Uber, Lyft drivers block Manhattan traffic to protest lockouts | Hacker News Reader

Uber, Lyft drivers block Manhattan traffic to protest lockouts

amny.com

26 pointsphilip120927 comments

Do they think that NYC can force Uber and Lyft (and others) to hire all of these people and pay a certain amount? Why wouldn’t these companies scale back their NYC operations in other ways in response to this?

If these companies are profitable, why would they leave the market rather than scale back their profits marginally?

They are not profitable per se. They need to have an order to earn profit. Fixed "hours paid for being available" doesn't mean they get enough orders to match with all logged drivers.

Bad rules = bad result.

They already were scaling back, and this is what caused the protests.

The city said that uber had to pay drivers hourly, and uber said, "OK, then we wont let drivers log in unless there is sufficient demand"

This is an entirely predictable response.

Every time I see an article about Uber/Lyft, I fantasize about a world where they operated on a business-to-business model.

Drivers could expense their cars, gas, insurance, and maintenance. Uber/lyft could avoid a significant portion of the employment lawfare. Many traditional cabs are operated as small businesses/sole proprietorships working with dispatchers.

Uber would probably have to build a streamlined tax filing system for drivers, but that really shouldn't be that hard for a business as simple as driving a car.

My best guess is that a big part of the reason they don't is that they launched in small business hostile California, but that doesn't seem to be a sufficient explanation.

If any insiders have thoughts or perspective, I would love to hear it.

> Drivers could expense their cars, gas, insurance, and maintenance.

If drivers were accurately tracking their car depreciation, gas, insurance, and maintenance, they would probably realize how lousy a deal driving for Uber/Lyft is. Uber does not want to encourage this type of critical cost/benefit analysis on the part of their drivers. Like bitcoin, they thrive on a regular stream of naive newbies.

I think that is overly cynical. Drivers aren't subhuman idiots. Most that I have spoken with seem to be intelligent and thoughtful people. I tend to believe that most of them can do the simple arithmetic and know if they are losing money each month.

I would be curious to see the numbers on driver retention, but a quick search didn't turn up anything.

Yeah, but there are a shocking number who are renting accounts. It is not uncommon for some dude with a clean record to get the account, and the car, and then rent out one or the other to someone with a not-so-clean record.

And I have often seen legitimate drivers swapping in other cars unannounced. It's extremely annoying when the app sends me a bunch of info about the car, and the driver pulls up, and it's all wrong. I ask the driver why, and they're always like "oh, my regular car is in the shop." And the car they're driving has temporary or dealer tags. And I'm like, would you please update it in the app, because riders like me get paranoid when someone's shady about their car or license plate.

I have seen this as well, and where the driver doesnt match the account. However, doesn't that indicate that there is some money to be made on the driver side?

I don't think anyone is an idiot for driving for Uber/Lyft, but there are a lot of costs that are very difficult to calculate except on a fleet level. e.g. are drivers factoring in the increased risk of getting in an accident that might raise their insurance rates for five years, etc.

Isn't this what it means to be a contractor?

When the contractee doesn't need your labor then they don't hire you.

If your want guaranteed work become an employee.

When a company plays hard ball in negotiations we call it good business, but when workers do it we spit in their face.

It clearly depends on what constitutes hardball, and we typically exclude illegal actions. Withholding labor or employment is hardball, shoving a gun in someone's face isn't.

The question then becomes: are these workers breaking the law when they obstruct the streets and inconvenience 3rd parties. Does the law not apply to them because they are workers in a labor dispute? If not, which laws can and cant they break with impunity?

If someone drags my life into their personal negotiation and breaks the law, I think they should face the consequences.

Nothing wrong with drivers wanting to be employees. However, they should be upfront with what they want.

Uber can't have it both ways. They can't treat drivers like contractors when it's convenient, but then flip to treating them like employees when they want more control.

If Uber drivers are contractors, fine. But then Uber should not be able to micromanage every aspect of the contractor's work.

Uber clearly wants contractors. The issue is that states generally detest contracting and wants workers to be paid hourly, not per contract.

You can have a lot of control over contractors.

You can offer them $X (i.e. set/negotiate pay).

You can tell them what hours they can have access to your building (i.e. set hours).

You can restrict their tools. (i.e. no flame torch, only ProPress).

You can set expectations. (i.e. transfer the passenger from pointA to pointB).

Afaik, you can't restrict their employment so no you can't drive for Lyft. While you can with employee.

What restrictions does Uber do that they couldn't do over a different contractor?

It might not be good for the US to transform into a Gig Economy but that's an entirely different discussion.

I keep wondering about this an no one is giving a clean answer on this.

I have no doubt that Uber and Lyft are in some ways doing this to game the system and I really don't want to defend how they treat their drivers.

But at the same time, if you are going to be paying an hourly wage you would expect some threshold of work activity during that time. If there are too many drivers on the road and that utilization is too low, than you are paying for people that you don't need.

That is how most hourly jobs work, you hire for the amount of work (or expected amount of work) that you expect needs to be done with an expectation of busy time.

All of the reporting has been about screwing over the drivers, but it seems like a thing you would do in any normal situation. The problem here is these companies before the law could have any number of cars on the road and it didn't matter how many people were using it. And any of the drivers were not interviewed in a traditional sense for the work.

No, it’s not quite the same. If they didn’t need the labor, you would be active in the app and would get no rides because there isn’t enough demand.

This is more like a business needs an employee to work, but they will book someone else who is below a regulatory threshold to avoid you being considered “full-time”.

This usually results in more regulations or unions.

"Lockout" being shorthand for Uber/Lyft enforcing a minimum number of passengers per mile (by suspending drivers to alter the driver/passenger ratio) in order to game NYC pay laws

I wish that better methods existed than blocking traffic. We probably wouldn’t have a front page story if they didn’t, but they probably also earned the anger of the public they blocked in traffic. The stories in the article make me feel they are being treated unfairly though

I don’t know of a single social movement that made significant progress without disrupting the public.

Are these rideshare drivers supposed to be coordinating with one another? Surely, they have been using out-of-band communications to discover and exchange information with other drivers. It doesn't seem like it would be in Uber/Lyft's best interest to help drivers coordinate or communicate, like at all. But any driver who doesn't, would probably be at a disadvantage.

Makes you consider how effective these platforms could be as attack vectors after a breach of their admin platform. You could shutdown entire parts of a city or snarl rush hour traffic. Or post an alert requesting drivers to explicitly block traffic.

Just gives a different perspective on the company as operating a small army in every city.

Can't you get the same effect by renting a large uhaul truck and parking it sideways in a road?

Who is doing the lockouts ? Seems to be Uber and Lyft Corporate as opposed to NYC. If so, that seems to be an FTC Issue. Or is there some law in NYC to help taxi drivers.

FWIW, in NYC I always take a cab due to regulations cab drivers have. It may be a bit more expensive but not that bad. If I lived there ? Maybe I would reconsider.

That's a good one: contrary to the Facebook of yore, Uber and Lyft have managed to Move Slow and Break Things! (I make myself laugh, while stuck in some traffic jam...)

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