Lyft, Uber to leave Minneapolis after city council forces higher driver pay
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Whether the rates are reasonable or not, the obvious move would be for Uber/Lyft to comply and pass the costs on to the riders, just like taxi companies have been doing forever. By instead pulling out entirely they are sending a message to Minneapolis and everyone else – if you try and regulate us in any way you will lose our services and your voter base will revolt, and we are willing to take the revenue hit for it.
I'm not sure that Minneapolis is the best place to put this in place. Folks in Minneapolis are wholly liberal and support living wages. If anything, this is just going to look bad for Uber/Lyft.
I don't live in Mpls proper, although I do reside in Hennepin County, and I primarily don't use Uber or Lyft so I don't really have skin in the game either way, but I just don't see this as being a great location for these two fairly shitty companies to attempt this.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/oregons-drug-decriminalization-law...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/06/drug-test-we...
Links to an article about how Oregon is partially rolling back their drug decriminalization policy.
1. Oregon never decriminalized drugs and 2. The policy was supposed to implement treatment programs that never materialized.
Further as an Oregonian. No one voted for people to be able to openly use drugs wherever they wanted, but most didn’t realize that once possession was decriminalized, smoking fentanyl on public transit was suddenly not in violation of any law on the books. No one voted for that, they just didn’t know it was on the table.
Although there were exceptions for limiting public alcohol use in proximity to schools and such, there were no such exceptions for hard drugs (since they were already illegal).
Had the legislature implemented this they would have been able to spend time investigating potential problems such as these and plan for a smoother rollout.
I voted for and still support measure 110 in principle. I would also be just fine with laws criminalizing public use. The two are perfectly compatible policies.
On the one hand, I agree, but on the flip side decriminalization is not something I would expect from our elected officials at any point this decade. The voters are able to push the envelope in ways that risk-averse career politicians simply will not.
We may finally see substantive election finance reform in Oregon (we lag dramatically behind most of the rest of the nation) come November due to our initiative system. IIRC, Cannabis legalization was another one that the citizens of Oregon pushed through and only then did the legislature get it's butt in gear and write comprehensive legislation. Same with decriminalized and medicalized psychedelics.
If we didn't have such dysfunction at the state level due to republican state reps continued antics protesting and not showing up to deny a quorum, it's entirely possible that the issues with measure 110 could have been sorted out at the capital before public opinion had time to do the full 180 on decrim.
It's a shame, but as an Oregonian with a drug felony from over a decade ago, I'm happy with the progress of making possession of personal amounts of hard drugs a misdemeanor instead of a felony. Two steps forward and one step back is still progress.
There's a lot of companies and cooperatives from a quick look. Even cities rolling their own. Uber/Lyft is handing an entire market over to a lucky competitor,
Right?
As an extreme example, if they regulated minimum $1000 per ride. No logical person, free market oriented or not, would expect "alternatives" to take their place.
That was my point, since in fact no market is free
The IRS is clear on what the definition[0] of an independent contractor is. Uber and Lyft drivers do not meet the definition because of the constraints imposed upon them by said companies.
[0]: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
Compare that with a Chef. The Chef at a restaurant decides on the menu, buys (or at least orders) the food, and cooks it to their own specifications. All of pushes them towards contractor. But they do all of that in their employer’s kitchen, using equipment provided by the employer. Therefore the IRS generally decides that chefs are employees.
The things you said (choosing what food to buy etc) just means their boss (ie maybe the owner of the place) has made choosing food part of their job requirement. I can't imagine how being given more responsibility like that is in any way related to contractor or not, as long as the chef's job requires them to provide food to paying customers.
But this is the point of the example: both the chef and the ride–share driver make similar decisions for themselves. They both decide for themselves how to accomplish the goal given to them by their employer. But unlike the chef, the ride–share driver also provides their own car. That’s a huge financial commitment that the driver makes and brings to the arrangement. Plus, they can easily work for more than one service at a time. Sure, they can only have one passenger at a time, but they can sign in to multiple services at the same time and pick and choose between jobs offered by all of them.
So while a chef is rarely going to be a contractor, a ride–share driver probably is. They have many more factors in favor of them being a contractor than the chef has.
Your own linked document says nothing about contractors being required to set their own rate. Other IRS documents[1] also does not mention being able to set your own rate as a factor.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
>The IRS is clear on what the definition[0] of an independent contractor is. Uber and Lyft drivers do not meet the definition because of the constraints imposed upon them by said companies.
The linked document doesn't say much aside from "You are not an independent contractor if you perform services that can be controlled by an employer", which isn't exactly "clear".
Probably because everyone sets their own rates by agreeing to work; it's not a real differentiator. What does them setting their own rates mean here? They're contracted by Uber, so the "rate" here is what Uber pays them, not what the customer pays Uber.
They're already more than free to demand that Uber pay them more and quit if they don't, same as any other contractor under the sun.
The only time someone isn't setting their own rates is slave labor, which is already incredibly illegal.
I have multiple friends who drive for Uber/Lyft, and it’s their second side gig they do when they have a couple extra hours and want some extra money.
Even if it’s not perfectly an independent contractor, from a practical standpoint it sure doesn’t smell like traditional employment at all. Imagining the Venn Diagram of features, it seems a lot closer to contactor.
They set their own hours; overtime pay would odd, but perhaps too many hours should be banned on safety grounds. They bring their own equipment. They owe no particular allegiance to an “employer” like Uber or Lyft (and can work for more than one of them at once!). Even family leave would be somewhat odd, at least in the way that family leave works in the US.
But, in the US, this results is a problem: they are low-paid contractors, and contractors don’t get certain critical employment benefits (automatically tax-deductible health care at group rates is the big one), and the result is extremely problematic.
Perhaps a much better solution would be to let drivers be contractors but to fix the benefit situation. Insurance should not be tied to employment! I, as as independent contractor, should be able (or required) to purchase (or have provided to me by the state) insurance under identical terms to those that employees benefit from. In fact, changing jobs or taking a break from work should have no effect on my insurance plan or the taxation thereof! Contractors should be eligible for Medicare and Social Security just like employees. And perhaps family leave should even be a state benefit: after all, the presence of children benefits society and the state (future labor and tax revenue, not to mention that children are nice to have around), and this benefit does not depend on whether the parents are employees, college students, low-paid contractors or high-paid contractors.
With all of that fixed, allowing people to put miles on their car to provide a useful service for not-amazing contractor pay doesn’t actually seem so bad to me.
The health insurance situation is not great, but it's available through Obamacare. In my experience the actual cost is not much worse than employer provided, but the true cost is often subsidized, so employees don't always realize how much salary they are giving up for health insurance.
No eligibility for unemployment or workers comp though.
Don't drivers know how much they'll be paid ahead of ride acceptance?