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But what if I legitimacy want to be a freelancer? Lifestyle reasons, freedom, whatever. I should have a choice.

GekkePrutser 5y ago
Then you're not going to do it for the money that uber pays. As a ZZP you're meant to provide for your own pension, sick leave, disability insurance. No way what Uber pays is going to cover that. This is why they're doing it of course, to avoid having to provide those things. But those are statutory rights in the Netherlands. And for good reason, otherwise if someone becomes disabled it ends up on the state's plate. We don't leave people by the side of the road if we can help it.
- syshum 5y ago
  You will if it not your primary income, but used to supplement or do when you have nothing else to do. Too many people think that the only people that drive for Uber are people that need it for Full Time employment. There are lots of people that use it for extra income, that is who these types of laws hurt the most
- devcpp 5y ago
  Why aren't these payments taken from the employee then? In my country retirement and social security appear right in my paycheck. Why isn't it the same for freelancers (when they declare taxes)? If their wage is too low as you claim, this isn't something that will change when they become employees, so this solves nothing. If this is about a minimum wage, then the real solution is forcing freelancers to work a minimum of monthly hours, which treats the root problem. This assumes the meaning of freelancers is being able to join and leave an employer when you want, and not being able to fix your own prices and refuse gigs like others are saying. I think you should be able to open a freelance provider with restrictions, as Uber is doing. I see no reason to outlaw that.
  - unnouinceput 5y ago
    <In my country retirement and social security appear right in my paycheck What country is that? US, the only country that its politicians actively lobbies against universal healthcare, healthcare that is successfully implemented in every! f*ing! other! Western country?!! (and quite a few other countries that are not Western, such as my full of corruption Eastern Europe one)
    - umanwizard 5y ago
      Plenty of countries in Western Europe too have mandatory employee contributions to various social programs.
      - nybble41 5y ago
        Every country that funds social programs with an income tax has mandatory employee contributions, differing only in the visibility of the cost to the employee (up-front taxes vs. a line-item in the pay stub vs. a "employer portion" which isn't reported to the employee but directly impacts the employee's wages).
  - consp 5y ago
    > This assumes the meaning of freelancers is being able to join and leave an employer when you want, and not being able to fix your own prices and refuse gigs like others are saying. You see it that way, but the Dutch law doesn't. If the freelancer has no real choice and cannot dictate his/her own terms they are not a freelancer but an employee without the benefits of an employee. Social programs should be displayed these days on your paycheck if you are an employee. Not every (administration) company is doing it properly though. Forcing freelancers to work more hours for less than a sustainable minimum pay solves nothing as the minimum wage is calculated on a full workweek. I'm sure Uber is allowed to offer freelance work, but not with the current way of doing business. As soon as they let the freelancer dictate the pay (or at least properly negotiate) it looks they will be fine.
  - mattmanser 5y ago
    Not sure what country you are, but most also have the Employer pay on top of that too. So you might pay a 10% social security tax, and the employer might be paying an additional 15% that doesn't appear on your payslip. That's what Amazon, etc. are talking about when they say they pay a load of employment taxes. That's also why a lot of countries are eying the gig economy with skepticism, it's actually often just a massive tax dodge for the company to not pay employment taxes.
- rattray 5y ago
  > Then you're not going to do it for the money that uber pays. Then, ah... who's driving the Ubers in the Netherlands and why? Is there some credible evidence of coercion at hand?
  - rattray 5y ago
    Elaboration: My impresssion is that rideshare driving is an incredibly liquid market, so its really hard to imagine a mechanism for long-term wage suppression other than external factors like an untrained workforce or poor economy overall.
  - yawaworht1978 5y ago
    Coercion is a bit a radical expression, I would call it dire economic straits, make a quick buck on the side. Whatever the reason, good on the Dutch and the union not letting them trample on their values by these "honorable" folks and their values, here is the hall of shame: Wednesday February 22: Cocaine and groping. Thursday February 23: Investor betrayal and accusations of stolen technology. Fowler, a former engineer at the company, alleged in a blog post that she was sexually harassed at Uber and experienced gender bias during her time at the company. She claimed that one manager propositioned her and asked for sex, but her complaints to HR were dismissed because the manager was a high performer. She said Uber continued to ignore her complaints to HR, and then her manager threatened to fire her for reporting things to HR. Isolated incident? Not so Employees did cocaine during a company retreat and a manager had to be fired after groping multiple women, according to the report. Former employees said they'd notified Uber's leadership, including Kalanick and CTO Thuan Pham, of the workplace harassment. Google, another Uber investor(!!!!), sued the company for intellectual property theft. Uber's SVP of engineering stepped down over sexual-harassment allegations at his former job at Google.Singhal went through the standard background checks before his employment at Uber and that the sexual-harassment allegations during Singhal's time at Google never came up. The New York Times revealed that Uber has been secretively deceiving authorities for years with a tool called 'Greyball' Escort karaoke bar visit in Seoul, After the evening, a female Uber employee told HR that the trip made her uncomfortable. Uber delays the investigation into workplace harrasment after information pours in from "hundreds" of its employees Apple CEO had threatened to yank Uber from the App Store if it continued to violate the App Store's terms and conditions. As an act of fraud prevention, Uber had affixed a small piece of code that could tell if someone was using the same phone over and over again and then wiping it to take advantage of promo codes Waymo accuses Uber of creating a shell company to bring on a former Google engineer. Disruptive business practices, eh?
dagw 5y ago
Nothing is stopping you from being an actual freelancer. A large point of this ruling was that people working for Uber aren't actually freelancers, since they're not free to pick their clients or set/negotiate their own prices.
- greatpatton 5y ago
  But the same rules applied to all taxi drivers before Uber. In a lot of place taxi driver were forbidden to not accept customer hailing them, and the price is controlled almost everywhere. The logic would be that all taxi drivers have to been employed.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    > In a lot of place taxi driver were forbidden to not accept customer hailing them I've hang out with my fair share of taxi drivers around the world (mainly Europe and South America) but never once heard of them being forbidden of not accepting customers, and heard plenty of stories when someone really fucked up tried to hail them but they declined. It doesn't mean it's not forbidden, but hard to reconcile my understanding. What places are you specifically thinking about where taxi drivers are not free to chose their customer?
    - niemandhier 5y ago
      Personenbeförderungsgesetz (PBefG) § 22 Beförderungspflicht which applies to taxis in Germany. Roughly translates to: Human Transportation Act §22 Duty to Transport.
    - macksd 5y ago
      In New York, the taxis with "medallions" are required to take you to places within the metro area. I'm not sure at what point that requirement sets in, whether it's hailing, or once you're in the cab, etc. but it's well-known that you can report them for refusing to take you somewhere.
    - djhworld 5y ago
      It depends, there's a lot of local and national regulations in different countries. For example in my part of the UK, only designated taxis can pick up ride hailers on the street, sort of like black cabs in London. Private firms who use their own fleet of cars can only offer pre-booked services, e.g. pre booked airport runs. Uber and co. shook this up a bit by offering a grey area, where the taxi ride isn't exactly hailed on the street (instead through the app) and is sort of "pre-booked" when you request it as the driver has to accept the job.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
You should also have a choice to not use Uber; besides customer discovery, what does Uber offer you that's worth their bad pay and commission? Plenty of old fashioned taxi companies that operate via a phone number or text messages. You don't need Uber if you want to be a freelancer. And as a court ruled, you're not actually a freelancer if you work for Uber.
- derekp7 5y ago
  How does that work out for a single taxi driver and customers calling them directly? They may be on the other side of town and get 5 calls at the same time, leaving most of their customers without service. Or more likely, customers will want to call one number and have a local cab dispatched to them from whoever is available. Now what would be nice is if someone would start a service, say a mobile-web-first service, that a bunch of independent cab drivers could sign up for. Then that service would act as a dispatcher (taking a cut of the fare), and send a dispatch message to whichever independent cab driver is closest by. Of course that sounds a lot like what Uber is doing. Which then goes back to, are these drivers independent, or are they working for that dispatch service? To make it truly independent, they would need to have more than one dispatch service that they could work at the same time (say both Uber and Lyft). And have a protocol so that dispatches from both services don't step on each other. Plus the ability for a customer to flag them down at random. Now they really are a self-employed contractor using these services as customer discovery / dispatch services.
isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
The reason for this is that you can be compelled by your totally-not-employer to pretend to want to be a freelancer. That's why different countries have various guidelines, e.g. if you economically depend on 1 contrahent (you fill in one invoice a month to the same one company), you are not self-employed, if you can't organize your own work however you like you are not self-employed, and so on. So in general if you are driving for one company and 75% revenue comes from them, you are really not a freelancer. This was and to a degree still is a big problem in e.g. Poland, where if you are unskilled you can be compelled to accept so called "trash contracts" which deny you any employee rights, but you are cheaper to the employer who exploits you. It might be foreign to Americans who in general have extremely poor worker protection laws (even worse than the trash contracts I mentioned), but in many other countries it doesn't really work like that.
- devcpp 5y ago
  I know some software consultants that have one major client but appreciate the work mobility and forcing them to get into a full employment contract would restrict their opportunities and payment. Forget definitions, why should we outlaw this?
  - BBC-vs-neolibs 5y ago
    We shouldn't, and no one is.
  - jonp888 5y ago
    For exactly the reason, the parent post said, it makes all worker protection and benefits laws meaningless, and most people think these laws are a good thing. If this was possible then every company would say: "We don't want to have to bother to pay your vacation days, sick leave(for as long as you are sick), maternity/paternity leave(up to 12 months in most European countries), or to have to give you a permanent contract with limited termination grounds, so 'choose' to become Freelancer that works 40 hours a week for us or we will fire you". It's true there are some people who like to work as you describe, I know some myself, but experienced software developers are a outlier case who are in an extremely fortunate position, not something the law should be optimised for at the expense of the majority.
jacquesm 5y ago
You can be a freelancer just fine, nothing stops you from doing that. But not within the Uber framework because you aren' a freelancer within that framework. So this is pretty specific: the Uber framework does not check enough of the boxes that would allow their pseudo employees to claim they are freelancers, which effectively makes it just another tax dodge, which it always was.
- unyttigfjelltol 5y ago
  Taxi businesses in the U.S. played this cat-and-mouse game for a long time, and generally 'won' the right to offload liabilities to drivers without much pay. Why anyone thought or thinks Uber is 'different' is hard to understand.
  - InitialLastName 5y ago
    Was that also the case for taxi businesses in European countries with functional social states? Because, this being a legal ruling in Europe, US precedent doesn't really matter.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    It's the US that is different not Uber, they are treated just like every other company here would be treated.
- devcpp 5y ago
  Then fix the tax loopholes by making it about sales or revenue rather than employment.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    No. The 'tax loopholes' are simply shifting the responsibility of paying those taxes from the employer to the employee, which when the company is doing well and the relationship is otherwise balanced is a net neutral. But once the larger picture is taken into account things like health benefits, continuing to be paid when temporarily unemployed (which for a gig worker is several times per hour) and so on become externalized to society when really they should be the problem of the employer. The current situation allows Uber to play its employees against the state (as they're very transparently trying to do in the referenced article with their remark that their employees (because that what they are) would prefer to be self employed, which is nonsense only when compared with the situation where Uber would not employ them at all. The vast bulk of the employees really would like steady employment. So the tax dodge should stop but not through fixing the tax loophoes, but simply by recognizing that which is already the fact on the ground: that these people are employees in all but name. Note that this is Europe where - to many American companies' surprise and detriment - it is not only the letter of the law that matters but also the intent of the law, in this case the intent of labor law here is to ensure our social contract continues to function. Hacking your way around that like you can do in the United States - where it is the letter of the law that matters far more than the intent - is going to be met with significant pushback from the courts.
AndyMcConachie 5y ago
I'm a consultant in The Netherlands and for this purpose I control my own BV. Similar to an LLC in the USA. But I don't drive a taxi, I do computer stuff. If you want to legitimately be independent in NL you can. I have a few friends in the construction industy(plumbers, carpenters, electricians, etc) who are ZZP'ers. There are a few options open to people who legitimately want to be independent in their work, and this has absolutely nothing to do with this ruling. Or about Uber. Uber is lying when it says that 90% of Dutch Uber drivers want to remain independent. There have been protests of Uber drivers wanting exactly this kind of ruling from the courts. And two major political parties (Groenlinks and PvDA) have been fighting for this. Uber is full of shit and they know it. Here is a better article on the ruling. https://www.ad.nl/werk/rechter-uber-moet-chauffeurs-in-dienst-nemen~a9f47354/ https://www.ad.nl/werk/rechter-uber-moet-chauffeurs-in-diens...
- jb1991 5y ago
  Just to point out, that a BV and an LLC are very different, in that anyone can have an LLC in the USA but the tax reporting requirements and overhead for a BV in NL are quite high and don't make much sense to anyone with an income less then.. well, quite high, by most standards. I know a lot of freelance software engineers in the netherlands, but none have a BV.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    I know a lot of freelance software engineers in the Netherlands and quite a few of them do. BV starts to make sense from about 100K turnover because you gain some tax advantages, it also makes working for larger entities easier and it allows you to charge a higher rate and to be in an easier position to work with subcontractors. It all depends on what you want, there are plenty of ZZP'ers in software development on the low end, but most of the high end will be through BV's.
    - belter 5y ago
      What is the difference between those freelance software engineers and the Uber drivers if they are freelancing for one company only? As far as I know, and I am happy to be corrected by somebody more knowledgeable, the famous Dutch ZZP'ers are tolerated. There is in the Dutch Law not a clarification of their legal and tax position: https://onl.nl/zzp-manifest/ https://onl.nl/zzp-manifest/
oliwarner 5y ago
So work part time, on the clock. Obviously this takes the company to provide those sorts of jobs. The problem for Uber is that they won't be able to —as easily— have slack staff, because they'll have to pay them minimum wage to wait for new fares.
bryanlarsen 5y ago
Working part time for Uber won't have less freedom than working as a free lancer for Uber.
- Vaslo 5y ago
  Absolutely it will. Everytime you try and force a labor law, companies have people who are smart and figure out a way around it. Now they can tell Uber drivers when they will work and where they will work. So if you don’t want to work the night shift, too bad. They will keep the part time hours to just the minimum needed and whatever shortfall they have to hit their yearly plan will be supplemented by releasing drivers who won’t work busy and profitable times. If you are the guy who drives a few evenings a week on the side, you may be out of luck.
  - bryanlarsen 5y ago
    Part time workers get fewer benefits than full time ones, so Uber will be incentivized to encourage part time workers.
yawaworht1978 5y ago
Good luck with that, if you pay for all the mandated services, you will run a deficit. Yes people laugh off drivers as a no skill job, but it's a craft. Shift work, passenger safety and so forth, they need to pass a test, sure that's a bit outdated in the time of online maps. But I can not simply open a dentistry just because I feel so due to lifestyle choices.
- isodev 5y ago
  Indeed, here in Belgium there are extensive requirements for taxi drivers in terms of certification, education and vehicle maintenance. That's one of the reasons Uber never really succeeded here - even as a "freelance driver", you still need to be qualified and that takes time and effort.
  - cinntaile 5y ago
    It's probably because it makes it difficult to dodge taxes when Uber registers all the transactions ;)
    - iso1631 5y ago
      Last time I got a taxi in Belgium the card machine (advertised on the window) was "broken". C'est la vie, I just walked off. Had that in Washington DC once, but magically the machine fixed itself when I said I had no cash and he'd have to get the police.
      - vidarh 5y ago
        In London you can now report the driver if they're on the road with a "broken" card machine, as that makes the car considered "unfit". A lot of drivers still use unapproved card devices, though (TFL points out handheld terminals are explicitly not approved, yet I regularly have taxi drivers insist their fixed terminal isn't working, and to use a handheld one), which I'm taking means there's assorted tax fraud going on.
- CaptainZapp 5y ago
brnt 5y ago
If you're a freelancer, a client could not be enforcing the demand that you don't work for other similar employers, nor demand that you take every single gig that they ask you to do. Uber wants it both ways, and correctly, the courts have stopped them from doing so.
- lstodd 5y ago
  > demand that you don't work for other similar employers, nor demand that you take every single gig That's news for me. Where I live, every single taxi driver has an app open for every uber-like company in the city, including Uber (there are at least four that I know of, most certainly more). They just pick what they feel like at the moment. How this is not freelancing I cannot fathom.
timwaagh 5y ago
Not in the Netherlands anymore according to this judgement. You won't have that choice anymore unless there are some very specific circumstances (an interior decorator working for clients would not be in an inferior position to some kind of organisation, for instance).
impute 5y ago
Then find your own clients who want to be driven around.

Then you're not going to do it for the money that uber pays. As a ZZP you're meant to provide for your own pension, sick leave, disability insurance. No way what Uber pays is going to cover that. This is why they're doing it of course, to avoid having to provide those things. But those are statutory rights in the Netherlands. And for good reason, otherwise if someone becomes disabled it ends up on the state's plate. We don't leave people by the side of the road if we can help it.

syshum 5y ago
You will if it not your primary income, but used to supplement or do when you have nothing else to do. Too many people think that the only people that drive for Uber are people that need it for Full Time employment. There are lots of people that use it for extra income, that is who these types of laws hurt the most
devcpp 5y ago
Why aren't these payments taken from the employee then? In my country retirement and social security appear right in my paycheck. Why isn't it the same for freelancers (when they declare taxes)? If their wage is too low as you claim, this isn't something that will change when they become employees, so this solves nothing. If this is about a minimum wage, then the real solution is forcing freelancers to work a minimum of monthly hours, which treats the root problem. This assumes the meaning of freelancers is being able to join and leave an employer when you want, and not being able to fix your own prices and refuse gigs like others are saying. I think you should be able to open a freelance provider with restrictions, as Uber is doing. I see no reason to outlaw that.
- unnouinceput 5y ago
  <In my country retirement and social security appear right in my paycheck What country is that? US, the only country that its politicians actively lobbies against universal healthcare, healthcare that is successfully implemented in every! f*ing! other! Western country?!! (and quite a few other countries that are not Western, such as my full of corruption Eastern Europe one)
  - umanwizard 5y ago
    Plenty of countries in Western Europe too have mandatory employee contributions to various social programs.
    - nybble41 5y ago
      Every country that funds social programs with an income tax has mandatory employee contributions, differing only in the visibility of the cost to the employee (up-front taxes vs. a line-item in the pay stub vs. a "employer portion" which isn't reported to the employee but directly impacts the employee's wages).
- consp 5y ago
  > This assumes the meaning of freelancers is being able to join and leave an employer when you want, and not being able to fix your own prices and refuse gigs like others are saying. You see it that way, but the Dutch law doesn't. If the freelancer has no real choice and cannot dictate his/her own terms they are not a freelancer but an employee without the benefits of an employee. Social programs should be displayed these days on your paycheck if you are an employee. Not every (administration) company is doing it properly though. Forcing freelancers to work more hours for less than a sustainable minimum pay solves nothing as the minimum wage is calculated on a full workweek. I'm sure Uber is allowed to offer freelance work, but not with the current way of doing business. As soon as they let the freelancer dictate the pay (or at least properly negotiate) it looks they will be fine.
- mattmanser 5y ago
  Not sure what country you are, but most also have the Employer pay on top of that too. So you might pay a 10% social security tax, and the employer might be paying an additional 15% that doesn't appear on your payslip. That's what Amazon, etc. are talking about when they say they pay a load of employment taxes. That's also why a lot of countries are eying the gig economy with skepticism, it's actually often just a massive tax dodge for the company to not pay employment taxes.
rattray 5y ago
> Then you're not going to do it for the money that uber pays. Then, ah... who's driving the Ubers in the Netherlands and why? Is there some credible evidence of coercion at hand?
- rattray 5y ago
  Elaboration: My impresssion is that rideshare driving is an incredibly liquid market, so its really hard to imagine a mechanism for long-term wage suppression other than external factors like an untrained workforce or poor economy overall.
- yawaworht1978 5y ago
  Coercion is a bit a radical expression, I would call it dire economic straits, make a quick buck on the side. Whatever the reason, good on the Dutch and the union not letting them trample on their values by these "honorable" folks and their values, here is the hall of shame: Wednesday February 22: Cocaine and groping. Thursday February 23: Investor betrayal and accusations of stolen technology. Fowler, a former engineer at the company, alleged in a blog post that she was sexually harassed at Uber and experienced gender bias during her time at the company. She claimed that one manager propositioned her and asked for sex, but her complaints to HR were dismissed because the manager was a high performer. She said Uber continued to ignore her complaints to HR, and then her manager threatened to fire her for reporting things to HR. Isolated incident? Not so Employees did cocaine during a company retreat and a manager had to be fired after groping multiple women, according to the report. Former employees said they'd notified Uber's leadership, including Kalanick and CTO Thuan Pham, of the workplace harassment. Google, another Uber investor(!!!!), sued the company for intellectual property theft. Uber's SVP of engineering stepped down over sexual-harassment allegations at his former job at Google.Singhal went through the standard background checks before his employment at Uber and that the sexual-harassment allegations during Singhal's time at Google never came up. The New York Times revealed that Uber has been secretively deceiving authorities for years with a tool called 'Greyball' Escort karaoke bar visit in Seoul, After the evening, a female Uber employee told HR that the trip made her uncomfortable. Uber delays the investigation into workplace harrasment after information pours in from "hundreds" of its employees Apple CEO had threatened to yank Uber from the App Store if it continued to violate the App Store's terms and conditions. As an act of fraud prevention, Uber had affixed a small piece of code that could tell if someone was using the same phone over and over again and then wiping it to take advantage of promo codes Waymo accuses Uber of creating a shell company to bring on a former Google engineer. Disruptive business practices, eh?

dagw 5y ago

Nothing is stopping you from being an actual freelancer. A large point of this ruling was that people working for Uber aren't actually freelancers, since they're not free to pick their clients or set/negotiate their own prices.

greatpatton 5y ago
But the same rules applied to all taxi drivers before Uber. In a lot of place taxi driver were forbidden to not accept customer hailing them, and the price is controlled almost everywhere. The logic would be that all taxi drivers have to been employed.
- capableweb 5y ago
  > In a lot of place taxi driver were forbidden to not accept customer hailing them I've hang out with my fair share of taxi drivers around the world (mainly Europe and South America) but never once heard of them being forbidden of not accepting customers, and heard plenty of stories when someone really fucked up tried to hail them but they declined. It doesn't mean it's not forbidden, but hard to reconcile my understanding. What places are you specifically thinking about where taxi drivers are not free to chose their customer?
  - niemandhier 5y ago
    Personenbeförderungsgesetz (PBefG) § 22 Beförderungspflicht which applies to taxis in Germany. Roughly translates to: Human Transportation Act §22 Duty to Transport.
  - macksd 5y ago
    In New York, the taxis with "medallions" are required to take you to places within the metro area. I'm not sure at what point that requirement sets in, whether it's hailing, or once you're in the cab, etc. but it's well-known that you can report them for refusing to take you somewhere.
  - djhworld 5y ago
    It depends, there's a lot of local and national regulations in different countries. For example in my part of the UK, only designated taxis can pick up ride hailers on the street, sort of like black cabs in London. Private firms who use their own fleet of cars can only offer pre-booked services, e.g. pre booked airport runs. Uber and co. shook this up a bit by offering a grey area, where the taxi ride isn't exactly hailed on the street (instead through the app) and is sort of "pre-booked" when you request it as the driver has to accept the job.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

You should also have a choice to not use Uber; besides customer discovery, what does Uber offer you that's worth their bad pay and commission? Plenty of old fashioned taxi companies that operate via a phone number or text messages. You don't need Uber if you want to be a freelancer. And as a court ruled, you're not actually a freelancer if you work for Uber.

derekp7 5y ago
How does that work out for a single taxi driver and customers calling them directly? They may be on the other side of town and get 5 calls at the same time, leaving most of their customers without service. Or more likely, customers will want to call one number and have a local cab dispatched to them from whoever is available. Now what would be nice is if someone would start a service, say a mobile-web-first service, that a bunch of independent cab drivers could sign up for. Then that service would act as a dispatcher (taking a cut of the fare), and send a dispatch message to whichever independent cab driver is closest by. Of course that sounds a lot like what Uber is doing. Which then goes back to, are these drivers independent, or are they working for that dispatch service? To make it truly independent, they would need to have more than one dispatch service that they could work at the same time (say both Uber and Lyft). And have a protocol so that dispatches from both services don't step on each other. Plus the ability for a customer to flag them down at random. Now they really are a self-employed contractor using these services as customer discovery / dispatch services.

isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago

The reason for this is that you can be compelled by your totally-not-employer to pretend to want to be a freelancer. That's why different countries have various guidelines, e.g. if you economically depend on 1 contrahent (you fill in one invoice a month to the same one company), you are not self-employed, if you can't organize your own work however you like you are not self-employed, and so on. So in general if you are driving for one company and 75% revenue comes from them, you are really not a freelancer. This was and to a degree still is a big problem in e.g. Poland, where if you are unskilled you can be compelled to accept so called "trash contracts" which deny you any employee rights, but you are cheaper to the employer who exploits you. It might be foreign to Americans who in general have extremely poor worker protection laws (even worse than the trash contracts I mentioned), but in many other countries it doesn't really work like that.

devcpp 5y ago
I know some software consultants that have one major client but appreciate the work mobility and forcing them to get into a full employment contract would restrict their opportunities and payment. Forget definitions, why should we outlaw this?
- BBC-vs-neolibs 5y ago
  We shouldn't, and no one is.
- jonp888 5y ago
  For exactly the reason, the parent post said, it makes all worker protection and benefits laws meaningless, and most people think these laws are a good thing. If this was possible then every company would say: "We don't want to have to bother to pay your vacation days, sick leave(for as long as you are sick), maternity/paternity leave(up to 12 months in most European countries), or to have to give you a permanent contract with limited termination grounds, so 'choose' to become Freelancer that works 40 hours a week for us or we will fire you". It's true there are some people who like to work as you describe, I know some myself, but experienced software developers are a outlier case who are in an extremely fortunate position, not something the law should be optimised for at the expense of the majority.

jacquesm 5y ago

You can be a freelancer just fine, nothing stops you from doing that. But not within the Uber framework because you aren' a freelancer within that framework. So this is pretty specific: the Uber framework does not check enough of the boxes that would allow their pseudo employees to claim they are freelancers, which effectively makes it just another tax dodge, which it always was.

unyttigfjelltol 5y ago
Taxi businesses in the U.S. played this cat-and-mouse game for a long time, and generally 'won' the right to offload liabilities to drivers without much pay. Why anyone thought or thinks Uber is 'different' is hard to understand.
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  Was that also the case for taxi businesses in European countries with functional social states? Because, this being a legal ruling in Europe, US precedent doesn't really matter.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  It's the US that is different not Uber, they are treated just like every other company here would be treated.
devcpp 5y ago
Then fix the tax loopholes by making it about sales or revenue rather than employment.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  No. The 'tax loopholes' are simply shifting the responsibility of paying those taxes from the employer to the employee, which when the company is doing well and the relationship is otherwise balanced is a net neutral. But once the larger picture is taken into account things like health benefits, continuing to be paid when temporarily unemployed (which for a gig worker is several times per hour) and so on become externalized to society when really they should be the problem of the employer. The current situation allows Uber to play its employees against the state (as they're very transparently trying to do in the referenced article with their remark that their employees (because that what they are) would prefer to be self employed, which is nonsense only when compared with the situation where Uber would not employ them at all. The vast bulk of the employees really would like steady employment. So the tax dodge should stop but not through fixing the tax loophoes, but simply by recognizing that which is already the fact on the ground: that these people are employees in all but name. Note that this is Europe where - to many American companies' surprise and detriment - it is not only the letter of the law that matters but also the intent of the law, in this case the intent of labor law here is to ensure our social contract continues to function. Hacking your way around that like you can do in the United States - where it is the letter of the law that matters far more than the intent - is going to be met with significant pushback from the courts.

AndyMcConachie 5y ago

I'm a consultant in The Netherlands and for this purpose I control my own BV. Similar to an LLC in the USA. But I don't drive a taxi, I do computer stuff. If you want to legitimately be independent in NL you can. I have a few friends in the construction industy(plumbers, carpenters, electricians, etc) who are ZZP'ers. There are a few options open to people who legitimately want to be independent in their work, and this has absolutely nothing to do with this ruling. Or about Uber. Uber is lying when it says that 90% of Dutch Uber drivers want to remain independent. There have been protests of Uber drivers wanting exactly this kind of ruling from the courts. And two major political parties (Groenlinks and PvDA) have been fighting for this. Uber is full of shit and they know it. Here is a better article on the ruling. https://www.ad.nl/werk/rechter-uber-moet-chauffeurs-in-dienst-nemen~a9f47354/ https://www.ad.nl/werk/rechter-uber-moet-chauffeurs-in-diens...

jb1991 5y ago
Just to point out, that a BV and an LLC are very different, in that anyone can have an LLC in the USA but the tax reporting requirements and overhead for a BV in NL are quite high and don't make much sense to anyone with an income less then.. well, quite high, by most standards. I know a lot of freelance software engineers in the netherlands, but none have a BV.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  I know a lot of freelance software engineers in the Netherlands and quite a few of them do. BV starts to make sense from about 100K turnover because you gain some tax advantages, it also makes working for larger entities easier and it allows you to charge a higher rate and to be in an easier position to work with subcontractors. It all depends on what you want, there are plenty of ZZP'ers in software development on the low end, but most of the high end will be through BV's.
  - belter 5y ago
    What is the difference between those freelance software engineers and the Uber drivers if they are freelancing for one company only? As far as I know, and I am happy to be corrected by somebody more knowledgeable, the famous Dutch ZZP'ers are tolerated. There is in the Dutch Law not a clarification of their legal and tax position: https://onl.nl/zzp-manifest/ https://onl.nl/zzp-manifest/

oliwarner 5y ago

So work part time, on the clock. Obviously this takes the company to provide those sorts of jobs. The problem for Uber is that they won't be able to —as easily— have slack staff, because they'll have to pay them minimum wage to wait for new fares.

bryanlarsen 5y ago

Working part time for Uber won't have less freedom than working as a free lancer for Uber.

Vaslo 5y ago
Absolutely it will. Everytime you try and force a labor law, companies have people who are smart and figure out a way around it. Now they can tell Uber drivers when they will work and where they will work. So if you don’t want to work the night shift, too bad. They will keep the part time hours to just the minimum needed and whatever shortfall they have to hit their yearly plan will be supplemented by releasing drivers who won’t work busy and profitable times. If you are the guy who drives a few evenings a week on the side, you may be out of luck.
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  Part time workers get fewer benefits than full time ones, so Uber will be incentivized to encourage part time workers.

yawaworht1978 5y ago

Good luck with that, if you pay for all the mandated services, you will run a deficit. Yes people laugh off drivers as a no skill job, but it's a craft. Shift work, passenger safety and so forth, they need to pass a test, sure that's a bit outdated in the time of online maps. But I can not simply open a dentistry just because I feel so due to lifestyle choices.

isodev 5y ago
Indeed, here in Belgium there are extensive requirements for taxi drivers in terms of certification, education and vehicle maintenance. That's one of the reasons Uber never really succeeded here - even as a "freelance driver", you still need to be qualified and that takes time and effort.
- cinntaile 5y ago
  It's probably because it makes it difficult to dodge taxes when Uber registers all the transactions ;)
  - iso1631 5y ago
    Last time I got a taxi in Belgium the card machine (advertised on the window) was "broken". C'est la vie, I just walked off. Had that in Washington DC once, but magically the machine fixed itself when I said I had no cash and he'd have to get the police.
    - vidarh 5y ago
      In London you can now report the driver if they're on the road with a "broken" card machine, as that makes the car considered "unfit". A lot of drivers still use unapproved card devices, though (TFL points out handheld terminals are explicitly not approved, yet I regularly have taxi drivers insist their fixed terminal isn't working, and to use a handheld one), which I'm taking means there's assorted tax fraud going on.
CaptainZapp 5y ago

brnt 5y ago

If you're a freelancer, a client could not be enforcing the demand that you don't work for other similar employers, nor demand that you take every single gig that they ask you to do. Uber wants it both ways, and correctly, the courts have stopped them from doing so.

lstodd 5y ago
> demand that you don't work for other similar employers, nor demand that you take every single gig That's news for me. Where I live, every single taxi driver has an app open for every uber-like company in the city, including Uber (there are at least four that I know of, most certainly more). They just pick what they feel like at the moment. How this is not freelancing I cannot fathom.

timwaagh 5y ago

Not in the Netherlands anymore according to this judgement. You won't have that choice anymore unless there are some very specific circumstances (an interior decorator working for clients would not be in an inferior position to some kind of organisation, for instance).

impute 5y ago

Then find your own clients who want to be driven around.