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But they aren't employees. I still dont understand why people who get to work on demand whenever they want without a boss to report to or set hours are employee

But they aren't employees. I still dont understand why people who get to work on demand whenever they want without a boss to report to or set hours are employees. The company doesn't get the benefits of having employees (schedule them in for rush hours, reliable controllable labor base), so why should drivers get the perks of becoming an employee without having to give up their flexibility and everything?

jakelazaroff 7y ago
But are they truly contractors? They don't set the price for their own labor and can be fired for declining too many rides.
- rsweeney21 7y ago
  As with any independent contractor, the market sets the rate. Uber is just a really efficient marketplace since an Uber ride is a complete commodity with no specialization.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    It's Uber who sets the price, not the market, so this doesn't apply.
  - celticmusic 7y ago
    What a crock, Uber is setting those prices not the market. The market says Uber should be going out of business with the prices it sets, except investors keep dumping money into it.
    - cle 7y ago
      Doesn’t Uber have competitors? And why shouldn’t we consider investors part of the market? (Pardon my ignorance if these are dumb questions...)
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        It does, but the competitors are having a hard time because Uber can keep undercutting them and staying unprofitable longer than the competitors can stay solvent. > And why shouldn’t we consider investors part of the market? We can, but there are rules of "fair play" to the market that are supposed to be followed. What Uber is doing with SV money is, in saner sectors, called dumping, and generally considered illegal. Somehow it isn't, and even if it was, it probably wouldn't do much, as Uber's whole "rideshare" operation is illegal almost everywhere they run it.
        jquery 7y ago
        >the competitors are having a hard time because Uber can keep undercutting them They keep undercutting Uber, should Uber ignore that? Besides, Uber doesn't set prices significantly below the competitors, it relies on being a superior service with lower wait times and higher vehicle utilization. If you open Uber and Lyft you will typically see very similar prices, with the main difference that Uber can be lower because they are a more efficient service, but Lyft will make up for this by subsidizing rides even more than Uber (something you can see very clearly in their S-1 and quarterly earnings reports).
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        cannonedhamster 7y ago
        No... Uber is not more efficient than a taxi service. They were at one point but now they aren't. Taxi businesses have similar apps, drivers who know the area, and regular hours. If it were more efficient, than they wouldn't have needed all that SV money, they still need SV money while cutting worker wages, commanding a ton of the market, and externalizing most of their costs. There is no way Uber exists without someone dumping money in to keep them artificially in business.
        jquery 7y ago
        That’s wrong. Uber is more efficient than taxis at keeping each car highly utilized. Real-time utilization of a changing network is not an easy problem to solve. Taxis are empty a much greater percentage of the time than Ubers. I won’t address the rest except to say that’s more a factor of them expanding into other markets or maintaining category position than efficiency.
    - jacques_chester 7y ago
      Markets are still markets when subsidy is involved. In this case the market behaves as an oligopoly: it's dominated by two firms.
      - xref 7y ago
        GP specifically claimed Uber was an efficient market, not simply a market. (Regardless, Uber is in a market, but it is not itself a market)
        jacques_chester 7y ago
        Good call. I think the discussion comes down to the difference between Uber being in the market vs Uber being a marketplace. The former is where subsidy and oligopoly belong. The latter is where Uber superficially resembles a market but is not.
    - jquery 7y ago
      Uber isn't setting the prices, Lyft exists too. Uber would be going out of business except for investor money but that goes for all their competitors too. >The market says Uber should be going out of business The market isn't saying Uber should go out of business or it would have gone out of business. The market is saying Uber should be aggressive about pricing until Uber's competitors stop subsidizing their rides. Investors are part of the market too.
  - jakelazaroff 7y ago
    Uber isn't a real marketplace. "Sellers" (riders) don't set their own prices, and "consumers" (riders) don't get to choose who provides the service to them. Furthermore, prices are driven down artificially by investors who are willing to take a loss until other "markets" are forced out of business, at which point Uber will presumably raise its prices to actual taxi market rates.
    - icebraining 7y ago
      > "Sellers" (riders) don't set their own prices They kinda do, by not accepting rides under a certain price and forcing a raise, like it has been reported. > Furthermore, prices are driven down artificially by investors who are willing to take a loss until other "markets" are forced out of business, at which point Uber will presumably raise its prices to actual taxi market rates. This will never happen. Anyone can start a ride-sharing service with a tiny investment. There's no way bankrupting current companies will give Uber an unassailable market.
      - jakelazaroff 7y ago
        > They kinda do, by not accepting rides under a certain price and forcing a raise, like it has been reported. Yes, kinda. My understanding is that once they're "on the clock", they get penalized for declining too many rides. > This will never happen. Anyone can start a ride-sharing service with a tiny investment. There's no way bankrupting current companies will give Uber an unassailable market. Except any startup will be forced to either price their rides above the cost of service, or find investors willing to take a loss in order to undercut the former. Uber may not ever have an unassailable market, but they will have to eventually raise their prices or lower the cost of providing rides.
      - kds3 7y ago
        > This will never happen. Anyone can start a ride-sharing service with a tiny investment. There's no way bankrupting current companies will give Uber an unassailable market. Also "markets" doesn't necessary mean ride-sharing markets, they can also destroy public transport and other new ways of transportation that doesn't fit well to Uber model.
- Consultant32452 7y ago
  Not setting the price doesn't seem like a big deal. I can put an ad on Craigslist saying I'm willing to pay $100 to have my driveway pressure washed. Doesn't make any takers my employee.
  - hanniabu 7y ago
    You kind of are setting your price on that. You see the job and you can tell if $100 is accommodatable or not, ie does it match your desired rate. With Uber, you don't get to pick and choose like that, you have no idea where the destination is when you select a job. I don't believe you have any idea how many people you're picking up along the way either.
  - jakelazaroff 7y ago
    I can pick and choose which driveways I wash; Uber drivers have their trips opaquely dispatched to them. Furthermore, I can decide not to wash as many driveways as I want, whereas Uber drivers have said they get "fired" for declining too many rides.
Zigurd 7y ago
You can see the two-sided market of Uber as a market, or a faux market used as an obfuscation of terms of employment. It's more clearly an obfuscation of employment when, for example, package delivery services fire employees and the turn around and use the same people as "contractors." Uber skipped the first phase.
bobthepanda 7y ago
This just codifies an existing California Supreme Court ruling and applies it to general employment status. Explainer of the Supreme Court ruling: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonymarks/2018/05/29/the-california-supreme-court-deals-a-blow-to-independent-contractors/#27991e8b70a1 https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonymarks/2018/05/29/the-califo... > Under the newly adopted ‘ABC test,’ a worker is an independent contractor to whom a wage order does not apply only if the hiring entity establishes all of the following: (A) that the worker is free from the control and direction of the hirer in connection with the performance of the work, both under the contract for the performance of such work and in fact; (B) that the worker performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business; and (C) that the worker is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business of the same nature as the work performed for the hiring entity. A is debatable at best, given that make and model of car is heavily restricted, particularly for the 'UberBlack' service. https://www.uber.com/drive/new-york/get-started/eligible-vehicles/ https://www.uber.com/drive/new-york/get-started/eligible-veh... If your contractor gets to dictate how you present yourself and how you do your job rather than just being happy with the end product, that looks a lot less like contracting as understood by laypeople.
- woah 7y ago
  What if you’re a clown and you show up in jeans and a button down with normal sized shoes and no makeup?
  - bobthepanda 7y ago
    As far as I could imagine, most clown contracts don't actually specify the exact articles of clothing down to the UPC; anything that looks reasonable is permitted. Whereas Uber has a list of specifically permitted vehicles.
    - jquery 7y ago
      That's a distinction without a difference. There's only so many car models, what alternative would you suggest to a whitelist of acceptable cars for UberBlack?
marcosdumay 7y ago
There is more to employment relations than set hours. Uber drivers absolutely have a boss to report too. Can they drive for other services? (I know that in Brazil they can, but Uber only started to allow it after a court ruled that exclusivity implies in employment.) Does Uber require a stable relationship? (Even the ranking system may imply in stability.)
- vikramkr 7y ago
  Every single driver I've seen in the us has both uber and lyft installed and picks between them at will.
- icebraining 7y ago
  > Even the ranking system may imply in stability. Seems weak. Are restaurants employed by Yelp? Ranking systems abound nowadays, they imply little.
jammygit 7y ago
Until there are 2-3 more large scale hailing services, they are employees, at best part-timers with 2 jobs. It isn’t really contracting if you have almost zero choice of client or the terms of your contracts ...might be a fun foss project to make a distributed alternative so people could be real contractors. GNUber or something
- icebraining 7y ago
  > ...might be a fun foss project to make a distributed alternative so people could be real contractors. GNUber or something https://libretaxi.org/ https://libretaxi.org/

jakelazaroff 7y ago

But are they truly contractors? They don't set the price for their own labor and can be fired for declining too many rides.

rsweeney21 7y ago
As with any independent contractor, the market sets the rate. Uber is just a really efficient marketplace since an Uber ride is a complete commodity with no specialization.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  It's Uber who sets the price, not the market, so this doesn't apply.
- celticmusic 7y ago
  What a crock, Uber is setting those prices not the market. The market says Uber should be going out of business with the prices it sets, except investors keep dumping money into it.
  - cle 7y ago
    Doesn’t Uber have competitors? And why shouldn’t we consider investors part of the market? (Pardon my ignorance if these are dumb questions...)
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      It does, but the competitors are having a hard time because Uber can keep undercutting them and staying unprofitable longer than the competitors can stay solvent. > And why shouldn’t we consider investors part of the market? We can, but there are rules of "fair play" to the market that are supposed to be followed. What Uber is doing with SV money is, in saner sectors, called dumping, and generally considered illegal. Somehow it isn't, and even if it was, it probably wouldn't do much, as Uber's whole "rideshare" operation is illegal almost everywhere they run it.
      - jquery 7y ago
        >the competitors are having a hard time because Uber can keep undercutting them They keep undercutting Uber, should Uber ignore that? Besides, Uber doesn't set prices significantly below the competitors, it relies on being a superior service with lower wait times and higher vehicle utilization. If you open Uber and Lyft you will typically see very similar prices, with the main difference that Uber can be lower because they are a more efficient service, but Lyft will make up for this by subsidizing rides even more than Uber (something you can see very clearly in their S-1 and quarterly earnings reports).
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        cannonedhamster 7y ago
        No... Uber is not more efficient than a taxi service. They were at one point but now they aren't. Taxi businesses have similar apps, drivers who know the area, and regular hours. If it were more efficient, than they wouldn't have needed all that SV money, they still need SV money while cutting worker wages, commanding a ton of the market, and externalizing most of their costs. There is no way Uber exists without someone dumping money in to keep them artificially in business.
        jquery 7y ago
        That’s wrong. Uber is more efficient than taxis at keeping each car highly utilized. Real-time utilization of a changing network is not an easy problem to solve. Taxis are empty a much greater percentage of the time than Ubers. I won’t address the rest except to say that’s more a factor of them expanding into other markets or maintaining category position than efficiency.
  - jacques_chester 7y ago
    Markets are still markets when subsidy is involved. In this case the market behaves as an oligopoly: it's dominated by two firms.
    - xref 7y ago
      GP specifically claimed Uber was an efficient market, not simply a market. (Regardless, Uber is in a market, but it is not itself a market)
      - jacques_chester 7y ago
        Good call. I think the discussion comes down to the difference between Uber being in the market vs Uber being a marketplace. The former is where subsidy and oligopoly belong. The latter is where Uber superficially resembles a market but is not.
  - jquery 7y ago
    Uber isn't setting the prices, Lyft exists too. Uber would be going out of business except for investor money but that goes for all their competitors too. >The market says Uber should be going out of business The market isn't saying Uber should go out of business or it would have gone out of business. The market is saying Uber should be aggressive about pricing until Uber's competitors stop subsidizing their rides. Investors are part of the market too.
- jakelazaroff 7y ago
  Uber isn't a real marketplace. "Sellers" (riders) don't set their own prices, and "consumers" (riders) don't get to choose who provides the service to them. Furthermore, prices are driven down artificially by investors who are willing to take a loss until other "markets" are forced out of business, at which point Uber will presumably raise its prices to actual taxi market rates.
  - icebraining 7y ago
    > "Sellers" (riders) don't set their own prices They kinda do, by not accepting rides under a certain price and forcing a raise, like it has been reported. > Furthermore, prices are driven down artificially by investors who are willing to take a loss until other "markets" are forced out of business, at which point Uber will presumably raise its prices to actual taxi market rates. This will never happen. Anyone can start a ride-sharing service with a tiny investment. There's no way bankrupting current companies will give Uber an unassailable market.
    - jakelazaroff 7y ago
      > They kinda do, by not accepting rides under a certain price and forcing a raise, like it has been reported. Yes, kinda. My understanding is that once they're "on the clock", they get penalized for declining too many rides. > This will never happen. Anyone can start a ride-sharing service with a tiny investment. There's no way bankrupting current companies will give Uber an unassailable market. Except any startup will be forced to either price their rides above the cost of service, or find investors willing to take a loss in order to undercut the former. Uber may not ever have an unassailable market, but they will have to eventually raise their prices or lower the cost of providing rides.
    - kds3 7y ago
      > This will never happen. Anyone can start a ride-sharing service with a tiny investment. There's no way bankrupting current companies will give Uber an unassailable market. Also "markets" doesn't necessary mean ride-sharing markets, they can also destroy public transport and other new ways of transportation that doesn't fit well to Uber model.
Consultant32452 7y ago
Not setting the price doesn't seem like a big deal. I can put an ad on Craigslist saying I'm willing to pay $100 to have my driveway pressure washed. Doesn't make any takers my employee.
- hanniabu 7y ago
  You kind of are setting your price on that. You see the job and you can tell if $100 is accommodatable or not, ie does it match your desired rate. With Uber, you don't get to pick and choose like that, you have no idea where the destination is when you select a job. I don't believe you have any idea how many people you're picking up along the way either.
- jakelazaroff 7y ago
  I can pick and choose which driveways I wash; Uber drivers have their trips opaquely dispatched to them. Furthermore, I can decide not to wash as many driveways as I want, whereas Uber drivers have said they get "fired" for declining too many rides.

Zigurd 7y ago

You can see the two-sided market of Uber as a market, or a faux market used as an obfuscation of terms of employment. It's more clearly an obfuscation of employment when, for example, package delivery services fire employees and the turn around and use the same people as "contractors." Uber skipped the first phase.

bobthepanda 7y ago

This just codifies an existing California Supreme Court ruling and applies it to general employment status. Explainer of the Supreme Court ruling: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonymarks/2018/05/29/the-california-supreme-court-deals-a-blow-to-independent-contractors/#27991e8b70a1 https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonymarks/2018/05/29/the-califo... > Under the newly adopted ‘ABC test,’ a worker is an independent contractor to whom a wage order does not apply only if the hiring entity establishes all of the following: (A) that the worker is free from the control and direction of the hirer in connection with the performance of the work, both under the contract for the performance of such work and in fact; (B) that the worker performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business; and (C) that the worker is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business of the same nature as the work performed for the hiring entity. A is debatable at best, given that make and model of car is heavily restricted, particularly for the 'UberBlack' service. https://www.uber.com/drive/new-york/get-started/eligible-vehicles/ https://www.uber.com/drive/new-york/get-started/eligible-veh... If your contractor gets to dictate how you present yourself and how you do your job rather than just being happy with the end product, that looks a lot less like contracting as understood by laypeople.

woah 7y ago
What if you’re a clown and you show up in jeans and a button down with normal sized shoes and no makeup?
- bobthepanda 7y ago
  As far as I could imagine, most clown contracts don't actually specify the exact articles of clothing down to the UPC; anything that looks reasonable is permitted. Whereas Uber has a list of specifically permitted vehicles.
  - jquery 7y ago
    That's a distinction without a difference. There's only so many car models, what alternative would you suggest to a whitelist of acceptable cars for UberBlack?

marcosdumay 7y ago

There is more to employment relations than set hours. Uber drivers absolutely have a boss to report too. Can they drive for other services? (I know that in Brazil they can, but Uber only started to allow it after a court ruled that exclusivity implies in employment.) Does Uber require a stable relationship? (Even the ranking system may imply in stability.)

vikramkr 7y ago
Every single driver I've seen in the us has both uber and lyft installed and picks between them at will.
icebraining 7y ago
> Even the ranking system may imply in stability. Seems weak. Are restaurants employed by Yelp? Ranking systems abound nowadays, they imply little.

jammygit 7y ago

Until there are 2-3 more large scale hailing services, they are employees, at best part-timers with 2 jobs. It isn’t really contracting if you have almost zero choice of client or the terms of your contracts ...might be a fun foss project to make a distributed alternative so people could be real contractors. GNUber or something

icebraining 7y ago
> ...might be a fun foss project to make a distributed alternative so people could be real contractors. GNUber or something https://libretaxi.org/ https://libretaxi.org/