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> as it allows drivers to discriminate against riders who are going to poor neighborhoods or from cities to suburbs where they may have difficulty in getting an
by ProAm 6y ago
> as it allows drivers to discriminate against riders who are going to poor neighborhoods or from cities to suburbs where they may have difficulty in getting another rider.
This is exactly what being a contractor is though. Accepting contract work you'd like, and turning down work you don't. Otherwise you are an employee.
- kingnothing 6y agoIn the case of rideshare, I imagine the driver contract agreement has that stipulation in it. You'll agree to pick up a passenger taking a trip to an unknown destination with up to N hours of travel time. If you don't like the terms of the contract, you don't have to work for that company.
- raducu 6y agoHow is that different from a regular taxi driver? Where's the "sharing" in the "ride share" if the driver is forced to take any ride?
- modeless 6y agoRegular taxi drivers are often contractors. At least, they were in the past, I'm not sure how this new stuff is affecting regular taxi companies.
- olyjohn 6y agoThis is the thing that really chafes my testes. People need to get real and start calling it what it is. It's a taxi service. This is not ride sharing. The driver was not already going somewhere. The driver was waiting around for a call to pick someone up, and was going to take them where they wanted to go. Nothing is being shared. This is a Taxi service and the Uber app is the dispatcher. If I was already going to work, and I picked someone up along the way, that's sharing a ride. The only thing the driver is sharing is the money they are giving to their mechanic when all the around town driving wears out their car.
- PunchTornado 6y agoA ride is more like a task. I've been a contractor and I couldn't refuse jira tasks. You've signed a contract with the company, you should do all the jira tasks they throw at you.
- novok 6y agoMany people argue that those kinds of contractors are employees. Often your an employee of the contracting firm AFAIK too, so you have to follow the implicit orders of the contracting firm.
- raducu 6y agoI am a "contractor", but yeah, if you only work for one company for X months, you should be an employee. If all your money comes via a single company, even if you phisically work at a different place each day, you should be an employee of that company.
- fastball 6y agoThat's kinda the problem with ride-sharing though. Many (most) drivers are driving with multiple apps.
- freeone3000 6y agoMany, many people in the US are employed with multiple companies at a time. Everyone who "works two jobs". Employment is not exclusive.
- fastball 6y agoI was responding to a comment about "only working for one company for X months".
- Slartie 6y agoBut you could have refused the customer in the first place. Nobody forced you to make a contract with him. Of course, once you did, you are compelled to keep up your end of the bargain, and that probably included you doing those jira tasks (you could have probably refused to do entirely different work, like walking the dog of the manager, when you were originally contracted for doing IT development work). A true contractor in the rideshare space would have an individual contract with each rider, and could of course reject riders based on the terms of the contract (of which the target location is one). However, once a customer is accepted based on the agreed-upon terms (fare, target, number of passengers etc.) he wouldn't be able to throw the passenger out in the middle of the ride for no good reason. If you now want to say that a rideshare contractor should not be able to reject a customer based upon the terms of the ride, I ask you: why shouldn't he? With whom does he have a contract that binds him? And you say: with Uber. And I say: yeah, and that's why your analogy is fundamentally flawed, why he isn't an individual contractor for each customer but simply an employee of Uber, with whom he has a contract that mandates him to accept all customers that Uber deems acceptable. Exactly like a plumber working at a plumbing company who also has to do plumbing work at any customer his boss sends him to, while his individually contracting plumber colleague can decide to decline or accept customers at his own discretion.
- amyjess 6y agoWhich is why I'm vehemently opposed to classing Uber drivers as contractors.