> I don't think somebody becomes an employee because they require you to use a hammer and not a rock to push nails into wood when building a house. While that i

> I don't think somebody becomes an employee because they require you to use a hammer and not a rock to push nails into wood when building a house. While that is not the best analogy I think you should be able to expect the contractor to show up to work with the right tools to do the job. This is actually a relevant distinction for the building trades. A contractor will have their own nail gun with a brand-specific feeding system, or might even choose to use an impact driver in certain circumstances. When a construction firm requires all its subcontractors to have a particular model of nail gun that would be an argument for them being employees. > I would really like to see a system that was more like a real time Angie's list. In such when ride request came in drivers made bids, and requesters could pick from the bids. The bids might also have information about distance from pickup location (or expected pickup ETA, along with price). Maybe have a default setting to pick lowest bidder and shortest ETA. But other things like car styles or types could be part of the system too. This was how a lot of people expected Internet commerce to work in the early 1990s - the research term for it was agents/multi-agent systems. The passenger would have their agent put out a call for bids for a ride from one location to another. The driver's agents would reply with bids and the passenger agent would take the lowest one. The driver's agent would base the bid on some function that could take into account things like distance, predicted driving time based on current traffic conditions, predicted mileage cost based on MPG estimates based on data from the car's OBDII sensor data, etc. That would be a market system. Uber and Lyft are a duopoly from the point of view of passengers and monopsonies from the point of view of drivers.