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If you are able to factor out all the despise you have for Uber, I think the article has a lot of good points. There is no great option in between full employm

If you are able to factor out all the despise you have for Uber, I think the article has a lot of good points. There is no great option in between full employment and a contractor. There is a trade-off for both employers and employees in both agreements. Different people want different degree of benefits. It seems to me that everybody would win if there was more flexibility here, and this is what the article seem to be suggesting. Seems reasonable.

pixelrevision 6y ago
It’s reasonable, just hard to take seriously coming from a company that skirts around laws and regulation as a business model.
thrav 6y ago
It is very reasonable, even if it does benefit Uber. He should really be going the step further and saying, “Health Care shouldn’t even be tied to employment in a developed nation,” but that would be too political. The fact that we have millions who just lost health care during a time when they need it most should be the nail in the coffin of our current system. It’s been hugely flawed for years, and now it’s just a joke. Some problems have very simple, but very big and different from American status quo solutions. People who love markets would still be able to pay a premium for what they want, just like they do now with all the care providers who have totally bailed on taking even the best insurance.
NelsonMinar 6y ago
Why would anyone try to forget all the reasons we have to despise Uber? The company is corrupt to its founding core.
pwinnski 6y ago
"There is no great option in between full employment and a contractor." This begs the question of why there should be an option between those two things. I'm not sure why there should be, except that employers don't like supporting employees and aren't allowed to treat contractors the same way.
- SilasX 6y ago
  As mentioned in my sibling reply, I tried to unravel the logic there and made my best attempt at an answer a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11670698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11670698
  - pwinnski 6y ago
    Name-dropping fallacies doesn't make your position make any more sense. Create a third option and someone will ask why there's no option between 2 and 3. Create a fourth option and someone will ask why there's no option between 3 and 4. It's non-central fallacies all the way down, until there are no categories for anything at all, because each and every single person occupies their own category, reductio ad absurdum. So I posit that we have separate categories for very clear and simple historical reasons: we have "employees" because a set of laws came into being to push back against employer abuses, and to improve conditions for workers generally. "Employees" are not "slaves," is the primary distinction there. But if I own a company and hire another company to provide services, I'm not hiring an employee, I'm establishing a contract, so a different set of laws comes into play to attempt to ensure fair dealing. But what if the "company" I hire to provide services is a single-person company? Is that just a fiction I'm employing to get around those laws that protect workers? Could be, so the courts have established a series of ways to determine the difference. A contractor, for example, usually provides services to more than one company. I've done this as a software developer. So Uber might claim that because drivers can work for Uber or Lyft or other ride-sharing services, that makes their drivers contractors. Drivers claim that doing this results in serious disadvantages compared to drivers who exclusively stay with one company, so it doesn't really feel like a choice they can make. A contractor usually has control over their own hours. If I hire a cleaning company to clean my office, I can't really tell them that they have to come at exactly 2am and work until exactly 3:30am; I give them my business hours and ask them to work outside of those. They have other offices they clean, so they choose the hours they allot to each. Uber, again, might claim that drivers can sign on or off as they will, but there is a very strong effect that has on ratings and compensation, so drivers have claimed it doesn't really seem like a choice, but a requirement. Again, the reason for this distinction, historically, is to protect workers from mistreatment by employers while still providing the freedom to workers to have more than one client, control their own hours, etc. The debate here is over whether gig workers really control their own hours, really work independently, really have the benefits of being contractors, or whether that's a legal fiction used by companies to avoid treating their workers well. If there's a need for a third category, what would be the point of that? Would this third category result in workers being treated better than they are now as contractors? What advantage for employers would there be over treating workers as contractors? The general argument from the companies to date seems to be reasonably summarized as "our business model doesn't support treating our employees as employees," which is not an argument that anyone should actually care about. If there are good arguments why people who drive full-time for Uber should not be treated as full-time employees, with all of the benefits associated with that, Uber has failed to make a good case for this in court to date.
SilasX 6y ago
Yes! A while back I used different reasoning to reach the same conclusion, based on my best guess about what the employee/contractor distinction is optimizing for. (Can’t believe it was four years ago!) >>Sadly, it turns out, the law commits the Noncentral Fallacy by acting as if everyone [is] fully in one category or the other... A better way would be to require more [safety net]-type benefits as someone becomes increasingly “employee-like"... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11670698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11670698
troupe 6y ago
Some of what Uber is describing sounds like a way to keep competitors from entering the market. The best way I know to keep driver's total compensation high is for them to be able to drive for places other than Uber.

pixelrevision 6y ago

It’s reasonable, just hard to take seriously coming from a company that skirts around laws and regulation as a business model.

thrav 6y ago

It is very reasonable, even if it does benefit Uber. He should really be going the step further and saying, “Health Care shouldn’t even be tied to employment in a developed nation,” but that would be too political. The fact that we have millions who just lost health care during a time when they need it most should be the nail in the coffin of our current system. It’s been hugely flawed for years, and now it’s just a joke. Some problems have very simple, but very big and different from American status quo solutions. People who love markets would still be able to pay a premium for what they want, just like they do now with all the care providers who have totally bailed on taking even the best insurance.

NelsonMinar 6y ago

Why would anyone try to forget all the reasons we have to despise Uber? The company is corrupt to its founding core.

pwinnski 6y ago

"There is no great option in between full employment and a contractor." This begs the question of why there should be an option between those two things. I'm not sure why there should be, except that employers don't like supporting employees and aren't allowed to treat contractors the same way.

SilasX 6y ago
As mentioned in my sibling reply, I tried to unravel the logic there and made my best attempt at an answer a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11670698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11670698
- pwinnski 6y ago
  Name-dropping fallacies doesn't make your position make any more sense. Create a third option and someone will ask why there's no option between 2 and 3. Create a fourth option and someone will ask why there's no option between 3 and 4. It's non-central fallacies all the way down, until there are no categories for anything at all, because each and every single person occupies their own category, reductio ad absurdum. So I posit that we have separate categories for very clear and simple historical reasons: we have "employees" because a set of laws came into being to push back against employer abuses, and to improve conditions for workers generally. "Employees" are not "slaves," is the primary distinction there. But if I own a company and hire another company to provide services, I'm not hiring an employee, I'm establishing a contract, so a different set of laws comes into play to attempt to ensure fair dealing. But what if the "company" I hire to provide services is a single-person company? Is that just a fiction I'm employing to get around those laws that protect workers? Could be, so the courts have established a series of ways to determine the difference. A contractor, for example, usually provides services to more than one company. I've done this as a software developer. So Uber might claim that because drivers can work for Uber or Lyft or other ride-sharing services, that makes their drivers contractors. Drivers claim that doing this results in serious disadvantages compared to drivers who exclusively stay with one company, so it doesn't really feel like a choice they can make. A contractor usually has control over their own hours. If I hire a cleaning company to clean my office, I can't really tell them that they have to come at exactly 2am and work until exactly 3:30am; I give them my business hours and ask them to work outside of those. They have other offices they clean, so they choose the hours they allot to each. Uber, again, might claim that drivers can sign on or off as they will, but there is a very strong effect that has on ratings and compensation, so drivers have claimed it doesn't really seem like a choice, but a requirement. Again, the reason for this distinction, historically, is to protect workers from mistreatment by employers while still providing the freedom to workers to have more than one client, control their own hours, etc. The debate here is over whether gig workers really control their own hours, really work independently, really have the benefits of being contractors, or whether that's a legal fiction used by companies to avoid treating their workers well. If there's a need for a third category, what would be the point of that? Would this third category result in workers being treated better than they are now as contractors? What advantage for employers would there be over treating workers as contractors? The general argument from the companies to date seems to be reasonably summarized as "our business model doesn't support treating our employees as employees," which is not an argument that anyone should actually care about. If there are good arguments why people who drive full-time for Uber should not be treated as full-time employees, with all of the benefits associated with that, Uber has failed to make a good case for this in court to date.

SilasX 6y ago

Yes! A while back I used different reasoning to reach the same conclusion, based on my best guess about what the employee/contractor distinction is optimizing for. (Can’t believe it was four years ago!) >>Sadly, it turns out, the law commits the Noncentral Fallacy by acting as if everyone [is] fully in one category or the other... A better way would be to require more [safety net]-type benefits as someone becomes increasingly “employee-like"... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11670698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11670698

troupe 6y ago

Some of what Uber is describing sounds like a way to keep competitors from entering the market. The best way I know to keep driver's total compensation high is for them to be able to drive for places other than Uber.