6 ms·

Uber loses New Zealand appeal, court rules drivers are employees not contractors

117 points by ajdlinux 2y ago

flerchin 2y ago
There is a model where a driver picks up the uber app and drives a couple times a month because it's a way to earn beer money once in a while. What percentage of trips do we think are driven by drivers like this? I bet a small percentage, maybe less than 1%. Once a driver starts driving more than 30 hours a week for Uber, they're effectively Uber Drivers, and the employment concept starts to make sense.
- TheAlchemist 2y ago
  This is probably simmilar to what happened with AirBnb - in the beginning it was about renting your house from time to time. Nowadays, it's mostly professionals who own / manage several properties which are exclusively being rented on Airbnb.
  - troad 2y ago
    I wouldn't mind a platform that tries to bring back the old model - perhaps by limiting the amount of time a property can be made available, or something along those lines?
    - shuckles 2y ago
      Kindred is an attempt at that: https://livekindred.com/ https://livekindred.com/.
  - ngcazz 2y ago
    I rented an Airbnb in downtown Lisbon some years ago (2016 perhaps?), and was actually welcomed by the owning company's MD who told me they'd purchased _75_ apartments in and around Bairro Alto in the year leading up to my stay. The unpreparedness of legislation was wild.
- throwaway22032 2y ago
  The issue with this is that it's illegal in a bunch of places. I would love to drive for Uber when I have a bit of free time, but I'd need a licence from my local authority, and taxi insurance which is unrealistically expensive to obtain on a ride by ride basis.
- lolinder 2y ago
  > more than 30 hours a week for Uber, they're effectively Uber Drivers Every Uber driver I've ever had also did Lyft and would go with whichever was paying better or more active or would get them where they needed to be at the time. So even if they're driving 30 hours a week, that time is split between two companies.
- wvenable 2y ago
  One of my Uber drivers just drove during school hours as he dropped his grandchildren off at school and then picked them up at the end of the day. But nearly all my Uber drivers have been immigrants working full time or more.
jpollock 2y ago
Employees might not get to claim the cost of their car (loan and depreciation), but contractors will. Healthcare doesn't come into it, NZ has government provided healthcare. While you don't get vacation, you get to claim a lot of expenses. In New Zealand, it's pretty much "at-will" anyways, with the cost of removing an employee typically being 3-months wages. Personally, being a contractor was much more profitable than being an employee, even if I was on the same wage.
- superb_dev 2y ago
  How much time do you book keeping to claim all of that?
- crowcroft 2y ago
  Citation needed for New Zealand being pretty much 'at will'. Especially for large companies. From https://www.employment.govt.nz/ending-employment/dismissal https://www.employment.govt.nz/ending-employment/dismissal If an employer wants to dismiss an employee (end their employment), they must: * act in good faith * have a good reason Redundancy would cost three months reasons and Uber would be required Uber to argue, not that the person doing a job isn't a worthy employee, but that the role they perform shouldn't exist in the company anymore – a hard argument for Uber to make about their drivers I imagine. > NZ has government provided healthcare. Which contractors have to pay for through ACC levies.
  - Taniwha 2y ago
    ACC levies in NZ pay for no-fault accident insurance - it's paid in part by taxpayers, and (for industrial accidents) paid for by employers (companies that employ coal miners pay more than companies that employ programmers). Our public health system (hospitals, doctors, etc) are different and is largely paid for from income tax (lower than many states in the US, 10% lower marginal rate than I was paying in CA).
    - crowcroft 2y ago
      Yea it's very different to the US, and it's much much cheaper than what people in the US would think when they think about paying health insurance, but contractors do generally need to pay ACC levies still. Flat rate is a little over 1%, and for high risk industries you would generally pay more. https://www.acc.co.nz/for-business/understanding-levies-if-you-work-or-own-a-business https://www.acc.co.nz/for-business/understanding-levies-if-y... > If you’re self-employed, a shareholder-employee or a contractor you’ll pay three different levies
TheAlchemist 2y ago
This is really good. Quite a lot of 'disruptive' business lately are actually just going around the laws, and sometimes borderline exploiting people. From my experience, in big cities, Deliveroo and similar apps riders are mostly half legal young immigrants not realizing (at first) that they are being exploited and that they take quite some work risks without any coverage at all. But hey, at least we can have a Big Mac delivered to one's door for almost nothing.
- cwalv 2y ago
  What is a 'half legal' immigrant?
  - rblatz 2y ago
    Likely in the country legally, but not on a visa that allows them to work in the country.
- pkaye 2y ago
  That is something the government could fix by requiring these companies to check the applicants are permitted in the country through some government supplied means.
- searealist 2y ago
  You really think Uber's success was simply "just going around the laws"?
  - djbusby 2y ago
    They were, here's a starter https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Uber https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Ub...
    - searealist 2y ago
      There is a "just" word in my question you decided to ignore.
yedava 2y ago
The primary "innovation" of Uber is political, not technological. They've managed to circumvent labor protections and at the same time position themselves as the middleman between drivers and riders. In another Universe, a technology company would develop software that taxi companies can use to provide the same services that Uber does. But that wouldn't be as profitable as there wouldn't be scope for labor exploitation.
- mhb 2y ago
  Sort of like this?: https://drivers.coop/ https://drivers.coop/ "We are a driver-owned cooperative in New York City specializing in paratransit and Non-Emergency Medical Transportation."
- alvah 2y ago
  In this other universe, would the entrenched taxi operators willingly embrace new technology such as this, rather than continuing to provide a sub-par experience enabled by their entrenched position & political lobbying? Because that certainly didn't happen in this universe.
- cwalv 2y ago
  Uber drivers themselves never seem to complain about this. It's almost like those labor protections come with a bunch of other baggage that makes the tradeoff not worth it to them. Of course, it's easy to explain away any perceived 'tradeoffs' with them just being too stupid to know better, but I don't think that's accurate.
  - sabbaticaldev 2y ago
    > Uber drivers themselves never seem to complain about this why would they? uber takes more money from the customers than taxis got in the past, pay less to the drivers and less taxes. Everybody pays for uber benefit
    - thfuran 2y ago
      Most people don't like being underpaid.
emilsedgh 2y ago
Something that has been baffling me is how Uber is not in panic mode and it's market price not affected by Waymo? I've always been skeptical [of self driving] but at this point (after having a few rides with Waymo) it appears that the folks at Alphabet have figured it out already and are coming for Uber. Why is not that affecting Uber's price?
- dylan604 2y ago
  How many cities is Uber in? How many cities is Waymo in? That's why
  - emilsedgh 2y ago
    If they were in all cities already Uber would be dead. But someone, either Uber or market is not even reacting to this inevitability?
    - AlexandrB 2y ago
      The time horizon on Waymo getting there is quite long. Uber is in every city because they don't have to build and maintain their own fleet. Waymo will have to. That's not only a massive capital cost, but a substantial scaling problem.
    - dylan604 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - emilsedgh 2y ago
        I'm LA based and I witnessed them loading the entire city with Waymo cars in a span of two months. And no, I don't have stock and I was very skeptical of them being able to crack this but I was proven wrong in the past 2 months.
    - duped 2y ago
      Because there's two decades of revenue between that happening and today. It's far more likely that Uber buys Waymo than Waymo replacing Uber.
forrestthewoods 2y ago
I'm surprised, and somewhat disappointed, that no state/country has created a formal third class of worker. There's obviously some type of gig-worker role that is neither employee nor contractor.
bdw5204 2y ago
Uber drivers, by any reasonable standard, are contractors not employees. Uber does not, to the best of my knowledge, tell them when or where to drive nor does it force them to pick up passengers. That's the distinction between contractor and employee. Declaring Uber drivers to be employees seems to be a political move, likely lobbied for by low wage employers that are being forced to offer higher wages because many of their former minimum wage employees are now contractors for apps.
- Taniwha 2y ago
  I live in NZ - these unions are very much NOT working for employers
  - bdw5204 2y ago
    There's a long history of "Baptists and bootleggers"[0] pushing for regulations that serve both of their interests. The term comes from the 2 main groups that advocated for laws against the sale of alcohol in the southern US. The unions can easily be secretly in cahoots with McDonald's or the taxi industry. Its also clearly not just something they're pushing in New Zealand given that California voters had to overturn a similar state law via referendum[1] a few years ago. They did this by a 17 point margin at the same time that they voted for the left wing candidate for president by around a 30 point margin[2]. In virtually any other state in the US, declaring Uber drivers to be "employees" would almost certainly lose at the polls by a much larger margin. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_22 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_elections#President_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_elections#Pres...
worik 2y ago
New Zealand (where I live) has changed the law before to make employees contractors because of either corruption or economic necessity depending on which side of the fence you stand Weta Digital had people building models on "at will" contracts and not paid very much. They were working on a film for Warner Brothers (if memory serves, I am not looking this up) A contractor was fired and took a case that since they: worked only for Weta, only on Weta equipment, and for all the working hours there were for Weta they were an employee of Weta (that is the law here - until then) The employee won. Peter Jackson and Richard Taylor are very rich, very entitled, and Warner threatened to throw their toys across the room and the government changed the law so that any artist, or computer programmer working on a movie or a computer game had no employment rights.... I doubt that will happen this time. I do not think Uber wants to pay enough.
Apocryphon 2y ago
Between this and the Australian government's ruling on after-hours emails, seems like ANZAC countries still maintain worker's rights.

117 points by ajdlinux 2y ago

There is a model where a driver picks up the uber app and drives a couple times a month because it's a way to earn beer money once in a while. What percentage of trips do we think are driven by drivers like this? I bet a small percentage, maybe less than 1%. Once a driver starts driving more than 30 hours a week for Uber, they're effectively Uber Drivers, and the employment concept starts to make sense.

TheAlchemist 2y ago
This is probably simmilar to what happened with AirBnb - in the beginning it was about renting your house from time to time. Nowadays, it's mostly professionals who own / manage several properties which are exclusively being rented on Airbnb.
- troad 2y ago
  I wouldn't mind a platform that tries to bring back the old model - perhaps by limiting the amount of time a property can be made available, or something along those lines?
  - shuckles 2y ago
    Kindred is an attempt at that: https://livekindred.com/ https://livekindred.com/.
- ngcazz 2y ago
  I rented an Airbnb in downtown Lisbon some years ago (2016 perhaps?), and was actually welcomed by the owning company's MD who told me they'd purchased _75_ apartments in and around Bairro Alto in the year leading up to my stay. The unpreparedness of legislation was wild.
throwaway22032 2y ago
The issue with this is that it's illegal in a bunch of places. I would love to drive for Uber when I have a bit of free time, but I'd need a licence from my local authority, and taxi insurance which is unrealistically expensive to obtain on a ride by ride basis.
lolinder 2y ago
> more than 30 hours a week for Uber, they're effectively Uber Drivers Every Uber driver I've ever had also did Lyft and would go with whichever was paying better or more active or would get them where they needed to be at the time. So even if they're driving 30 hours a week, that time is split between two companies.
wvenable 2y ago
One of my Uber drivers just drove during school hours as he dropped his grandchildren off at school and then picked them up at the end of the day. But nearly all my Uber drivers have been immigrants working full time or more.

jpollock 2y ago

Employees might not get to claim the cost of their car (loan and depreciation), but contractors will. Healthcare doesn't come into it, NZ has government provided healthcare. While you don't get vacation, you get to claim a lot of expenses. In New Zealand, it's pretty much "at-will" anyways, with the cost of removing an employee typically being 3-months wages. Personally, being a contractor was much more profitable than being an employee, even if I was on the same wage.

superb_dev 2y ago
How much time do you book keeping to claim all of that?
crowcroft 2y ago
Citation needed for New Zealand being pretty much 'at will'. Especially for large companies. From https://www.employment.govt.nz/ending-employment/dismissal https://www.employment.govt.nz/ending-employment/dismissal If an employer wants to dismiss an employee (end their employment), they must: * act in good faith * have a good reason Redundancy would cost three months reasons and Uber would be required Uber to argue, not that the person doing a job isn't a worthy employee, but that the role they perform shouldn't exist in the company anymore – a hard argument for Uber to make about their drivers I imagine. > NZ has government provided healthcare. Which contractors have to pay for through ACC levies.
- Taniwha 2y ago
  ACC levies in NZ pay for no-fault accident insurance - it's paid in part by taxpayers, and (for industrial accidents) paid for by employers (companies that employ coal miners pay more than companies that employ programmers). Our public health system (hospitals, doctors, etc) are different and is largely paid for from income tax (lower than many states in the US, 10% lower marginal rate than I was paying in CA).
  - crowcroft 2y ago
    Yea it's very different to the US, and it's much much cheaper than what people in the US would think when they think about paying health insurance, but contractors do generally need to pay ACC levies still. Flat rate is a little over 1%, and for high risk industries you would generally pay more. https://www.acc.co.nz/for-business/understanding-levies-if-you-work-or-own-a-business https://www.acc.co.nz/for-business/understanding-levies-if-y... > If you’re self-employed, a shareholder-employee or a contractor you’ll pay three different levies

TheAlchemist 2y ago

This is really good. Quite a lot of 'disruptive' business lately are actually just going around the laws, and sometimes borderline exploiting people. From my experience, in big cities, Deliveroo and similar apps riders are mostly half legal young immigrants not realizing (at first) that they are being exploited and that they take quite some work risks without any coverage at all. But hey, at least we can have a Big Mac delivered to one's door for almost nothing.

cwalv 2y ago
What is a 'half legal' immigrant?
- rblatz 2y ago
  Likely in the country legally, but not on a visa that allows them to work in the country.
pkaye 2y ago
That is something the government could fix by requiring these companies to check the applicants are permitted in the country through some government supplied means.
searealist 2y ago
You really think Uber's success was simply "just going around the laws"?
- djbusby 2y ago
  They were, here's a starter https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Uber https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Ub...
  - searealist 2y ago
    There is a "just" word in my question you decided to ignore.

yedava 2y ago

The primary "innovation" of Uber is political, not technological. They've managed to circumvent labor protections and at the same time position themselves as the middleman between drivers and riders. In another Universe, a technology company would develop software that taxi companies can use to provide the same services that Uber does. But that wouldn't be as profitable as there wouldn't be scope for labor exploitation.

mhb 2y ago
Sort of like this?: https://drivers.coop/ https://drivers.coop/ "We are a driver-owned cooperative in New York City specializing in paratransit and Non-Emergency Medical Transportation."
alvah 2y ago
In this other universe, would the entrenched taxi operators willingly embrace new technology such as this, rather than continuing to provide a sub-par experience enabled by their entrenched position & political lobbying? Because that certainly didn't happen in this universe.
cwalv 2y ago
Uber drivers themselves never seem to complain about this. It's almost like those labor protections come with a bunch of other baggage that makes the tradeoff not worth it to them. Of course, it's easy to explain away any perceived 'tradeoffs' with them just being too stupid to know better, but I don't think that's accurate.
- sabbaticaldev 2y ago
  > Uber drivers themselves never seem to complain about this why would they? uber takes more money from the customers than taxis got in the past, pay less to the drivers and less taxes. Everybody pays for uber benefit
  - thfuran 2y ago
    Most people don't like being underpaid.

emilsedgh 2y ago

Something that has been baffling me is how Uber is not in panic mode and it's market price not affected by Waymo? I've always been skeptical [of self driving] but at this point (after having a few rides with Waymo) it appears that the folks at Alphabet have figured it out already and are coming for Uber. Why is not that affecting Uber's price?

dylan604 2y ago
How many cities is Uber in? How many cities is Waymo in? That's why
- emilsedgh 2y ago
  If they were in all cities already Uber would be dead. But someone, either Uber or market is not even reacting to this inevitability?
  - AlexandrB 2y ago
    The time horizon on Waymo getting there is quite long. Uber is in every city because they don't have to build and maintain their own fleet. Waymo will have to. That's not only a massive capital cost, but a substantial scaling problem.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - emilsedgh 2y ago
      I'm LA based and I witnessed them loading the entire city with Waymo cars in a span of two months. And no, I don't have stock and I was very skeptical of them being able to crack this but I was proven wrong in the past 2 months.
  - duped 2y ago
    Because there's two decades of revenue between that happening and today. It's far more likely that Uber buys Waymo than Waymo replacing Uber.

forrestthewoods 2y ago

I'm surprised, and somewhat disappointed, that no state/country has created a formal third class of worker. There's obviously some type of gig-worker role that is neither employee nor contractor.

bdw5204 2y ago

Uber drivers, by any reasonable standard, are contractors not employees. Uber does not, to the best of my knowledge, tell them when or where to drive nor does it force them to pick up passengers. That's the distinction between contractor and employee. Declaring Uber drivers to be employees seems to be a political move, likely lobbied for by low wage employers that are being forced to offer higher wages because many of their former minimum wage employees are now contractors for apps.

Taniwha 2y ago
I live in NZ - these unions are very much NOT working for employers
- bdw5204 2y ago
  There's a long history of "Baptists and bootleggers"[0] pushing for regulations that serve both of their interests. The term comes from the 2 main groups that advocated for laws against the sale of alcohol in the southern US. The unions can easily be secretly in cahoots with McDonald's or the taxi industry. Its also clearly not just something they're pushing in New Zealand given that California voters had to overturn a similar state law via referendum[1] a few years ago. They did this by a 17 point margin at the same time that they voted for the left wing candidate for president by around a 30 point margin[2]. In virtually any other state in the US, declaring Uber drivers to be "employees" would almost certainly lose at the polls by a much larger margin. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_22 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_elections#President_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_elections#Pres...

worik 2y ago

New Zealand (where I live) has changed the law before to make employees contractors because of either corruption or economic necessity depending on which side of the fence you stand Weta Digital had people building models on "at will" contracts and not paid very much. They were working on a film for Warner Brothers (if memory serves, I am not looking this up) A contractor was fired and took a case that since they: worked only for Weta, only on Weta equipment, and for all the working hours there were for Weta they were an employee of Weta (that is the law here - until then) The employee won. Peter Jackson and Richard Taylor are very rich, very entitled, and Warner threatened to throw their toys across the room and the government changed the law so that any artist, or computer programmer working on a movie or a computer game had no employment rights.... I doubt that will happen this time. I do not think Uber wants to pay enough.

Apocryphon 2y ago

Between this and the Australian government's ruling on after-hours emails, seems like ANZAC countries still maintain worker's rights.