profile scandal under new management that I recall was the Tempe SDV death, and that division got sold off to Aurora...
So you are saying the new c level are something like angels and saints? https://lawstreetmedia.com/tech/uber-officers-and-board-memb...
If I wanted to make claims about saintness, I wouldn't bring up Tempe, I would've brought up the stuff about the CLO leading equality efforts (him being a black person), or the stuff about Afghanistan relief donation matching and other similar initiatives. But like said, I'm not interested in playing good-guy-bad-guy games, and I'm perfectly content w/ characterizing Uber as a company seeking profits just like Microsoft, Google or FB or whoever else is getting a stink eye these days.
You're free to be cynical, but doing so by cherrypicking only stuff that supports "your" side is kinda intellectually dishonest. </two-cents>
Too many people think that the only people that drive for Uber are people that need it for Full Time employment.
There are lots of people that use it for extra income, that is who these types of laws hurt the most
I've hang out with my fair share of taxi drivers around the world (mainly Europe and South America) but never once heard of them being forbidden of not accepting customers, and heard plenty of stories when someone really fucked up tried to hail them but they declined. It doesn't mean it's not forbidden, but hard to reconcile my understanding.
What places are you specifically thinking about where taxi drivers are not free to chose their customer?
Human Transportation Act §22 Duty to Transport.
For example in my part of the UK, only designated taxis can pick up ride hailers on the street, sort of like black cabs in London.
Private firms who use their own fleet of cars can only offer pre-booked services, e.g. pre booked airport runs.
Uber and co. shook this up a bit by offering a grey area, where the taxi ride isn't exactly hailed on the street (instead through the app) and is sort of "pre-booked" when you request it as the driver has to accept the job.
Yeah, that makes sense, that's the only thing I've seen around the world as well. But can these designated taxis reject customers at will? That was my question.
UK:
"Cabbies can be penalised for refusing passengers" https://www.lta.gov.sg/content/ltagov/en/newsroom/2019/8/3/c...
Canada - Montreal:
https://ville.montreal.qc.ca/pls/portal/docs/page/bur_taxi_f...
"Le titulaire d'un permis de chauffeur de taxi ne peut refuser d'effectuer une course"
France:
"Normalement, un taxi n'a pas le droit de refuser une course sauf si vous êtes à 50 mètres d'une borne de taxi et qu'un taxi attend à cette borne"
https://www.europe1.fr/societe/taxi-ce-qui-est-legal-et-ce-q....
and so on...
Most places have lots of rules forbidding you from working under certain conditions or doing a job any way you want to do it.
I mean, that's some niche requirements there, I would categorise it as serfdom.
I am onboard in principle - I want try all the psychedelics, fly a plane without a licence and experiment with explosives for education purposes, but as R v Copeland shows, the law can't cater to everyone - tradeoffs have to be made.
You can certainly take that approach if you want, though. As an independent driver you own all the capital equipment in this business (your car) and you can stop working for Uber at any point without penalty and start offering rides under your own brand, on your own terms. However, you'll find that you still need to meet certain standards as to price and reliability if you want people to choose you over calling an Uber. Working for yourself doesn't mean you get to do whatever you feel like all the time without any commitments.
Plenty of old fashioned taxi companies that operate via a phone number or text messages. You don't need Uber if you want to be a freelancer. And as a court ruled, you're not actually a freelancer if you work for Uber.
Now what would be nice is if someone would start a service, say a mobile-web-first service, that a bunch of independent cab drivers could sign up for. Then that service would act as a dispatcher (taking a cut of the fare), and send a dispatch message to whichever independent cab driver is closest by. Of course that sounds a lot like what Uber is doing. Which then goes back to, are these drivers independent, or are they working for that dispatch service?
To make it truly independent, they would need to have more than one dispatch service that they could work at the same time (say both Uber and Lyft). And have a protocol so that dispatches from both services don't step on each other. Plus the ability for a customer to flag them down at random. Now they really are a self-employed contractor using these services as customer discovery / dispatch services.
That's why different countries have various guidelines, e.g. if you economically depend on 1 contrahent (you fill in one invoice a month to the same one company), you are not self-employed, if you can't organize your own work however you like you are not self-employed, and so on.
So in general if you are driving for one company and 75% revenue comes from them, you are really not a freelancer.
This was and to a degree still is a big problem in e.g. Poland, where if you are unskilled you can be compelled to accept so called "trash contracts" which deny you any employee rights, but you are cheaper to the employer who exploits you.
It might be foreign to Americans who in general have extremely poor worker protection laws (even worse than the trash contracts I mentioned), but in many other countries it doesn't really work like that.
If this was possible then every company would say:
"We don't want to have to bother to pay your vacation days, sick leave(for as long as you are sick), maternity/paternity leave(up to 12 months in most European countries), or to have to give you a permanent contract with limited termination grounds, so 'choose' to become Freelancer that works 40 hours a week for us or we will fire you".
It's true there are some people who like to work as you describe, I know some myself, but experienced software developers are a outlier case who are in an extremely fortunate position, not something the law should be optimised for at the expense of the majority.
But that would increase government expenses because many more people would become eligible for the benefits. Using businesses as a proxy lets society implicitly restrict the quantity and quality of those benefits to certain people.
How does this make sence - are we meant to move you on government payroll for the 1 week you have the flu and can't work? Should the government pay for your annual leave?
Additionally, this idea will incentivise employers to destroy human capital - like an employer could drive their employees to burnout and then discard them because they bear no consequences.
This is already happening to a large extent thanks to gig economy- Uk employers have cut their investments in staff training by 2.4 billion since 2011.
You should have enough savings set aside that going without a paycheck for at least a week or two won't put you in dire straits—the official recommendation is actually several months. Anyone who is self-employed is already managing their own (unpaid) vacation time and medical leave. It is the expectation that income is guaranteed even when you aren't working—that you can safely live paycheck-to-paycheck without planning for the future—which is unreasonable.
UBI doesn't really count as "planning for the future" unless it's somehow contractually guaranteed for life and not subject to being curtailed as a result of shifting politics. A social program instituted with the passing of a bill can be limited or revoked in the same way at any time. If the goal is to ensure a predictable income stream then a fully-funded, non-revocable trust or annuity for the benefit of a specific person is a much more stable option.
> … like an employer could drive their employees to burnout and then discard them because they bear no consequences.
Just assume that an employer will take whatever an employee is willing to give regardless. It's the employees' responsibility to push back and manage their own work-life balance. It would be unreasonable (as in: an obvious conflict-of-interest) to expect employers to prioritize employees' welfare over their own.
We have tried 'maximum capitalism' experiment in the 1800's: it gave us children in coal mines working 10 hours a day and dying of blacklung. It gave us people in workhouses losing their hands because the steam press malfunctioned and then starving to death because they have no way to support themselves.
Do you want goid old days back, or do you have good reason to believe it will be different this time?
you know the reason these things are payed for by bussiness right?
most social welfare programs are created after world war 2, because the alternative was the workers simply seizing the wealth of their former bosses by force.
OP seems to greatly understimate how close most countries in europe came to a mass revolt of civil war after world war 1 and world war 2. (1848 revolutions are also an important time in history for civil rights).
the dutch for instance, have a constitution thanks to the threat of revolution in 1848. The alternative was the threat of revolution and the violent end of the monarchy.
The same is basically true for labour rights. In most european countries these got implemented after world war 1 and during the great depression, a time in which a lot of people got destitute and had acces to weaponry.(World war 1 also left a massive social trauma in many nations, leading to revolutions because of its effects on society).
E.g. I'm in the UK. I've been a contractor with multiple contracts as well as with a single employer both in situations where they are obviously acting as an employer, and in situations where they were genuinely not.
Here there's specific legislation to handle this now - "IR35", which ensures that if your contract is equivalent to employment you'll be taxed accordingly, with an "umbrella company" acting as an employer on behalf of the company that you're contracting with if that is the case to prevent there from being a tax advantage from pretending to be freelance if you're in effect an employee. It doesn't stop you from doing it - it just takes away the tax advantage and creates some bureaucratic hurdles.
But it's easy to avoid as long as you're not trying to avoid taxes, by setting terms that ensures it doesn't match the criteria. Employers are often keen to do this, and it gives you extra negotiating power.
E.g. when I was doing this, key points involved the fact I had a small marketing budget to bring in additional work, I didn't usually work out of their office, I controlled my own hours, I determined how to carry out the work, I negotiated my day rate, the contract had a defined end-date (we could renew, but there are pitfalls there), and so on. Another strong sign you're genuinely not an employee is a right to substitution (e.g. if you can provide someone else to do the work, when you're not available and that right is genuine). UK tax authorities (HMRC) has a checklist as to what they consider "deemed employment" and or that falls under IR35 (it's not an absolute set of criteria, but basically the more you look like a business, the more likely you are to be considered one).
So for high earners like software consultants with an actual reasonable power balance vs. the other side, this is rarely a problem. It cost me a tiny proportion of my revenues to make sure that I met more than enough criteria to be able to do as I pleased.
But most of the people these regulations are there for are in a substantially weaker position. If you're a low enough earner to not be in a position to work around this, then you're not likely to have the power to genuinely negotiate either.
It's unavoidable, since different countries have different worker protection systems. For instance, some of these countries have to pick up the tab when employers cheat their way out of paying their dues.
The current situation allows Uber to play its employees against the state (as they're very transparently trying to do in the referenced article with their remark that their employees (because that what they are) would prefer to be self employed, which is nonsense only when compared with the situation where Uber would not employ them at all. The vast bulk of the employees really would like steady employment.
So the tax dodge should stop but not through fixing the tax loophoes, but simply by recognizing that which is already the fact on the ground: that these people are employees in all but name. Note that this is Europe where - to many American companies' surprise and detriment - it is not only the letter of the law that matters but also the intent of the law, in this case the intent of labor law here is to ensure our social contract continues to function. Hacking your way around that like you can do in the United States - where it is the letter of the law that matters far more than the intent - is going to be met with significant pushback from the courts.
But I don't drive a taxi, I do computer stuff. If you want to legitimately be independent in NL you can. I have a few friends in the construction industy(plumbers, carpenters, electricians, etc) who are ZZP'ers.
There are a few options open to people who legitimately want to be independent in their work, and this has absolutely nothing to do with this ruling. Or about Uber.
Uber is lying when it says that 90% of Dutch Uber drivers want to remain independent. There have been protests of Uber drivers wanting exactly this kind of ruling from the courts. And two major political parties (Groenlinks and PvDA) have been fighting for this. Uber is full of shit and they know it.
Here is a better article on the ruling. https://www.ad.nl/werk/rechter-uber-moet-chauffeurs-in-diens...
BV starts to make sense from about 100K turnover because you gain some tax advantages, it also makes working for larger entities easier and it allows you to charge a higher rate and to be in an easier position to work with subcontractors. It all depends on what you want, there are plenty of ZZP'ers in software development on the low end, but most of the high end will be through BV's.
As far as I know, and I am happy to be corrected by somebody more knowledgeable, the famous Dutch ZZP'ers are tolerated. There is in the Dutch Law not a clarification of their legal and tax position:
So there's nothing to "tolerate" but money. ;)
Both have more or less the same tax and structural advantage (like limited liability, a far easier time to get acknowledged by social security, etc)
The main difference is capital requirements and more formality for the AG. For example: The law requires yearly external audits for an AG, while that's not necessarily the case for a GmbH.
Does Holland also make such a difference, or is BV the only such corporate form?
Note: Differences listed apply for Switzerland. It could be different in Germany.
Private limited company (BV or besloten vennootschap)
or
Public limited company (NV or naamloze vennootschap)
The BV is like a Ltd in the Anglo Saxon world and the NV is your company with equity defined by shares/stocks.
you can also have:
Cooperative (coöperatie)
Association (vereniging)
Foundation (stichting)
Nice overview(s) for Germany and most other countries with comparisons where appropriate.
Regarding the AG in Germany and required regular external auditing, in my university course where I learned about the charasteristics of the most common German legal entities [0], there was no such requirement listed or talked about, maybe that's only for Switzerland?
The GmbH on the other hand requires a minimum capital of 25.000€ and is expensive to form (from the course mentioned above >1.000€ in fees for notarizations etc.) which is one reason why the "UG (haftungsbeschränkt)" (essentially "baby's first GmbH") was established a while ago. A UG only has to have a minimum of 1€ in starting capital but has to
> "enlarge its capital by at least 25% of its annual net profit (with some adjustments), until the general minimum of €25,000 is reached (at which point the company may change its name for the more prestigious GmbH)."
Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrepreneurial_company_(Germa... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesellschaft_mit_beschr%C3%A4n...
[0]: as part of the subject "Finanzwirtschaft"/"Managerial finance?"
Forgot to insert the following link after the above sentence and can't edit anymore:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_legal_entity_types_by_...
Also your threshold of 100K does not align with my accountant's, who said it was at least 200K to justify the added overhead.
- You work for yourself so you get 100% of the risk
- You have no benefits
- If you are sick you get no pay, unless you make a very expensive work sickness/income insurance
the Dutch tax office, judges that they do not want you to be in a "too advantageous fiscal position" ...( Not making this up...these are their own words) so, forces you to pay yourself a minimum yearly salary that is updated every year so they can tax you. It is currently at 47,000 EUR per year I believe...and is independently of you making money or not...
There is a fundamental principle here, and that is the tax office considering that, unlike a permanent employee who cannot be fired and has almost no liability, an entrepreneur, despite taking all the risk and having non of the benefits, is judged that it should be forced into the same tax position. Where is the upside then?
This coming from the same tax office, that has enabled some of the biggest tax dodgers in the planet:
"Netherlands earned €25 mil. from Google's tax avoidance"
https://nltimes.nl/2021/01/13/netherlands-earned-eu25-mil-go...
"Forget about the Gates Foundation. The world's biggest charity owns IKEA—and is devoted to interior design"
https://www.economist.com/business/2006/05/11/flat-pack-acco...
"Netherlands world's 4th biggest tax haven"
https://nltimes.nl/2021/03/09/netherlands-worlds-4th-biggest...
"The Netherlands is still one of the world's main tax havens, coming in fourth place on Tax Justice Network's biennial ranking of tax havens. Only the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands and Bermuda scored worse than the Netherlands when it came to tax avoidance."
Obviously this takes the company to provide those sorts of jobs. The problem for Uber is that they won't be able to —as easily— have slack staff, because they'll have to pay them minimum wage to wait for new fares.
Yes people laugh off drivers as a no skill job, but it's a craft. Shift work, passenger safety and so forth, they need to pass a test, sure that's a bit outdated in the time of online maps.
But I can not simply open a dentistry just because I feel so due to lifestyle choices.
Had that in Washington DC once, but magically the machine fixed itself when I said I had no cash and he'd have to get the police.
A lot of drivers still use unapproved card devices, though (TFL points out handheld terminals are explicitly not approved, yet I regularly have taxi drivers insist their fixed terminal isn't working, and to use a handheld one), which I'm taking means there's assorted tax fraud going on.
As a passenger I feel it's a significant qualitative difference if I have a driver who knows his way around town compared to one who obviously and fixatedly relies on the GPS.
The vaunted "knowledge" failed miserably as he pulled over to drop me off -- I looked up and saw we were just south of Tower Bridge. he clearly hadn't got a clue. I said "just take me to Southwark tube station". I know there's all sorts of one way systems but when he was heading to Bermondsey I just told him to let me out and got the tube (well tried to - Southwark was closed, so ended up at Waterloo and having to walk)
Uber just works because it's not based on a system from 1865.
Uber wants it both ways, and correctly, the courts have stopped them from doing so.
That's news for me.
Where I live, every single taxi driver has an app open for every uber-like company in the city, including Uber (there are at least four that I know of, most certainly more).
They just pick what they feel like at the moment.
How this is not freelancing I cannot fathom.
Jobs as trade work for cash went out the window around the middle of the previous century.
Sometimes work is physically hard, and the effect of that type of work usually doesn't show until you've done it for a longer time. So not only should you get money for the time and effort you spend, you should also get money for how hard the work was on your body. Pension and other benefits help with this.
Sure, if you're a programmer this might be true, but for most of physical jobs out in the world, the physicality of the job is literally tearing down peoples bodies one way or another.
> Also we already have government pensions
Yeah, so not "A job should trade work for cash and no more" but "A job should trade work for cash + pension" as pension is a social benefit.
> The economic effect of this is that workers have to wait years for some of their pay instead of getting it right now
No, the economic effect of this is that workers get paid for their work now, and the effect of that work in the future.
I have known plenty of young guys in the UK who went on these fly in fly out jobs on gas or oil platforms in Australia, as it's a relatively uncomplicated way to get a well paid job (the only good thing about it) due to easy access to Australia, being commonwealth etc. Some of them turned into literal cripples within 2-3 years, others half cripples requiring re education or placement in a less physically demanding job. It's not the same doing this once for a weekend and then classify it as "not so hard" and go out there, work in 100 deg heat or sub freezing temperatures every day, rain, wind etc. It grinds down a body slowly.
Dutch society (and most of western Europe) has made an explicit choice to create a social contract in which employees and employers are bound by the law of the government in question. and that law contains rules about employment.
mind you these rules exists because of the risk of the threat of violent uprisings in the 1850's. the revolutions of 1848 are a result of working in the way you just stated. it leads to massive unrest and instability.
There are many such social contracts, written, unwritten and I am proud that Europe has them and is keeping them.
Interestingly, having spent plenty of time in LATAM, many people consider themselves leftists, but it's very, very different, the social system is bad due to lack of money, or impractical allocation of funds, but the will and spirit is there.
Uber drivers I've talked to didn't join because they were desperate -- they joined to have more freedom and control.
no they where far worse. its unemployment numbers are low now. but it hasn't always been the case.
What is it in us that can’t let people have what they value, just because it is different than what we value?
Are the drivers you talk to actually friends of yours? Are they driving to make a living? Are they stuck driving due to poor child care choices? Are they on the clock and hesitant to dismiss the company they work for?
Have you asked them if they'd rather the company process the taxes? Do they have difficulty doing so? Have any of them found themselves in a hole because of the 'contractor' system?
I'll add that this isn't like a normal contract job: Uber needs drivers. Without drivers, they wouldn't have a business. And they need them constantly - not in the way that a firm needs temporary help to upgrade things.
But why would a better fix not be to require ZZP contractors to pay into government-matched/supported funds for healthcare, retirement, etc?
Many people really prefer to not be an employee. Why tether their health and old age to a big employer with a ball and chain?
The types of zzzp'ers I'm most familiar with are in construction and they are cheaper than traditional businesses. They're outcompeting traditional businesses because they don't have to pay retirement and insurance and all that.
It's been a topic for years here what to do about ZZP'ers because if something _does_ happen to one at work (ie an accident to their health or to the house they're working on it whatever) they typically don't have insurance which leads to big personal problems for them.
It's like a high risk high reward type of thing, but the issue is that they're also outcompeting traditional workers all over the place.
Otoh, if you were to require them to pay for stuff like insurance and retirement, the whole idea of being a zzp'er will cease to make any sense. You don't earn any higher any more, you will need to charge more so people have no reason to prefer your services over traditional ones.
Zzp'er just means that you work alone and have no personnel. Ie, similar to a freelancer basically.
Also sadly enough, often zzp'ers are less skilled than traditionally employed individuals. Not exactly sure why that is but might be related to how they were trained and a lack of institutional knowledge due to not working with an established workplace/having regular colleagues etc
If ZZP outcompetes more "socially responsible" options, it's a buggy system and should be fixed. Freedom as a freelancer should probably be the only/primary benefit of such a designation, not the ability to dodge responsibilities.
Thank you for the color!
The effect of this will be temporary 0 hour contract and you create exactly the same situation with less flexibility for the employee and a limit of three contracts of a year.
But, I would go out on "unprofitable times" (when my hourly pay was substantially less than minimum wage due to a lack of rides) and read books (that I would have read anyway). Doing this I made small amounts of money while doing a leisure activity.
I loved the ability to drive less than full time in exchange for less pay. I don't want to be "on the clock". If I am on the clock and I am not actively working, that is time theft. If I am driving Uber and I don't feel like taking that ride because I'm at a good point in the book I'm reading, I'm free to just sit there.
I liked that option.
Rather than require minimum hourly pay, I want to increase the minimum per mile pay and require Uber to pay the drivers for the time and miles spent driving to the riders.
But please no hourly pay.
- Driver 'clocks in' when they are in the app and ready to receive rides.
- They get paid as normal, however there is a guaranteed minimum which means that they will get paid the minimum wage.
- Driver can decline rides, but there is a % threshold at which point they can be performance managed if required (i.e. warnings for declining too many rides and then removed if required).
- Driver clocks out when they are no longer wanting to receive rides. 3 declines in a row or something similar automatically ends shift. Shift can also be ended due to low demand, unless the driver has signed up for a particular shift ahead of time.
That's not particularly great, and I'm sure some people will have builds/other suggestions, but Uber is a 76 billion dollar company, I'm sure they can come up with something better and a way of operating within labour laws.
That's a good point. If those 10x engineers can't figure out a way to make it legal and ethical, maybe it's not good.
When i'm in rural areas, there are often no taxis and one will show up an hour after you call, maybe. Without order liquidity, it is infeasible to maintain supply. Which company (or person) would stand ready to ride just in case an order came thru once every 4 or 5 hours?
The current market response to this is simply not supporting the market. The alternative is Uber where presumably the person is doing their yard work and jumps and does a ride if one happens to pop up. I cannot imagine Uber will sponsor idle wages in rural regions where you get an order or two a day.
The only solution here is if the ride is absurdly high, to the point where you break even with drivers in the nearest high-population city, which people also don't want since they'd be paying multiple hundreds of dollars for a ride. At that point, people will just get a car.
The issue with uber is that it's compensating for a lack of public transportation that takes you exactly where you want to end up at (or public transportation at all in most of the U.S.). Maybe the only way car-on-demand is profitable is if (A) we get self-driving cars, or (B) the government creates their own system with lower fares and runs it at a pure loss with no profitability in mind.
If Uber can't operate while paying minimum wage then maybe they shouldn't be operating.
Every other company has to work out how to pay minimum wage. An unprofitable rural convenience store doesn't get to pay its clerks less because the sales aren't high enough, so I fail to see why it should be different for Uber and their drivers.
To be fair, an appropriate Uber setup here would also require that drivers know the destination beforehand and get compensated if the ride is cancelled and have the ability to decline rides.
The problem for both babysitters and uber drivers in low-usage areas is that there is NO economic model that allows for 40hr workweeks once population (or usage) declines sufficiently. All these gig models work very well in the city but totally break down as you go to rare use areas. A new model is required -- i'm not saying Uber is it, but Uber is closest.
Anyone who isnt in an urban environment, or who's landed at an airport at 2am knows this is a problem. We just need a way to fairly compensate people to solve it.
I.e in your example, where someone wants to work in 30 minute increments and that is the staff member's choice and the employer is happy, then fine.
However it would be unreasonable for an employer to say to a staff member "I'm only going to pay you in 30 minute increments, and after each 30 minutes you can go watch TV, but if a customer arrives when you are on break I want you to run back to work straight away to staff the till, and I'm not going to pay you for the time watching TV".
It's reasonable to ask the Babysitter to work part-time and have fairly short shifts. An example of being unreasonable would be to say that they have to take calls during the day with customers and they will only be paid the minutes talking to customers. It's worth saying the laws here change if you are an employee vs sole-trader, and most babysitters would not be classed as an employee while Uber drivers are.
For any situation in-between, the answer probably ends somewhere on the spectrum between "yes" and "no".
The point wouldn't be to control the drivers, but for uber to assume some of the risk.
A company isn't going to let people just do whatever if the company is assuming risks. For example, say demand peaks at 7-9am and 4-6pm. The company could simply dictate that that's the only times you can work (because the full time old-timer high earners already took all other time slots). But maybe you're a stay-at-home parent and only have free time during school hours, so for you, that's objectively a worse deal, since you get to take home $0 as opposed to whatever you could make under a work-at-any-time model.
Or maybe the company tells you that you can't work on-and-off around your town like you used to, due to existing driver saturation, and they tell you that you have to drive to the downtown of the nearby metropolitan city for a shift (many full time drivers I've talked to actually do this today to get better on-the-clock volume).
Or maybe you just can't work at all because there's enough drivers on the road today already.
There's a million scenarios like these.
As a thought exercise, you could go out and drive an Uber casually for a couple of hours, and simultaneously pay yourself whatever amount you think is fair, out of your own pocket. The gist is to track your on-the-clock time and mileage (which is fairly easy w/ the app), and then work out the math to figure out how much the rides should've cost to pay the amount you decided. If the exercise comes out to charging $40 for 10 min rides to account for suboptimal downtime, or you're finding that you need to work a 12 hour day to hit a similar income threshold as a full timer elsewhere, you can be sure that you've neglected some important aspect of the unit economics math and you would've failed at being Uber.
If we’re starting off with that as a belief why have any regulations at all?
> A company isn't going to let people just do whatever if the company is assuming risks.
Companies routinely do that. Hell sometimes that is the entire reason for employing a specific person, is to let them do what they want and then reap the economic benefit from owning the outcome.
People are so quick to say "oh just raise wages" as if Uber/etc never contemplated the idea (recall we're talking about the company that popularized the idea of surge pricing for rides), but I don't think many of the armchair analysts have put an ounce of thought into what actually happens when you dictate monetary factors (let alone the gradient of effects relative to different degrees of change). Uber/Lyft were fairly clear about potential impact of employment mandates on service reliability when prop 22 was making the rounds, and I find it curious that there's simultaneously a sentiment that pre-uber service availability was crap and a sentiment that one just ought to raise prices and somehow people will get to eat their cake and have it too.
> Companies routinely do that
You're giving an apples-to-oranges example and you know it. Hiring Rob Pike vs letting unskilled drivers sit idly on company dime are completely different scenarios. The latter group doesn't even generate leads (unlike cabs being hailed off the street).
As independent contractor Uber was handing off every risk associated with running a business to their drivers.
Also, a 0 hour contract is a iffy construct. If someone can show they worked N hours on the regular, they have the right to get a contract on the amount of hours they worked. Also, 0 hour contracts are only allowed for a limited number of times afaik. (2x up to one year i believe).
You might be willing to work for less than minimum wage, but in reality minimum wages exist because without them they create a race-to-the-bottom for workers, and it's very hard to write a policy that's something like "you can pay a person less if they are enjoying it and are reading a book and not really doing that much".
Waiting time is a regular part of jobs and we pay for it in other career paths - can you imagine if everyone only had to pay security guards for the time spent apprehending thief's and they got no pay for all the waiting around reading newspapers they do?
The problem with that is these services are only viable because there is a core of drivers that work long hours and have this as their primary source of income. Part time casual drivers are also an important part of what makes services like this effective, but without the core drivers there's no service. What's happening at the moment is that the low expectations of the casual drivers is under cutting the livelihoods and bargaining power of core drivers. That's not an equitable state of affairs.
This is also gig work, the person that made a full time job from gig work didn’t understand what gig work is in the first place.
I'm a lot more relaxed about minimum wages and such than I used to be. Here in the UK we've ramped up minimum wages over the last decade or so and the feared impact on jobs for low wage earners never materialised.
I'm a conservative and free market liberal because I'm primarily interested in what works. Ideology be damned, and I've been slapped in the face by a reality check that actually some basic wage floor rules and employment standards work just fine. Those minimum wage rises? Conservative government.
It was meant to be something someone did on the side. It paid well so people turned it into a full time job.
Then if these people are really poor they can get free heath insurance right? And they have a retirement account through the gov right? What other benefits do they need? All those garbage/useless mental health services the code shops push around?
Yes, it's called a commission. Many jobs pay that way.
Making a comparison between a security guard and an Uber driver is like making a comparaison between a limo chauffer and a bounty hunter. It's an unnecessary and convoluted analogy given the differences in goals. Regular taxi drivers are paid per ride (i.e. a commission) and Uber drivers are taxi drivers without the medallions. I don't see how one would take issue with Uber drivers doing what taxi drivers do while simultaneously operating as rational actors by undercutting the competition on price.
Well in the case of commissions for employees in Europe you still have to guarantee a minimum wage and fill any gap between commission payments and the minimum wage.
> Making a comparison between a security guard and an Uber driver is like making a comparaison between a limo chauffer and a bounty hunter.
Well, the bounty hunter comparison depends on if you are an employee or if you are self-employed. Let's remember the precedent for uber drivers being employees has already been established in European/Dutch courts.
If a bounty hunter is an employee in Europe (i.e. working for a bounty hunting firm rather than owning one), if any commissions don't make their wage up to the minimum wage they will have to be paid the difference by the employer. The worked hours for bounty hunting include any waiting time on the job. I don't see why Uber should be exempt from this rule when every other industry, including the traditional taxi industry, has to follow it.
I feel like being able to monetize your freetime is a luxury a society can't afford when your leisure activity could be someone's job. You could spent time volunteering, like meals on wheels or something. But instead you're driving down the labor rate, as a hobby.
That sounds harsh and I don't want you to feel personally attacked, so I'll just it's cool, no one's perfect. But jobs need to pay live able wages, IMHO.
Uber/Lyft have said on various occasions that the majority of drivers are part-timer/casual. While being able to read books between trips might seem a bit of a privileged situation, many who do Uber for supplemental income don't have room to engage in luxury.
I personally know of someone who does deliveries as a side gig from a restaurant job (which is already grueling on its own) because they really need the extra cash and there's literally nothing else on the job market with the flexibility of gig economy stints.
Being an Uber driver is a new thing which people started doing voluntarily knowing full well what the conditions were. For people then to start complaining "this is a abuse" and OMG no social security just seems ... weird.
Here in Belgium you now need to have a taxi license and everything good about Uber is now gone (it's more expensive, the drivers are all moody a-holes and they've gone back to doing detours for no reason just to jack up the price).
This has nothing to do with worker's rights. No one gave a crap about Taxi driver's work standards and they are/were treated worse than Uber drivers.
This is all about the Taxi industry fighting back.
75% of all ride share drivers would prefer to remain independent.
In Chicago, I can make $42/hour driving Uber. I still don't understand how anyone can claim I'm being mistreated.
- Uber passengers LOVE the service. Way more than taxi service or public transportation. - Since Uber started, drunk driving injuries/fatalities are down 30%-35%. - Drivers can be anyone with a working car. There is no "interview". You get background checked and your car is inspected. - Drivers get to write off miles. - Drivers get discounts on service at Jiffy Lube and tire stores.
Now if people are worried about employment practices, why not look at Walmart, Amazon, Target, and most retail stores. They intentionally staff people with erratic weekly hours, keeping shifts to 4 hours (no breaks or lunches required) and no one reaches 35 hours to enforce benefits.
You can't compare Uber to Retail.
I'm 100% liberal and support progressive worker protection, but Uber isn't actually hurting anyone. Only the Taxi industry and the cities that used to make a fortune on selling "medallions" to license taxis. In Chicago those were $400k and in NYC they were even more. So imaging you're a Taxi company with 200 medallions. Uber basically just shredded your net worth.
That's who has really seen pain. Not workers.
Is there Target in the Netherlands?
I literally have family members who work full shifts. You're taking anecdotal examples and extrapolating that to the entire retail force. dumb opinion.
The cost of healthcare is the direct result of the creation of the HMO laws during Reagan's presidency, allowing hospitals and doctors to make pre-arranged profit oriented agreements that increased insurance costs.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/04/upshot/reagan-deregulatio...
> After accounting for driving expenses and self-employment taxes, the average TNP driver in Chicago earns about 3% to 5% less than minimum wage. In 2019, drivers earned $12.30 per hour, or 5% less than the city’s minimum wage of $13 per hour at the time. In 2020, drivers earn slightly above minimum wage, but the hourly rate of pay was artificially inflated due to the reduction of traffic congestion on Chicago roads. With pre-pandemic levels of traffic congestion, drivers would have only earned an hourly wage of $13.62 per hour after expenses and taxes, which is 3% below the city’s minimum wage of $14 per hour at the time. The authors note that the city’s minimum wage will increase to $15 per hour on July 1, 2021.
https://illinoisupdate.com/2021/01/26/release-the-average-ub...
Hm.
Wait a minute, I think this is intentional! Can you imagine an employer trying to subvert the gains of the labor movement?!
The Uber model will never translate to Retail, Tech, Banking, Finance, Healthcare.
It does translate to transportation, food and package delivery. Let the disruption make capitalism more efficient. Focus on areas where a balance is important, like making healthcare and college universally free.
I can show anyone my weekly driver log that shows how many hours I drove and how much I was paid. It is at least $42/hr and on weekends it can be $50/hr.
So it's about if we want to let companies hire individuals to do contract work that would be below the level we would allow someone to hire an employee. And, if we do (which I think we should) how do we set the standards of such an arrangement? Being an app driver is clearly different from being a traditional independent contractor (handyman, etc), but it is also different from being an employee. What a fair and just version of this relationship looks like is, to me, obviously unsettled.
P.s. Uber lost ~$4.5B last year on ~$11B revenue. It does not seem reasonable to say that the payment rates you've been getting represent what Uber 'will be' in a long term way. The economic situation is not sustainable.
But everyone seems to forget that it’s the independence that driver’s love. I can turn the app on/off whenever I feel like it. That’s a level of freedom that no other “job” offers.
They'll then choose which classification gymnastics they can perform under the legal language and optimize on to minimize their labor costs. That'll take a couple years and the law change to catchup to this abusive behavior avoiding the intent of the law will take another 10-30 years, and we'll repeat the process.
We need better definitions for the labor relation that make it difficult to play these optimization games created simply to optimize on labor and more significant consequences for that behavior to encourage businesses to innovate in other areas (like, I don't know, technology, new products, improved products, etc.) instead of simply extracting wealth from their own workforces.
To be fair to Uber they did create new value in finding and scheduling rides/taxies and I think that is a valuable service. That infrastructure and convenience has a cost though. No longer do you need to hail a taxi and deal with trying to pass directions, miscommunication of destination and charge rates and so on. But it seems they've passed many of those costs onto the drivers themselves and probably consumers to assure a certain sort of profit margin per transaction.
I'm sure there are some complexities due to the weaker relationship between the two, but it seems like it would be beneficial to remove this somewhat artificial cliff between self-employed contractors or employees which is almost certainly more of a septum. (For example freelance picking up jobs posted to a public job board, to a contractor in frequent contracts with multiple companies, to a contractor working with a single company, to an employee which works with one company.)
There are a bunch of guidelines, but the main factors generally boil down to these questions: Is the employee working for a single employer? How much independence do they have? (e.g. holidays, working hours, etc.) Were the contract details mandated by the employer? etc.
Sources (in Dutch): - https://www.ondernemenmetpersoneel.nl/orienteren/dienstverba... - https://noestadvocatuur.nl/zzper-werknemer/
Its not hard to imagine a software engineer who likes to work a part time job on the weekends, gets to set their own hours as long as they complete assigned tickets, and who negotiated their employment contract aggressively. That person would still be an employee.
If anything, Uber should let you set prices, and show a competitive market price.
Uber is a unsustainable business built employee exploitation to effectively pay them less than minimum wage while flouting "freedom" to bait the people in the worst situations. This was known from the start. Meanwhile subsidising rides with investor-cash to effectively bait-and-switch society. The recent-ish price hikes are only a start.
Anyone repeating their PR should be ashamed. "gigs" are cancer or wait, this is hackernews so "Gig-economy considered harmful" is the correct nomenclature I guess.
There's enough other comments with the typical "nuance" you can read.
COVID has killed over four and a half million people; about four million people have driven for Uber (worldwide). Do you really think that doing some driving for Uber and dying of COVID are "likewise bad"?
Walmart, for example, will schedule employees < 30 hours and stack entire stores with part timers.
My confusion is that the gig economy companies get a large share of the hate (justified or unjustified) but much of the criticism seems to boil down to unregulated capitalism.
That's funny, because the court's reasoning was that drivers in their daily work are almost completely dependent on Uber, which calls all the shots.
right now it's like debating which is less expensive unicorns or leprechauns.
Who's liable if the automated car crashes?
Uber doesn't want to be responsible for the risks associated with their reward.
Depends. If the driver is judged to be an employee, the employer can be liable, depending on circumstances.
Extreme ends of the spectrum:
- Company didn’t and couldn’t know that the driver was too drunk/tired to drive
- Employee complained about working hours and traffic conditions; employer threatened employee with dismissal.
> Who's liable if the automated car crashes?
Again, depends. Could be the taxi company, the car owner, the manufacturer, even the driver (if they ignored zillions of warnings from the car, for example)
And now, they have been given a huge incentive to do just that.
Way to foster innovation Dutch govt. !
There's always a case to be made that any form of employment is exploitation. Sararīman, as the corporate slave is known in Japan. The question is how much regulation do we want. And do we want it for regulation's sake, or does it actually benefit the people. There are many labor laws that hinder innovation and keep employment down.
I think it's fair to say that the huge majority of labor laws actually protect laborers, and have been won through blood and sweat over many generations. To opt on "the safe side" and say "look, yes jobs at Uber are complicated, but if you work there 40 hours per week then it's a fulltime job and we should treat it as such" is quite fair.
The break it ask for forgiveness later approach is generally not welcome in Europe, it's regarded as borderline criminal practice. And then delay court procedures and are the other slimy practices.
Always easier to make a buck when breaking the law when everyone else is not breaking it. These companies have compliance departments and lawyers not to see what's legal, but to see how much they can get away with. Today, a Dutch Judge showed them the demarcation lines.
This is extremely vague. The legal system changes continuously and quickly, especially when under pressure from big money.
If something doesn't either it's because it's not important or somebody is benefiting from it.
But then again I never take taxis either. For me it's either walk, bike or OV. It might be like that for you as well, which is why you forgot they exist.
Real world example - taking Uber to my workplace would cost me one-two hours of net pay, and I'm in the top 5% earners. Another one-two hours of net pay to go back home.
For comparison - public transportation costs 3€/day regardless of usage, and only takes about 15% longer to get there.
Usually they have a taxi sign on top of the car, and always have blue license plates (which you can only get if you are a taxi).
So, I think that the workaround must have been that they actually employ licensed taxi drivers. This is, however, only speculation.
Methinks the flexibility of dealing with temporary workers is more pertinent than the added cost. Pure speculation of course.
So all Uber drivers are taxi drivers and all Uber vehicles are taxi vehicles. Simple.
If Uber tried to somehow do taxi services without their drivers having taxi drivers licenses or their cars being registred taxi cars, they'd be laughed at.
Everything is really really simple once there is no taxi monopoly or medallion system.
I think it's always a regular taxi that shows up, though.
It's not just Uber. All companies in the gig economy work like this. It's not only about paying minimum wage and benefits either, it's also about shifting the costs of doing business to the workers calling them independent contractors.
As independent contractors, drivers need to pay for their car, pay for gas, taxes, insurance and maintenance costs, but if they were employees from the beginning, all these costs would be getting out of the Uber's pockets.
Edit: the threads got merged now. At the time that I commented, the title was "Uber Loses Battle Over Drivers’ Rights in the Netherlands" and the link was going to Bloomberg.
I don't see how you can read that any other way than the Dutch court is forcing Uber to employ its drivers.
Possible outcomes:
- Uber could pull out from the Netherlands
- Drivers in the Netherlands could organize themselves, but they will need a structure similar to Uber
- Other countries will follow the Netherlands ruling
We could see the implosion of the gig economy (doubt it) or - most probably - some places like the Netherlands will be gig-economy-free zones; and we'll see the impact on their economies.
Dozens of other jurisdictions seem to have ruled similar already, but for whatever reason, with limited change yet.
I'm not sure why not. Possibly stuck in various appeals, or maybe Uber made some other small change and waited to get sued again?
In Israel, we use Gett. It's fine.
All because it's illegal to take money to transport someone from A to B without an exorbitant license for no specific reason.
As for the implosion of the gig economy, I doubt it too. We've had a neo-liberal gov for the last 12 years, and they've pushed the gig economy (successfully) within the boundaries of north western EU social democracy (Dutch: ZZP).
What we are witnessing here is the courts pushing back on companies abusing the system. They can't have it both ways; wanting flexible workers with those kinds of wages, with demanding 'contracts' akin to employee contracts.
This of course is tricky, but at some point all the big regulatory arbitrage plays (uber, airbnb) etc were obvious for what they were - and I am not sure they got adjusted. In other words short term competition and PR played as big a role it seems in valuation models as did "can airbnb keep renting out against local laws"
I have not dug into their IPO documents but it must be in there.
But once you are worth a gazillion dollars regulators have an uphill struggle.
The thing is short selling is such a poor way to signal criticism of the company. Investing is a default optimistic thing.
And I am not sure there is an alternative. Some kind of anti-investment?
I don't think there is any possible such vehicle.
I just kind of wish there was.
A way of allowing the market to take care of externalities.
All we have is regulation, and as a fan of markets, that kind of annoys me. (or rather, I recognise that markets are after all dependant on the existence of government (as opposed to the right-wing style if only governments did not exist markets would take over). And am annoyed that this market has not been created.)
Any IPO document I've seen had several pages of future risks, so I'm almost certain that Uber has put the regulatory thing somewhere in that chapter.
Uber's margins have always been super thin, I would imagine this makes them squarely unprofitable in the Dutch market.
You know, the legal definition of what is exploitative labour and what isn't.
The question is perhaps: is Uber interested in being just another taxi company, withut much of a disruptive edge?
But isn't that already the case? I not sure Uber is making a profit anywhere in the world, so maybe they don't care if they lose $0.58 or $0.75 per ride?
Seems like regulating "car stuff" in general is always a good thing if you ask me.
I've lived in a walkable area and QoL goes up immensely. No amount of money or luxury in an American suburb will compare. There is nothing like the sheer convenience of being able to get your groceries in a 3 minute walk.
I walk most places: There are walking paths and crosswalks lots of places. I have nearby grocery stores in a short walking distance (10 minutes or less). Lots of folks ride bikes, and an amount of those folks put on studded tires in the winter. I simply do not as it is literally an uphill battle and I didn't grow up in a mountainous region. I can rent a manual bicycle or an electric scooter and be safe while riding.
I can take public transport both across town and out of town. I have choices: There is a small tram line for some parts of town. Busses go both in town and between towns. I can take a train through much of Norway (from up north to Oslo) or over to Sweden if I want. Taxis exist, too, and they are clean. (Illegal taxis are here too, but I've never used them).
And sure, there are cars and they are convenient - and like the US, you probably need one if you live in the countryside. But I can get by just fine without a license, too.
I think the idea is that people will drive if their tolerance level for slowness is satisfied. So the amount of traffic will always be high enough to look acceptable for some people, unacceptable for others.
As for parking, in London there are definitely parking lots scattered around the city - can't speak for New York though.
> Like where are they coming from and where are they going?
Probably going between their homes and family / friends / shops / entertainment venues / restaurants.
But in cities these places don't have parking outside. So where are they parking?
You won't always be able to park right outside your destination, but between street parking and garages there's definitely parking in many places.
Ah I had no idea and would never have guessed that - thanks.
My guess is that even if people living there use a car once a year, you end up with a huge number of cars every day.
I can't imagine the logic of thinking 'I need to go into central London to do something today... I know I'll drive'. Not even just from an environmental standpoint - even without that the stress of navigating London and parking and then leaving your car in such a busy place.
A few years ago I arrived in London at Paddington station and was late for meeting on the other side of the city. I'd been told that taking the Tube could take up to 30 minutes (including changes), so I decided to grab a Taxi. I arrived at my meeting 40 minutes later.
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High commuter rail costs - If you have 2+ people in the car, it's likely equal cost at worst to drive if your origin point is beyond the reach of the subway. This is especially true if you wish to go across the metro and therefore get to pay per-person fares on more than one commuter rail system. Going from 15mi West of Manhattan (NJ burbs) to 15mi East of Manhattan (Nassau County), will run you about $50 per person round-trip. It's not hard to see why no one would take commuter rail with their family of 4 for that trip even if they live next to a CR station and their family on the other side does as well, $200 is a lot of money.
Parking - There's tons of (typically underground) garages in NYC and particularly Manhattan. While you may get gouged if you just randomly turn in to the first garage you see and pay the walkup rate, some minor research on rates can easily get you somewhere to park for $20-35 for a full day in Manhattan. 2 seconds on Spothero and I could park right next to Penn Station 9am-9pm today for ~$22, and that's not a rare exception. This was the case before those services as well, it just required more knowledge of where to look for deals.
Scheduling - Off-peak/late-night frequencies are limited and service is often much slower. PATH (a subway with limited reach) to NJ runs 24/7, but late night you're looking at 40min between trains and the trip time often gains 5-10min as well between maintenance and a less direct routing. And if you don't live next to it's limited reach, you're still driving after that. On the actual commuter rail last trip is typically ~1AM and the last few trains of the night have 1-1.5hrs between trains on many lines. I could be back home by car before I even get on the train in Penn Station if I'm particularly unlucky on timing for when the concert I'm seeing ends.
Infrastructure - There's 4 roads to get across the Hudson from NJ in the region, and 2 of them go into Manhattan. Not hard for an accident or minor disruption to make going through Manhattan the only way you're getting across to go to the other side in a sane period of time. The limitations of NYC's "ring" roads also mean you can't necessarily easily just go the longer way around the opposite side of the metro.
There's plenty of areas even within NYC that are poorly served by transit services, to say nothing of the suburbs. When the trip takes 4 transfers to get there, it's a lot less appealing to take and a lot more at risk of issues, even if it should work in theory.
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I am not suggesting cars are the ideal mode of travel, and I'd like to see further investment in broadening both the reach and service levels of transit services, as well as re-examining fare pricing, but with the current systems/infrastructure being what they are.....yes, there are lots of trips where the sensible choice is to drive.
Mandatory ride sharing by taxing gas, or heavily subsidizing public transport?
Uber would have an unique opportunity to group rides for small busses.
Oh i see, we ll soon have a wave of startups who are disruptors-of-the-regulated-disruptors-of-the-regulations
Pricing (and marketing, and UX, and features) that transparently informs that offering rides it is not long-term profitable, it only makes sense as cost savings for inevitable drives, similar to BlaBlaCar or Waze Carpool.
But this would have hampered their growth, so they didn’t. Ride-sharing (fake proposition) isn’t really that big of a market as urban mobility in general (target proposition)
In my home country (Eastern Europe) I took übers that made me think I'm gonna die in them.
Questionable pro, but OK
This is not a surprise, this extra money is effectively bringing the employee health insurance, pension, invalidity pension, unemployment benefit, maximum number of hours to work per week, paid vacations, etc.
If you need to pay it out of your pocket, it turns out to be the same.
In the "old" Europe, the net salary is basically 50% of the cost for the company, sometimes a bit more, sometimes less depending of marital status, country, etc. But this is a good rule of thumb.
You say it like they just walk in, ask for money and get it. It's really much harder, practically impossible if you're not on some priority list (with kids, disability, single mother, etc).
There is a limit on how much can and can't be done within the EU, it's not a gravy train buffet. There is peer pressure and potential, let's call it cascading effect. Some lawmaker will hear about this and try to get it passed in another country as well. I struggle to think of one state which would simply accept Uber as some great Enterprise idea, look at the history here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_ridesharing_comp... Most places banned and this bit. In December 2017, the European Court of Justice ruled that Uber is a transport company, subject to local transport regulation in European Union member states, rather than an information society service as Uber had argued.[99]
So at best, tolerated for the time being.
In Europe, working without full compensation is typically called illicit work(instead of side gig), not extremely frowned upon, but the main job has to have proper compensation. It very normal and expected to get 4 weeks paid holidays or more, sick days covered, insurance in most places, pension contributions etc. Uber tells you to get a car, petrol, pay insurance and take jobs when available, and get none of the above, who are they kidding.
This is true for basically every single European city. Public transport is of such high quality that taking a taxi simply doesn't make sense.
I dispute this number. Do you have a source for this?
- net: 2000€
- gross: 3100€
- company cost: 3850€
- net: 4300 PLN - gross: 6000 PLN - total employer cost: 7200 PLN
So, the total tax burden is around 40%.
What gets neglected in these discussions though is that everything employer pays is counted as a cost he can write off from revenue to decrease his profit taxes (assuming company makes profit!). So, the effective cost on employer side is lower than 7200 PLN - naive calculation, assuming 15% profit taxes, would make it 0.85 * 7200 PLN = 6100 PLN.
Also, to make it worse, once you get your 4300 PLN salary into your bank account, you pay on average 16% VAT on every purchase (8-23%, depending on the item bought). So in reality your net salary is 4300*0.84 = 3612, making total tax burden almost 50%.
In EU countries, there are many taxes that do not carry the official name "tax".
Much easier that way to get the people to swallow the pill.
Paying your tax and premiums is way cheaper and much more pleasant.
To an American it may sound communist (though technically it's more socialist) but it's our country, we can choose the system we want. And we've done an OK job IMO (In fact I wish things were a bit more socialist - this abuse of the ZZP concept has been going on for far too long).
If things don't add up or can be done a cheaper way, talk to the government. Don't stop obeying the law.
You're protecting your own interests. The state has to protect everyone's interests; and there's always an international aspect, at least in the EU. That goes beyond than what short-sighted and possibly "primed" employees might think they want.
i don't think this is correct. the state only protects their own interests. do these align with the general populace? sometimes they do, other times they don't.
It no longer works in on demand economies, with variable hours and self employment and people working multiple jobs.
Why? There are people who work variable hours, self employment and working multiple jobs. They're called freelancers. You can freelance in most countries, and it's not a problem. What is a problem is Uber and gig economy companies saying that the people that work for them are "actually freelancers" as an excuse to offload costs onto the workers, who don't get any of the advantages of being a freelance (they always work under the conditions for these companies, with no power of negotiation.
* In the uk, you and your employer pay national insurance if you earn over a given limit. Thats fine for an uber driver who becomes an employee instead of self employed.
* but your employer only pays if you earn over X. So employers have a big incentive to stop you earning over thst limit. You see this in the US with workers being kept at 1h less than full time to avoid paying for health insurance. So now we're limiting the income of the people we're meant to be helping!?
* plus in the uk, your contributions only count if you do a full year. Thats fine if you're a full time employee, you work 52 weeks (and when you're on holiday you're paid and that includes NI contributions), and your wage is the same every week. But if an uber driver misses a pay period or has a slow month, he paid a lot of NI and gets no credit for it. Nor can he claim it back.
* plus now, as an employee, your expenses are not tax deductable.
Im not being anti-worker. But our current systems arent fit for purpose anymore. We need to review them. Thats benefits, workers rights and the tax code.
Why dont we just charge a percentage of earnings and then base unemployment payout on that?
Because in 1950 someone dreamt up this system and designed it so we could support men working full time in factories and to operate using just pen and paper but cause computers didnt exist. 70 years later, we have the same system with 101 bits of crap bolted on. And it isnt working.
You can see issues in any system. But that doesn't mean it isn't working fundamentally. I'm all for reviewing and improving the system, adapting it for new jobs and ways of working. But those changes cannot be an excuse to slash benefits and worker rights, which is what Uber has been doing for years.
Drivers might have the freedom to turn off their phones and choose not to work, but they don't have the freedom to choose which routes/destinations. Seems to me that their argument is one-sided and deceptive.
There's a penalty for rejecting too many rides - but i think that's a fair outcome.
Ideally, uber also allows a driver to set the price, and allow a customer to see price comparisons between all offered drivers (and wait times etc), to truly make it a competitive market place.
According to this article drivers weren't given information on fare or destination when they were offered fares, until legally required in California. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/story/uber-change...
They won't be letting drivers set fares until legally obligated. They are a taxi service that cosplays as a "ride sharing" "marketplace" in the legal system.
Uber is all about keeping maximum control of the driver while denying them the rights of employees (or in the UK, "worker" status, which is a halfway house between employee and self employed)
If Uber let drivers reject as many rides as they wanted and allowed drivers to set their own fares and negotiate directly with their clients, then they may very well have won the case. But then they would also be a very different company.
https://www.reddit.com/r/uber/comments/lzl3xp/why_doesnt_ube...
Is it just the extra employee costs on the company side?
I am pretty sure the drivers would nearly always make more than that.
Or is it illegal to just have employees set their own time/targets?
If a driver is an employee, who provides the car?
oh, whoops, forgot that most uber drivers are on non-commercial car insurance...
This is achieved by having a lot of underpaid drivers idling or parked nearby.
Minimum wage kills that advantage.
Most Uber drivers say they make good money (all that I've met, too), which imo means better than a minimum wage job like warehousing or w/e.
They wouldn't do the job if it meant idling without pay. They couldn't, as it would just burn money.
I recall one uber ride I had in Kentucky, driver was a retired accountant. He said he figured he was earning about $2/hr after costs. He said he liked it because it got him out of the house and gave him something to do.
The people not making enough quit, as I said.
There seems to be this weird thinking that gig workers are all exploited.
Meanwhile many Deliveroo workers make 2000+/mo in the UK and immigrants in factories get wages withheld for PPE and "damage to equipment" in Germany. Not even speaking about the farm workers.
I don't even care about all this, I was wondering if Uber can make it work legally.
Take a look at HSBC[1][2]....they got caught laundering money for Mexican cartel and helped NK/Iran circumvent the nuclear sanctions. They were given a slap on the wrist of 2 billion dollars in fines. (Can't find the source but they were also caught transferring money to known terrorist groups)
If anyone is interested there is a Netflix show they covers this. I think it's called Dirty Money. [3]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSBC#Money_laundering [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSBC#US_Senate_investigation... [3] https://www.netflix.com/title/80118100?preventIntent=true
Also: https://www.ft.com/content/5b986586-0f85-47d5-8edb-3b49398e2...
Only to have people who have no skin in the game tell them both what they have to do... because it's 'the right thing'.
So the government imposed a bit of a less radical change, as predatory pricing consists of predating(done) and recoupment(not happened yet). This is the legal term for Microsoft embrace, extend, extinguish practice.
No, it's a major victory for the administrative arm of the FNV trade union. Look beyond the formal argument here (workers rights) and look at what this actually is about - power. The FNV wants to get their cut so they can collect more dues paying members and further enrich the admins. The workers here will probably not benefit at all.
The beliefs of fringe groups rest on a set of absurd conspiracy theories, like vaccines being harmful to public health, and pushed on the population merely to profit Big Pharma. But the beliefs of the mainstream rest on a set of equally absurd conspiracy theories, and all of them based on socialist class warfare narratives. It is in the interests of a critical mass of special interest groups, who hold political power, for people to believe in these conspiracy theories.