Seattle becomes first in U.S. to protect gig workers from sudden 'deactivation'
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Ofc, this depends on the region (country, state, etc.), I'd love to see some estimates on how much prices would go up in a particular region, and how much the demand would potentially decrease - when classifying drivers as full / part time workers.
Will be keeping an eye on this Seattle experiment.
Executive pay seems fairly independent of the issue at hand.
Counterpoint: if they could extract more profit from the market by increasing prices, why haven't they done so already?
Market determines viable price for service, not cost. If the cost of doing business can't find a balance at rates the market will pay at acceptable profit margin, the business simply doesn't exist. Many aspects of our lives suffer from this reality: renewable energy companies in many places survives only because they're propped up by government subsidy.
The answer to "why aren't the executives cutting pay" is obvious: it's up to the executives, and why on earth would they cut their own pay, when they could instead simply decrease worker conditions and cut cost of labor? Without a union, executives have literally all the power.
Executive pay + shareholder profits (through stock buybacks, dividends) are where all the massive margins go to right now. There's no more profit to extract from the market (unless the finance team is terrible at their jobs and have been leaving money on the table) so that's where the money to cover increased cost of labor needs to come from.
I'm not really upset at the idea of CEOs making less money, I don't get what the big deal is.
So market set the pay for services however executive pay is not affected by the market at all?
Uber pays its executives what it does because other comparable companies pay the same. If they cuts that people they’d want to hire will choose to work for other places and they will have to find someone who agrees to work for less (which might or might not be bad a thing)
And arguable, executive pay is perhaps a lot more elastic than ordinary workers' pay. Companies aren't shy about paying huge bonuses to their CEO one year, but cutting them to nothing the next. Ordinary workers have a much steadier pay check, even when working for Uber.
Similarly, most companies are also quite willing to hire and fire CEOs. Statistical distribution of CEO tenures is a well studied subject.
No. Uber still has to compete for workers with other companies looking for labour. Unions presence or absence doesn't change that dynamic.
> Counterpoint: if they could extract more profit from the market by increasing prices, why haven't they done so already?
Not sure that's a counterpoint to anything? Yes, I assume that they are setting their prices to maximize long term profits.
However, if regulation increases costs across the industry, supply curves will recede, and if demand curves stay roughly the same, prices will rise (because the point where the curves meet will be at a higher price point).
If the executives of Uber could just ignore shareholders, they wouldn't need to worry about profits at all.
How would you prove a decision was wrong without hindseight? How would you prove an executive shouldn't make X amount of money?
Imagine I'm the CEO of Nike, I make $100 million a year. The company is doing amazing. Is that because of decisions I made, marketing, good product, word of mouth, things that happened before I was CEO. Prove that I shouldn't get that money.
They don't get the money back they already spent, of course.
In California Uber and Lyft rammed through a proposition to enable them to continue their labor abuses. Anecdotally, the prices have gone through the roof and I've never had more trouble getting rides, so I don't believe that. It's a failed business model because Uber has to provide a return to investors and livery is basically a race to the bottom without some form of price controls.
Sounds good for customers?
this is going to be a rant, but i mean…
the reason uber and lyft (and countless other “disrupters”) disrupted anything is they pretended the externalities didn’t exist/ignored the very externalities the already existing industry had previously already sorted out and lived through.
and lo and behold, no one even halfway intelligent is shocked that all of these issues arose at scale.
i’ll repeat what i’ve said countless other times: anyone who thinks they have a “disruptive” idea yet hasn’t extensively studied why the already existing industry does things a certain way, is an absolute lightweight and no one should be investing in with them.
we have a major problem in some of our industries of people who have deluded themselves that the people who came before were somehow primitive or less enlightened.
we see this all over the place, from people who want entirely rebuild large software packages from the bottom up, from submarine tourism companies, to “house flippers”, to short-term rental apps, who because their egos refuse to let them explore the history of their project, they just end up in the exact same place. only they took a really long, wasteful, and stupid detour to get there.
if an industry is doing something you think is wrong, explore the history of why it is done this way. don’t pretend like that problem doesn’t exist and then call yourself a disrupter. this is a recipe to have everyone laugh and go “it’s not like you weren’t warned there was giant hole around the corner and then you drove right into it.”
and even worse, if they have explored the history of their project, know very well the problems coming, but try to externalize that to wider society, it’s outright malicious.
> leaving customers to rely on…the bus? Or just not traveling.
again, taxis have been around for pretty much ever.
Or simply stop using uber ?
> It's a failed business model because Uber has to provide a return to investors and livery is basically a race to the bottom without some form of price controls.
You can't have a race to the bottom without competitors still in the market.
If competitors like Uber leave the market, Lyft can raise prices.
In the long run, there will be a balance between competitors entering and exiting the market just around the point where the industry is barely viable as a business.
That's also how eg restaurants or cafes work in many big cities; and this explains why so most cafes fail, but why there are also always some cafes around.
A lot of complaints i see on HN are very first world and don’t see how much some of these companies actually help.
These companies are not set up as charities. If they happen to help people, that’s a side affect of the primary purpose - generate maximum revenue.
Regulation is required where a businesses incentives do not align with societies (mining is an easy example). As much as C level execs will argue, self regulation has never been an effective mechanism. So Uber is incentivised, naturally, to provide a safe experience for a rider, as to do otherwise would reduce revenue. They are not incentivised to provide their drivers any semblance of a “life worth living”, as it has no positive correlation to revenue. This isn’t out of malice, it’s just economics at work. If we, as a society, want a better standard of living for gig workers, then regulation, flawed as it is, is the only mechanism I know of that has some chance of working.
See Ohio for what happens to an unpopular ballot initiative.
I’d vote against the Ohio initiative and for the Uber one.
I hated taxi cartels. They had horrible customer service, high prices, and I’m a big dude who had to deal with them. I cannot imagine how toxic it was for gals.
What changes is the information asymmetry where Uber etc knows a lot more about the conditions of people working for them than the people taking these jobs do. As a general rule those with more information are simply in a vastly better negotiating position.
That’s not something the average person off the street is going to ask. But many are going to be pissed learning they will reimburse you for paying someone to clean your car but not the time it takes you to do it yourself, nor the lost wages until it’s clean.
But taking the outside view, you don't need to know all the specifics. You can just check Uber's general reputation (or lack thereof perhaps) for fair dealings with drivers. That general reputation will reflect how they are dealing with those edge cases in general.
Just like in the 2010s you could be reasonable certain that a job at Google meant you got free food, even if you didn't know the exact specific rules about what food would be available when and where.
If people get a worse impression than reality they can release more information, but if the public has a better impression than reality then they have zero incentives to say anything.
Information asymmetry isn’t about people knowing nothing. If you’re offended a job at some salary you know roughly how much they are willing to pay but you don’t know the minimum you can negotiate for. Similarly, companies don’t know the minimum you’re willing to accept but they do know quite a bit about market rates.
Or they could keep pissing off the people with the monopoly on violence, maybe that'll work long term?
You've been told multiple time people value flexibility and yet you keep fixating on an old work model that you want to apply to everyone. More options are better. Full time jobs didn't go away. This whole industry didn't exist other than getting paid per shift as a pizza delivery driver.
How many gig workers do you personally know? I know more than 20 and all of them prefer gig work to signing up for a full time delivery position at a restaurant.
Gig work is available to immigrants super fast as well. Go to any major city in Europe and see migrants and refugees making a living delivering food. Do you think they are dumb and choose the worst job they can get?
Talk to some people before you pontificate over what they should want for themselves. They can literally stop the app at any point so your problem isn't that gig work exists, but that other people value things you don't.
Frequently it's their only option, the only job the have access to, so in a way, you're right.
They're not dumb, just constrained.
One can stay here debating all along why people get to those situations in the first place, and that normal jobs shouldn't require extra work, or that immigrants should be able to find easy "normal" jobs etc, but the point stands for me that a world where I can pick from three options (full-time, part-time, gig) is better than a world where I can only pick from two.
That being said, I'm supportive of more regulation around gig-work to protect gig-workers, but that regulation needs to be specific to gig work and not just force it to disappear outright. A gig-worker shouldn't be able to be kicked out without explanation, there should be recourse for customer ratings, they should be covered by some kind of global insurance, etc, but these things will need to be tweaked to this new reality instead of us pretending like there aren't many many people around the world that prefer this work arrangement.
Alas, that doesn't mean that everyone will have a utopian job.
Uber argue that most gig workers are just doing it as a spur of the moment side hustle, and therefore the flexibility is necessary. But your anecdote is the opposite.
To me it sounds like drivers support Uber because of some dystopian Stockholm syndrome where it's their only hope in a failed system.
Showing up for work on Monday is no guarantee you will show up on Tuesday. Correspondingly employing you on Monday is no guarantee you will be employed on Tuesday.
I think it's a bit silly to expect any other state of affairs.
That amount of insecurity is to me just insane. I can't fathom living like that.
The moment you have multiple employers to choose from (ie an actual market for labor) then the insecurity is removed. Indeed, for the most part, if you can deliver value, you can find someone to pay you for it and your bills will get paid.
It's not your employer's job to mitigate the risks an employee took on by not saving money. Everyone should have 90 days of expenses saved up.
I think your views come from a point of privilege.
- they have no savings or access to credit
AND
- they get fired on short notice
AND
- they can't get another job
I'm not sure that making the employer fire them with a longer notice period, given that they can't get another job, means they won't be screwed. Therefore, I don't think there is any utility in so restricting the employer.
Not having savings is bad and dangerous. That's not caused by labor law.
Jobs should serve the people.
So he uses Uber Eats to pick up the slack. The app lets him go online and go offline any time he wants — no shifts, no scheduling ahead. He’s also completely free to reject as many orders as he wants until he gets ones that offer a bigger tip. Skip, on the other hand, penalizes his earnings if he falls below 80% moving average accept rate (over the last 10 orders).
If Uber were forced to employ all of their drivers full- or part-time, he would lose all of the flexibility he now enjoys. He’d have scheduled shifts and have to clock in and clock out at specific times on specific days. He’d likely also lose the ability to reject orders entirely.
I can tell you right now, he would hate that. So would many other gig workers, who take full advantage of the flexibility to be able to look after their families and otherwise live their lives. Compare that with the chaos that is the life of a retail worker stuck with an automated shift scheduling system and zero start/stop time consistency and zero flexibility.
You are completely failing to see my point--if gig company A had to employ your Dad as a part time or full time employee with guaranteed minimum wage or work hours and other benefits he wouldn't have to tetris together an insane set of gig work jobs to keep from being evicted or starved.
Your dad is forced to be an indentured servant for these companies that can't make money without exploiting people like him. And somehow you are immediately going to bat for these employers... pretty sick IMHO.
The point is true gig work allows you the flexibility to fit it around whatever else you have going on, be that part time work, starting a startup, taking care of a family, etc. of course it’s downsides and probably needs some more rules to protect the workers. But banning eliminates the opportunity entirely.
It sucks to be a freelance writer and it’s easy to get screwed; should we ban that too?
Your only comment here is to try to pivot into other arguments that you are inventing. Not gonna work here.
That would encourage companies to offer full time positions. Current law (in the US) financially penalizes full time employers, which is why most part time workers end up working multiple part time jobs.
A full time job gives your employer the power to dictate your life schedule to you. Your boss wants you at your desk at 8am but you have to take your kid to school at 8:30? Too bad! You’re there at 8 or you’re fired.
It’s even worse in retail and food service, as I alluded to in my original post. These workers get their schedules a week ahead, with shifts all over the place. One day you’re opening at 6am. Next day you’re closing at 9pm. Good luck having any kind of life outside of work with a schedule like that!
It results in eliminating part-time jobs, overloading full-time employees, and increasing unemployment.
That is irrelevant, because of how it's measured: 1 person working 40 hours/week and 9 people not working gives an unemployment of 90%, but 10 persons working 4 hours/week gives an unemployment of 0% -- yet both scenarios have the same amount of work. Of course using part-time jobs reduces the unemployment figures. It says nothing, however, about the availability of work.
All this does is eliminate more jobs.
In your hypothetical scenario, a company that hires 2 or 3 people part-time would need to do health insurance for each of them, benefits for each of them and the additional full-time equivalent paperwork for each of them...
In that scenario, the company would end up just hiring 1 person full-time for the hours, and have much less added overhead costs.
This would lead to higher unemployment, because now instead of 3 people being employed part-time, only 1 person is employed.
Where's the good in that? Maybe I'm just not seeing it from my perspective, if anyone else can chime in?
His dad can work at anytime, anywhere and doesn't have a boss to mandate when he clocks in. How is that being an indentured servant?
> Skip, on the other hand, penalizes his earnings if he falls below 80% moving average accept rate (over the last 10 orders).
Certainly your ability to reject jobs or even to select the time you want to work would be severely limited (but let’s ignore that..)
If they were employing him, penalizing him for declining work would be fine.
Any company which would have to directly employ him would certainly penalize him for not accepting work and would not allow him to start his shift whenever he wanted.
That other app he’s using seems to be somewhere in between gig and normal work (so you seem to get the worst from both worlds).
> If they were employing him, penalizing him for declining work would be fine.
Which seems like a huge downside?
I find it so puzzling that some people can’t accept that there are gig workers who prefer the flexibility and many of them wouldn’t be able to work at all if they had to be treated as part/full time.
That's not exactly true if we consider the environment that allows companies to operate like this, insomuch as his dad will eventually starve or be homeless if he doesn't eventually clock in. Hence the indentured servitude. The "worker's choice" of "just do gigs for a different gig company" doesn't really work if all gig companies stand together at the other side of the homelessness cannon.
How are traditional full time jobs not even worse then? They require you to clock in at times chosen by the employer or you lose the job and income.
The term refers to situations such as "An employer pays for transit of one or more people on condition that work of the employer's choosing is performed until the cost of transit, and any accompanying expenses, are repaid to the employer." Generally, these include specified wages, but employers commonly arranged that expenses and wages combined guarantee that the workers will be unable to pay off the contract within any specified timeframe. This often resulted in lifelong service, and could at times extend to workers' heirs (whether debyst inheritance be legal or not, as such workers were often at severe disadvantage to risk challenging the employer on any matter). Effectively, indentured servitude was usually indistingushable from slavery.
To address your "will eventually starve if he doesn't _eventually_ clock in", this seems to be the default case for all forms of employment (even if you employ yourself, in the wilderness, entirely on your own). The exception being that some places have sufficient social or legal safeguards to prevent a "clocked out" person from meeting this fate.
It all comes down to trade offs in the end. Either we optimize for people to hold jobs that allow them to survive in society and earn enough to do things like pay rent and buy food. Or we optimize for job dabblers who don't really need the work but want some extra cash. I believe we should optimze for people to hold steady jobs that allow them stability and do important stuff like pay rent and buy food. We should optimize for survival of the worker and workers require steady employment.
Eg, ridesharing can be done ride-by-ride by people choosing to accept fares from a marketplace but stocking store shelves works better having people there on committed shifts and delivering packages is in between, where people sign up for shifts but are expected to complete the full shift.
Why can’t we fulfill the needs of both people who want reliable, shift-based employment and people who want variable gigs?
Not everyone doing gig work is hustling as a second job to get ahead (though that should also be both legal and accepted, IMO).
And you don't see an issue with that?
I don't think we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Certainly there's some legal regime where workers can continue to enjoy the kind of work time flexibility they have with gig work, while also being compensated and treated fairly.
Social unrest is bad for business. I'm not sure why companies keep turning the screws when profits are at record highs.
I think on the one hand maybe a lot of people are away on summer vacation so not ordering food as often. On the other hand, interest rates in Canada have shot through the roof, so maybe a lot of people are cutting back on ordering in and choosing to cook more to save money.
Unfortunately, interest rates also affect my dad, so he’s getting squeezed pretty hard. I can’t blame the gig companies for that though, that’s the Bank of Canada’s doing.
I know I have never ordered from either because I was immediately aghast at the massive markup over the regular price for the products...
If the alternative is more degrading forms of labor, with businesses sneaking around full time protections by only giving people 30 hours of work, and paying an absurdly low minimum wage, that's hardly an indictment of the idea of strong labor protections - quite the opposite. Why did you bring up socialism? Are you saying capitalism can't provide good labor conditions and we need socialism to do so? Extremely based take.
It's not. Gig work is one of many options.
You can be a full-time employee. You can be a part-time employee. You can start your own business. You can work for local, state, or federal government in innumerable roles.
Or, if it suits you, you can be a gig worker.
Focus on specific cases of companies treating workers unfairly, as this legislation appears to do. There's no point railing against "the system" because there is no "system".
Prottip: they don't exist
Delivery drivers always got paid jack and made the majority of thier income from tips. It was always a bad industry and Uber etc just make it worse by taking an additional cut and causing businesses to outsource to fewer total workers across the industry than would be employed/were employed under the traditional model where any business that wanted to do delivery had to do so by directly employing someone.
That argument is essentially: Workers should suffer so those who already were of means can profit more.
You can't open a restaurant unless you're already doing well, with large amounts of capital etc.
Drivers are generally living oatcheck to paycheck with zero available capital.
You do see why I feel zero sympathy, right?
And that's ignoring you're actually arguing for drivers to do more work for the same or even less pay....
- have unlimited VC money (35 billion in operational losses over 10 years)
- offload things like medical insurance, depreciation, equipment costs etc. onto people who work for them
- screw over restaurants
I can't see how it's a net benefit
If we had any kind of sense, as a society, this shit would have been banned years ago.
This is absurdly patronizing to people making their own choices, and the freedom to seek employment or work as they see fit. As someone who, as an independent contractor in CA, was the victim of such patronizing sympathy that resulted in regulation which was deeply contrary to my own interests, please stop trying to "protect" people like me. Ironically, that regulation was targeted at Uber, who then received a specific carve out that left me screwed over as a small independent contractor.
There are some niches that have operated under the gig work model for almost 100 years, such a certain sectors of trucking where drivers own their own rigs and specifically choose to enter that line of work, as opposed to a salaried job where they don't have to worry about maintaining their own vehicle, precisely because they want the ability to simply switch their (very well-paid 6 figure minimun) job off like a light when they feel like it, for a couple of weeks or a couple of months or longer, and then switch it back on.
I personally know a guy who has performed with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra for almost 20 years doing exactly this. he's a trucker with his own rig and his own schedule on his own terms for 6 months out of the year, and tours with the orchestra for the other 6 months. This type of lifestyle would not be possible if there was no established gig system available for people who wished to have that flexibility.
It's hard to see a victim here; no victim, no crime.
Company assumed the rider was innocent until proven otherwise. Two way road here, being a middleman-as-a-service.
Amazon is very quick to refund, Aliexpress is slightly slower and more effort, a local shop is up to how they feel with only the vague threat of a chargeback.
and then let the exception make the rule, since it never will be the same
in other contexts, no, I am not suggesting that, but there are some fringes that try
That's impossible to codify at any reasonable level.
When your philosophy was developed, if you didn’t like your circumstances you could literally move to the wilderness and make a life for yourself by exploiting unclaimed land. Or if you lived in a different part of the world then nations would go to war with each other over resources.
We don’t live in a world with unclaimed land anymore.
It would be really super duper nice if nations stopped going to war with each other over resources.
We have to figure out how to coexist with each other, and that means treating humans with more dignity than an object that is ruled by an algorithm.
Of course, one thing on which the vast majority of people, regardless of their different moral systems, agree on is that this is not the case.
There's no such thing as not having the will of a group imposed on others. The best we can do is formalize a non-violent system of consensus of rules we can live by, and then allow only said system to use violence to enforce such rules.... Which is literally what government is.
I agree it's not an absolute, immutable concept, but I think it's a hell of a lot clearer than "good" or "right" or "fair". What makes consent is the fact that either party can opt out at any time for any/no reason. It's consensual because we are decision-making agents, and in spite of privation we can still choose to refuse to transact. Consent is violated by force or direct threat of force, not by the circumstances the transacting parties may find themselves in.
If you're very horny can you still refuse to consent to sex? If you happen to be dying of thirst and I offer you a glass of water, can you refuse? You can. Are there may reasons why you would? I don't imagine so. Does it follow there there are no circumstances under which anyone would refuse? It does not.
Did anyone get my consent before pulling all the fish out of the ocean?
Did anyone get my consent before dumping toxic chemicals into the river that runs through my backyard?
At one point damage to the environment wasn’t considered a problem of the commons.
This hasn't always been the case, and still isn't everywhere today. Slavery still exists, so does misogyny.
I'm a fan of the saying "tolerance isn't a paradox, it's a peace treaty". To extend that, peace treaties are literally laws.
Obviously, not arguing for CP here, but I'm pointing out that the age of consent is indeed is a (valuable!) will imposed by society on others. I'm bringing CP up because it shows a bound on behavior which exists, and thus there is a line which needs to be drawn.
All I'm suggesting is that this liberal imposition - that relationships between adults (as above caveated) must be symmetrically consensual - should take precedence over how good, right, just, harmonious, or fair said relationships are perceived to be. If we think we can make something more fair but less consensual, we should not.
At best there might be the occasional power vacuum. Just existing is a political act and the unit of human survival is tribe-sized or larger.
Land described as "unclaimed" is typically a convenient fiction used to support sovereignty transfer.
I.e. if the best job that someone can negotiate is one where they are being exploited or abused, then that doesn't make the exploitation/abuse any more just.
And that's what this pretty good system doesn't account for: the inherent coercion of a fundamentally unjust system
Its been a while since I’ve read Locke, but my impression was that he would agree with that. (Not that I would, to be sure.)
What makes you think he wouldn’t?
Hence, I doubt he’d find a giant company using its negotiating power - and not forgetting its other legal shenanigans (most relevant in this case would be trying to prevent unions[1] forming) - that necessitates harm to an individual through a “consensual” contract to be part of his idea of what liberty looks like. Would you negotiate such a contract for yourself? I doubt it. Can an Uber driver negotiate it away? I doubt that even more. In fact, there is no negotiation, it’s a take it or leave it offer.
In short, he didn’t seem interested in allowing powerful interests to crush individual interests based on some ill-conceived notion that it’s a free market or that there is true freedom to consent in any meaningful way.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-lyft-and-others-launch-cam...
Of course, the inherent power imbalance between an employer and a worker is what allows for exploitation, when not otherwise protected by law.
Since most of us have to work to live is it consensual? I do understand that there are other places to potentially work but that may be limited.
Also passengers pay you $20 or so for returning an item.
Only situations where they will disable you automatically is when someone complains about safety or violence or something along those lines.
* I worked there from 2016-2020
When you started, "when I was in college..."
I wasn't expecting "I used to work Uber" to follow!
Uber still feels new to me. Haha.
Anyway, on a serious note, that is frustrating...
I'm surprised there is no arbitration...
It's scary to think that someone could knowingly use this against a driver as a cruel joke, or to save face.
I have a mobile app on the Apple app store that makes a little money each month.
I'm anxious that despite thousands of personal investment, Apple can unplug me in an instant... like flushing a parasite out of the Matrix.
Taxis were as unreliable and untrusworthy and they could be - unpredictable prices, you never know if it will actually come even if company accepted your request, shady city navigation when pay by meter etc.
So I'm all for company like Uber to be able to cut such bad actors very fast to be able to provide good service for customers. But that ability seems like quickly and universally degrades to "we own you and your schedule" attitude by ubers of the world
Seriously, the number of times I've seen cancellations because the Uber didn't want to go in that direction or that neighborhood... or had unreal surge pricing applied, etc.
And that's today, so I doubt the Seattle change will make much of a difference. Many (not necessarily most. I don't have that data) drivers game the system in its current state.
Uber and the like are getting worse, but they're just coming down to the level the taxi industry has been at for most of the last century.
I'm not sure how that's a win for anyone other then Uber, and I'm fine with them being legislated out of existence.
I find it hard to believe that most people find Uber to be a equal or worse experience that they're paying "dramatically more" for, but still buy it anyway. It's also not as if the Taxi companies aren't taking home the bulk of the profits in the old system. It's bad all the way around.
In many places (e.g. New York City) taxis are regulated and this behavior is illegal.
The main improvement of Uber in NYC was that actually hailing a cab can be difficult in remote areas or during busy hours, and Uber solved that problem.
I see your illegal and I raise you a 'no legal body gives a hoot'
Sincerely,
- A fare that has been refused a ride to an odd location, a dozen times. (TGIB - thank god its uber coming to get me today.)
(I picked a cab due to low battery, who charged me 40% standard uber fare. Nice reminder to my wallet to never get cabs on the street )
For going to an odd location, once in a while I've had a problem in Manhattan where the drivers are all heading home for the evening and they won't do trips that are "out of their way". But it was about the same frequency as Uber canceling (or hovering nearby waiting for you to cancel).
So they replaced one crappy service with another that has a better UX. All other benefits seem to have vanished when forced to actually make money and we’ve seen a ton of rationale for the existing regulations in the process. Similar to Airbnb
Edit: honestly what is the rationale for the existing regulation?
I see the arguments for regulation around employee protection. But a lot of the licensing regulations seem designed to enforce artificial scarcity and restrict competition. The medallion system in NYC comes to mind. The value of an NYC medallion was insane pre Uber, there's no good reason for that.
Some of the licensing was clearly regulatory capture by existing taxi companies.
I had essentially sworn off of taxis, or even visiting cities where I would need to get a taxi. For all of their supposed regulation, there was almost no other industry I wanted to interact with less.
Uber had a really low bar to clear, and even at increased prices, I'm unsure if it would drive me back to cabs.
That is not why registries and medallions existed. The point of it was to prevent a race to the bottom that crowded the streets with empty taxis all honking at each other.
Which is, to your point, exactly what has happened with Ubers and Lyfts in Seattle.
In any popular neighborhood on any popular evening, public transport becomes even more difficult to use because Uber and Lyft drivers absolutely do not respect bus lanes or bus stops. They turn, even more than they already are, into fare pickup zones for these private companies. If a bus driver does manage to make it close enough to honk but far enough to not pick up someone safely, the gig worker does not do anything.
I'm starting to see this at the new train station that opened on the north end of Seattle. There is a "kiss and ride" area and it is routinely covered up with people driving vehicles festooned with the logos of the app companies. Some have even figured out that, apparently, they can get even better ratings by dropping their fares off at the bus stops in the bus-only lanes.
Meanwhile, there's nothing any of us can do because there is no public registry or complaint process for the public to gripe about app gig workers, and if you ask for one you are pilloried as wanting to "take away good pay from hard-working immigrants" or some other trope.
In any case I guess one could try to organize and write to the police / local councils etc...
The nyc medallion system needed disruption, sure, but I’m not sure if the current state is a net benefit to very many people, excepting some entrepreneurs who made the right bets.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/10/leaked-uber-files-reveal-h...
Taxis in many cities were/are horrible, Uber is a godsend in cities like Manila where the option is to (a) get ripped off (for sure) by a taxi or (b) use the Uber app and don't get ripped off. It is honestly an improvement. Likewise for didi dache in many Chinese cities where getting ripped off is common.
Getting a taxi concession was no joke. You literally had to study on the layout of the city. And given that those are European cities, there is no grid system. You also had to know about safety and take first aid courses.
Additionally, taxis require special inspection on top of the rigid inspections necessary for cars in Germany (you wouldn’t want to endanger people with a rust bucket on the autobahn). So yes, they were exceptionally safe.
Taxis are mostly Mercedes in Germany, as traditionally Mercedes had the most experience with taxis, and the proper programs in place for taxi use. When I see a Mercedes E wagon on a freeway, I still think "taxi" (like some think police car when they see a Crown Victoria).
Source: There was a time where I took a taxi almost every day in Germany, and a close family member owns a German taxi concession for many decades now.
Lyft+Uber are an absolute joke in comparison.
(I talk mostly in the past tense, because I haven’t lived in Germany for long now. I don’t know whether the gig economy damaged the enormous quality of taxis over there.)
Regardless. If I'm taking an uber/taxi/etc, I want to get to my destination safely in a reasonable time, in a clean vehicle. If the driver strikes up a friendly conversation that's fine. But its definitely not what I am in the car for. If the driver is silent for the entire trip, that is also fine as long as they get me where I need to go.
If you required taxi drivers to have a PhD, they would be even better!
I don't know if it made him better.
As far as I’ve heard from my family member, taxi concessions were highly sought after, but from my experience there were always more than enough to serve the population well. Some taxi drivers were employees of actual owners of the taxis, some (like my family member) owned their own taxi(s).
Taxi customers effectively had to pay for the labour of the driver, the actual cost of running a car, and for the cost of capital to finance the medallions.
Taxi medallions set a cap on the available supply of taxi services. Demand was driven by the market. Cost of labour was driven by what drivers could earn in other industries. We can treat the actual cost of running the car as approximately fixed.
Because of the fixed supply of taxi services and high demand, prices were high. But the extra profit went all into inflating the cost of the medallions, because labour costs were essentially determined by competition for labour from other industries.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxi_medallion#New_York_City
After Uber and friends entered the market, the cap on supply was effectively lifted. Prices of medallions crashed, because with extra supply and approximately the same demand curve, the market price for taxi services dropped to just above the cost of labour and car.
> [...] but from my experience there were always more than enough to serve the population well.
Whether you interpret the pre-Uber era of New York's taxis as 'enough to serve the population well' is up to you. But keep in mind that the drivers themselves did not benefit at all, since the cost of capital for the medallions ate up all the excess income.
(Many medallions were rented out by investors, but some drivers were also medallion owners. So in the latter situation they benefited in their capacity as medallion owners, but were 'exploited' in their role as drivers.)
This also mentions that a concession cannot be sold, but if an entire taxi business is sold, the concession can be sold with it. It expires after 5 years however.
I still don't understand how what is going on in New York has anything to do with taxis in Germany. Whatever Germany is doing seems to work, and whatever New York is doing apparently not? I don't know, I'm not familiar with NY taxis.
They also mention the rather strong transport laws, that most likely prohibit them from offering the same model as in the US. (But I really don’t know.)
So, not comparable it seems.
You are correct. Uber tried their usual model here and we threw the law at them. Then they tried to ignore it (cause, why not, it worked in various US cities). And got hit over with the law again and again. Then they changed it to their current model.
So now taking a taxi comes with most of the benefits of having Uber, while also having all the benefits that come with the rather highly regulated industry of taxi services.
I guess it’s more expensive, but then, does Uber make money? Because if they don’t, then when will it disappear?
Pre-Uber, I would use taxis when visiting NYC all the time. It was fine; taxis were all over the place, and hailing one was easy. Hotels and some higher-end restaurants would even help line one up for you. Drivers were all over the map, though: some were quiet, some loud, some annoying, some offensive. Most drivers drove aggressively. Some cars were clean, some dirty. The credit card machine was usually "broken" (wink, wink). No good way to get any of this feedback acted on.
In SF (where I've lived since pre-Uber times), taxis were useless. There was pretty much nowhere in the city where you could reliably flag one down. You could call a dispatcher, but the standard answer was "a taxi will pick you up in 20 minutes", and then at least half the time they'd never show up. The rest of the time it'd take at least twice that amount of time.
So I walked or took transit when I had the extra time in my schedule, or I drove. Which sucked in many ways, as parking is annoying in SF, and if I'm going out to drink, it means either carefully controlling how much I drink, and leaving some buffer time at the end of the night to sober up, or leaving my car wherever it is, and hoping I don't get a parking ticket in the morning (a hope that failed often enough to get expensive).
Nowadays I still walk or take transit as much as possible, but I hardly ever drive in the city. Uber/Lyft have completely filled this void. As much as their business practices have been terrible, there's nothing else that fills their niche.
> So I'm all for company like Uber to be able to cut such bad actors very fast to be able to provide good service for customers.
The problem with this is that there's no due process. Some disgruntled rider can be an asshole and rate a driver with 1 star, with a comment about feeling unsafe, and that's it, even if the driver didn't do anything wrong. How is that fair?
I find pricing very variable with uber.
Meanwhile, taxis have always had predictable pricing based on tariffs.
Honestly, I think the answer usually is in robust competition.
thing is, with this brave new world of purchasing services through apps and websites, competition is not assured. You will have a very difficult time fighting through the gauntlet of adtech and dark patterns, you might have a hard time getting a fair deal. Do people really get fair pricing getting a hotel, a plane ticket, a rental car, a tow truck or an emergency plumber anymore?
We would have infinitely more sophisticated discourse if we allowed for the possibility that our taxonomy does not capture the reality we live in, where there are intermediate classes of labor which should have some (but not all) the rights, protections, and expectations accorded to full-time employees.
> Our discourse on this topic is horribly stunted by [...] insisting that there are only two
Most of these cases involve resolving how (or whether) a current situation must be brought into alignment with current laws, rather than how laws could look in 10+ years, so I think it's reasonable for much of the discourse to reflect that.
Sure, we could dramatically overhaul national employment laws and legal theory, but that's not what courts are supposed to do during a lawsuit, and it's usually outside the scope of what many local/state legislatures are prepared and willing to tackle.
Literally what you are saying is "well that might be a better place to be, but the courts can't do it, and also it's too hard for the legislatures".
If you truly believe that making good laws is too complicated for the government to handle, then people and corporations are perfectly within their moral rights to ignore the bad laws and to do everything in the power to evade the consequences. You've lost the mandate of heaven, it's time to start over.
Some people call that “getting fired.”
That’s obviously a bit different from a regular job.
There is a lot of competition for these courier gigs, so the companies can choose who they allow to get gigs.
Unilaterally firing is much more inline with being a contractor than an employee.
Glad to see municipalities finally taking some territory on this, it’s long overdue.
Edit: typo
This article is about cutting off the workers' employment with the delivery/etc app, not the end users' ability to use the app
I’m still not sure if there’s anything preventing TLD providers from revoking your domain for any purposes (higher bidder, etc).
> The Congress shall have Power...To establish Post Offices and post Roads
It does not obligate the congress to do so, and most certainly (and unsurprisingly) does not contain language that guarantees any sort of right to email service.
You may make the argument that it should be, and I might even tend to agree, but you don’t get to declare that the Constitution agrees with you. You can certainly even claim the spirit of the law should extend to the internet due to its ubiquity (which i might agree with as well), but that’s nothing but an interpretation.
> I don’t need a citation other than the fact that they share the common root word, and that people with common sense, which we would hope to be on the Supreme Court, see the argument that I’ve made is perfectly logical. I don’t need freaking precedence. I’m setting the precedence right now by giving a better logical argument than anybody else apparently ever has
I mean, the real issues here are labor and consumer rights, and the arbitrary power that American capitalism gives to corporations and employers, but God forbid Americans take either of those seriously, that would be communist.
Clearly, the world is transitioning to a place where your quality of life without an online presence is severely reduced.
Currently, due to the lack of government provided infrastructure, we all live at the mercy of a few giant corporations, who answer to no one and are free to refuse business to anyone, at anytime.
I do not see why anyone would want private banks to be able to hold the specter of canceling your account and blacklisting you over your head, or google/apple/Microsoft/whoever locking you out of email, or some underpaid ATT/Verizon/T-Mobile worker forwarding your SMS so someone can steal your 2FA codes and empty your accounts.
I would not want the lives of citizens be tied so strongly with government provided infrastructure that the babus can "turn off" your digital life on a whim and suffocate you out of existence...maybe because you tweeted a joke, criticized a low level minister, praised a neighboring country, "hurt religious sentiments", or other flavors of independent opinions and free speech that the rulers of the day (present or future) don't support.
Fears like these are already voiced by privacy and citizens rights activists about the national ID system (Aadhaar), digital payments infrastructure, and all kinds of interlinking of databases and making such linkages mandatory for availing all kinds of services -- from birth certificates, to banking, to tax returns, to voting.
Hence the constitutional amendment. If you cannot trust the government to uphold the law, perhaps like it is in India, then this might not be a solution. But it should still work in the US.
This is also relevant a different context: Google (or some other similar provider) cutting off your access suddenly, throwing your life suddenly into extreme disarray.
For example, the ordinance would prohibit deactivating drivers who:
- Fail background checks - Establish a record of traffic infractions - Achieve a 1 star rating - Cherry picking only the best fares.
I'm willing to believe that outcome may be better in the abstract, since I'm not a big fan of Uber in the first place, but it's not clear that the average user of Uber wants that trade.
Pointing out that Decision A will likely lead to Outcome B, which may in turn cause Outcome C doesn't automatically mean it's a fallacy. It certainly doesn't mean that you snarkily posting wikipedia articles accusing me of bad-faith argumentation is justified.
In this case, it's not patently obvious that fewer, higher quality drivers is a net negative.
From there, sure, it's unclear if less "better" drivers are a business positive, but either way, that's an interesting discussion worth more than just "haha you did a fallacy". Claiming that it's likely that having less drivers that are "higher quality", whatever that means, will improve the service overall is just as much of a guess as what I put forward.
Either way, to go back to my original post, it's unclear to me that the users of the service are, on average, that upset about the quality of their drivers. The alternative is taxis, which certainly aren't better on average at screening their drivers for anti-social behavior in my experiences.
You should probably reflect on why you don't seem to realize the extreme privilege and benefits you have and instead choose to blame or vilify low paid gig workers who are subsidizing and delivering the treats you demand and consume daily.
Do the gig workers pay in to unemployment?
Do you know for a fact OC uses any of these exploitive services or companies at all?
Why else would uber be so desparate to prevent their drivers from being classified as employees?
Why isn't the question why you have to live without any sense of security and basic human dignity?
That is essentially the life of a prostitute. You get paid today if you're lucky, and it might even be a lot, but are neither seen as or treated like a human, just a "provider". You give up the autonomy of your own business and the lions share of the rewards for your own work to be a mere employee, in trade for all the same risk as being out there on your own. That's showing 'em.
I would actually be embarrassed to admit that I had so little self esteem and dignity that my uber driver has higher minimum standards for professional relationships than myself, but hey that's just me.
We can't have it both ways with utter flexibility on the business side and no support on the social side. Cutting flexibility on the business side is an option, the other is to increase the support without an employer paying for it.
There's no legal confusion, responsibilities are clear, and taxes are clear.
The examples of TaskRabbit and Rover, are they just a gray area?
This would be detrimental to my capacity of locomotion.
It’s not sustainable.
Isn't Netflix and a load of other successful companies also not profitable?
Is there such a requirement for at will employment as well?
I doubt that it will help, though. Instead of deactivation companies will shadow ban or “effectively” deactivate. When you can log into an account, but there is no more work for you. It’d be great if there were wider regulation preventing sudden deactivation by services in general. Getting locked out of your email, creator’s youtube account or a a small company’s account with a payment provider due to some algorithm without recourse can be equally painful.
- Expensive unregulated taxi!
- Expensive unregulated hotel!
- Picture of monkey (formerly valuable)!
- Imaginary restaurant that serves bad food!
- Imaginary scam money (in 17,382 flavors)!
- Expensive unregulated television!
- Another picture of monkey (never valuable)!
- Twitter but it sucks now!
- The news but it also sucks and steals your personal information!
Plus, try our greatest achievement yet:
- Expensive unregulated scam concert tickets!
Then you come to rely on the service.
Then they start giving you orders.
Isn’t this a good thing?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
2023: Appeals court upheld the decision.
If you don’t like this voting process, then propose an alternative.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/13/business/prop-22-upheld-c...
And Seattle is only a city.
California is regarded as the most “liberal” state.
If gig workers “lost” in California, they will likely “lose” Washington state as well.
WA, OR, CO, hell, maybe even MN, are all states that - just off the top of my head - I'd classify as far more progressive than CA, and particularly, less beholden to Silicon Valley investor money.
WA was (alongside CO) the first state in the country to legalize cannabis, Seattle as a city has some of the strongest renter protections in the country behind NYC and Chicago (admittedly this is a ridiculously low bar, "literally any rights at all" is better than 99.99999% of the country), pay transparency even went into effect here before CA. I wouldn't assume that what a CA court thinks of Uber drivers is necessarily what a WA court will.
California is neither the most “liberal” state as leftists use the term (meaning “supporting capitalism”) nor the most “liberal” state as rightist use the term (meaning usually one of “to the left of the rightists doing the describing” or “leaning toward the Democratic Party”.)
Vermont probably wins using the right-wing use of “liberal”, Given how the left-wing use of the term fits the dominant philosophy of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party and maybe a moderate fringe of the Republican Party, probably one of the near-parity states would fit that description.
Thank you, absurd iPhone autocorrect. This should have been “within the”.