4 ms·

No idea how you can hold a company liable for the crimes committed by employees, regardless of how awful those crimes might be. I assume this will get overturne

No idea how you can hold a company liable for the crimes committed by employees, regardless of how awful those crimes might be. I assume this will get overturned.

buellerbueller 8mo ago
Is an owner of a dog that mauls someone responsible for damages to the victim?
- GaryBluto 8mo ago
  Do companies own their workers?
  - buellerbueller 8mo ago
    There are jobs where anything the employee does on company time is owned by the company.
  - Edman274 8mo ago
    The companies themselves certainly think they do when they give tasks for their workers by dictating the duration, manner, and other terms of employment. Why should they be able to have it both ways? No risk, all reward?
  - quickthrowman 8mo ago
    If one of my electricians accidentally bangs a sprinkler head and thousands of gallons of water dump into the building, my company is responsible for any damages. Obviously we’re insured against these risks, but we’re liable. There’s almost always a contract that spells it out, but in the situation where there is no explicit contract, I’d expect that we’re still liable. My electricians are W2 employees and not contractors, and it’s possible that construction has different laws regarding liability than a ride share company that uses contractors, so they’re not equivalent, and I am not a lawyer.
    - rented_mule 8mo ago
      Oh wow, what a bad memory. This exact thing happened in a building I lived in several years ago, a couple of floors above me. It looked like waterfalls outside our windows and water was rushing in under the baseboards. All while every fire alarm in the building was going off and fire truck sirens were blaring outside. Understandably, the fire department would not turn off the water until they had been to every floor to check for fire. On the upside, it's impressive how much water can be delivered by fire sprinklers. Closer to the topic, the building's management company tried to come after me (a renter) for the expense of the restoration people who were brought in to rip out my drywall and carpet so mold wouldn't form. Maybe they figured tenants were an easier target than the contractor's insurance? Oh, and the management company were the ones who selected and hired the contractors. I had to get very aggressive, with plenty of threats of legal action, to get them to back down. That was fairly easy to do as my state's laws specifically specify liability rules for flooding in multi-tenant buildings. They never did do repairs while I was there - I moved out when my lease expired nearly a year later as they were tying to raise the rent, with drywall still missing.
      - quickthrowman 8mo ago
        Oh man, multi-tenant housing sounds like the worst case scenario for this sort of thing. I’m glad you were able to avoid any liability, trying to pin liability for rebuilding a unit on a tenant is insane. And yeah, the volume of water a fire pump can move is astounding. Electrical code requires the fire pump to be wired so that it can run at its locked rotor amp rating without tripping overcurrent protection and it’s usually tapped directly off the utility transformer separately from the rest of the electrical service. There’s also a smaller jockey pump that maintains water pressure in the system so that when the main pump turns on, there’s no lag with water coming out. The pump motor will keep spinning even if there’s a dead short if it’s fused right above locked rotor amps, since replacing a motor is cheaper than replacing a fully burned out structure and keeping the water flowing allows as many people to escape as possible. The feeder has to be encased in concrete or it has to be fire-resistant cable.
- kingstnap 8mo ago
  Extremely strange analogy. Uber drivers aren't per dogs. They are adult humans you can make them liable for shit they do.
  - buellerbueller 8mo ago
    You can make both liable, too.
- hackingonempty 8mo ago
  It probably depends on the state but in California, yes. Dog owners there are strictly liable for any injuries caused by their dogs unless the victim was trespassing.
  - buellerbueller 8mo ago
    Yes, that was my point; it was a rhetorical question.
cute_boi 8mo ago
I agree the company shouldn’t be held liable. But Uber doesn’t vet drivers properly because they want driver numbers to be high. I see too many Uber vehicles where the driver doesn’t match the name/photo.
- Edman274 8mo ago
  What incentive would there be for a gig company like Uber to not deliberately hire criminals if Uber isn't liable, but other companies could be? Reputational damage isn't enough to hurt the bottom line and to change behavior - if it were, they would've already done more, but they didn't because they were operating under the assumption that they were legally insulated.
bonsai_spool 8mo ago
> No idea how you can hold a company liable for the crimes committed by employees This is quite standard actually, and there's a long common law tradition around this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respondeat_superior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respondeat_superior). The question here was whether Uber could claim the drivers were not, in fact, employees. (edit: A commenter correctly explains that no employee relationship is necessarily required; I should have stated that this was one part of Uber's defense, in addition to the driver having agreed not to assault riders and having undergone a safety screening)
- carlosjobim 8mo ago
  Do you think Uber instructed their drivers to rape people? According to the article you linked to, a similar case was already tried in 1838, when a boy fell off a wagon, and the master was not guilty of the behaviour of the wagon driver.
  - buellerbueller 8mo ago
    >Do you think Uber instructed their drivers to rape people? Is that the legal standard here? No.
    - carlosjobim 8mo ago
      Yes, that's the legal standard. You should read the linked article. A company is only responsible for crimes or injuries their employees commit, if these are part of what they've been instructed to do by the company. How can you even think another way? Only the rapist is guilty of rape. Any other thinking is apologizing for heinous crimes.
      - surgical_fire 8mo ago
        > A company is only responsible for crimes or injuries their employees commit, if these are part of what they've been instructed to do by the company. Are you trying to imply that the driver was not instructed by Uber to pick the woman who was raped? > How can you even think another way? Only the rapist is guilty of rape. Any other thinking is apologizing for heinous crimes. The company is responsible for sending a rapist to pick up the woman that was raped.
JohnTHaller 8mo ago
If you go into Walmart and one of its employees assaults you, Walmart can be held liable.
pacificmint 8mo ago
I mean, it’s not quite that simple, is it? Did they do everything they could to make drivers and passengers safe? Or did they put profits over people’s safety? From the article: > internal company documents […] showing that Uber had flagged her ride as a higher risk for a serious safety incident moments before she was picked up. Uber never warned her […] Uber actually had a whole project that produced systems that determine the risk of incidents happening. Could they make rides safer but chose not to? That’s at the core of these lawsuits.
- satellite2 8mo ago
  Interesting. When it's the state I think the overwhelming opinion is that predictive policing is dangerous but when it's a private company we actually want it to enforce it?
  - itsdesmond 8mo ago
    They could not be held accountable to warn her if they had not done the analysis. They did. Their organizational conclusion was that it was potentially an unsafe trip. Shit, they could have just cancelled the ride dynamically and re-assigned her. Why wouldn’t they do that? It’d probably be more expensive. Maybe they’d get more cancelled rides. Maybe this woman wouldn’t have been raped by an agent of Uber selected for and sent to her by them.
    - satellite2 8mo ago
      Wouldn't they then expose themselves to discrimination and loss of revenue lawsuits from targeted drivers?
      - itsdesmond 8mo ago
        It depends. Are the inputs to the algorithm themselves discriminatory? If so, then yes that would be appropriate. But that is a different conversation. They determined the passenger may be unsafe and did nothing. Mind you, these companies work very hard for us to not know how they match A to B, usually so we don’t notice things like their disregard for safety.
croes 8mo ago
The same companies claim ownership for their employees‘ inventions. So …
b00ty4breakfast 8mo ago
The article lists a few reasons why. There were some ("some" meaning "thousands of pages", per the article) documents from the company >....including some showing that Uber had flagged her ride as a higher risk for a serious safety incident moments before she was picked up. Uber never warned her, with an executive testifying that it would have been “impractical” to do so. as well as some >...suggesting that Uber resisted introducing safety features such as in-car cameras because it believed these measures would slow corporate growth. I would probably have not been included on the jury because I think uber is run by some of the biggest scumbags in the corporate world but if the article is to be believed it's not an unreasonable verdict unless you think no company should be liable for anything that results from their choices and actions.

No idea how you can hold a company liable for the crimes committed by employees, regardless of how awful those crimes might be. I assume this will get overturned.

buellerbueller 8mo ago

Is an owner of a dog that mauls someone responsible for damages to the victim?

GaryBluto 8mo ago
Do companies own their workers?
- buellerbueller 8mo ago
  There are jobs where anything the employee does on company time is owned by the company.
- Edman274 8mo ago
  The companies themselves certainly think they do when they give tasks for their workers by dictating the duration, manner, and other terms of employment. Why should they be able to have it both ways? No risk, all reward?
- quickthrowman 8mo ago
  If one of my electricians accidentally bangs a sprinkler head and thousands of gallons of water dump into the building, my company is responsible for any damages. Obviously we’re insured against these risks, but we’re liable. There’s almost always a contract that spells it out, but in the situation where there is no explicit contract, I’d expect that we’re still liable. My electricians are W2 employees and not contractors, and it’s possible that construction has different laws regarding liability than a ride share company that uses contractors, so they’re not equivalent, and I am not a lawyer.
  - rented_mule 8mo ago
    Oh wow, what a bad memory. This exact thing happened in a building I lived in several years ago, a couple of floors above me. It looked like waterfalls outside our windows and water was rushing in under the baseboards. All while every fire alarm in the building was going off and fire truck sirens were blaring outside. Understandably, the fire department would not turn off the water until they had been to every floor to check for fire. On the upside, it's impressive how much water can be delivered by fire sprinklers. Closer to the topic, the building's management company tried to come after me (a renter) for the expense of the restoration people who were brought in to rip out my drywall and carpet so mold wouldn't form. Maybe they figured tenants were an easier target than the contractor's insurance? Oh, and the management company were the ones who selected and hired the contractors. I had to get very aggressive, with plenty of threats of legal action, to get them to back down. That was fairly easy to do as my state's laws specifically specify liability rules for flooding in multi-tenant buildings. They never did do repairs while I was there - I moved out when my lease expired nearly a year later as they were tying to raise the rent, with drywall still missing.
    - quickthrowman 8mo ago
      Oh man, multi-tenant housing sounds like the worst case scenario for this sort of thing. I’m glad you were able to avoid any liability, trying to pin liability for rebuilding a unit on a tenant is insane. And yeah, the volume of water a fire pump can move is astounding. Electrical code requires the fire pump to be wired so that it can run at its locked rotor amp rating without tripping overcurrent protection and it’s usually tapped directly off the utility transformer separately from the rest of the electrical service. There’s also a smaller jockey pump that maintains water pressure in the system so that when the main pump turns on, there’s no lag with water coming out. The pump motor will keep spinning even if there’s a dead short if it’s fused right above locked rotor amps, since replacing a motor is cheaper than replacing a fully burned out structure and keeping the water flowing allows as many people to escape as possible. The feeder has to be encased in concrete or it has to be fire-resistant cable.
kingstnap 8mo ago
Extremely strange analogy. Uber drivers aren't per dogs. They are adult humans you can make them liable for shit they do.
- buellerbueller 8mo ago
  You can make both liable, too.
hackingonempty 8mo ago
It probably depends on the state but in California, yes. Dog owners there are strictly liable for any injuries caused by their dogs unless the victim was trespassing.
- buellerbueller 8mo ago
  Yes, that was my point; it was a rhetorical question.

cute_boi 8mo ago

I agree the company shouldn’t be held liable. But Uber doesn’t vet drivers properly because they want driver numbers to be high. I see too many Uber vehicles where the driver doesn’t match the name/photo.

Edman274 8mo ago
What incentive would there be for a gig company like Uber to not deliberately hire criminals if Uber isn't liable, but other companies could be? Reputational damage isn't enough to hurt the bottom line and to change behavior - if it were, they would've already done more, but they didn't because they were operating under the assumption that they were legally insulated.

bonsai_spool 8mo ago

> No idea how you can hold a company liable for the crimes committed by employees This is quite standard actually, and there's a long common law tradition around this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respondeat_superior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respondeat_superior). The question here was whether Uber could claim the drivers were not, in fact, employees. (edit: A commenter correctly explains that no employee relationship is necessarily required; I should have stated that this was one part of Uber's defense, in addition to the driver having agreed not to assault riders and having undergone a safety screening)

carlosjobim 8mo ago
Do you think Uber instructed their drivers to rape people? According to the article you linked to, a similar case was already tried in 1838, when a boy fell off a wagon, and the master was not guilty of the behaviour of the wagon driver.
- buellerbueller 8mo ago
  >Do you think Uber instructed their drivers to rape people? Is that the legal standard here? No.
  - carlosjobim 8mo ago
    Yes, that's the legal standard. You should read the linked article. A company is only responsible for crimes or injuries their employees commit, if these are part of what they've been instructed to do by the company. How can you even think another way? Only the rapist is guilty of rape. Any other thinking is apologizing for heinous crimes.
    - surgical_fire 8mo ago
      > A company is only responsible for crimes or injuries their employees commit, if these are part of what they've been instructed to do by the company. Are you trying to imply that the driver was not instructed by Uber to pick the woman who was raped? > How can you even think another way? Only the rapist is guilty of rape. Any other thinking is apologizing for heinous crimes. The company is responsible for sending a rapist to pick up the woman that was raped.

JohnTHaller 8mo ago

If you go into Walmart and one of its employees assaults you, Walmart can be held liable.

pacificmint 8mo ago

I mean, it’s not quite that simple, is it? Did they do everything they could to make drivers and passengers safe? Or did they put profits over people’s safety? From the article: > internal company documents […] showing that Uber had flagged her ride as a higher risk for a serious safety incident moments before she was picked up. Uber never warned her […] Uber actually had a whole project that produced systems that determine the risk of incidents happening. Could they make rides safer but chose not to? That’s at the core of these lawsuits.

satellite2 8mo ago
Interesting. When it's the state I think the overwhelming opinion is that predictive policing is dangerous but when it's a private company we actually want it to enforce it?
- itsdesmond 8mo ago
  They could not be held accountable to warn her if they had not done the analysis. They did. Their organizational conclusion was that it was potentially an unsafe trip. Shit, they could have just cancelled the ride dynamically and re-assigned her. Why wouldn’t they do that? It’d probably be more expensive. Maybe they’d get more cancelled rides. Maybe this woman wouldn’t have been raped by an agent of Uber selected for and sent to her by them.
  - satellite2 8mo ago
    Wouldn't they then expose themselves to discrimination and loss of revenue lawsuits from targeted drivers?
    - itsdesmond 8mo ago
      It depends. Are the inputs to the algorithm themselves discriminatory? If so, then yes that would be appropriate. But that is a different conversation. They determined the passenger may be unsafe and did nothing. Mind you, these companies work very hard for us to not know how they match A to B, usually so we don’t notice things like their disregard for safety.

croes 8mo ago

The same companies claim ownership for their employees‘ inventions. So …

b00ty4breakfast 8mo ago

The article lists a few reasons why. There were some ("some" meaning "thousands of pages", per the article) documents from the company >....including some showing that Uber had flagged her ride as a higher risk for a serious safety incident moments before she was picked up. Uber never warned her, with an executive testifying that it would have been “impractical” to do so. as well as some >...suggesting that Uber resisted introducing safety features such as in-car cameras because it believed these measures would slow corporate growth. I would probably have not been included on the jury because I think uber is run by some of the biggest scumbags in the corporate world but if the article is to be believed it's not an unreasonable verdict unless you think no company should be liable for anything that results from their choices and actions.