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.
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.
Honestly, it's pretty annoying that some people decide what others can do or can't do with their free time and their car.
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.
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".