Is a bad gig job worse for you than no job at all? (If it is, then why are you doing it?)
These are serious questions, because rideshare jobs would not exist if you were compensated as a full-time employee with benefits. Uber and Lyft have never made a profit as it is, and increasing their costs would make the business simply impossible to sustain.
There is no rate card based on time/miles so every ride is an arbitrary payout based on a black box algorithm. With Lyft you’re incentivized with streak bonuses for 3 consecutive rides. The 3rd ride is always an awful fare that will lose money and if you decline you lose the bonus for the first two rides. Ride cost has stayed the same for the passenger and payouts have plummeted for drivers.
Anecdotal, but I’ve started gathering data to suggest that Uber/Lyft are capping wages to <$30/hr. When I have high tip passengers I am seemingly throttled with fewer requests and lower fares.
If I offer a electrican contractor to fix a property in a dangerous area and they refuse, I might stop calling them in the future.
If contractor rates are high today, I might choose not to hire one today.
Hell, I might even make sure to split my contracts between different contractors to make sure they all stay in business.
We do care about reliable service, though. That's something the ride share companies create incentives for with their games. But they are artificial games compared to a more free market situation where you can cherry-pick.
Do you not see why this is a policy? If you're in SF for example and drivers refuse to pick up anyone from the Tenderloin, and the Tenderloin is predominately one race, it's easy to label Uber as perpetuating racism etc.
Yes, but the existence of policies like that are why folks say rideshare isn't a contracting scenario.
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
"You are not an independent contractor if you perform services that can be controlled by an employer (what will be done and how it will be done)."
They're basically saying they don't want to work with unreliable contractors.
I don’t see how that’s any argument in favor of being a contractor
"You are not an independent contractor if you perform services that can be controlled by an employer (what will be done and how it will be done)."
They tell you "Hey, Joe wants a ride from A to B and we will pay out $X for that, do you accept this job?". They're not telling you "Hey, Joe wants a ride from A to B, you must take it and you must perform it within 15 minutes and you must do x y z"
“Do you accept this job? If you don’t take this job we won’t give you any jobs in the future” — contractor
“If you don’t take this job you’re fired” - employee
It’s identical. Nobody is forcing you to do it in either case, but the result is exactly the same. Whether you’re an employee or contractor makes no difference in the result, even if the wording is different.
Maybe I should tell that to half the HVAC guys in my area so they can start collecting health insurance from me
The issue is where the middleman determines all of the terms for both the contractor and the end-customer.
If I as a customer can reach out directly to a bunch of contractors independently, then that’s a fair free market, and the contractors can compete for my business or not accept it at all if they don’t like the terms, without harming any of their other customer relationships.
But if I as a customer can only reach out to a middleman, and that middleman decides who works for me. And the contractor also doesn’t get to pick their individual customers. Then it’s clearly not a fair free market at all.
If there were a company called SanFranciscoHVAC and I reached out to them to fix my heater. They send someone out to fix it. But I don’t get to pick who comes to work on my house, and they don’t get to pick who their customers are. And they can’t refuse a job or else SFHVAC stop giving them jobs. Can you really call them contractors?
Consider a property owner who contracts a property management company that has a lease (contract) with a tenant, who complains about broken AC so the management company contracts an HVAC contractor to replace the AC, and the HVAC contractor in turn contracts a drywall guy because they needed to open walls for their install.
Who is the employer of the drywall guy in your theory and why?
If you put out an offer, and a company consistently rejects it, then it’s fair to say you don’t want to waste your time with them anymore.
Big or small, companies are at least knowledge and serious about analyzing their situation. Individual people can’t do that and once you start using them you have to treat them as employees, no matter how lenient you are about punishing them when they don’t follow orders.
I’ve been a contractor. I didn’t have the ability to randomly reject assignments as the contract was for a term of time, not job to job.
Is this true? Or is the driver contracted from the time they sign on to the time they sign off, with nondiscretionary jobs given to them in that interval?
I never understood what this means exactly, and I think a lot of other people are confused.
It clearly doesn't mean that a contractor decide to install a sink when I asked them to install a toilet. It doesnt mean that if I pay them to do it to code, they can decide to disregard the codes.
If my original example is what we went with, you could because tenderloin is smack dab in SF, and it would be clearly discriminatory to pick up passengers from everywhere in SF except that one neighborhood.
I have tons of rides that originate in the TL/Mission that are unaccompanied minors or small children (toddlers or actual babies) without car seats. Lyft/Uber don’t care why I canceled. Only that I canceled and now I am penalized for following the law.
I know they are unsafe.
To put it simply, taking peoples' income away by killing their employers does not help them; it hurts them.
Are you opposed to that regulation also, or is there some rubric we can use to choose what regulation is acceptable?
You can't take something away from someone if they never had it.
Is regulation created today different than regulation created in 1950 for some reason?
Like sure, it's worth accounting for the 1950 regulation apparently working well enough to keep when you look at it, but you are arguing that further restrictions are self evidently bad and existing regulations are (apparently anyway) self evidently fine.
Our dwindling birthrates make this harder and harder to do unless we stop supporting retired seniors and end retirement benefits. Seniors are on their way to outnumbering other demographics. Historically, working adults outnumbered seniors 4 - 1. Now it’s getting closer to 2 - 1 which is still unsustainable.
Just like capitalism, socialism and socialist programs need the right kind of population growth; or both systems fall apart.
> It's not, because our economy works on wealth creation not wealth extraction.
This can be true of the economy overall, but false of particular actors or actions within the economy, as in the case of rent-seeking, for example.