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U.S. judge says Uber drivers are not company's employees
- lokopodium 9y agoYou'd think minimum wage should be observed even if you're allowed a nap.
- chrischen 9y agoRecent studies released show Rideshare drivers do make more than minimum wage (per hour).
- phrz 9y agoCan you substantiate that? Thanks in advance.
- cuckcuckspruce 9y agoAfter you take depreciation, wear-and-tear, insurance, and maintenance into account?
- bkor 9y agoA Dutch journalist drove for Uber for various months. They advertise that drivers can make loads of money. After expenses, the journalist barely made more than minimum wage. He also found that drivers often handed out business cards to encourage repeat customers to pay them directly (avoid taxes+Uber, etc). Further, customers abused drivers various times (e.g. it's used as a cheap moving service incl expecting you to carry boxes), etc. Entire article (use Google Translate): https://www.volkskrant.nl/kijkverder/2017/uber/ https://www.volkskrant.nl/kijkverder/2017/uber/
- HenryBemis 9y agoI like Dutch people. I really do. They have this sense of honesty, that if they don't like something, they'll blatanly tell you "that sucks, throw it away and make a new one". No sugar-coating involved. That said, Dutch people tend to be (let me say it nicely) 'very considerate on their spending patterns'. The biggest object I've moved with Uber was a 40" TV which I carried and placed in/removed from the trunk.
- ed_balls 9y agoThe thing is he was a clueless journalist. Uber drivers with experience know where to hangout and which rides to take to maximize profit, know where drive to skip the traffic. They often drive when there is a surcharge and know when to take breaks. They know which car would be best for driving e.g. Skoda Rapid with factory LPG can reduce the cost of the fuel. They often share a car between 2 or 3 people. You can drive in New Year's Eve for 4x the price. There are a lot of ways to optimize. What I know from talking to people is that the Uber drivers used to make above average wage after taxes and expenses. Now Uber takes a bigger cut and there is competition, so it's below average. Also you get a car with all expenses paid. I think the problem is that in Europe the state covers healthcare and other benefit so Uber drivers are doing alright here.
- the_mitsuhiko 9y ago> The drivers work when they want to and are free to nap, run personal errands, or smoke cigarettes in between rides, Baylson said. Interesting. If that makes you not an employee then half the flexible working time companies don't have employees :)
- chrischen 9y agoWhat are flexible working time companies?
- polskibus 9y agoI guess the parent meant come in between 8-10 leave 8hrs later?
- regularfry 9y agoOr "As long as you've clocked 40 hours in a week, we don't care when".
- gizmo686 9y agoYou don't have set hours. In my experience (as a software engineer) most companies take a hybrid approach, where they define a few core hours a day when you are supposed to be working (to assure that everyone is in at the same time for at least part of the day), but let you decide when to put in the majority of your hours.
- walshemj 9y agoWhich is the basis of all salaried jobs ie you don't have fixed hours of work
- jiveturkey 9y agomy guess is most (by far) salaried jobs are not flex time. certainly flex hours is not the basis of all salaried jobs. to pick a job at random: teachers are salaried. they certainly have fixed working hours.
- ggm 9y agoUnsurprising, but luckily only applicable to the US however undoubtedly will be referred to on other trials in other economies. We've always had the 'gig' economic problem. It's maybe me but I don't get it. Treating employment as subcontracting tilts benefits massively to the employer and reduces unionisation. It's anti worker. It's retrograde. It's going to increase dependencies on state benefits due to the lack of savings, depressed lifetime income and absense of 401 self funded retirement.
- hardwaresofton 9y ago> It's maybe me but I don't get it. Treating employment as subcontracting tilts benefits massively to the employer and reduces unionisation. It's anti worker. It's retrograde. It's going to increase dependencies on state benefits due to the lack of savings, depressed lifetime income and absense of 401 self funded retirement. Yes. However the venn diagram of people who know/learned this, and people who are willing to change it, and those who have influence requisite to make change do not overlap enough at present. I get most surprised that this is the steady state of things in a large supposedly democratic republic like America -- if the country was reckless in hopes for growth and selling Special Economic Zones and stuff OK, there's clearly a large problem maybe even a short-sighted goal issue (oh they're trading worker's lives for short term maybe long-term economic growth), but that just isn't the case with the US.
- collyw 9y agoEven as a fairly educated decently paid software engineer I got screwed over by a somewhat similar situation.. I took a job where I was paid through an international company (well 3/4 of my pay was that way, and the rest was a normal contract) here in Spain. When I saw my pay go in before taxes it looked significantly more than what I had seen before, and I though I was doing well out of the deal. Of course I had to pay all the taxes anyway. It was only a year later when I got changed to a full Spanish contact I started checking numbers (to make sure they were equivalent) that it occurred to me that I would only have been getting 1/4 of the pension payments before then, which in Spain is a significant amount. I doubt most Uber employees are seeing noticing anything like that (though to be fair I have no idea how those extra are paid in the US).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- gnicholas 9y agoNote that this is just for the purposes of one federal law, and it is not dispositive for the question of taxation. > U.S. District Judge Michael Baylson on Wednesday said San Francisco-based Uber does not exert enough control over drivers for its limo service, UberBLACK, to be considered their employer under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act. The factors for the FLSA determination are not identical to the factors that the IRS considers for the purposes of making their employee/contractor determination. [1] Also, of course, this is just one US District Court judge, so it's not binding on other District Courts or Courts of Appeal. Basically, we're still in the early days. 1: https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=062eba8d-8fad-4bbf-9cf7-86df34b9dcf0 https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=062eba8d-8fad...
- flukus 9y agoWouldn't that screw drivers both ways? Not an employee IR purposes but not a contractor for tax purposes? We have two different definitions?
- HenryBemis 9y agoI was thinking the exact same thing. In the eyes of the State you are ONE or the OTHER. Can't have only the good halves of the bad halves. If the State hasn't figured out what 'Uber drivers' are, then this discussion will lead only to more confusion and pain.
- gowld 9y agoDon't confuse what makes sense with what the law says.
- vertex-four 9y agoIf it turns out to be the case that Uber drivers fall between the cracks, so to speak, that’s kind of the legislature’s job to solve. Not that they will, of course.
- walshemj 9y agoWhich is the problem IT contractors and IR35 in the Uk. Funnily IR35 is written so that self employed barristers don't get caught - even though they work on the same case for the same employer for over a decade.
- SoulMan 9y agoYes like, Amazon/eBay sellers are not their employees.
- lerax 9y agoExactly
- tom_mellior 9y ago> The case is Razak v. Uber Technologies Inc, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, No. 2:16-cv-00573. I would just like to commend Reuters for giving an explicit, concrete citation of the case in question. We should really hold journalists to the minimal standard of actually pointing us the the primary source. It's not hard; they know what it is they are referring to. All they need to do is to put it into the article, as was done here. Good job. (The same goes not just for "some court has ruled that X", but also for "a new study found that Y".)
- jiveturkey 9y agoI don’t think they leave out citations due to laziness or difficulty. It’s because the general public glazes over as more of the detail is presented. Which hurts revenue.
- tom_mellior 9y agoThe "general public" that reads an article about a specific court case until the very end would be too scared by a case number appearing in the last sentence or in an end note? I don't quite believe that.
- zhte415 9y agoWhen writing for diverse audiences there are ways of dealing with this. Footnotes. 'Click for conments' etc
- gowld 9y agoIt's especially great because if you search the actual ruling, you can see that Reuters summary is BS.
- tom_mellior 9y agoOops, I missed this late answer. In case you wonder by here again, would you mind providing a link and maybe a brief summary of what parts of the Reuters article is BS?
- aksss 9y agoRide-sharing, like a fry cook, was never meant to be a life’s career ambition. Jeez people. Folks are complaining that a fry cook can’t afford to buy a house and an Uber driver doesn’t get a 401(k). Wake up and smell the coffee. Let these positions continue to function as gap-filling opportunities for the young and those who need massive flexibility or want side-hustles. We drive up employment cost massively and wonder why less people get employed. We come up with creative opportunities like ride-sharing and then try to kneecap it. Guess what? Driving cars for hire has always been a shit way to make a living, ask anyone who’s driven cab. Now some dim people are shocked their career ambitions can’t end with Uber? Let them learn that lesson and move on. We don’t need to anihilate the awesomeness that is Uber and the benefit it has for drivers who use it with the proper expectations.
- bkor 9y ago> Let these positions continue to function as gap-filling opportunities for the young and those who need massive flexibility or want side-hustles. It seems pretty clear that instead of letting people be underpaid (which affects the economy badly anyway) they prefer people to be paid properly. In Netherlands there's a proposal that employers who use flex workers should actually pay more social benefits for such people. This as these workers will likely need more social security. That cost needs to be on the employer, plus it'll encourage companies to hire people on a permanent contract.
- dannyw 9y agoOr the costs push companies or of business and less jobs exist.
- jiveturkey 9y agoless of that type of job
- seanccox 9y agoThis is a common misunderstanding about the relationships between companies, employees, and markets. Companies aren't the originators of jobs. Instead, demand for goods/services can reach a threshold that makes corporate organization for profit viable, and in so doing, requires that employees be hired to fill the demand. If there isn't demand for a good/service, then even a company that is providing it will be unable to pay people. On the other hand, if demand for that good/service exceeds the capacity of the company, they will hire more people (and/or more companies will be created to compete for business).
- lerax 9y agoThey are users too, what's the surprise?
- jmull 9y agoNot surprising, and probably the right decision. But... If you’re fighting for the ability to not pay your front-line people minimum wage, I have to wonder if you’ve got a viable business. These are the people who interact directly with your paying customers and the ones who actually provide the service your customers value. Keeping costs down is great, but you cannot squeeze the life-blood out of your business.
- gowld 9y agoUber works by suckering drivers into a huge up front investment so they have to work for a "decent" wage to pay back the sunk cost, so the overall average pay is terrible. It's a simple scam akin to Groupon and MLMs (but not multilevel). Eventually they will run out of suckers and flop like Groupon did. That's why they are so desperate to fake self driving tech to prop up their valuation.