Nah, the idea just needs additional elaboration to protect it against gaming the system like you describe, without introducing systemic discrimination against

Nah, the idea just needs additional elaboration to protect it against gaming the system like you describe, without introducing systemic discrimination against passengers in less trendy areas. Here is a quick brainstorm of one possible fix, without any promises I didn’t overlook a flaw in this idea: maybe the minimum wage per some suitably granular time period when not currently or recently driving a passenger could be made to vary somewhat depending on whether enough other vehicles from the fleet are in the area, and could then potentially have a percentage penalty subtracted for not accepting and timely arriving to a high enough percentage of offered ride opportunities. Plus, of course, if some drivers game the system, Uber and Lyft can notice those abusive patterns in the data and stop working with them, disincentivizing other drivers from similar abuse. That’s the biggest countermeasure. The problem we are discussing is only Uber and Lyft abruptly locking out a driver mid-shift purely to save money. Nobody is objecting to Uber ending a relationship abruptly due to documented driver abuse or even doing so without driver misconduct but with reasonable notice. And no, I don’t assume that movers are already paired up with customers. They present the minimum number of billable hours per visit as part of their standard terms during the first conversation with a new potential customer, and at least in the residential moving space, customers don’t generally argue with it. The reason customers don’t argue with it is largely because movers can easily get another customer by doing almost nothing (at least in the big cities where I’ve lived) whereas it’s a hassle for customers to juggle too many different potential moving companies when planning the move. But another factor is that the minimum hourly rate billings are reasonable, typically 1-3 hours per visit in my personal experience, likely because there is enough competition among moving companies that offering unreasonable terms will lose them customers. I completely realize the power dynamic is different in the ride-sharing space, and I acknowledged that in my previous comment. But that just changes how the negotiation has to occur in order to balance out Uber and Lyft’s disproportionate power, not whether it can work in a gig worker context.