CA Labor Commission Has Just Killed Uber

Note this is a different article than the TechCrunch one, this goes into the impact to Uber if they classify drivers as employees and you can see that it doesn't look good for Uber.

I wonder what the appeal process is here. I guess one of the good things about the current 'all money is private' investment strategy is that there isn't some hedgefund dumping millions of shares of Uber stock in uncovered short sales.

"This would obviously make Uber drivers subject to minimum wage. How does one even figure that out? Now that there are local minimum wages (e.g. LA soon to be $15 an hour) how do you compute minimum wage for a trip that begins outside of LA but ends inside the city? Or vice versa?"

Probably you count time in LA at the LA rate, and when they leave the LA area by crossing the city limit, you calculate that accordingly.

A lot of these seem like non issues.

Like the time waiting to pick up a driver isn't the responsibility of the company anymore then your time checking a website to see if you got hours that week is the company's responsibility.

The California Supreme Court, in Brinker Restaurant Corp. v. Superior Court, found that you don't have to force meal breaks, simply provide them, and my understanding is that that only applies if they work more then five hours, and if a work period is no more then 6 hours, meals can be waived by mutual consent.

Easy enough to do through the app.

The employees will just be part time employees working a variable shift. That solves like half of these "issues".

This didn't kill Uber. It still has economies of scale that put it ahead of normal taxi services, and the ability to intelligently adjust pricing.

Seems more like a lot of whining about how hard it is these days for a small business to hire really low-paid, uninsured workers than anything to do with Uber. I'm inclined to think Uber won't go out of business if it is treated just like taxicab companies. After all, the selling point of Uber isn't low cost - if you can find a taxi it will usually be cheaper - it's superior service.

Also, see the comment by Morgan D. Frank below the article.

CA <> the addressable market in the world.

I know that this site is going to be overwhelmingly pro-uber, but this guy is also a climate denier?