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Comment by dylanjermiah | Hacker News Reader

>This is a good ruling for workers,

Is it? If this were to remain, the large majority of the drivers will not have a position to fill. It will not be viable.

>That is, Uber has realized significant margin gains by pushing all risk of carrying passengers and car maintenance onto its drivers

No one has 'pushed' anything. Drivers are consensually agreeing to drive because the pay they receive values their time.

>Therefore, this risk is transferred to either drivers (who are on average mot equipped to handle this risk)

How are they not equipped?

>Now, what society is really missing out on is an opportunity or reason to transition from employer-based benefits to government or society-based benefits. This ruling will postpone a public discussion on the role of employer-based insurance and benefits.

What society needs is less people forcing them to do what others think is best.

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> Is it? If this were to remain, the large majority of the drivers will not have a position to fill. It will not be viable.

It's simple supply and demand. The demand for easy-to-book, gps-enabled car rides is there. If uber cannot accommodate, someone else will.

>No one has 'pushed' anything. Drivers are consensually agreeing to drive because the pay they receive values their time.

People undervalue their labor in order to get the gigs they need to make money. Laborers consensually agreed to unsafe, 18 hour factory work back in the day, and indentured servants consensually agreed to years-long contracts of, effectively, their life.

If the only reason uber competes is due to price difference gained by eschewing labor laws and benefits, then of course drivers are agreeing to drive with them -- there is no other option for their labor when the competitors that provide benefits have to shrink operations due to demand shifting to illegally-sourced labor. That said, I don't think Uber is used due to their price so much as their technology.

>How are they not equipped?

I doubt many will afford commercial vehicle insurance, health insurance, 401Ks, in addition to substantially increased maintenance costs covered out of their own pocket. It will certainly make driving for uber undesirable. Of course, Uber covering these costs is far cheaper overall, and the price change would likely be negligible.

>What society needs is less people forcing them to do what others think is best.

This is just a stupid talking point.

If the only reason uber competes is due to price difference gained by eschewing labor laws and benefits

Taxi drivers already were consider contractors and didn't have benefits, so I'd really like to hear that argument.

I agree. I don't use Uber for the price, as much as the convenience.

The supply of taxis is regulated in the cities, amongst other things, so that the pricing reflects society's ideas of the minimum fair compensation for that class of work.

The constraint on the supply of taxis has no effect on prices, which are regulated separately.

The real effect of the supply regulation is to force drivers to pay up to a hundred dollars per day to be allow to work by some medallion-owning companies and investors.

Lease drivers rent the medallions, and usually the taxis, for a day or a week from their owners or a middleman. Depending on the owner and the night of the week, a lease driver pays $72 to $100 to take a car out for a 12-hour shift, or about $450 to $650 for a weekly lease. The driver must also pay for gas, at $15 to $20 a night. Drivers keep whatever fares and tips they collect, but they often start a day's work $100 or more behind.

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/09/nyregion/driving-a-taxi-di...

>No one has 'pushed' anything.

Oh, come on. Would you accept the phrasing, "Uber has shifted risk away from themselves and toward its drivers"? Which 99% of English speakers would read as equivalent to "Uber pushed risk to its drivers."

That's just factual, not some hidden communist rhetoric.

Perhaps you misunderstood, no one is coercing anyone to drive for Uber. People are consensually choosing to driver for Uber.

What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?

I really hate the trend of libertarianism inventing its own political correctness, policing regular speech with well-known meanings ("pushing risk") for hidden accusations of oppression and slavery.

Not that it matters, but I'm not a libertarian.

There is no pushing of risks. There are inherent risks to any activity, be it crossing the road or driving for Uber.

I don't think you quite understand.

With a conventional taxi company, if something bad happens, you deal with the taxi company, get compensation, etc etc

With Uber, they wash their hands of it and say it's all the individual drivers fault. So now the drivers have to deal with any bad stuff, and their insurance companies as well.

This is Uber, pushing the risk onto drivers, so it can make more money.

pro tip: If you don't want to cover your own liability, don't drive for Uber. I have to have liability insurance for my office, $50/mo or whatever. I could have chosen to forgo it but that would have been stupid wouldn't it?

I fail to see why that should prevent Uber from having to take liability.

>With a conventional taxi company, if something bad happens, you deal with the taxi company, get compensation, etc etc

In many places, if something bad happens with your taxi ride, you're still dealing with just the taxi driver. They are independent contractors in many places.

I'm not sure what the makeup is of employees vs. independent contractors, but they are definitely out there in significant numbers. In NYC, for example, most are independent contractors, and this has resulted in a whole mess of problems ( http://nypost.com/2015/01/22/1-5m-in-taxi-drivers-money-held... )

Choices take place within causality. Causal language can and should be applied to choices. If your politics appears to require a spooky metaphysical sort of free will and your ethics fail to align with the real world of cause-and-effect, then they are wrong.

An infinite number of theories of causality can be applied to any situation. This is why much of human thought, and some brands of political theory and law assume the ideal of "free will". To determine the actual "cause" of any event in the way you would like to interpret it, you would have to be omniscient.

Some people would "consensually" trade both their kidneys for a hot meal. A company offering this deal would be exploiting the inability of these people to properly assess risk, and would be acting unethically.

That argument is worthless.

>If this were to remain, the large majority of the drivers will not have a position to fill. It will not be viable.

That's correct, it's probably not viable.

>How are they not equipped?

Most personal car insurance policies don't cover operating your car commercially. In addition, each driver would be required to conform to ADA rules (which apparently not all of them were doing https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/blind-users-with...) and the penalties for noncompliance are higher than most people can afford. And those aren't the only rules they would be responsible for - the risks are just really high!

But Uber does have a commercial insurance policy: http://newsroom.uber.com/2014/03/56463/

Why is everyone talking about as if we were in 2013?

Oh - sorry about that. Thanks for the update.

Uber's commercial insurance policy only applies when a driver is actually conveying a passenger or has accepted a trip, not when they're, say, on the way to an area of high demand but don't have a trip accepted yet. This is different from a taxi company's insurance policy, which covers the driver effectively the entire time they are in the cab.

Drivers are consensually agreeing to drive because the pay they receive values their time.

I just want to make sure that I understand you fully:

You believe that Uber and its drivers negotiate as equals?

'equals' is incredibly hazy. There will never be a perfect equilibrium but it is close, if drivers could command better pay at a better establishment why would they choose to drive for Uber?

There will never be a perfect equilibrium but it is close

Thanks for your clarification.

Since you apparently believe that they're negotiating as "close" equals, I don't believe that you and I can have a constructive conversation about this, and so I'm going to bow out now.

Before you do, please answer the question I asked.

(I'm not mootothemax and if I were you I wouldn't expect a reply after someone has left the conversation.)

They are not equals, the drivers probably can't get a better deal anywhere else, and the law should be changed to make sure drivers can get a better deal in the future.

> and the law should be changed to make sure drivers can get a better deal in the future.

What law and how will it work?

>the drivers probably can't get a better deal anywhere else

You just made my point, if driving for Uber was terrible, people wouldn't do it. They do because it's there best alternative.

>You just made my point, if driving for Uber was terrible, people wouldn't do it.

Of course they would, because there is no alternative.

Are Lyft and Sidecar not alternatives?

Welcome to Hacker News, where everyone on earth has $90k in the bank, and nobody ever needs money right-this-second so they can continue to barely-afford their food, housing, and medical care.

It is nowhere near close.

Does any contractor / employer? The ultimate power in negotiatons is the ability to walk away. Uber created value through its product and network and drivers want a piece of it, otherwise, what's the conversation?

> It will not be viable.

Sure it would, why wouldn't it? It's not like Uber is the first taxi company that has employees in the history of USA. Why do you think it would make Uber not viable?

Because they're competing against all the other taxi companies that already exist.

Thing is, I don't use uber for the price. Most of the time the price is obscured anyway. Uber lets me pull out an app, see where drivers are, book a driver, and get an estimate for how long it takes for them to arrive. A taxi requires me to stand on a busy street and wave for half an hour, or call one or more taxi businesses and go through an operator, get a vague ETA, and hope it arrives, eventually.

There is nothing innate about Uber preventing any other transportation system from moving its tech offerings into the present day. Before UberX, Uber was significantly more expensive than taxis anyway (at least for me it was).

You're not in the majority. A former coworker worked for a company that actually did what Uber has always claimed it does -- the app connected passengers to independent companies for a seamless experience.

What distinguished it from Uber is that the connection was made to livery companies who complied with labor law, and they therefore cannot really compete on price and struggle to gain traction.

Products and services fail for a lot of reasons. To start with, customers have to be aware that a competitor even exists before price can become a factor.

Very true. The company's not failing, but it has not yet captured any significant consumer interest. From what I understand, they get most of their revenue from corporate clients for whom safety and compliance and more important than price.

Most taxis have an app that does similar things to Uber.

So? Many people claim they bring something better than the existing taxi companies. If that's the case, then they should be able to survive this no problem. If they can't, then it turns out that what they brought to the table wasn't that great in the first place.

Yup. I don't think I'm disagreeing with you.

The traditional taxi market has been expanded due to Uber's low prices and liquidity. In SF Uber is reportedly doing 3-5x what all taxis were doing before.

Restricting supply and increasing the prices will forego the benefits of Uber.

> Is it? If this were to remain, the large majority of the drivers will not have a position to fill. It will not be viable.

I guess you found the main point. If Uber would operate like a normal company, with employees, proper insurance and risk coverage for everyone, it might not be profitable.

So tell all their customers, who love it, to go pound sand (or pay 2x or 3x more), and the drivers to sit at home... This doesn't seem like a good solution.

If they can't abide by the rules that the state have set for them - in this case, what seems to be a fairly reasonable a ruling saying that their 'contractors' are actually employees - and they can't make profit with those changes, then their company should die, or reform. That's basically all it comes down to. If their company is downsized as a result, well, you can blame them for unsustainable business that didn't actually work when the alarm finally rang, and their inability to respond.

If your friends want a startup that will help them get downtown to pound beers faster, and Uber dies, don't worry - someone else who can _actually do the job_ and abide by the rules will almost certainly be there. And the Uber employees who get canned? They might actually

The amount of doublethink people have here about "bad actors will get pushed out of the market for better ones" while simultaneously defending shitty business practices, or conveniently ignoring that bad actor principle when their oh-so-favorite business gets a slap, is pretty astonishing. But given most people on HN seem to only want to "disrupt" the wallets of other so theirs can get fatter through acquihire buy-out plans for their ephemeral startups, I guess it's not surprising.

You are completely blind to the desire of the customer. You are happy to tell the customer to absorb costs for services they clearly do not want.

What's amazing is that people are voting with their dollars that they approve of the business and you want to stick your nose in there and say "hey guys, I don't approve of this transaction. Get out of the car."

So, according to you, McDonald's should be free to break minimum wage law in order to lower their prices? That other companies should be allowed to violate safety regulations in order to provide cheaper prices?

The customer wanting something in no way, shape, or form justifies violating the law. And in this case, the customer is NOT told to absorb costs for services they don't want. They're simply told to pay the true cost of the service. If they don't want to, then they clearly did not value the service that much.

Two drivers approach you.

Driver A: "I'll get you there for $10. If I crash, you don't get to sue Uber, just me."

Driver B: "I'll get you there for $15. If I crash, you can go after Uber."

As the customer, do you believe I should have the right to choose between these two options? Or do you believe I should be forced to choose B every time?

Yes, I think it's fine for you to be forced to choose B. Because when people get hurt, someone pays. And if uber doesn't pay, and the driver doesn't pay, society does. Hurt passengers would have their medical problems paid for by their insurance or by all of us through taxes.

In CA, you have to have insurance to drive a car. It would be cheaper for you not to have insurance, but most people don't have the money to make things right when they get into an accident. This is exactly analogous.

Nowhere in the example was the condition that the driver is not insured.

Outside of that, I find this attitude incredibly patronizing. "We need to save you from yourself" is what it boils down to. You pay somebody for a ride knowing she's not insured? That's _your_ problem, not mine.

until you get hurt without insurance and we end up paying for you

If they loved it, then they should be willing to pay. I don't see why people liking a service means they shouldn't have to comply with the law.

Found the American libertarian. You hit all the talking points in a few sentences; now that's efficiency the government can only dream of!

If you have a constructive comment to add, please feel free.

I'm not going to engage in Actual Deep Political Conversation on HN, but I would like to take this opportunity to apologise for two things:

1. You're getting downvotes for reasonable requests after taking an unpopular stance, and I hate HN for that. I expected my little pointless bit of snark to be crushed but instead you seem to be getting the blunt end of public opinion here. That sucks, and you're right to want constructive criticism.

2. I (and you) missed a couple of talking points, actually: 'monopoly on violence', 'fruits of labor', and 'coercion/taxation/etc is slavery'.

No. Just no. This idea that every single thing like this has no coercion needs to stop. You cannot possibly make the argument that both the driver and Uber are on the same level of power in that relationship.

Not everyone agrees with you, but I think there's a good debate to be had about if and how to update laws to accommodate new business models.

Operating in a legal gray area isn't a good solution for drivers, riders, or Uber.

It's been working out for Uber pretty well so far.

I guess we'll see what happens next in California? I'm guessing they'll significantly relax the controls they exert over drivers to get them back to contractor status. Which doesn't sound great for Uber.

What needs updating? This is not a new business model; they aren't doing anything special from a legal point of view.

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