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Comment by hungryforcodes | Hacker News Reader

But what if I legitimacy want to be a freelancer? Lifestyle reasons, freedom, whatever. I should have a choice.

Then you're not going to do it for the money that uber pays.

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.

Why aren't these payments taken from the employee then? In my country retirement and social security appear right in my paycheck. Why isn't it the same for freelancers (when they declare taxes)? If their wage is too low as you claim, this isn't something that will change when they become employees, so this solves nothing. If this is about a minimum wage, then the real solution is forcing freelancers to work a minimum of monthly hours, which treats the root problem.

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.

<In my country retirement and social security appear right in my paycheck

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)

Plenty of countries in Western Europe too have mandatory employee contributions to various social programs.

Every country that funds social programs with an income tax has mandatory employee contributions, differing only in the visibility of the cost to the employee (up-front taxes vs. a line-item in the pay stub vs. a "employer portion" which isn't reported to the employee but directly impacts the employee's wages).

> 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.

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.

Not sure what country you are, but most also have the Employer pay on top of that too.

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.

I never understood why this distinction is made and why it’s not just obfuscation. The real numbers are the cost of an employee to the employer and the amount the employee gets, the difference is what the state took as a tax, and the way that cut is divided to different state budget chapters is inconsequential to both the employee and the employer

> Then you're not going to do it for the money that uber pays.

Then, ah... who's driving the Ubers in the Netherlands and why? Is there some credible evidence of coercion at hand?

Elaboration: My impresssion is that rideshare driving is an incredibly liquid market, so its really hard to imagine a mechanism for long-term wage suppression other than external factors like an untrained workforce or poor economy overall.

Coercion is a bit a radical expression, I would call it dire economic straits, make a quick buck on the side.

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?

Uber is about as close to a ship of theseus as it gets.

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...

Nope, this excuse does not fly. First they do things clandestinely, then try to prevent any court case, then drag the court case out as long as possible and then it's supposed to be ancient?

So you are saying the new c level are something like angels and saints? https://lawstreetmedia.com/tech/uber-officers-and-board-memb...

You're the one clearly pushing an agenda, I'm just stating facts. IIRC the discussion here at the time about the lawsuit you linked characterized it as "frivolous" and "sour grapes", and other words to that effect.

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>

You will if it not your primary income, but used to supplement or do when you have nothing else to do.

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

You can be a freelancer just fine, nothing stops you from doing that. But not within the Uber framework because you aren' a freelancer within that framework. So this is pretty specific: the Uber framework does not check enough of the boxes that would allow their pseudo employees to claim they are freelancers, which effectively makes it just another tax dodge, which it always was.

Taxi businesses in the U.S. played this cat-and-mouse game for a long time, and generally 'won' the right to offload liabilities to drivers without much pay. Why anyone thought or thinks Uber is 'different' is hard to understand.

Was that also the case for taxi businesses in European countries with functional social states? Because, this being a legal ruling in Europe, US precedent doesn't really matter.

It's the US that is different not Uber, they are treated just like every other company here would be treated.

Then fix the tax loopholes by making it about sales or revenue rather than employment.

No. The 'tax loopholes' are simply shifting the responsibility of paying those taxes from the employer to the employee, which when the company is doing well and the relationship is otherwise balanced is a net neutral. But once the larger picture is taken into account things like health benefits, continuing to be paid when temporarily unemployed (which for a gig worker is several times per hour) and so on become externalized to society when really they should be the problem of the employer.

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.

The reason for this is that you can be compelled by your totally-not-employer to pretend to want to be a freelancer.

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.

I know some software consultants that have one major client but appreciate the work mobility and forcing them to get into a full employment contract would restrict their opportunities and payment. Forget definitions, why should we outlaw this?

For exactly the reason, the parent post said, it makes all worker protection and benefits laws meaningless, and most people think these laws are a good thing.

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.

All those things should actually be under the purview of the government, rather than businesses.

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.

"All those things should actually be under the purview of the government, rather than businesses."

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?

Sort of, although the most efficient and effective implementation in my opinion would basically result in a universal basic income.

Even with a real UBI system, having random fluctuations in earnings when you get a cold or break a leg is not reasonable.

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.

Why would they be able to drive the employee to burnout if the employee can quit since they have UBI?

> Even with a real UBI system, having random fluctuations in earnings when you get a cold or break a leg is not reasonable.

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.

"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."

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 are describing corporatism, not capitalism. It is not "maximum capitalism" to always side with the employer in any dispute, ignoring the natural rights of the employee. If the employer causes harm to an employee, deliberately or through negligence, then the employer must make the victim whole. Non-aggression and strict liability for any harm done to others are integral aspects of a capitalist society. Employees have their own responsibilities, of course. If they knowingly take risks in pursuit of better pay then they ought to bear the consequences—the employer is not always at fault. This is a natural consequence of having the freedom to make your own choices.

>All those things should actually be under the purview of the government, rather than businesses.

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).

Most places they don't prevent what you describe. There are usually just some extra hoops to jump through and/or some tax implications.

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.

Who is "we" in this situation? For this specific case, it seems different countries have different opinions about what is the right tradeoff between allowing freelancers with leverage to enjoy their situation, and protecting workers with less bargaining power from being locked out of worker protection systems.

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.

Nothing is stopping you from being an actual freelancer. A large point of this ruling was that people working for Uber aren't actually freelancers, since they're not free to pick their clients or set/negotiate their own prices.

But the same rules applied to all taxi drivers before Uber. In a lot of place taxi driver were forbidden to not accept customer hailing them, and the price is controlled almost everywhere. The logic would be that all taxi drivers have to been employed.

> In a lot of place taxi driver were forbidden to not accept customer hailing them

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?

Personenbeförderungsgesetz (PBefG) § 22 Beförderungspflicht which applies to taxis in Germany. Roughly translates to:

Human Transportation Act §22 Duty to Transport.

In New York, the taxis with "medallions" are required to take you to places within the metro area. I'm not sure at what point that requirement sets in, whether it's hailing, or once you're in the cab, etc. but it's well-known that you can report them for refusing to take you somewhere.

It depends, there's a lot of local and national regulations in different countries.

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.

> 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.

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.

Practically, they can but I'm not sure about the regulations. Interesting question though.

In most countries Taxi drivers cannot refuse a passenger hailing them. Its difficult to enforce and they normally claim they did not see you but they must take you:

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...

The difference here is that these requirements are not set by a company contracting you to drive for them.

Then it's stopping you from working for a company that forces you to take clients at a given price without an employment contract and all its implications. What if that's what I want? I think some Uber drivers appreciate the work mobility.

What if that's what I want?

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 want and like being exploited"

I know that there are circles in which it is argued freedom means being allowed to sell yourself into slavery, but you'd hope the vast majority of us have come to understand the danger of that interpretation of freedom.

You want to be forced to take clients you don't want. You want someone else to decide a price you might not want. You want to be unable to get employment benefits you might want.

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.

What you want is to work with a service that customers will choose to rely on. This implies that sometimes—to get the benefit of being "an Uber driver" and not just some random guy with a car taking people for rides—you need to accept clients you wouldn't have chosen on your own, at standard prices set by someone else. It's not that you wouldn't prefer to pick and choose your clients or set your own prices, but if you insisted on doing things your own way all the time you wouldn't have nearly as many clients since they couldn't trust your service and your revenues would be much lower. Uber sets standards for drivers, which means clients can expect a certain quality of service, without which they would be much less inclined to accept rides, even from the same drivers.

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.

Both are features that Uber can implement, but you can't cheat the market. At the end of the day, if you're just driving someone from point A to point B, you're competing with everyone else at the moment doing the same. As a driver, your client in this case is either Uber, Lyft, or another ridesharing service. If they add the ability to decline riders, I don't see how it would be used for anything else besides discrimination.

I'm a consultant in The Netherlands and for this purpose I control my own BV. Similar to an LLC in the USA.

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...

Just to point out, that a BV and an LLC are very different, in that anyone can have an LLC in the USA but the tax reporting requirements and overhead for a BV in NL are quite high and don't make much sense to anyone with an income less then.. well, quite high, by most standards. I know a lot of freelance software engineers in the netherlands, but none have a BV.

I know a lot of freelance software engineers in the Netherlands and quite a few of them do.

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.

What is the difference between those freelance software engineers and the Uber drivers if they are freelancing for one company only?

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:

https://onl.nl/zzp-manifest/

Both freelancing and ZZP don't have a legal definition. It's just a business. In these cases a business of one. Without being incorporated, so if you screw up, creditors can come after your personal bank account.

So there's nothing to "tolerate" but money. ;)

In Switzerland and Germany there's a difference between an AG (Aktiengesellschaft) and a GmbH (Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung).

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.

In the Netherlands you have essentially:

Private limited company (BV or besloten vennootschap)

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)

Thank you.

> It could be different in Germany.

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?"

> Nice overview(s) for Germany and most other countries with comparisons where appropriate.

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_...

What are those tax advantages, assuming that you're talking about income and not business expenses/investments? Why would making a BV enable you to charge higher rates if you're still the only 'employee' in the BV and have the same insurances?

Doesn't change my point though that a BV is an unfair comparison to an LLC.

Also your threshold of 100K does not align with my accountant's, who said it was at least 200K to justify the added overhead.

Correct. With a BV in the Netherlands, you get immediately the fiscal Calvinism of the Dutch tax office at play. Despite the fact that:

- 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...

the reason they use this salary is for tax purposes. otherwise doing tax fraud would be easy with a BV. by simply not paying yourself a wage and living of the BV instead.

The BV has to pay taxes. And costs have to be business related. Since when living from your own work is considered fraud?

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."

Good luck with that, if you pay for all the mandated services, you will run a deficit.

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.

Indeed, here in Belgium there are extensive requirements for taxi drivers in terms of certification, education and vehicle maintenance. That's one of the reasons Uber never really succeeded here - even as a "freelance driver", you still need to be qualified and that takes time and effort.

It's probably because it makes it difficult to dodge taxes when Uber registers all the transactions ;)

Last time I got a taxi in Belgium the card machine (advertised on the window) was "broken". C'est la vie, I just walked off.

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.

In London you can now report the driver if they're on the road with a "broken" card machine, as that makes the car considered "unfit".

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.

> sure that's a bit outdated in the time of online maps

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.

I got a black cab a couple of weeks ago in London (it was chucking it down) near St Pauls. Asked to go to Nandos in Southwark.

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.

So work part time, on the clock.

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.

Not in the Netherlands anymore according to this judgement. You won't have that choice anymore unless there are some very specific circumstances (an interior decorator working for clients would not be in an inferior position to some kind of organisation, for instance).

If you're a freelancer, a client could not be enforcing the demand that you don't work for other similar employers, nor demand that you take every single gig that they ask you to do.

Uber wants it both ways, and correctly, the courts have stopped them from doing so.

> demand that you don't work for other similar employers, nor demand that you take every single gig

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.

Then find your own clients who want to be driven around.

Working part time for Uber won't have less freedom than working as a free lancer for Uber.

Absolutely it will. Everytime you try and force a labor law, companies have people who are smart and figure out a way around it. Now they can tell Uber drivers when they will work and where they will work. So if you don’t want to work the night shift, too bad. They will keep the part time hours to just the minimum needed and whatever shortfall they have to hit their yearly plan will be supplemented by releasing drivers who won’t work busy and profitable times. If you are the guy who drives a few evenings a week on the side, you may be out of luck.

Part time workers get fewer benefits than full time ones, so Uber will be incentivized to encourage part time workers.

You should also have a choice to not use Uber; besides customer discovery, what does Uber offer you that's worth their bad pay and commission?

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.

How does that work out for a single taxi driver and customers calling them directly? They may be on the other side of town and get 5 calls at the same time, leaving most of their customers without service. Or more likely, customers will want to call one number and have a local cab dispatched to them from whoever is available.

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.

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