>It's a murky area. Like you said, it's a gray area and applying the IRS 20 Questions does not yield an exact black & white determination of contractor vs emp

>It's a murky area. Like you said, it's a gray area and applying the IRS 20 Questions does not yield an exact black & white determination of contractor vs employee. The drivers have hybrid attributes of both contractors and employees. In some ways, the Uber drivers are like "contractors" such as hair salon stylists, Hollywood stuntmen, fashion models, magazine photographers, etc. On the other hand, they are like "employees" such as UPS/FedEx/pizza drivers. >It sets requirements for cars, rates and "fires" drivers, etc. I've boldly said it before and I'll boldly predict it again: it is much more likely that Uber will tweak its "control" rules to act more like ebay/craigslist/AppleAppStore rather than switch to an employee model that pays for minimum hourly wages, worker's comp, health benefits, liability insurance, etc. The auction sellers and the iPhone iOS programmers uploading apps are not "employees" of Ebay and Apple and it's much more realistic for Uber to relax some rules to be more like Ebay rather than be more like FedEx. Why? Because we (the riders) won't pay for the higher fares (probably more than 2x the costs) to fund an employer/employee model. If Uber did switch to a more expensive "employee" organization, a new competitor that deliberately structured itself more like Ebay/Craigslist and utilized true "contractors" as drivers would undercut them. Riders en masse would pick the cheaper fare from a contractor rather than the 2x fare for an Uber employee. I think some observers confidently think that Uber will ultimately lose the "employee" classification legal battle and there will be a financial windfall for the 160,000+ drivers. For the reasons I stated above, that is not going to happen.