[HN Gopher] Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch court rules
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Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch court rules
Author : jsiepkes
Score : 434 points
Date : 2021-09-13 09:53 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nltimes.nl)
(TXT) w3m dump (nltimes.nl)
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| I remember quite well some people here claiming that Uber was
| just about to replace all their drivers with autonomous cars. It
| was back in 2015... we're in 2021.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > replace all their drivers with autonomous cars.
|
| And now, they have been given a huge incentive to do just that.
|
| Way to foster innovation Dutch govt. !
| weijoi wrote:
| No driver - no problem. Communists will downvote this comment
| :D
| teekert wrote:
| It's happening in the year of Linux on the desktop.
| the-dude wrote:
| We can invent something new : _The year of the Linux driver_
| shaan7 wrote:
| Or, "When Linux becomes your daily driver" ;)
| cblconfederate wrote:
| and apple web notifications
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Autonomous cars are more expensive than drivers; the only
| reason they dislike having real drivers is that they have a
| voice.
| hmate9 wrote:
| Over the long run there is no way that autonomous cars are
| more expensive
| XCSme wrote:
| Depends on how often they crash.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Depends on how much more expensive autonomous car is. If
| such car is 1 million and regular is 100k and lifetime of
| both is 5 years you can pay more than 20 per hour to
| driver...
| wwtrv wrote:
| Creating an autonomous car in the first place is the
| expensive part, the marginal cost can't be significantly
| higher than the cost of a regular car.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| The hardware (ML chips, failsafe systems, LIDAR, radar,
| cameras, other sensors) isn't cheap. I'd expect an
| autonomous car to cost at least 5k-10k more if mass
| produced at a similar scale, and probably more than that
| in practice due to smaller numbers. Plus R&D of course.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Who's liable if the driver crashes?
|
| Who's liable if the automated car crashes?
|
| Uber doesn't want to be responsible for the risks
| associated with their reward.
| Someone wrote:
| > Who's liable if the driver crashes?
|
| Depends. If the driver is judged to be an employee, the
| employer can be liable, depending on circumstances.
|
| Extreme ends of the spectrum:
|
| - Company didn't and couldn't know that the driver was
| too drunk/tired to drive
|
| - Employee complained about working hours and traffic
| conditions; employer threatened employee with dismissal.
|
| > Who's liable if the automated car crashes?
|
| Again, depends. Could be the taxi company, the car owner,
| the manufacturer, even the driver (if they ignored
| zillions of warnings from the car, for example)
| asdff wrote:
| Often times an expensive machine with an expensive service
| contract that requires an expensive technician is often a
| lot more expensive than just hiring someone for minimum
| wage and offering zero benefits. It's why McDonalds has had
| technology to automate burger flipping since the invention
| of the integrated circuit but prefers to use cheaper part
| time labor instead to this day, and why car factories only
| started using more automation and reducing headcounts in
| factories only after labor unions began demanding better
| pay and benefits.
| paulcole wrote:
| autonomous cars have to exist before we can debate which is
| less expensive.
|
| right now it's like debating which is less expensive
| unicorns or leprechauns.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28509506
| LatteLazy wrote:
| We really need to review "employment" as a legal concept. Most of
| these systems were set up post ww2. They worked ok when everyone
| was working full time as employees of single large companies, in
| factories where their time was directed.
|
| It no longer works in on demand economies, with variable hours
| and self employment and people working multiple jobs.
| gjulianm wrote:
| > It no longer works in on demand economies, with variable
| hours and self employment and people working multiple jobs.
|
| Why? There are people who work variable hours, self employment
| and working multiple jobs. They're called freelancers. You can
| freelance in most countries, and it's not a problem. What is a
| problem is Uber and gig economy companies saying that the
| people that work for them are "actually freelancers" as an
| excuse to offload costs onto the workers, who don't get any of
| the advantages of being a freelance (they always work under the
| conditions for these companies, with no power of negotiation.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| There are 1000s of small ways it doesnt work:
|
| * In the uk, you and your employer pay national insurance if
| you earn over a given limit. Thats fine for an uber driver
| who becomes an employee instead of self employed.
|
| * but your employer only pays if you earn over X. So
| employers have a big incentive to stop you earning over thst
| limit. You see this in the US with workers being kept at 1h
| less than full time to avoid paying for health insurance. So
| now we're limiting the income of the people we're meant to be
| helping!?
|
| * plus in the uk, your contributions only count if you do a
| full year. Thats fine if you're a full time employee, you
| work 52 weeks (and when you're on holiday you're paid and
| that includes NI contributions), and your wage is the same
| every week. But if an uber driver misses a pay period or has
| a slow month, he paid a lot of NI and gets no credit for it.
| Nor can he claim it back.
|
| * plus now, as an employee, your expenses are not tax
| deductable.
|
| Im not being anti-worker. But our current systems arent fit
| for purpose anymore. We need to review them. Thats benefits,
| workers rights and the tax code.
|
| Why dont we just charge a percentage of earnings and then
| base unemployment payout on that?
|
| Because in 1950 someone dreamt up this system and designed it
| so we could support men working full time in factories and to
| operate using just pen and paper but cause computers didnt
| exist. 70 years later, we have the same system with 101 bits
| of crap bolted on. And it isnt working.
| gjulianm wrote:
| None of the issues you mentioned are fundamental to the
| employee system. I am not familiar with the issues you
| mentioned in Spain, for example.
|
| You can see issues in any system. But that doesn't mean it
| isn't working fundamentally. I'm all for reviewing and
| improving the system, adapting it for new jobs and ways of
| working. But those changes cannot be an excuse to slash
| benefits and worker rights, which is what Uber has been
| doing for years.
| hobom wrote:
| Unfortunate consequence of a legacy legal system. Uber drivers
| are clearly neither quite like employees nor are they
| entrepreneurs, and the law should come up with a fitting category
| that ensures they are protected from exploitation but continue to
| enjoy some of the freedoms associated with the gig economy.
| dahfizz wrote:
| This is also my stance. Everyone debates whether Uber drivers
| and gig workers are employees or contractors: They are clearly
| neither. But people love a dichotomy, I guess.
| Frost1x wrote:
| And after you define this mid-point employment classification
| between traditionally employed and self employed, businesses
| who hold the leverage will look at the segments from
| traditionally employed to the new mid-point as we as self-
| employed to the new midpoint.
|
| They'll then choose which classification gymnastics they can
| perform under the legal language and optimize on to minimize
| their labor costs. That'll take a couple years and the law
| change to catchup to this abusive behavior avoiding the intent
| of the law will take another 10-30 years, and we'll repeat the
| process.
|
| We need better definitions for the labor relation that make it
| difficult to play these optimization games created simply to
| optimize on labor and more significant consequences for that
| behavior to encourage businesses to innovate in other areas
| (like, I don't know, technology, new products, improved
| products, etc.) instead of simply extracting wealth from their
| own workforces.
|
| To be fair to Uber they did create new value in finding and
| scheduling rides/taxies and I think that is a valuable service.
| That infrastructure and convenience has a cost though. No
| longer do you need to hail a taxi and deal with trying to pass
| directions, miscommunication of destination and charge rates
| and so on. But it seems they've passed many of those costs onto
| the drivers themselves and probably consumers to assure a
| certain sort of profit margin per transaction.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| I fully agree but I don't believe Uber has the best interests
| of society in mind and care more about their investors.
| Exploitation of workers would be a feature to them not a bug.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| This ruling against Uber doesn't seem to affect Blablacar, a
| European competitor that lets you set your own prices.
|
| If anything, Uber should let you set prices, and show a
| competitive market price.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| I wouldn't compare Blablacar with Uber. Most drivers use the
| service once a month to cover fuel cost and meet people
| during occasional trips.
| irtigor wrote:
| I agree with you in my area it replaces some FB groups for
| long distance drives/hitchhiking (a hour or more of driving
| is not unusual), but not taxis/uber, because the driver
| sets a price, when they will arrive and where they will
| meet/drop you (usually a gas station), it is also generally
| true that it is just gas money (cheaper than a uber fare of
| the same distance). There is a uber-like service where the
| passenger makes a fare offer and if I'm not mistaken the
| driver can make a counter offer, it is called indriver, but
| I don't know if it exists there.
| kevincox wrote:
| Possibly a better option is to remove these categories
| together. What would happen if we struck the whole concept of
| "Employment" from the law. As a person you just had the chance
| to get income. We can retarget all of the laws and benefits
| previously using Employment to be about income instead. If you
| make an income you can pay into a pension, pay taxes...
| Everyone is entitled to some number of vacations and sick days
| that can not be taken away from a contract. (any contract)
|
| I'm sure there are some complexities due to the weaker
| relationship between the two, but it seems like it would be
| beneficial to remove this somewhat artificial cliff between
| self-employed contractors or employees which is almost
| certainly more of a septum. (For example freelance picking up
| jobs posted to a public job board, to a contractor in frequent
| contracts with multiple companies, to a contractor working with
| a single company, to an employee which works with one company.)
| [deleted]
| ByteWelder wrote:
| The regulations in The Netherlands in this regard have recently
| (May 20160) been updated to prevent fake freelance/independent
| status.
|
| There are a bunch of guidelines, but the main factors generally
| boil down to these questions: Is the employee working for a
| single employer? How much independence do they have? (e.g.
| holidays, working hours, etc.) Were the contract details
| mandated by the employer? etc.
|
| Sources (in Dutch): -
| https://www.ondernemenmetpersoneel.nl/orienteren/dienstverba...
| - https://noestadvocatuur.nl/zzper-werknemer/
| dahfizz wrote:
| Those three questions seem pretty weak to me.
|
| Its not hard to imagine a software engineer who likes to work
| a part time job on the weekends, gets to set their own hours
| as long as they complete assigned tickets, and who negotiated
| their employment contract aggressively. That person would
| still be an employee.
| hkt wrote:
| I don't know exactly how it works in Holland, but in the UK we're
| now in a funny situation whereby an Uber is almost more ethical
| than a taxi - once the employees get proper sick pay, PTO etc,
| that is.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| If this ever happens in the U.S. I won't bother with driving Uber
| anymore and this would probably put them out of business. The
| Taxi industry will win back from the disruption that Uber caused.
|
| This has nothing to do with worker's rights. No one gave a crap
| about Taxi driver's work standards and they are/were treated
| worse than Uber drivers.
|
| This is all about the Taxi industry fighting back.
|
| 75% of all ride share drivers would prefer to remain independent.
|
| In Chicago, I can make $42/hour driving Uber. I still don't
| understand how anyone can claim I'm being mistreated.
| dml2135 wrote:
| Do you mind if I ask your methodology for the $42/hour number?
| Do you take your vehicle's depreciation into account?
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| If I subtract my entire vehicle cost over three years, I'm
| still making $25/hr or more.
|
| But everyone seems to forget that it's the independence that
| driver's love. I can turn the app on/off whenever I feel like
| it. That's a level of freedom that no other "job" offers.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| I also have never heard a proven argument against Uber.
|
| - Uber passengers LOVE the service. Way more than taxi service
| or public transportation. - Since Uber started, drunk driving
| injuries/fatalities are down 30%-35%. - Drivers can be anyone
| with a working car. There is no "interview". You get background
| checked and your car is inspected. - Drivers get to write off
| miles. - Drivers get discounts on service at Jiffy Lube and
| tire stores.
|
| Now if people are worried about employment practices, why not
| look at Walmart, Amazon, Target, and most retail stores. They
| intentionally staff people with erratic weekly hours, keeping
| shifts to 4 hours (no breaks or lunches required) and no one
| reaches 35 hours to enforce benefits.
|
| You can't compare Uber to Retail.
|
| I'm 100% liberal and support progressive worker protection, but
| Uber isn't actually hurting anyone. Only the Taxi industry and
| the cities that used to make a fortune on selling "medallions"
| to license taxis. In Chicago those were $400k and in NYC they
| were even more. So imaging you're a Taxi company with 200
| medallions. Uber basically just shredded your net worth.
|
| That's who has really seen pain. Not workers.
| w-j-w wrote:
| Customers love Uber for the same reason they loved pets.com:
| the prices are artificially low. A fair comparison between
| Uber and traditional taxis hasn't happened yet because Uber
| is hysterically unprofitable.
| aqsalose wrote:
| >Now if people are worried about employment practices, why
| not look at Walmart, Amazon, Target, and most retail stores.
| They intentionally staff people with erratic weekly hours,
| keeping shifts to 4 hours (no breaks or lunches required) and
| no one reaches 35 hours to enforce benefits.
|
| Is there Target in the Netherlands?
| richwater wrote:
| > They intentionally staff people with erratic weekly
| hours, keeping shifts to 4 hours
|
| I literally have family members who work full shifts.
| You're taking anecdotal examples and extrapolating that to
| the entire retail force. dumb opinion.
| maslam wrote:
| No. We respect our workers too much.
| blueboo wrote:
| A recent study suggests Chicago drivers earn less than minimum
| wage.
|
| > After accounting for driving expenses and self-employment
| taxes, the average TNP driver in Chicago earns about 3% to 5%
| less than minimum wage. In 2019, drivers earned $12.30 per
| hour, or 5% less than the city's minimum wage of $13 per hour
| at the time. In 2020, drivers earn slightly above minimum wage,
| but the hourly rate of pay was artificially inflated due to the
| reduction of traffic congestion on Chicago roads. With pre-
| pandemic levels of traffic congestion, drivers would have only
| earned an hourly wage of $13.62 per hour after expenses and
| taxes, which is 3% below the city's minimum wage of $14 per
| hour at the time. The authors note that the city's minimum wage
| will increase to $15 per hour on July 1, 2021.
|
| https://illinoisupdate.com/2021/01/26/release-the-average-ub...
|
| Hm.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Well good thing independent contractors are exempt from
| minimum wage laws! And union protections, mandatory breaks,
| sick days, workers compensation, health insurance, overtime
| pay, discrimination law, unemployment insurance, employer
| liabilities to social security pay...
|
| Wait a minute, I think this is intentional! Can you imagine
| an employer trying to subvert the gains of the labor
| movement?!
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| Uber isn't subverting the labor movement. It's a very small
| part of the overall economy. Go look at bigger industry
| practices to find the bad guys.
|
| The Uber model will never translate to Retail, Tech,
| Banking, Finance, Healthcare.
|
| It does translate to transportation, food and package
| delivery. Let the disruption make capitalism more
| efficient. Focus on areas where a balance is important,
| like making healthcare and college universally free.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| So it's unskilled labor that offers the same (+/- a single
| digit percentage) pay after expenses as compared to other
| minimum wage jobs, but offers substantially better
| flexibility of hours. I can still see why plenty of people
| would prefer it to flipping burgers.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| I 100% refute that story. After taxes I'm still making close
| to $30/hr. I get to write off mileage at $.58/mile so my
| taxes get lowered.
|
| I can show anyone my weekly driver log that shows how many
| hours I drove and how much I was paid. It is at least $42/hr
| and on weekends it can be $50/hr.
| aeturnum wrote:
| The take away here is not that you are wrong or that Uber
| is a bad choice for everyone. It's that some number of
| people provide diving services to Uber at a rate lower than
| we generally allow.
|
| So it's about if we want to let companies hire individuals
| to do contract work that would be below the level we would
| allow someone to hire an employee. And, if we do (which I
| think we should) how do we set the standards of such an
| arrangement? Being an app driver is clearly different from
| being a traditional independent contractor (handyman, etc),
| but it is also different from being an employee. What a
| fair and just version of this relationship looks like is,
| to me, obviously unsettled.
|
| P.s. Uber lost ~$4.5B last year on ~$11B revenue. It does
| not seem reasonable to say that the payment rates you've
| been getting represent what Uber 'will be' in a long term
| way. The economic situation is not sustainable.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| Uber reported a profit in the last quarter. Turns out,
| the food delivery business is really profitable.
| weijoi wrote:
| Soviet Union also successfully required that everyone will be
| officially employed.
| have_faith wrote:
| This isn't mandating that uber has to hire these people, or
| that these people have to have jobs, it's that if Uber wants
| them to work an amount of hours equivalant to a full time
| emlpoyee then they need to not pretend that they're not full
| time employees.
| 988747 wrote:
| The amount of time worked has nothing to do with it -
| contractors in other industries typically work long hours.
| The reasoning is that contractors should retain some level of
| independence, like choosing their rides, and setting their
| own prices, for example. Uber is micromanaging all driver's
| daily activities, which is antithesis of being independent
| contractor.
| srmarm wrote:
| What's that supposed to mean? Dutch people can still be self-
| employed - this ruling applies to one particular employer that
| has been pretending it's staff are self-employed.
| SMAAART wrote:
| What we have here is a unique, unprecedented, real life
| experiment in Game Theory.
|
| Possible outcomes:
|
| - Uber could pull out from the Netherlands
|
| - Drivers in the Netherlands could organize themselves, but they
| will need a structure similar to Uber
|
| - Other countries will follow the Netherlands ruling
|
| We could see the implosion of the gig economy (doubt it) or -
| most probably - some places like the Netherlands will be gig-
| economy-free zones; and we'll see the impact on their economies.
| Telluur wrote:
| Uber could pull out from NL, and not be missed, as the country
| is not super car dependent to start with. Taxi's (or uber like
| services) are rarely used here. People mostly walk, bike or
| take public transport.
|
| As for the implosion of the gig economy, I doubt it too. We've
| had a neo-liberal gov for the last 12 years, and they've pushed
| the gig economy (successfully) within the boundaries of north
| western EU social democracy (Dutch: ZZP).
|
| What we are witnessing here is the courts pushing back on
| companies abusing the system. They can't have it both ways;
| wanting flexible workers with those kinds of wages, with
| demanding 'contracts' akin to employee contracts.
| adwww wrote:
| > Other countries will follow the Netherlands ruling
|
| Dozens of other jurisdictions seem to have ruled similar
| already, but for whatever reason, with limited change yet.
|
| I'm not sure why not. Possibly stuck in various appeals, or
| maybe Uber made some other small change and waited to get sued
| again?
| sbilstein wrote:
| I think the competitive advantages of Uber will weaken with all
| these legal challenges. In NYC, as Uber prices increased
| dramatically after the pandemic began to wane, folks just
| starting catching cabs again. The cabs use ride hailing apps. I
| no longer care about the rating system or any of that. It is
| fine.
|
| In Israel, we use Gett. It's fine.
| devcpp wrote:
| And Gett is dependent on the taxi cartel, its excessive
| price, the black market of taxi medallions, etc. It's a
| nonsensical market and we're overdue a shared transport
| option. Good luck getting around on Saturday.
|
| All because it's illegal to take money to transport someone
| from A to B without an exorbitant license for no specific
| reason.
| tzs wrote:
| Or Uber could start _actually_ offering the service they claim
| to offer: providing a marketplace where independent freelance
| drivers can offer rides and people needing rides can buy them.
| criddell wrote:
| When the city of Austin, TX added some minor regulations around
| ride share companies, Uber and Lyft left the city. About 24
| hours later, ten new services started up. Shortly after that,
| Uber and Lyft came back.
| xur17 wrote:
| But the quick startup time / ability for small startups to
| compete was likely due to being able to hire contractors vs
| "employing" the drivers.
| [deleted]
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| Ah yes, the war against the free market continues, unabated.
| Certain tenets of socialist ideology - like the idea that large
| companies exploit the masses if afforded contract liberty - are
| so deeply ingrained in the collective psyche, that they are never
| even questioned.
|
| The beliefs of fringe groups rest on a set of absurd conspiracy
| theories, like vaccines being harmful to public health, and
| pushed on the population merely to profit Big Pharma. But the
| beliefs of the mainstream rest on a set of equally absurd
| conspiracy theories, and all of them based on socialist class
| warfare narratives. It is in the interests of a critical mass of
| special interest groups, who hold political power, for people to
| believe in these conspiracy theories.
| christkv wrote:
| One thing I've noticed with food delivery companies here is the
| obvious fraudulent identities of the delivery people. The photo
| shows a completely different person than the one showing up with
| the delivery leading me to think there is some sort of trade of
| delivery accounts happening to allow undocumented workers to
| pretend working legally with someone taking a cut of the
| earnings.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I love when US companies get to learn our unions and work laws
| are actually to be followed upon.
| drstewart wrote:
| Yeah, it's the environmental and corruption laws you get to
| skirt in Europe! Just ask VW, FIFA, or any bank. So much more
| progressive.
|
| Also:
| https://www.ft.com/content/5b986586-0f85-47d5-8edb-3b49398e2...
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post shallow provocations to HN, and especially
| don't take HN threads into political or (god help us)
| nationalistic flamewar. None of that is what this site is for.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| amelius wrote:
| But why did it take so long?
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| Indeed, probably massive delays by Ubers legal team. The
| whitelisting principle should apply for such things, this
| disrupt now, ask later is just a trick to gain market share
| at the expense of taxpayers and employees and competition
| which abides by the regulations.
| junon wrote:
| The US's are too, to be fair. The laws just suck to begin with,
| unlike most European countries'.
| mithusingh32 wrote:
| Or if you have enough money to by pass the laws all together.
|
| Take a look at HSBC[1][2]....they got caught laundering money
| for Mexican cartel and helped NK/Iran circumvent the nuclear
| sanctions. They were given a slap on the wrist of 2 billion
| dollars in fines. (Can't find the source but they were also
| caught transferring money to known terrorist groups)
|
| If anyone is interested there is a Netflix show they covers
| this. I think it's called Dirty Money. [3]
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSBC#Money_laundering [2]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSBC#US_Senate_investigation.
| .. [3]
| https://www.netflix.com/title/80118100?preventIntent=true
| junon wrote:
| Okay but they were still caught and fined. That doesn't
| negate my point, nor is a sample size of 1 anything to
| write home about.
| bserge wrote:
| Why doesn't Uber employ them and guarantee minimum wage, anything
| extra is a bonus?
|
| Is it just the extra employee costs on the company side?
| lozenge wrote:
| The most noticeable difference between Uber and other services
| in my city was the waiting time. 3-6 minutes versus 15-20
| minutes.
|
| This is achieved by having a lot of underpaid drivers idling or
| parked nearby.
|
| Minimum wage kills that advantage.
| bserge wrote:
| I see the advantage of a lot of unpaid drivers, but they also
| aren't morons.
|
| Most Uber drivers say they make good money (all that I've
| met, too), which imo means better than a minimum wage job
| like warehousing or w/e.
|
| They wouldn't do the job if it meant idling without pay. They
| couldn't, as it would just burn money.
| mellavora wrote:
| And how many of the uber drivers who said they were making
| good money were good at math? People think lots of things
| to convince themselves that they are doing ok, when a more
| objective look says 'maybe not'.
|
| I recall one uber ride I had in Kentucky, driver was a
| retired accountant. He said he figured he was earning about
| $2/hr after costs. He said he liked it because it got him
| out of the house and gave him something to do.
| bserge wrote:
| Don't need math when you can't pay for fuel.
|
| The people not making enough quit, as I said.
|
| There seems to be this weird thinking that gig workers
| are _all_ exploited.
|
| Meanwhile many Deliveroo workers make 2000+/mo in the UK
| and immigrants in factories get wages withheld for PPE
| and "damage to equipment" in Germany. Not even speaking
| about the farm workers.
|
| I don't even care about all this, I was wondering if Uber
| can make it work legally.
| ianleeclark wrote:
| If you do such a thing, then you need to start worrying about
| local labor laws, vacation time, healthcare in the US, sick
| leave, etc. The gig economy works by circumventing these
| things.
| [deleted]
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| They aren't hard but they do have costs. Once you start
| paying for them then your offering doesn't look much
| different to traditional taxi companies.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| It's more than just the wage: insurance, HR compliance,
| employee taxes... hiring is expensive.
| aikinai wrote:
| Then Uber would have to decide who works when and for how long.
| Right now it's controlled by supply and demand through pricing
| algorithms.
| bserge wrote:
| OK, bear with me here. Same system as now, but if you make
| less than minimum hourly wage (calculated every month), the
| company covers the difference.
|
| I am pretty sure the drivers would nearly always make more
| than that.
|
| Or is it illegal to just have employees set their own
| time/targets?
| maccolgan wrote:
| Okay, now, who pays for the difference?
| phicoh wrote:
| It gets expensive when drivers game the system. What
| happens when a driver just stops driving? You have to fire
| them. Which can take quite a bit of effort. What if a
| driver calls in sick? You have to check that.
|
| If a driver is an employee, who provides the car?
| mellavora wrote:
| And who provides the car insurance? And who verifies that
| that insurance allows commercial use of the vehicle?
|
| oh, whoops, forgot that most uber drivers are on non-
| commercial car insurance...
| bserge wrote:
| Those don't seem like big problems to me, but Uber knows
| the game better. I just think it could work while being
| legal.
| axkdev wrote:
| I hope uber goes bankrupt and we forget about all of this
| insanity. In Germany where I live the taxi service is amassing,
| at least in my city can't say for whole country. They are quick
| clean the drivers are professionals and not some randos who will
| break rules to get there faster or drive so insanely that you
| want to puke. They know the city by heart and don't use
| navigators. Due to being professionals they are compensated more
| fairly than in other countries and they have benefits like all
| other employees. Also if you like using apps you can do that with
| normal taxi as well.
|
| In my home country (Eastern Europe) I took ubers that made me
| think I'm gonna die in them.
| drstewart wrote:
| I hope all the taxi drivers in Germany go bankrupt and we
| forget they ever existed.
| freemint wrote:
| Why? Also Taxi Driver can't really go bankrupt since they are
| employees. Taxi companies however can.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Some taxi drivers in some countries are sole
| proprietorship, technically companies, but still I would
| call such driver going bankrupt for failing to pay lease a
| not a employee.
| bserge wrote:
| > They know the city by heart and don't use navigators
|
| Questionable pro, but OK
| axkdev wrote:
| They don't waste valuable time asking how do you spell the
| street and so on. Also it indicates that they are working in
| the area for a long time, so to me it adds credibility. With
| uber drivers it's always a gamble. Most people are nice, but
| that <1% of psychopaths can really ruin your day.
| yarabarla wrote:
| Why are they asking how the street should be spelled? They
| can get your destination from the app.
| campl3r wrote:
| that has not been my experience. As a German having used taxis
| in many German cities I do prefer taking an US Uber over any
| German taxi every time.
| 988747 wrote:
| > "We know that the vast majority of drivers would like to remain
| independent," said Maurits Schonfeld, general manager of Uber in
| Northern Europe
|
| That's funny, because the court's reasoning was that drivers in
| their daily work are almost completely dependent on Uber, which
| calls all the shots.
| nulbyte wrote:
| I feel this is very disingenuous on Uber's part. Either it's
| just their way of distracting from the actual point, or they
| really don't understand what is happening. The case wasn't
| about what driver's prefer, but about the reality of driving
| for Uber. What small bit of independence drivers had in setting
| their own hours is not necessarily eroded by this ruling. It
| just means Uber will have to (gasp!) innovate to deal with a
| few specific things. I think Uber making cases like these out
| to require fundamental changes to the business model is absurd.
| xputer wrote:
| Yes, also it is to be expected that Uber has a large number
| of drivers that only do a couple of riders per week while a
| smaller number of drivers work full time. The larger number
| of drivers that only do a few rides of course would be in
| favor of flexibility, but this ruling is as far as I
| understand mainly about protecting those who work for Uber
| full time.
| BLanen wrote:
| Good.
|
| Uber is a unsustainable business built employee exploitation to
| effectively pay them less than minimum wage while flouting
| "freedom" to bait the people in the worst situations. This was
| known from the start. Meanwhile subsidising rides with investor-
| cash to effectively bait-and-switch society. The recent-ish price
| hikes are only a start.
|
| Anyone repeating their PR should be ashamed. "gigs" are cancer or
| wait, this is hackernews so "Gig-economy considered harmful" is
| the correct nomenclature I guess.
| safog wrote:
| Yes, clearly you're a smart one and can see things clearly and
| none of the poor Uber drivers are smart enough to figure it
| out.
|
| Get over yourself.
| [deleted]
| BLanen wrote:
| Yes, clearly this is all rational individual choice and
| society doesn't exist.
|
| Get over yourself.
| Jommi wrote:
| What a terribly lopsided and blanket view on a business working
| over 50+ different ethical and regulatory
| environments/societies.
| BLanen wrote:
| I don't care that they exist in many places. Corona is in
| 200+ different ethical and regulatory environments/societies,
| I think that that is likewise bad for society and hope we get
| rid of it.
|
| There's enough other comments with the typical "nuance" you
| can read.
| nickff wrote:
| > _" Corona is in 200+ different ethical and regulatory
| environments/societies, I think that that is likewise bad
| for society and hope we get rid of it."_
|
| COVID has killed over four and a half million people; about
| four million people have driven for Uber (worldwide). Do
| you really think that doing some driving for Uber and dying
| of COVID are "likewise bad"?
| w-j-w wrote:
| They're both bad, and the comparison points out why the
| parent comment had a garbage argument. Being able to
| swindle many sets of employment laws is not the same
| thing as "being good"
| arrosenberg wrote:
| More like, working around 50+ regulatory states.
| jorblumesea wrote:
| How is the "gig economy" any different from the usual tricks
| that employers get around benefits?
|
| Walmart, for example, will schedule employees < 30 hours and
| stack entire stores with part timers.
|
| My confusion is that the gig economy companies get a large
| share of the hate (justified or unjustified) but much of the
| criticism seems to boil down to unregulated capitalism.
| amelius wrote:
| A similar article was already submitted here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28509506
| akagusu wrote:
| The so called gig economy was built upon a unsustainable business
| model that depends of exploitation of workers.
|
| It's not just Uber. All companies in the gig economy work like
| this. It's not only about paying minimum wage and benefits
| either, it's also about shifting the costs of doing business to
| the workers calling them independent contractors.
|
| As independent contractors, drivers need to pay for their car,
| pay for gas, taxes, insurance and maintenance costs, but if they
| were employees from the beginning, all these costs would be
| getting out of the Uber's pockets.
| snidane wrote:
| It was never for the drivers. It certainly isn't a win for the
| customer. It is only a win for the state to collect their taxes.
| maccolgan wrote:
| Everything is a win for the state, can't remember the last time
| anything happened in the employment law space that has been
| good for everybody...
| shimonabi wrote:
| Great to see that over 100 years of labour laws won by the
| workers' movements can't be innovated away in SOME countries.
| umvi wrote:
| But does every single way to make money have to provide a
| living wage with full health benefits, etc.? Seems like you
| limit types of innovation that could otherwise happen. For
| example, say you create some kind of trash cleanup/recycling
| incentive app that pays out some small amount for
| trash/recyclables picked up and turned in. Soon: everyone is
| outraged that some poor person can't make a living wage picking
| up recyclables and they try to force you to hire all users of
| your app as full time employees with full health benefits, etc.
| That doesn't seem right.
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| Can't compare that app to Uber, Uber hasn't innovated much of
| anything besides a tracking app with a payment integration.
| Lift forked their product in no time. They have undercut the
| competition, skirted laws, pay horrible wages, promised a
| self driving fleet , this is the funniest to me. I bet they
| want that released without too much regulatory friction too.
| There was this incident where their fsd fleet car run over 6
| red lights consecutively.
|
| The break it ask for forgiveness later approach is generally
| not welcome in Europe, it's regarded as borderline criminal
| practice. And then delay court procedures and are the other
| slimy practices.
|
| Always easier to make a buck when breaking the law when
| everyone else is not breaking it. These companies have
| compliance departments and lawyers not to see what's legal,
| but to see how much they can get away with. Today, a Dutch
| Judge showed them the demarcation lines.
| Spivak wrote:
| I agree with this in theory but you have to contend with how
| people actually engage with these kinds of gig jobs. You
| can't just legalese "this isn't a full time job" when people
| are working it as a full time job.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| This already exists but without an app. Anyone can collect
| scrap and sell it to a recycling center. Plenty of homeless
| people use this as a primary income source. No one has ever
| tried to classify it as employment.
| bthrn wrote:
| The other side of this is that many laws do not neatly
| accommodate advances in technology. There are currently laws in
| place that predate cars, predate the internet, predate
| electricity. At some point, in some contexts, they will be a
| hinderance rather than a benefit.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > At some point, in some contexts, they will be a hinderance
| rather than a benefit.
|
| This is extremely vague. The legal system changes
| continuously and quickly, especially when under pressure from
| big money.
|
| If something doesn't either it's because it's not important
| or somebody is benefiting from it.
| gpvos wrote:
| Well, you can fool all of the people _some_ of the time, so it
| was possible for many years.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| How were they fooled? In the Netherlands, no one is forced to
| work anywhere. People drive Ubers out of their own volition,
| whether we think it's stupid or not. I'm not sure about other
| countries but in China where the market used to be even less
| regulated, both drivers and customers switched in droves from
| traditional taxis to ride hailing apps. For various reasons
| they just like it better. And it's not exactly difficult to
| see the advantages even if you have concerns about labor
| laws.
|
| There's always a case to be made that any form of employment
| is exploitation. _Sarariman_ , as the corporate slave is
| known in Japan. The question is how much regulation do we
| want. And do we want it for regulation's sake, or does it
| actually benefit the people. There are many labor laws that
| hinder innovation and keep employment down.
| paulluuk wrote:
| > There are many labor laws that hinder innovation and keep
| employment down
|
| I think it's fair to say that the huge majority of labor
| laws actually protect laborers, and have been won through
| blood and sweat over many generations. To opt on "the safe
| side" and say "look, yes jobs at Uber are complicated, but
| if you work there 40 hours per week then it's a fulltime
| job and we should treat it as such" is quite fair.
| dncornholio wrote:
| If you're a freelancer in NL and your income comes from only one
| client, you're not even being seen as a freelancer AFAIR.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Rightly so. The 'gig economy' is abused by quite a few companies
| to create employment like situations without the required
| trappings (social security payments, employee protection, hourly
| minimums and so on). This was long overdue, let's hope it has
| precedent effect for other companies that abuse the ZZP
| construct.
| tomp wrote:
| _Must_ is just as wrong as _won 't_. The ideal solution is,
| drivers being given the choice. Wanna earn more (but less
| predictable), pay less tax, have less social security, work
| whenever you want to? Or do you want to earn less (but
| completely predictable), pay more tax, have unemployment
| security, work fixed hours.
| Maarten88 wrote:
| > The ideal solution is, drivers being given the choice.
|
| Choice is real only when you have options. Here, the option
| of having a fixed-income, fixed-time taxi driver job will get
| out-competed in the long term because it is more expensive,
| so the other option will be to have no job. Not paying into
| social security and pension funds saves a lot of money! It
| may even seem beneficial to the driver in the short term. But
| it offloads the costs further down the line to society or the
| driver personally (when reaching pension age or getting
| sick).
|
| Maybe that type of innovation is simply not good for society
| and better avoided.
| maccolgan wrote:
| In this case, the consumers are making the choice, not the
| drivers. I'd generally prefer consumers to have more
| options than drivers, you can't just sacrifice one for the
| other...
| tasubotadas wrote:
| Not sure why this comment is down voted but it's spot on.
|
| Honestly, it's pretty annoying that some people decide what
| others can do or can't do with their free time and their car.
| chefkoch wrote:
| Yeah, no street racing, drunk driving.
| WJW wrote:
| Welcome to society. I'm not sure where you live but in
| every country I know of there are plenty of things you
| can't do with your car and/or your free time.
| devcpp wrote:
| That doesn't harm others? Like what?
| WJW wrote:
| Not harming others is a condition you just added to the
| argument, and it is also a condition that Uber does not
| meet in the eyes of Dutch law. By not paying taxes on the
| wages of their drivers, Uber shifts the costs for the
| healthcare, pensions and general public services (dikes,
| fire services, etc etc) of those drivers onto the rest of
| society, thereby harming all those companies and citizens
| that do pay their taxes as required.
| riffraff wrote:
| because it ignores the reality of european society: it's
| not a libertarian utopia, it's a society where the states
| do dictate things.
|
| More specifically, it's blind to the fact that the parent
| comment is about _existing regulation_ which is being
| abused.
|
| It's like arguing with someone saying "you can't drive at
| 100 km/h in a residential area" with "well I am a CAN
| person myself, and I don' think we should say CAN'T".
| devcpp wrote:
| Driving at 100km/h in a residential area harms others
| with a high probability. Can you say that of someone
| working the way they want to with transactions consented
| between two adults?
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| The issue is that minimum employment rights are less
| effective in general if it's possible to opt out of them.
| For lots of people, they're not worth sacrificing earning
| potential for (this is one of the reasons contractors
| exist).
|
| Most people wouldn't think that a person earning a high
| hourly/daily rate working in some big enterprise, or a
| freelancer that takes home a respectable annual income is
| being exploited. But lots of people think that lower income
| gig contractors are definitely being exploited. I think the
| truth is actually a bit more complicated than that, but in
| any case, the law in most countries is that a person must
| not be allowed to enter into any arrangement that resembles
| employment if a set of minimum entitlements aren't
| provided.
|
| One way of looking at contracting arrangements is that
| they're simply a way of bypassing these requirements. This
| never used to be a contentious issue, because contractors
| used to be primarily high income earners. But now that
| there's a new class of lower income contractors, they must
| be protected, and the regulatory response has generally
| been to outlaw elements of contracting agreements in
| general.
|
| A more sensible approach, if you wanted to achieve this
| outcome, would be to apply these regulations only to
| contractors that bill below a particular rate. But that
| would require making legislative concessions for high
| income earners, and nobody cares about doing that. I've
| been a contractor for years, and I can guarantee you that
| nobody is being exploited when I bill some huge bank an
| especially high hourly rate for months on end, but anti-
| contractor regulations routinely interfere with my ability
| to do so.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| And then you fall ill.
|
| Who looks after you then? Hospitals paid for by taxation? Or
| are you just left on the street to die?
| rattray wrote:
| I like the "hospitals paid for by taxation" option, myself
| (with tweaks and caveats).
|
| I can't fathom why so many people on this thread think it's
| a good thing for workers to depend on their employer for
| essentials like healthcare.
| tomp wrote:
| Same as any independent contractor / self-employed person.
| In a sane country, they'd be required to pay into social
| security system themselves. In many countries, however,
| being self-employed is a tax loophole.
| eplanit wrote:
| The whole appeal for the drivers was "employment-like"
| opportunities with more freedom for themselves. This takes that
| away. If they wanted regular jobs they would have sought that.
| gilrain wrote:
| You are badly out of touch. People take the jobs they have to
| take to survive. The choice you imagine does not exist for
| most of humanity.
| eplanit wrote:
| You make it sound like the job situation in the Netherlands
| is desperate. From what I can tell by searching,
| unemployment is only about 3%. Where's the desperation in
| that?
|
| Uber drivers I've talked to didn't join because they were
| desperate -- they joined to have more freedom and control.
| kazen44 wrote:
| ah yes. and the years 2009- 2015 where the same?
|
| no they where far worse. its unemployment numbers are low
| now. but it hasn't always been the case.
| avsteele wrote:
| Does there exist any company that allows their employees to
| work any number of hours they want, whenever they want?
| chaosite wrote:
| Neither does Uber, if they don't have rides to give, they're
| not gonna let anyone work for them.
| throwawaycities wrote:
| What does that matter?
|
| Just because you can pick your own hours/work schedule, that
| doesn't make you an independent contractor. At least it's not
| determinative in the US under federal law nor any state that
| I am aware, but maybe that is the Dutch law and the court
| just got it wrong here
| avsteele wrote:
| To determine if they are employees we look for ways the
| Uber/driver relationship is similar and different to other
| businesses using the employee model.
|
| To determine if they are contractors we look for ways the
| user/driver relationship is different from other businesses
| using the employee model.
|
| If no other businesses allow employees to set their number
| of hours with such flexibility then that is evidence the
| relationship doesn't fall under the employee model.
|
| This need not be all or nothing but it is (obviously) a
| factor.
| DeusExMachina wrote:
| Here in the Netherlands, where the ruling was made, it's
| definitely the case that being able to determine your own
| hours is one of the requirements of being a freelancer.
|
| When I was freelancing, clients could not tell me at what
| time I had to be in the office, when I could live, or on
| which days I had to go, to avoid me being considered an
| employee.
| nulbyte wrote:
| I don't believe that was GP's point. Setting your own
| hours is not anathema to an employer-employee
| relationship.
| WJW wrote:
| Yes, Uber, since their gig workers are now employees. \s
|
| Under Dutch law, to be classified as an independent
| contractor you also need to be able to set your own prices
| and have a "significant" (the law is fairly specific but it
| is too long for a HN comment) say in exactly how you provide
| your services. The court ruled that Uber drivers do not meet
| this bar and are therefore not independent contractors. TBH,
| the "ZZP" construction used has always been a fairly
| transparent attempt by Uber and the other gig companies to
| evade labor regulations for their own profits and I'm glad
| that the court has issued a clear statement about it.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| Blablacar lets you set your own prices on trips, and they
| don't kick you off if you refuse fares
| gjulianm wrote:
| It's funny that Uber decided to force employment laws to
| avoid paying social security, taxes and other obligations
| related to regular employment, but won't force employment
| laws to allow employees to work any number of hours they want
| whenever they want.
| blendergeek wrote:
| I drive Uber for a few months. I hate the idea of "hourly
| minimums". Maybe we can have that for full time drivers.
|
| But, I would go out on "unprofitable times" (when my hourly pay
| was substantially less than minimum wage due to a lack of
| rides) and read books (that I would have read anyway). Doing
| this I made small amounts of money while doing a leisure
| activity.
|
| I loved the ability to drive less than full time in exchange
| for less pay. I don't want to be "on the clock". If I am on the
| clock and I am not actively working, that is time theft. If I
| am driving Uber and I don't feel like taking that ride because
| I'm at a good point in the book I'm reading, I'm free to just
| sit there.
|
| I liked that option.
|
| Rather than require minimum hourly pay, I want to increase the
| minimum per mile pay and require Uber to pay the drivers for
| the time and miles spent driving to the riders.
|
| But please no hourly pay.
| Scarblac wrote:
| They can employ drivers and still give them the freedom to
| accept or decline tides as they wish.
| dahfizz wrote:
| Yes, that would be technically possible. But it will not
| happen because of how the incentives are set up. If Uber
| now has to bear the cost of being an employer, it will need
| to exercise its power over the employee drivers and force
| them to work.
| hinkley wrote:
| Will need to, or will feel justified in doing so?
| judge2020 wrote:
| Well, 'need' can be synonymous with 'not burn money in a
| way that leads to bankruptcy'. Uber is largely an
| uneconomical business that won't work if they end up
| having to keep their <10 hours a week drivers AND pay
| benefits.
| lhorie wrote:
| I think the conundrum is that either Uber pays for downtime
| (employee model) or it doesn't (contractor model). It's
| literally impossible to be actively driving passengers for
| a solid 40 hours a week while maintaining reasonable work
| hours. For the model that pays for downtime, it needs to
| make it up somehow since it wouldn't be able to afford
| people just sitting around doing nothing in the middle of
| nowhere. Typically, this is accomplished by mandating
| employees to be "clocked in", unable to refuse rides, and
| chasing some sort of quota. I'd be curious to hear about
| different options.
| delusional wrote:
| What's blocking them from doing metrics based payment,
| but with employee like protections? Pay people for the
| time they mark themselves "available" (regardless of if
| there's any rides), and require that drivers take
| anything you give them while they are available. I
| imagine you could put in a cap and a floor if you really
| wanted to. You could even allow drivers to reject a
| certain percentage of rides if you felt like it.
|
| The point wouldn't be to control the drivers, but for
| uber to assume some of the risk.
| ghiculescu wrote:
| GP wants the option to decline rides even while available
| - you'd be taking that option away. I doubt GP is alone
| in this.
| lhorie wrote:
| Ultimately there is no such thing as driver protections.
| Either they bring in more money than they are paid or
| they are going to be out of work (either by being fired,
| or the company going under).
|
| A company isn't going to let people just do whatever if
| the company is assuming risks. For example, say demand
| peaks at 7-9am and 4-6pm. The company could simply
| dictate that that's the only times you can work (because
| the full time old-timer high earners already took all
| other time slots). But maybe you're a stay-at-home parent
| and only have free time during school hours, so for you,
| that's objectively a worse deal, since you get to take
| home $0 as opposed to whatever you could make under a
| work-at-any-time model.
|
| Or maybe the company tells you that you can't work on-
| and-off around your town like you used to, due to
| existing driver saturation, and they tell you that you
| have to drive to the downtown of the nearby metropolitan
| city for a shift (many full time drivers I've talked to
| actually do this today to get better on-the-clock
| volume).
|
| Or maybe you just can't work at all because there's
| enough drivers on the road today already.
|
| There's a million scenarios like these.
|
| As a thought exercise, you could go out and drive an Uber
| casually for a couple of hours, and simultaneously pay
| yourself whatever amount you think is fair, out of your
| own pocket. The gist is to track your on-the-clock time
| and mileage (which is fairly easy w/ the app), and then
| work out the math to figure out how much the rides
| should've cost to pay the amount you decided. If the
| exercise comes out to charging $40 for 10 min rides to
| account for suboptimal downtime, or you're finding that
| you need to work a 12 hour day to hit a similar income
| threshold as a full timer elsewhere, you can be sure that
| you've neglected some important aspect of the unit
| economics math and you would've failed at being Uber.
| lovich wrote:
| > Ultimately there is no such thing as driver
| protections. Either they bring in more money than they
| are paid or they are going to be out of work (either by
| being fired, or the company going under).
|
| If we're starting off with that as a belief why have any
| regulations at all?
|
| > A company isn't going to let people just do whatever if
| the company is assuming risks.
|
| Companies routinely do that. Hell sometimes that is the
| entire reason for employing a specific person, is to let
| them do what they want and then reap the economic benefit
| from owning the outcome.
| lhorie wrote:
| Regulations or no regulations, that's just a fact. You
| can't have a company paying out more than it intakes,
| that's just basic math.
|
| People are so quick to say "oh just raise wages" as if
| Uber/etc never contemplated the idea (recall we're
| talking about the company that popularized the idea of
| _surge_ pricing for rides), but I don 't think many of
| the armchair analysts have put an ounce of thought into
| what actually happens when you do that (let alone the
| gradient of effects relative to different degrees of
| change). Uber/Lyft were fairly clear about potential
| impact of employment mandates on service reliability when
| prop 22 was making the rounds, and I find it curious that
| there's simultaneously a sentiment that pre-uber service
| availability was crap and a sentiment that one just ought
| to raise prices and somehow will people get to eat their
| cake and have it too.
|
| > Companies routinely do that
|
| You're giving an apples-to-oranges example and you know
| it. Hiring Rob Pike vs letting unskilled drivers sit idly
| on company dime are completely different scenarios. The
| latter group doesn't even generate leads (unlike cabs
| being hailed off the street).
| Closi wrote:
| I think there are quite a few options. It took me about a
| minute to think of the below, so I'm sure with the
| resources of Uber they can come up with something better:
|
| - Driver 'clocks in' when they are in the app and ready
| to receive rides.
|
| - They get paid as normal, however there is a guaranteed
| minimum which means that they will get paid the minimum
| wage.
|
| - Driver can decline rides, but there is a % threshold at
| which point they can be performance managed if required
| (i.e. warnings for declining too many rides and then
| removed if required).
|
| - Driver clocks out when they are no longer wanting to
| receive rides. 3 declines in a row or something similar
| automatically ends shift. Shift can also be ended due to
| low demand, unless the driver has signed up for a
| particular shift ahead of time.
|
| That's not particularly great, and I'm sure some people
| will have builds/other suggestions, but Uber is a 76
| billion dollar company, I'm sure they can come up with
| something better and a way of operating within labour
| laws.
| delusional wrote:
| > but Uber is a 76 billion dollar company, I'm sure they
| can come up with something better and a way of operating
| within labour laws.
|
| That's a good point. If those 10x engineers can't figure
| out a way to make it legal and ethical, maybe it's not
| good.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| I think part of the problem is the market, for some
| markets. The new law would not affect NYC or dense urban
| areas because there is lots of order liquidity there. But
| what about rural Pennsylvania? (Ask me how I know? Hint:
| management consulting air dropped to remote client
| location)
|
| When i'm in rural areas, there are often no taxis and one
| will show up an hour after you call, maybe. Without order
| liquidity, it is infeasible to maintain supply. Which
| company (or person) would stand ready to ride just in
| case an order came thru once every 4 or 5 hours?
|
| The current market response to this is simply not
| supporting the market. The alternative is Uber where
| presumably the person is doing their yard work and jumps
| and does a ride if one happens to pop up. I cannot
| imagine Uber will sponsor idle wages in rural regions
| where you get an order or two a day.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > Without order liquidity, it is infeasible to maintain
| supply. Which company (or person) would stand ready to
| ride just in case an order came thru once every 4 or 5
| hours?
|
| The only solution here is if the ride is absurdly high,
| to the point where you break even with drivers in the
| nearest high-population city, which people also don't
| want since they'd be paying multiple hundreds of dollars
| for a ride. At that point, people will just get a car.
|
| The issue with uber is that it's compensating for a lack
| of public transportation that takes you exactly where you
| want to end up at (or public transportation at all in
| most of the U.S.). Maybe the only way car-on-demand is
| profitable is if (A) we get self-driving cars, or (B) the
| government creates their own system with lower fares and
| runs it at a pure loss with no profitability in mind.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| I think even absurdly priced rides dont work beyond a
| certain level of illiquidity. Matching price to order is
| just too spotty. A perfect example is landing in an
| airport on a late flight -- i've waited 45min for a taxi
| at Delta Terminal in NYC. As a business customer, I would
| have paid $100 or even $200 for a ride that cold night.
| Most business travelers are cost elastic, esp post-
| travel. Except there is no way to broadcast that
| willingness to pay to cab companies, esp at an off-
| terminal like Delta Terminal. I dont think people realize
| how truly game-changing Uber and surge pricing was.
| Closi wrote:
| > I cannot imagine Uber will sponsor idle wages in rural
| regions where you get an order or two a day.
|
| If Uber can't operate while paying minimum wage then
| maybe they shouldn't be operating.
|
| Every other company has to work out how to pay minimum
| wage. An unprofitable rural convenience store doesn't get
| to pay its clerks less because the sales aren't high
| enough, so I fail to see why it should be different for
| Uber and their drivers.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| At least how I see it, many of the problems are that the
| company is not giving the protections that they've
| historically supposed to have given. I think one option
| is to extricate those protections from the employers and
| bring them to a different level. It could be a union, it
| could be a local/regional/national/(dare I say global)
| government, it could be some other org that provides
| those services. Then the employer could still give the
| flexibility and not have to worry about providing those
| extra benefits.
| joshuahaglund wrote:
| It sounds like you have another source of income. If you were
| in the middle of a good chapter you could turn down a ride. I
| don't think you're exactly the kind of driver these companies
| are looking for, but if they were I think they'd have a hard
| time finding enough of you.
|
| I feel like being able to monetize your freetime is a luxury
| a society can't afford when your leisure activity could be
| someone's job. You could spent time volunteering, like meals
| on wheels or something. But instead you're driving down the
| labor rate, as a hobby.
|
| That sounds harsh and I don't want you to feel personally
| attacked, so I'll just it's cool, no one's perfect. But jobs
| need to pay live able wages, IMHO.
| [deleted]
| lhorie wrote:
| > It sounds like you have another source of income. [...] I
| don't think you're exactly the kind of driver these
| companies are looking for
|
| Uber/Lyft have said on various occasions that the majority
| of drivers are part-timer/casual. While being able to read
| books between trips might seem a bit of a privileged
| situation, many who do Uber for supplemental income don't
| have room to engage in luxury.
|
| I personally know of someone who does deliveries as a side
| gig from a restaurant job (which is already grueling on its
| own) because they really need the extra cash and there's
| literally nothing else on the job market with the
| flexibility of gig economy stints.
| Closi wrote:
| > But please no hourly pay.
|
| You might be willing to work for less than minimum wage, but
| in reality minimum wages exist because without them they
| create a race-to-the-bottom for workers, and it's very hard
| to write a policy that's something like "you can pay a person
| less if they are enjoying it and are reading a book and not
| really doing that much".
|
| Waiting time is a regular part of jobs and we pay for it in
| other career paths - can you imagine if everyone only had to
| pay security guards for the time spent apprehending thief's
| and they got no pay for all the waiting around reading
| newspapers they do?
| simonh wrote:
| This is basically the line of reasoning that changed my
| opinion on this issue. Previously I thought, well it's up
| to people when they want to work and how much for.
|
| The problem with that is these services are only viable
| because there is a core of drivers that work long hours and
| have this as their primary source of income. Part time
| casual drivers are also an important part of what makes
| services like this effective, but without the core drivers
| there's no service. What's happening at the moment is that
| the low expectations of the casual drivers is under cutting
| the livelihoods and bargaining power of core drivers.
| That's not an equitable state of affairs.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Yeah, its the comparison between those who are there to
| skim of the limited hours of top demand or don't care
| about making reasonable living out of it. And those that
| can't find other work and want to earn reasonable living
| doing reasonable hours.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| >Can you imagine if everyone only had to pay security
| guards for the time spent apprehending thief's and they got
| no pay for all the waiting around reading newspapers they
| do?
|
| Yes, it's called a commission. Many jobs pay that way.
|
| Making a comparison between a security guard and an Uber
| driver is like making a comparaison between a limo chauffer
| and a bounty hunter. It's an unnecessary and convoluted
| analogy given the differences in goals. Regular taxi
| drivers are paid per ride (i.e. a commission) and Uber
| drivers are taxi drivers without the medallions. I don't
| see how one would take issue with Uber drivers doing what
| taxi drivers do while simultaneously operating as rational
| actors by undercutting the competition on price.
| Closi wrote:
| > Yes, it's called a commission. Many jobs pay that way.
|
| Well in the case of commissions for employees in Europe
| you still have to guarantee a minimum wage and fill any
| gap between commission payments and the minimum wage.
|
| > Making a comparison between a security guard and an
| Uber driver is like making a comparaison between a limo
| chauffer and a bounty hunter.
|
| Well, the bounty hunter comparison depends on if you are
| an employee or if you are self-employed. Let's remember
| the precedent for uber drivers being employees has
| already been established in European/Dutch courts.
|
| If a bounty hunter is an employee in Europe (i.e. working
| for a bounty hunting firm rather than owning one), if any
| commissions don't make their wage up to the minimum wage
| they will have to be paid the difference by the employer.
| The worked hours for bounty hunting include any waiting
| time on the job. I don't see why Uber should be exempt
| from this rule when every other industry, including the
| traditional taxi industry, has to follow it.
| zouhair wrote:
| No, rules should be made so people doing it full time for a
| living should get a living.
| apexalpha wrote:
| In your case they would give you a "0 hour contract". You
| choose your hours but still have protections like an
| enployee.
|
| As independent contractor Uber was handing off every risk
| associated with running a business to their drivers.
| judge2020 wrote:
| In that situation a "0 hour contract" would mean Uber has
| to pay for all of their benefits even if they don't work at
| all. A net negative for uber, so the 0 hour contract isn't
| created. The only way this changes while not ensuring uber
| loses money on their drivers is if they operate like a
| regular company and have both part-time and full-time
| employees, with 20 hour minimums for part-timers.
| markus92 wrote:
| What kind of benefits do you mean? It's a very common
| construction in The Netherlands.
| kazen44 wrote:
| when people are on 0 hour contracts, the company still
| has to pay social insurance for the employee. Some of
| which are not bound to the hours worked.
|
| Also, a 0 hour contract is a iffy construct. If someone
| can show they worked N hours on the regular, they have
| the right to get a contract on the amount of hours they
| worked. Also, 0 hour contracts are only allowed for a
| limited number of times afaik. (2x up to one year i
| believe).
| toshk wrote:
| Social security is just a hole in the Dutch law, freelancers
| should just also start paying social security. Like they do for
| instance in Spain, then they can also get unemployment money
| etc.
|
| The effect of this will be temporary 0 hour contract and you
| create exactly the same situation with less flexibility for the
| employee and a limit of three contracts of a year.
| rattray wrote:
| I'm unfamiliar with Dutch ZZP, and it sounds like there are
| indeed specific rules that preclude Uber drivers from neatly
| fitting into the category.
|
| But why would a better fix not be to require ZZP contractors to
| pay into government-matched/supported funds for healthcare,
| retirement, etc?
|
| Many people really prefer to not be an employee. Why tether
| their health and old age to a big employer with a ball and
| chain?
| azeirah wrote:
| I'm Dutch but not particularly knowledgeable about this, but
| as far as I understand it the reason being a ZZP'er is so
| popular is precisely because you don't have to hand in a lot
| of money to required stuff like retirement and insurance and
| stuff.
|
| The types of zzzp'ers I'm most familiar with are in
| construction and they are cheaper than traditional
| businesses. They're outcompeting traditional businesses
| because they don't have to pay retirement and insurance and
| all that.
|
| It's been a topic for years here what to do about ZZP'ers
| because if something _does_ happen to one at work (ie an
| accident to their health or to the house they're working on
| it whatever) they typically don't have insurance which leads
| to big personal problems for them.
|
| It's like a high risk high reward type of thing, but the
| issue is that they're also outcompeting traditional workers
| all over the place.
|
| Otoh, if you were to require them to pay for stuff like
| insurance and retirement, the whole idea of being a zzp'er
| will cease to make any sense. You don't earn any higher any
| more, you will need to charge more so people have no reason
| to prefer your services over traditional ones.
|
| Zzp'er just means that you work alone and have no personnel.
| Ie, similar to a freelancer basically.
|
| Also sadly enough, often zzp'ers are less skilled than
| traditionally employed individuals. Not exactly sure why that
| is but might be related to how they were trained and a lack
| of institutional knowledge due to not working with an
| established workplace/having regular colleagues etc
| rattray wrote:
| Exactly!
|
| If ZZP outcompetes more "socially responsible" options,
| it's a buggy system and should be fixed. Freedom as a
| freelancer should probably be the only/primary benefit of
| such a designation, not the ability to dodge
| responsibilities.
|
| Thank you for the color!
| tw20212021 wrote:
| Everybody pays retirement, the public one, you pay it
| through taxes. They probably don't pay a private pension.
| And insurance yes, some don't pay disability insurance
| which pays you for a while if you're injured and can't work
| (don't underestimate here the lobby of the insurance
| companies who pay the press to complain that people don't
| buy their insurance policies. In the end they are the ones
| who profit most). One benefit of being a zzper is that you
| don't have overhead. When you're employed the company gets
| 100/hr for your work and pays you 25/hr, some of that money
| may be there to keep you employed when there's less work to
| do, although when a company is in trouble they will find a
| way to fire you. The most part goes to the owner of the
| company, who can take it out, or grow the company, but in
| the end for their own benefit. There's other dynamics of
| course, take construction companies, projects come and go,
| sometimes one company gets a big project, then sometimes
| another one gets it. These are different companies. They
| couldn't always employ the same number of people, but they
| benefit that they can quickly scale the workforce by hiring
| zzp-ers.
| belter wrote:
| There are some consequences. If they will be hired as employees
| it will be first with a temporary contract. Since there is a
| limitation to renewal of fixed term contracts, after a certain
| period the employment is seen as an indefinite employment
| contract rather than a new fixed term agreement. Meaning then
| they could not be fired something Uber will not want. The limit
| is 3 years or 3 contract renewals:
|
| https://www.tax-consultants-international.com/read/Changes_D...
|
| Are some of these drivers not working for other companies also?
| In that case they really are freelancers/entrepreneurs not
| employees...I think the decision will be appealed.
| Jochim wrote:
| > Are some of these drivers not working for other companies
| also? In that case they really are freelancers/entrepreneurs
| not employees...I think the decision will be appealed.
|
| That's a pretty bad test on it's own. Plenty of people
| working in restaurants work for multiple companies, they're
| still employees.
| adventured wrote:
| > Plenty of people working in restaurants work for multiple
| companies, they're still employees.
|
| And do they cook one food order at a restaurant they work
| for, then 15 minutes later walk across the street and cook
| for a competing restaurant for 30 minutes, and then
| immediately walk back across the street and cook a food
| order for the other restaurant? No, of course that's not
| normal.
|
| This will ultimately accelerate the ability of the
| strongest companies to destroy their competition and
| potential competition. If Uber doesn't bleed to death
| financially first, that will be Uber due to their global
| scale.
|
| Uber may not realize it because they're stupid, but this
| bolsters survival of the strongest in the segment. They can
| easily kill off competition using this by eating the labor
| supply. Someone that would have previously worked for
| multiple companies - trivially flipping between services as
| it was most ideal for the driver to grab a fare - will no
| longer be available for multiple companies at the same
| time. They'll now largely hold a normal job and will not
| want to work for multiple companies, pulling two shifts per
| day. Sure, there may be exceptions of drivers that want to
| pull a weekend job with another service or work two jobs
| per day, but exceptions is all they'll be. This will narrow
| the market winners dramatically and quickly.
|
| Monopolize the market, consume the labor supply, raise
| passenger fees, lean in to killing off the competition.
| It's super simple.
|
| If I were Uber I'd abuse the stock market for funding to
| pay artificially high wages to the labor supply (get all
| the best drivers), and I'd hire more drivers than I
| absolutely need (deprive the competition), and begin this
| killing process immediately. I'd go one market to the next,
| using Uber's market cap as the funding base to monopolize
| each market. This type of ruling makes labor supply a
| competitive advantage to whichever company can acquire the
| most and best drivers. A global ride hailing app will be
| advantaged over the smaller local/regional competition
| accordingly.
|
| The next ride hailing app in the market that wants to get
| started will find no available labor supply to compete
| with. Welcome to competition stagnation.
|
| And of course then the moronic regulators will come back
| around, having created a monster, and they'll have to
| pursue anti-trust (or the equivalent) against the market
| winner they helped to cause.
| belter wrote:
| Speaking about financials...The court ruled that in
| certain cases drivers can claim overdue salary. Uber had
| according to statistics approximately 5,200 drivers in NL
| on December 2019.
| aembleton wrote:
| > Monopolize the market, consume the labor supply, raise
| passenger fees, lean in to killing off the competition.
| It's super simple.
|
| What does "lean in to killing off the competition" mean?
| I don't understand what you mean by lean in.
| dnautics wrote:
| > And do they cook one food order at a restaurant they
| work for, then 15 minutes later walk across the street
| and cook for a competing restaurant for 30 minutes, and
| then immediately walk back across the street and cook a
| food order for the other restaurant? No, of course that's
| not normal.
|
| As a former Lyft/uber driver this is absolutely correct.
| It gets even hairier: suppose you are sitting on both
| apps (or even more) waiting for a ride. Do you get to
| double-bill two companies for minimum wage hours?
|
| I think what is going happen is if Uber and Lyft are
| forced to recategorize as employees, they get to do
| something like "compel drivers to wear a uniform", so
| like a polo with the brand on it, and prohibit wearing of
| competitors logo. Or prohibit displaying competitor logo
| on the car (displaying is a legal requirement in many
| jurisdictions). In the end the take-home for the driver
| is going to be worse.
|
| I'm quite frankly surprised that Uber didn't preempt the
| legislation by creating a class of driver that _is_ an
| employee, putting these sorts of onerous restrictions on
| the driver, plus other ones like "you must start and end
| at central processing center, drive an uber-owned car",
| "requiring shifts on ADA-compliant vehicles", "being
| required to comply with an uber-generated shift
| schedule", in exchange for bare minimum wage and
| benefits.
| mattmanser wrote:
| Does Lyft even operate in Holland?
|
| Here in the UK Uber drivers have Uber stickers on their
| cars. I rarely get picked up by a driver without them.
|
| What imaginary other company are they working for that
| would tolerate that?
|
| It might not be the case in America, but over here it
| certainly seems most drivers are working for one company.
| dahfizz wrote:
| Is Uber the only rideshare company available in Europe?
| In America, every rideshare car has uber and lyft
| stickers, at a minimum. Just about every driver keeps
| both apps open and takes rides from wherever they come
| in.
| dnautics wrote:
| I think GP has a good point, I took a slightly america-
| centric POV on the issue; topic is specifically about
| Dutch legal system. Nonetheless the end bit about
| 'strategies' is likely to be applicable across
| jurisdictions.
| markus92 wrote:
| Bolt has a tiny bit of market share, Lyft is all but
| existent. Uber has a de facto monopoly in The
| Netherlands.
| arenaninja wrote:
| > It gets even hairier: suppose you are sitting on both
| apps (or even more) waiting for a ride. Do you get to
| double-bill two companies for minimum wage hours?
|
| IMO this is a no-brainer, the answer is yes, double-bill.
| The same applies if you get two remote jobs, you bill
| both.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| In many cases this will be a felony, FYI.
| dnautics wrote:
| IANAL, but my understanding is: Double-billing hours is
| probably illegal, but many remote programmers likely have
| two "full time", salaried, jobs with no stipulation about
| "you must work X hours"... at the very least a legal grey
| area, and if you breach some contract clause, you are
| most likely in breach of contract, which is a civil suit,
| and most likely you'll just be dismissed, no severance
| will be offered, and they might try to take away any
| unexercised options grants.
| arenaninja wrote:
| This is not just programmers by the way. I know of people
| in other professions doing this. And as long as there
| isn't a conflict based on anything you signed or company
| policy I'm not sure a company has recourse beyond
| terminating you
|
| Again, I don't do it because I can't handle the stress of
| two jobs, but I don't begrudge those who can
| arenaninja wrote:
| I appreciate the concern but I don't do it. What are the
| statutes against this?
| dahfizz wrote:
| > The same applies if you get two remote jobs, you bill
| both.
|
| That's definitely illegal.
| arenaninja wrote:
| I appreciate the concern but I don't do it. What are the
| statutes against this? Is it a felony or misdemeanor?
| judge2020 wrote:
| I don't think it'd be strictly illegal, they'd just have
| grounds to fire you if you ever refused a ride (that goes
| for both Uber/Lyft).
|
| Maybe fraud and breach of contract if, in the full-time
| contract, it says "you affirm you do not have another
| full-time job that will interfere with this job".
| Volundr wrote:
| > They can easily kill off competition using this by
| eating the labor supply.
|
| I'm not at all sure they can. You haven't really
| explained here why Uber is apparently capable of hiring
| all drivers and starving the labor pool, yet Applebees
| can't use the same strategy for cooks, or Amazon the same
| strategy for warehouse workers or software engineers.
|
| Calling them "moronic regulators" without explaining why
| the same model that works in other markets can't work in
| this one isn't all that compelling.
| dahfizz wrote:
| There are meaningful alternatives for your examples. If
| you didn't want to work at Applebees, you could work at
| Chilis.
|
| Right now, I would be willing to bet that a large
| majority of Lyft drivers also drive for Uber. Uber is so
| much larger that there is no real alternative. If the law
| makes it so that drivers can choose only one rideshare
| app, they will all choose Uber because its bigger.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| This is an extraordinary claim, this has never been a
| problem in a major city in recorded history.
|
| The idea that Uber would pay drivers so much to have
| extra drivers just sitting around doing nothing is
| absurd. The idea that there would be no suitable drivers
| left to other firms to hire is absurd.
|
| If any of this claim made sence, then this would have
| happened 50 years ago, we've had drivers around for a
| while.
|
| Yet it does not happen in haulage where drivers are
| actual professionals, it does not happen for solicitors
| where labour supply is way more constrained. What do you
| have to backup your claim?
| dahfizz wrote:
| > this has never been a problem in a major city in
| recorded history.
|
| This _has_ been the case in major cities around the world
| before Uber took over. NYC has the yellow cab monopoly.
| London had the black cab monopoly. These companies grew
| large enough to buy up all available labor (this was made
| easier by the medallion system).
|
| Uber is no different. It _already_ has a dominant market
| position. Other rideshare companies _already_ share their
| drivers. The amount of drivers who drive for Lyft only is
| vanishingly small. If you force all those drivers to
| choose, they will choose Uber and Lyft will die.
| vidarh wrote:
| There is no "black cab monopoly". Black cabs are not
| operated by a single company.
|
| It's a number of companies, and a huge number of
| individual operators, competing with dozens of private
| hire companies.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "YC has the yellow cab monopoly. London had the black cab
| monopoly."
|
| Exactly, legislative monopoly - they didn't run out of
| people with cars willing to drive. You are talking about
| labour shortage, that's a completely different argument
| belter wrote:
| As some Dutch media, (not all), persist on their annoying
| habit of copy pasting ANP press releases and not doing much
| of real journalism...or not linking to original sources even
| if you paid for their subscription services...I am adding
| some original resources here:
|
| The Netherlands Trade Union Confederation (FNV) has around 1
| million members, is both a trade union federation and a trade
| union and launched the lawsuit.
|
| The FNV's pleading notes for this lawsuit can be found here:
| https://www.fnv.nl/getattachment/Nieuwsbericht/Algemeen-
| nieu...
|
| The fact sheet is here:
|
| https://www.fnv.nl/getattachment/Nieuwsbericht/Algemeen-
| nieu...
|
| Court statement:
|
| https://www.rechtspraak.nl/Organisatie-en-
| contact/Organisati...
|
| The court veredict:
|
| https://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/inziendocument?id=ECLI:NL:.
| ..
|
| ( you can access the original PDF from the drop down menu on
| the right or the link below)
|
| https://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/InzienDocument/GetPdf?ecli.
| ..
| goodpoint wrote:
| > they really are freelancers/entrepreneurs not employees
|
| Taxi drivers are not knowledge workers, or artists and
| clearly not entrepreneurs.
|
| They are easily replaceable "cogs in the machine", like many
| non-specialised factory workers, office clerks, retail
| employees and so on.
|
| There's a reason why humanity introduced protections for
| vulnerable workers in almost every society.
| starfallg wrote:
| Exactly. It's unskilled or semi-skilled work. Treating them
| the same as freelancers doesn't reflect reality as they
| have almost no leverage in there situation with their
| employers.
| bko wrote:
| > Taxi drivers are not knowledge workers, or artists and
| clearly not entrepreneurs.
|
| Of course they're entrepreneurs. They have to own or
| finance a car. They choose when and where to work and for
| what company to drive for. They can also work for black car
| in addition to ride share and can even manage private
| rides. They have some ability to accept or reject fares.
|
| > There's a reason why humanity introduced protections for
| vulnerable workers in almost every society.
|
| No one is restricting "knowledge workers" from being able
| to strike a contract. Why can't we afford the same dignity
| and respect to "cogs in the machine"? You ever thing these
| "protections" that "humanity" places on "cogs" can end up
| hurting them? Like how immigrant taxi drivers in NYC were
| encouraged to rack up 100k debt to buy medallions
| goodpoint wrote:
| > Of course they're entrepreneurs. They have to own or
| finance a car.
|
| That's such a broad definition of entrepreneur that
| includes 99% of freelancers and self-employed.
|
| > No one is restricting "knowledge workers" from being
| able to strike a contract.
|
| The job market does, unfortunately.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "Of course they're entrepreneurs. They have to own or
| finance a car."
|
| When we were taught business in school, it was about
| setting the price, hiring staff, choosing a target
| market. You know, thigs that make a business a business.
|
| I am willing to bet my house that there isn't a single
| business or economics testbook where maintaining a car is
| even a consideration.
| bko wrote:
| > When we were taught business in school, it was about
| setting the price, hiring staff, choosing a target
| market. You know, thigs that make a business a business.
|
| You have a very narrow understanding of business and
| entrepreneurship. Not all businesses have employees.
| Every business book will tell you almost all businesses
| are price takers, not price setters. You can't wave a
| wand and say "I want to charge X".
|
| The target market could be Uber, Lyft, black car, limo or
| personal. Maintaining equipment and accounting for
| depreciation is very important
| st1ck wrote:
| I'd expect entrepreneur to have a freedom to set own rate
| and market own brand, for example.
| bko wrote:
| You can choose when and where to work. Most businesses
| don't have pricing power. There's a market price. They
| can charge more or less sure but in theory there's a
| market clearing price, and anything above/below that
| price will yield suboptimal returns. You're romanticizing
| the discretion individual businesses have.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| > Taxi drivers are not knowledge workers, or artists and
| clearly not entrepreneurs.
|
| > They are easily replaceable "cogs in the machine", like
| many non-specialised factory workers, office clerks, retail
| employees and so on.
|
| > There's a reason why humanity introduced protections for
| vulnerable workers in almost every society.
|
| I appreciate the point you're making, but I also think you
| are grossly undervaluing the specialisation of cab drivers.
|
| In the UK, the Knowledge [1] is a notoriously arduous exam
| which certainly makes cab drivers anything but "replaceable
| 'cogs in the machine'".
|
| In fact, I think the fact that people view these jobs as
| being replaceable is what leads to their deterioration.
| Someone who has a GPS but no innate and learned knowledge
| of the terrain does not provide a service comparable to
| someone who has a thorough understanding of the domain. And
| the more people rely on the former, the more they think
| that that's all there is to it, and so it becomes a race to
| the bottom of sorts.
|
| I'm not sure if I'm articulating this fully, but basically:
| jobs such as cab driving require specialisation and skill
| to be done well, but are often replaced by those without
| that skill doing freelance driving, which leads to a
| deterioration of expected service, and people ultimately
| thinking that the workers are all interchangeable.
|
| [1] https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/taxis-and-private-
| hire/licensing...
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > he Knowledge
|
| Only applies in London.
| starfallg wrote:
| >In the UK, the Knowledge [1] is a notoriously arduous
| exam which certainly makes cab drivers anything but
| "replaceable 'cogs in the machine'".
|
| >In fact, I think the fact that people view these jobs as
| being replaceable is what leads to their deterioration.
|
| Uber and the online routing within the app made this
| obsolete. The jobs that gig economy jobs may be skilled,
| but these gigs now aren't. The platform took the skill
| away from the job. The workers are just drones now.
| bitdivision wrote:
| I agree uber drivers =/= black cab drivers, but I'd also
| argue that most people don't want or need a black cab
| driver today.
|
| What extra services does a black cab driver provide over
| an Uber driver in London? - Better
| knowledge of traffic patterns? - Ability to
| recommend places, give you local knowledge
|
| That's all I can really think of. I agree that local
| knowledge is sometimes useful, but the vast majority of
| the time I know exactly where I want to go, and if I'm
| looking for recommendations I'm likely to trust the
| internet more than a taxi driver.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| It's all about the subtle nuance of the service provided.
| A skilled driver will know which route to take if the
| passenger wants the absolute quickest route, or if the
| passenger wants a scenic route, or which cobble-stone
| roads to avoid if the passenger says they're feeling a
| bit ill, or hundreds of other such intricacies and
| peculiarities which come with offering expert service
| which someone who just has a GPS app on their phone and
| some free time can't begin to offer.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| That's nice. They should continue to offer this premium
| service at premium prices, then, for the few people who
| are willing to pay the premium.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| My point up-thread was that this tier of service used to
| be more or less the de facto standard of service that you
| would get for a standard, not a premium, fee. Over time,
| it has deteriorated and is now the domain of specialty
| car hire services. I'm not sure that that's a good thing.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| My point is that the "standard" fee is premium when
| compared to Uber which tends to cost half as much in the
| countries where I tried it.
|
| Aside from solving the trust/scam problem, that's one of
| the reason why people like Uber - it made 'car as a
| service' affordable. Without Uber, I might have bought a
| car, because a factor of 2 completely changes the
| picture.
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| I bet employers are wishing they never got involved in
| benefits. Now they're just the governments execution arm for
| social programs and they're stuck forever.
|
| Looking back, the only reason employers started getting
| involved in Healthcare was because the 1942 Stabilization Act
| restricted them from raising wages and they had to come up
| with a more creative way of competing for talent.
|
| Now the ACA forces companies to privide insurance by law.
| Under Biden's Covid plan they're now going to be the
| execution arm for vaccine mandates. It's crazy to think that
| to start a business you need to almost immediately be
| prepared to be a federal government franchisee.
| etchalon wrote:
| Yes, as a business owner, I'm very upset that I have to
| "follow the law". Things would be so much easier if I
| didn't.
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| My point is that it didn't used to be a law. Why can't
| the government enforce it's own social program and let
| businesses focus on their primary goal instead of
| healthcare compliance.
| etchalon wrote:
| The government does enforce its own social programs. It's
| found the most efficient/popular way to do that is
| through businesses.
| majormajor wrote:
| That greatly overstates the intentionality and search for
| efficiency involved in how we got this mismash of health
| care coverage.
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| Yeah, it's like companies are the gig economy workers for
| the government.
| com2kid wrote:
| > It's found the most efficient/popular way to do that is
| through businesses.
|
| Not at all, look up the history of health insurance in
| America, companies providing it was not by design, it was
| in fact done to get around government laws on wage caps
| during the great depression.
|
| Now days the system is entrenched, there are a large # of
| corrupt players who leech of the healthcare ecosystem in
| America, and they pay good $ to lobbyists and PR firms to
| keep things that way.
|
| Right now 1/3rd of health care costs go to working out
| billing. That type of insane inefficiency would not be
| tolerated in a true capitalist marketplace. Imagine if
| Visa charged 33% commission on every sale and then had a
| law passed saying all purchases had to be done with a
| Visa card! That'd be an insane drag on the economy,
| America's GDP would plummet.
|
| But we literally accept that exact scenario with health
| care costs. (Except for cosmetic procedures, which have a
| competitive market that has driven technology forward and
| prices down!)
| boplicity wrote:
| I wish more people realized how anti-capitalist the current
| healthcare system is in the U.S.
|
| If you want to encourage business, then remove barriers.
| Governments should be taking care of healthcare, not
| businesses.
|
| Businesses should be focused on the core work they do:
| Running their business. Not on providing health care.
|
| (Same goes, really, for childcare, transportation, and
| similar benefits that large employers sometimes offer,
| often because these things are not effectively provided by
| the government.)
| hellisothers wrote:
| Can the government take back all those sweet sweet tax
| deductions they provide in exchange?
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| Most of those seem decent [1] but mostly related to
| reducing taxes on income you put into the government
| social program instead of letting you invest somewhere
| else. Not sure employers would see the tax breaks as
| enough justification if they weren't forced.
|
| [1] - https://www.ncsl.org/research/health/employer-and-
| individual...
| etchalon wrote:
| Completely agree. Universal healthcare would empower a
| lot of entrepreneurs, make it easier to attract talent
| for smaller companies, and free me of a completely
| ridiculous amount of paperwork and oversight each year.
| If someone told me, as a business, I could just pay a tax
| and know my employees had access to the same quality of
| care as everyone else, I'd sign up in a heart beat.
| dantheman wrote:
| How about we get companies and government out of
| healthcare?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| So what's left, witch doctors?
| tmathmeyer wrote:
| you just want no health care at all then?
| dantheman wrote:
| Nope, how about you just buy insurance outside of the
| workplace like any other thing.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| So you meant 'employers' rather than 'companies'?
| e3bc54b2 wrote:
| Considering those same employers also get massive subsidies
| for every kind of self-inflicted damage, which results in
| massive C-suit cash-outs and buy-backs, this is the least
| the commons could hope for.
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| I guess I was thinking more about small to medium sized
| businesses. A business with 50-100 employees has to
| enforce government social programs but there won't be any
| c-suite golden parachutes.
| fallingknife wrote:
| 'Employment' is abused by the government to provide social
| benefits that it doesn't want to pay for. A job should trade
| work for cash and no more.
| jacquesm wrote:
| What a nonsense. This article is about NL and social benefits
| are working just fine here.
|
| Jobs as trade work for cash went out the window around the
| middle of the previous century.
| kazen44 wrote:
| sadly, that is not how capitalism works in practice.
| employers have a vastly higher amount of leverage at the
| negotiation table compared to employees.
|
| Dutch society (and most of western Europe) has made an
| explicit choice to create a social contract in which
| employees and employers are bound by the law of the
| government in question. and that law contains rules about
| employment.
|
| mind you these rules exists because of the risk of the threat
| of violent uprisings in the 1850's. the revolutions of 1848
| are a result of working in the way you just stated. it leads
| to massive unrest and instability.
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| You can include southern and eastern Europe as well, it's
| just bit different there. When society was still less
| mobile and many jobs were meant to be forever(when I
| started to work, this was coming to an end slowly), workers
| took their jobs very seriously(none of that we are family
| messaging on intranets like these days) and everyone knew
| their place, workers respected a managers authority and I
| have seen on more than one occasions how attempted manager
| power play was shut down right on the spot, often with
| let's say credible promises of sever aggression. Some parts
| of Europe have a population that's a bit short tempered,
| such things like some coked up Uber manager touching
| someone's gf or wife would be dealt with swiftly and
| personally.
|
| There are many such social contracts, written, unwritten
| and I am proud that Europe has them and is keeping them.
|
| Interestingly, having spent plenty of time in LATAM, many
| people consider themselves leftists, but it's very, very
| different, the social system is bad due to lack of money,
| or impractical allocation of funds, but the will and spirit
| is there.
| capableweb wrote:
| Everyone is abusing everything. We've seen time and time
| again companies abusing employees with hard work, long
| schedules, unsafe environments and skimping on safety, which
| is why we have laws for safe working environments now.
|
| Sometimes work is physically hard, and the effect of that
| type of work usually doesn't show until you've done it for a
| longer time. So not only should you get money for the time
| and effort you spend, you should also get money for how hard
| the work was on your body. Pension and other benefits help
| with this.
| fallingknife wrote:
| That's not so much an effect of years of hard work as it is
| that as you get older your capacity for hard work declines.
| Also we already have government pensions. So why should a
| company have to provide them? The economic effect of this
| is that workers have to wait years for some of their pay
| instead of getting it right now.
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| As programmers or office based workforce, the worst
| hazards might be carpal tunnel syndrome, bad back from
| bad posture and maybe an upset stomach from a bad coffee.
|
| I have known plenty of young guys in the UK who went on
| these fly in fly out jobs on gas or oil platforms in
| Australia, as it's a relatively uncomplicated way to get
| a well paid job (the only good thing about it) due to
| easy access to Australia, being commonwealth etc. Some of
| them turned into literal cripples within 2-3 years,
| others half cripples requiring re education or placement
| in a less physically demanding job. It's not the same
| doing this once for a weekend and then classify it as
| "not so hard" and go out there, work in 100 deg heat or
| sub freezing temperatures every day, rain, wind etc. It
| grinds down a body slowly.
| capableweb wrote:
| > That's not so much an effect of years of hard work as
| it is that as you get older your capacity for hard work
| declines
|
| Sure, if you're a programmer this might be true, but for
| most of physical jobs out in the world, the physicality
| of the job is literally tearing down peoples bodies one
| way or another.
|
| > Also we already have government pensions
|
| Yeah, so not "A job should trade work for cash and no
| more" but "A job should trade work for cash + pension" as
| pension is a social benefit.
|
| > The economic effect of this is that workers have to
| wait years for some of their pay instead of getting it
| right now
|
| No, the economic effect of this is that workers get paid
| for their work now, and the effect of that work in the
| future.
| rapind wrote:
| To be honest if there was government provided universal
| healthcare, basic income, and housing guarantees I would
| totally agree. It would create a ton more mobility, and take
| a lot of power away from employers.
| devcpp wrote:
| Let people opt into those things, or make it up to local
| law and let municipalities compete on services.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| That comes from a privileged point of view. People with
| little skills will be coerced to give up these things and
| the cost will be shifted on other people.
| fallingknife wrote:
| That's what I'm talking about though. The government thinks
| people should have these things but doesn't have the
| political will to implement them so they demand that
| employers provide them rather than just paying cash. This
| is the reason that the category 'employee' exists in the
| first place.
| wwtrv wrote:
| 'so they demand that employers provide them..' Yes,
| that's the situation in the US, yes, not sure how
| relevant it's to this discussion, though. In many
| European countries healthcare is funded through a payroll
| tax and provided by the government/a public agency.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Yes and that's what we should do instead of this half
| assed, politically expedient, 'make the corporations pay
| for it' bullshit that we do now.
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| But what if I legitimacy want to be a freelancer? Lifestyle
| reasons, freedom, whatever. I should have a choice.
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| 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-
| diens...
| jb1991 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| CaptainZapp wrote:
| In Switzerland and Germany there's a difference between
| an AG (Aktiengesellschaft) and a GmbH (Gesellschaft mit
| beschrankter Haftung).
|
| Both have more or less the same tax and structural
| advantage (like limited liability, a far easier time to
| get acknowledged by social security, etc)
|
| The main difference is capital requirements and more
| formality for the AG. For example: The law requires
| yearly external audits for an AG, while that's not
| necessarily the case for a GmbH.
|
| Does Holland also make such a difference, or is BV the
| only such corporate form?
|
| Note: Differences listed apply for Switzerland. It could
| be different in Germany.
| belter wrote:
| In the Netherlands you have essentially:
|
| Private limited company (BV or besloten vennootschap)
|
| or
|
| Public limited company (NV or naamloze vennootschap)
|
| The BV is like a Ltd in the Anglo Saxon world and the NV
| is your company with equity defined by shares/stocks.
|
| you can also have:
|
| Cooperative (cooperatie)
|
| Association (vereniging)
|
| Foundation (stichting)
| Lev1a wrote:
| > It could be different in Germany.
|
| Nice overview(s) for Germany and most other countries
| with comparisons where appropriate.
|
| Regarding the AG in Germany and required regular external
| auditing, in my university course where I learned about
| the charasteristics of the most common German legal
| entities [0], there was no such requirement listed or
| talked about, maybe that's only for Switzerland?
|
| The GmbH on the other hand requires a minimum capital of
| 25.000EUR and is expensive to form (from the course
| mentioned above >1.000EUR in fees for notarizations etc.)
| which is one reason why the "UG (haftungsbeschrankt)"
| (essentially "baby's first GmbH") was established a while
| ago. A UG only has to have a minimum of 1EUR in starting
| capital but has to
|
| > "enlarge its capital by at least 25% of its annual net
| profit (with some adjustments), until the general minimum
| of EUR25,000 is reached (at which point the company may
| change its name for the more prestigious GmbH)."
|
| Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entreprene
| urial_company_(Germa... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ges
| ellschaft_mit_beschr%C3%A4n...
|
| [0]: as part of the subject
| "Finanzwirtschaft"/"Managerial finance?"
| belter wrote:
| 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/
| rambambram wrote:
| Both freelancing and ZZP don't have a legal definition.
| It's just a business. In these cases a business of one.
| Without being incorporated, so if you screw up, creditors
| can come after your personal bank account.
|
| So there's nothing to "tolerate" but money. ;)
| gargs wrote:
| What are those tax advantages, assuming that you're
| talking about income and not business
| expenses/investments? Why would making a BV enable you to
| charge higher rates if you're still the only 'employee'
| in the BV and have the same insurances?
| jb1991 wrote:
| Doesn't change my point though that a BV is an unfair
| comparison to an LLC.
|
| Also your threshold of 100K does not align with my
| accountant's, who said it was at least 200K to justify
| the added overhead.
| belter wrote:
| Correct. With a BV in the Netherlands, you get
| immediately the fiscal Calvinism of the Dutch tax office
| at play. Despite the fact that:
|
| - You work for yourself so you get 100% of the risk
|
| - You have no benefits
|
| - If you are sick you get no pay, unless you make a very
| expensive work sickness/income insurance
|
| the Dutch tax office, judges that they do not want you to
| be in a "too advantageous fiscal position" ...( Not
| making this up...these are their own words) so, forces
| you to pay yourself a minimum yearly salary that is
| updated every year so they can tax you. It is currently
| at 47,000 EUR per year I believe...and is independently
| of you making money or not...
| kazen44 wrote:
| the reason they use this salary is for tax purposes.
| otherwise doing tax fraud would be easy with a BV. by
| simply not paying yourself a wage and living of the BV
| instead.
| belter wrote:
| The BV has to pay taxes. And costs have to be business
| related. Since when living from your own work is
| considered fraud?
|
| There is a fundamental principle here, and that is the
| tax office considering that, unlike a permanent employee
| who cannot be fired and has almost no liability, an
| entrepreneur, despite taking all the risk and having non
| of the benefits, is judged that it should be forced into
| the same tax position. Where is the upside then?
|
| This coming from the same tax office, that has enabled
| some of the biggest tax dodgers in the planet:
|
| "Netherlands earned EUR25 mil. from Google's tax
| avoidance"
|
| https://nltimes.nl/2021/01/13/netherlands-earned-
| eu25-mil-go...
|
| "Forget about the Gates Foundation. The world's biggest
| charity owns IKEA--and is devoted to interior design"
|
| https://www.economist.com/business/2006/05/11/flat-pack-
| acco...
|
| "Netherlands world's 4th biggest tax haven"
|
| https://nltimes.nl/2021/03/09/netherlands-worlds-4th-
| biggest...
|
| "The Netherlands is still one of the world's main tax
| havens, coming in fourth place on Tax Justice Network's
| biennial ranking of tax havens. Only the British Virgin
| Islands, the Cayman Islands and Bermuda scored worse than
| the Netherlands when it came to tax avoidance."
| oliwarner wrote:
| 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.
| impute wrote:
| Then find your own clients who want to be driven around.
| brnt wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Working part time for Uber won't have less freedom than
| working as a free lancer for Uber.
| Vaslo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Part time workers get fewer benefits than full time ones,
| so Uber will be incentivized to encourage part time
| workers.
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| 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.
| CaptainZapp wrote:
| > sure that's a bit outdated in the time of online maps
|
| As a passenger I feel it's a significant qualitative
| difference if I have a driver who knows his way around town
| compared to one who obviously and fixatedly relies on the
| GPS.
| iso1631 wrote:
| I got a black cab a couple of weeks ago in London (it was
| chucking it down) near St Pauls. Asked to go to Nandos in
| Southwark.
|
| The vaunted "knowledge" failed miserably as he pulled over
| to drop me off -- I looked up and saw we were just south of
| Tower Bridge. he clearly hadn't got a clue. I said "just
| take me to Southwark tube station". I know there's all
| sorts of one way systems but when he was heading to
| Bermondsey I just told him to let me out and got the tube
| (well tried to - Southwark was closed, so ended up at
| Waterloo and having to walk)
|
| Uber just works because it's not based on a system from
| 1865.
| isodev wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's probably because it makes it difficult to dodge
| taxes when Uber registers all the transactions ;)
| iso1631 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| 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.
| devcpp wrote:
| 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.
| consp wrote:
| > 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.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| <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 wrote:
| Plenty of countries in Western Europe too have mandatory
| employee contributions to various social programs.
| mattmanser wrote:
| 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.
| jhrmnn wrote:
| I never understood why this distinction is made and why
| it's not just obfuscation. The real numbers are the cost
| of an employee to the employer and the amount the
| employee gets, the difference is what the state took as a
| tax, and the way that cut is divided to different state
| budget chapters is inconsequential to both the employee
| and the employer
| rattray wrote:
| > 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?
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| 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?
| lhorie wrote:
| Uber is about as close to a ship of theseus as it gets.
|
| All this stuff you're talking about is ancient news from
| like 4 years ago. Since then, the entire C-suite left,
| including Kalanick and Thuan (Singhal spent virtually no
| time at Uber), not to mention crazy high attrition rates
| at all levels, and several rounds of layoffs to top it
| all off.
|
| Since then, greyball and its ilk got shutdown, the CSO
| got fired for hiding a leak, HR ramped up from its
| comically understaffed numbers, and Uber even "fired" a
| board member for making a sexist joke.
|
| The only high profile scandal under new management that I
| recall was the Tempe SDV death, and that division got
| sold off to Aurora...
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| Nope, this excuse does not fly. First they do things
| clandestinely, then try to prevent any court case, then
| drag the court case out as long as possible and then it's
| supposed to be ancient?
|
| So you are saying the new c level are something like
| angels and saints? https://lawstreetmedia.com/tech/uber-
| officers-and-board-memb...
| lhorie wrote:
| You're the one clearly pushing an agenda, I'm just
| stating facts. IIRC the discussion here at the time about
| the lawsuit you linked characterized it as "frivolous"
| and "sour grapes", and other words to that effect.
|
| If I wanted to make claims about saintness, I wouldn't
| bring up Tempe, I would've brought up the stuff about the
| CLO leading equality efforts (him being a black person),
| or the stuff about Afghanistan relief donation matching
| and other similar initiatives. But like said, I'm not
| interested in playing good-guy-bad-guy games, and I'm
| perfectly content w/ characterizing Uber as a company
| seeking profits just like Microsoft, Google or FB or
| whoever else is getting a stink eye these days.
|
| You're free to be cynical, but doing so by cherrypicking
| only stuff that supports "your" side is kinda
| intellectually dishonest. </two-cents>
| rattray wrote:
| 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.
| syshum wrote:
| 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
| dagw wrote:
| 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.
| Aunche wrote:
| Both are features that Uber can implement, but you can't
| cheat the market. At the end of the day, if you're just
| driving someone from point A to point B, you're competing
| with everyone else at the moment doing the same. As a
| driver, your client in this case is either Uber, Lyft, or
| another ridesharing service. If they add the ability to
| decline riders, I don't see how it would be used for
| anything else besides discrimination.
| devcpp wrote:
| Then it's stopping you from working for a company that
| forces you to take clients at a given price without an
| employment contract and all its implications. What if
| that's what I want? I think some Uber drivers appreciate
| the work mobility.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| You want to be forced to take clients you don't want. You
| want someone else to decide a price you might not want.
| You want to be unable to get employment benefits you
| might want.
|
| I mean, that's some niche requirements there, I would
| categorise it as serfdom.
|
| I am onboard in principle - I want try all the
| psychedelics, fly a plane without a licence and
| experiment with explosives for education purposes, but as
| R v Copeland shows, the law can't cater to everyone -
| tradeoffs have to be made.
| dagw wrote:
| _What if that 's what I want?_
|
| Most places have lots of rules forbidding you from
| working under certain conditions or doing a job any way
| you want to do it.
| claaams wrote:
| "I want and like being exploited"
| brnt wrote:
| I know that there are circles in which it is argued
| freedom means being allowed to sell yourself into
| slavery, but you'd hope the vast majority of us have come
| to understand the danger of that interpretation of
| freedom.
| greatpatton wrote:
| 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.
| vidarh wrote:
| The difference here is that these requirements are not
| set by a company contracting you to drive for them.
| capableweb wrote:
| > 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?
| macksd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| capableweb wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Yeah, that makes sense, that's the only thing I've seen
| around the world as well. But can these designated taxis
| reject customers at will? That was my question.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Practically, they can but I'm not sure about the
| regulations. Interesting question though.
| belter wrote:
| In most countries Taxi drivers cannot refuse a passenger
| hailing them. Its difficult to enforce and they normally
| claim they did not see you but they must take you:
|
| UK:
|
| "Cabbies can be penalised for refusing passengers" https:
| //www.lta.gov.sg/content/ltagov/en/newsroom/2019/8/3/c...
|
| Canada - Montreal:
|
| https://ville.montreal.qc.ca/pls/portal/docs/page/bur_tax
| i_f...
|
| "Le titulaire d'un permis de chauffeur de taxi ne peut
| refuser d'effectuer une course"
|
| France:
|
| "Normalement, un taxi n'a pas le droit de refuser une
| course sauf si vous etes a 50 metres d'une borne de taxi
| et qu'un taxi attend a cette borne"
|
| https://www.europe1.fr/societe/taxi-ce-qui-est-legal-et-
| ce-q....
|
| and so on...
| niemandhier wrote:
| Personenbeforderungsgesetz (PBefG) SS 22
| Beforderungspflicht which applies to taxis in Germany.
| Roughly translates to:
|
| Human Transportation Act SS22 Duty to Transport.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| timwaagh wrote:
| 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).
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| vidarh wrote:
| Most places they don't prevent what you describe. There
| are usually just some extra hoops to jump through and/or
| some tax implications.
|
| E.g. I'm in the UK. I've been a contractor with multiple
| contracts as well as with a single employer both in
| situations where they are obviously acting as an
| employer, and in situations where they were genuinely
| not.
|
| Here there's specific legislation to handle this now -
| "IR35", which ensures that if your contract is equivalent
| to employment you'll be taxed accordingly, with an
| "umbrella company" acting as an employer on behalf of the
| company that you're contracting with if that is the case
| to prevent there from being a tax advantage from
| pretending to be freelance if you're in effect an
| employee. It doesn't stop you from doing it - it just
| takes away the tax advantage and creates some
| bureaucratic hurdles.
|
| But it's easy to avoid as long as you're not trying to
| avoid taxes, by setting terms that ensures it doesn't
| match the criteria. Employers are often keen to do this,
| and it gives you extra negotiating power.
|
| E.g. when I was doing this, key points involved the fact
| I had a small marketing budget to bring in additional
| work, I didn't usually work out of their office, I
| controlled my own hours, I determined how to carry out
| the work, I negotiated my day rate, the contract had a
| defined end-date (we could renew, but there are pitfalls
| there), and so on. Another strong sign you're genuinely
| not an employee is a right to substitution (e.g. if _you_
| can provide someone else to do the work, when you 're not
| available and that right is genuine). UK tax authorities
| (HMRC) has a checklist as to what they consider "deemed
| employment" and or that falls under IR35 (it's not an
| absolute set of criteria, but basically the more you look
| like a business, the more likely you are to be considered
| one).
|
| So for high earners like software consultants with an
| actual reasonable power balance vs. the other side, this
| is rarely a problem. It cost me a tiny proportion of my
| revenues to make sure that I met more than enough
| criteria to be able to do as I pleased.
|
| But most of the people these regulations are there for
| are in a substantially weaker position. If you're a low
| enough earner to not be in a position to work around
| this, then you're not likely to have the power to
| genuinely negotiate either.
| jonp888 wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| All those things should actually be under the purview of
| the government, rather than businesses.
|
| But that would increase government expenses because many
| more people would become eligible for the benefits. Using
| businesses as a proxy lets society implicitly restrict
| the quantity and quality of those benefits to certain
| people.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "All those things should actually be under the purview of
| the government, rather than businesses."
|
| How does this make sence - are we meant to move you on
| government payroll for the 1 week you have the flu and
| can't work? Should the government pay for your annual
| leave?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Sort of, although the most efficient and effective
| implementation in my opinion would basically result in a
| universal basic income.
| kazen44 wrote:
| >All those things should actually be under the purview of
| the government, rather than businesses.
|
| you know the reason these things are payed for by
| bussiness right?
|
| most social welfare programs are created after world war
| 2, because the alternative was the workers simply seizing
| the wealth of their former bosses by force.
|
| OP seems to greatly understimate how close most countries
| in europe came to a mass revolt of civil war after world
| war 1 and world war 2. (1848 revolutions are also an
| important time in history for civil rights).
|
| the dutch for instance, have a constitution thanks to the
| threat of revolution in 1848. The alternative was the
| threat of revolution and the violent end of the monarchy.
|
| The same is basically true for labour rights. In most
| european countries these got implemented after world war
| 1 and during the great depression, a time in which a lot
| of people got destitute and had acces to weaponry.(World
| war 1 also left a massive social trauma in many nations,
| leading to revolutions because of its effects on
| society).
| BBC-vs-neolibs wrote:
| We shouldn't, and no one is.
| pyrale wrote:
| Who is "we" in this situation? For this specific case, it
| seems different countries have different opinions about
| what is the right tradeoff between allowing freelancers
| with leverage to enjoy their situation, and protecting
| workers with less bargaining power from being locked out
| of worker protection systems.
|
| It's unavoidable, since different countries have
| different worker protection systems. For instance, some
| of these countries have to pick up the tab when employers
| cheat their way out of paying their dues.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| devcpp wrote:
| Then fix the tax loopholes by making it about sales or
| revenue rather than employment.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's the US that is different not Uber, they are treated
| just like every other company here would be treated.
| throwaway212135 wrote:
| They need to go after DesignLab as well. They treat their
| American workers like shit and will give preferential treatment
| to foreign workers.
|
| It is time for Designlab mentors to unionize.
| whiddershins wrote:
| Ugh, the unique selling point of working Uber is the
| flexibility and autonomy. Every driver I talk to says that's
| what they love about working it.
|
| What is it in us that can't let people have what they value,
| just because it is different than what we value?
| ulucs wrote:
| What does that have to do with employment status? Does the
| Dutch Commercial Law state that the employees should only
| work on firm-appointed hours? The hours worked are already
| logged, the only new responsibilities fall on Uber except for
| filling a few documents for employment.
| [deleted]
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| They can still offer flexibility. No one was really, really
| autonomous, autonomous, though.
|
| Are the drivers you talk to actually friends of yours? Are
| they driving to make a living? Are they stuck driving due to
| poor child care choices? Are they on the clock and hesitant
| to dismiss the company they work for?
|
| Have you asked them if they'd rather the company process the
| taxes? Do they have difficulty doing so? Have any of them
| found themselves in a hole because of the 'contractor'
| system?
|
| I'll add that this isn't like a normal contract job: Uber
| needs drivers. Without drivers, they wouldn't have a
| business. And they need them constantly - not in the way that
| a firm needs temporary help to upgrade things.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Double edged sword. Dutch people use Uber because it's cheap.
| If that stops being true it's back to bicycles and buses.
| pbreit wrote:
| I'd say "wrongly so". The right answer is somewhere in the
| middle, leaning to "contractor". Drivers literally never have
| to even show up. The flexibility offered by contractor status
| is the #1 benefit to drivers.
| stef25 wrote:
| Especially in the EU the gig economy is relatively new and its
| not at all like factory workers who're getting shafted more and
| more as the years go by.
|
| Being an Uber driver is a new thing which people started doing
| voluntarily knowing full well what the conditions were. For
| people then to start complaining "this is a abuse" and OMG no
| social security just seems ... weird.
|
| Here in Belgium you now need to have a taxi license and
| everything good about Uber is now gone (it's more expensive,
| the drivers are all moody a-holes and they've gone back to
| doing detours for no reason just to jack up the price).
| nemo44x wrote:
| > _FNV called the ruling a major victory for drivers ' rights._
|
| No, it's a major victory for the administrative arm of the FNV
| trade union. Look beyond the formal argument here (workers
| rights) and look at what this actually is about - power. The FNV
| wants to get their cut so they can collect more dues paying
| members and further enrich the admins. The workers here will
| probably not benefit at all.
| pelorat wrote:
| Wait, I live in the Netherlands and I wasn't even aware that Uber
| was around. Didn't they get banned years ago, with only Uber
| Black being allowed?
| rocgf wrote:
| There is Uber around, 100%. I use it from time to time.
|
| I think it's always a regular taxi that shows up, though.
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| You're forgiven. I also live in the NL and I almost never see
| them. The last time I saw an Uber was two years ago when a
| friend came from the USA and wanted to use their app to call a
| Uber.
|
| But then again I never take taxis either. For me it's either
| walk, bike or OV. It might be like that for you as well, which
| is why you forgot they exist.
| thow-58d4e8b wrote:
| Same in Finland, Baltics or central/eastern Europe. Almost
| everything is within walkable/bike-able distance. Public
| transportation has good coverage, is affordable and safe.
| Taking taxis is just not something people normally do. From
| here, Uber feels like a quintessentially American solution
| for a quintessentially American problem.
|
| Real world example - taking Uber to my workplace would cost
| me one-two hours of net pay, and I'm in the top 5% earners.
| Another one-two hours of net pay to go back home.
|
| For comparison - public transportation costs 3EUR/day
| regardless of usage, and only takes about 15% longer to get
| there.
| wwtrv wrote:
| '..Baltics' maybe in Estonia.. in Lithuania Uber (or rather
| companies that are competing with it) is quite popular and
| that prices were very low (due to competition between
| different apps) until quite recently (mass transit is not
| that great here, though). AFAIK while not used by most
| people, it is also quite popular in Ukraine. Due huge
| income inequality the prices are very low but there is
| still a substantial section of the population which can
| afford it.
| pelorat wrote:
| Indeed. I don't own or travel by car. I just remember reading
| that the "Uber Pop" app was not allowed, but Uber Black(?)
| was, but it was more expensive and had licensed drivers. That
| was many years ago.
| mrsuprawsm wrote:
| Whenever I order an Uber in NL, I seem to get a car that is a
| licensed taxi.
|
| Usually they have a taxi sign on top of the car, and always
| have blue license plates (which you can only get if you are a
| taxi).
|
| So, I think that the workaround must have been that they
| actually employ licensed taxi drivers. This is, however, only
| speculation.
| bingohbangoh wrote:
| Perhaps Uber's solution will be to employ a company that
| employs drivers and let that company be saddled with all the
| awful paperwork involved.
|
| Methinks the flexibility of dealing with temporary workers is
| more pertinent than the added cost. Pure speculation of
| course.
| alkonaut wrote:
| This is 100% the case in Sweden. Since Uber is a ride
| service/taxi they are just like any other taxi company, of
| which there are hundreds (Taxi has one simple definition and
| it's to offer rides to the public for money). Since there are
| no artifical caps on number of taxis such as medallions, all
| that's required to run a taxi is to have a special drivers'
| license and a certified vehicle.
|
| So all Uber drivers are taxi drivers and all Uber vehicles
| are taxi vehicles. Simple.
|
| If Uber tried to somehow do taxi services without their
| drivers having taxi drivers licenses or their cars being
| registred taxi cars, they'd be laughed at.
|
| Everything is really really simple once there is no taxi
| monopoly or medallion system.
| Ekaros wrote:
| For Finland it is same. But it seems removing controls of
| licenses and pricing lead to worse service availability and
| higher prices... Who would have thought that operating taxi
| in country like Finland is pretty expensive...
| thejackgoode wrote:
| Is "undisrupt" a word already?
| grenoire wrote:
| It's called 'regulate.'
| cblconfederate wrote:
| but they disrupted the regulations in the first place
|
| Oh i see, we ll soon have a wave of startups who are
| disruptors-of-the-regulated-disruptors-of-the-regulations
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| "disruption" is basically newspeak for startups when they are
| weighting the ability and capacity of an administration or
| government to sue that startup for violating laws. It's legal
| arbitrage.
| stuaxo wrote:
| Interesting wording of this headline, you would almost think Uber
| were fighting for the rights of their drivers if you read it out
| of context.
| st_goliath wrote:
| I was thinking a similar thought. As the word _for_ obviously
| doesn 't really apply here, the word _over_ offers a nice
| "neutral" alternative to _against_.
|
| Edit: the threads got merged now. At the time that I commented,
| the title was "Uber Loses Battle Over Drivers' Rights in the
| Netherlands" and the link was going to Bloomberg.
| dahfizz wrote:
| The headline I see is " Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch
| court rules".
|
| I don't see how you can read that any other way than the Dutch
| court is forcing Uber to employ its drivers.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| This comment was moved from a dupe that was worded
| differently
| dncornholio wrote:
| Ubers whole statement is letting us think they do it for the
| drivers.. It's terribly obscene
| sdze wrote:
| but then again people remember how us-american gig-companies
| operate...
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Obligatory reminder that this isn't saying rideshare drivers must
| be employees. It is saying the specifics of uber, how it controls
| its drivers, and how it runs its business is an employment model
| per their laws. You could almost certainly build a new rideshare
| business that is not employment based.
| akrymski wrote:
| What next? Upwork must employ it's workers? Where is the line
| drawn?
|
| What if Uber didn't handle the money and riders paid cash?
|
| The result is simply consumers paying the difference for more
| expensive taxi services.
|
| Forcing this labour market underground trading in crypto or cash.
| Congratulations.
| gargs wrote:
| "Drivers don't want to give up their freedom to choose if, when
| and where to work."
|
| Drivers might have the freedom to turn off their phones and
| choose not to work, but they don't have the freedom to choose
| which routes/destinations. Seems to me that their argument is
| one-sided and deceptive.
| brnt wrote:
| If you don't have that freedom, you're an employee, which is
| what this conflict is about. Because if they're an employee,
| their employer must pay social insurance. The self-employed are
| exempted from this insurance (although highly encouraged,
| because, not surprisingly, the vast majority of self-employed
| people don't become lucky billionaires). Uber wanted to have it
| both ways, and, not surprisingly, it can't. Self-employed
| people do whatever they like, including choosing the rides they
| drive for Uber.
| chii wrote:
| but from what i recall, an uber driver do have the choice to
| accept or reject a ride.
|
| There's a penalty for rejecting too many rides - but i think
| that's a fair outcome.
|
| Ideally, uber also allows a driver to set the price, and
| allow a customer to see price comparisons between all offered
| drivers (and wait times etc), to truly make it a competitive
| market place.
| lozenge wrote:
| Ideally for who?
|
| According to this article drivers weren't given information
| on fare or destination when they were offered fares, until
| legally required in California.
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/story/uber-
| change...
|
| They won't be letting drivers set fares until legally
| obligated. They are a taxi service that cosplays as a "ride
| sharing" "marketplace" in the legal system.
|
| Uber is all about keeping maximum control of the driver
| while denying them the rights of employees (or in the UK,
| "worker" status, which is a halfway house between employee
| and self employed)
| dagw wrote:
| According to the article: "a driver may only refuse a few
| trips before being logged out by the system", that plus the
| fact that they can't set their own fares and Uber can
| retroactively lower drivers fares, was the main reason Uber
| lost the case.
|
| If Uber let drivers reject as many rides as they wanted and
| allowed drivers to set their own fares and negotiate
| directly with their clients, then they may very well have
| won the case. But then they would also be a very different
| company.
| Jxl180 wrote:
| If I hire a contractor to renovate my home to my exact
| specifications, by your logic they are my employee because they
| couldn't choose the "route" or "destination?"
| Ekaros wrote:
| If you were to hire contractor from company that was set-up
| to outsource your work to one of it many sub-contractors
| which only worked for them and had no deciding power how to
| do it and for what price, yes they would be employees.
| mqus wrote:
| They do get to set the prices (the part gp forgot to
| mention).
| killtimeatwork wrote:
| Employees also set their own prices? "For me to accept a
| job offer, you have to pay me at least $150k" - that's
| setting your own price.
| gjulianm wrote:
| They can choose to not work with you and instead work with
| another client that has specifications that fit better with
| their work.
| Jxl180 wrote:
| So do drivers for grubhub/doordash/uber eats. They see the
| final payout and have the choice to skip the order if it
| doesn't pay well enough.
| gjulianm wrote:
| Except for the part that the companies will punish them
| for rejecting orders, and that they can't negotiate the
| price of the orders nor set any price themselves.
| campl3r wrote:
| Are you saying if I hire a contractor with a price set by
| me and I would "punish" (i.e. never hire them again) when
| they don't agree, they are suddenly my employee?
| Ekaros wrote:
| When you are hiring contractor you offer a price the
| contractor can come back and say I can do it for this
| higher price. Clearly not employee. On other hand the gig
| workers can't lets say offer to bring your food for
| 1000EUR this one time. They should be able if they are
| independent.
| Jxl180 wrote:
| 1. Doordash does not penalize for skipping orders. They
| give the total payout first to allow people to skip
| orders in the first place. It's a feature. 2. Because you
| see the price before accepting an order, you are
| effectively negotiating the orders you want to take based
| on price. You can sit in your car all day declining
| orders until you see a price you agree with.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| They could reject based on the drop/pickup location at least in
| my area.
| gargs wrote:
| Only if they're rated high enough. This is not available to
| every driver.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/uber/comments/lzl3xp/why_doesnt_ube.
| ..
| kwonkicker wrote:
| I am torn on this issue, maybe I don't see the whole picture.
| Uber was never meant to be a taxi company. It was a means for
| people with cars to share their gas expenses. I don't know how
| could they ever prevent this gig from becoming a full-time job
| for most drivers, but I think forcing employment is not a
| solution.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Was Uber ever actually ridesharing platform that is way to find
| someone going from near location to an other location for
| singular shared trip?
| villasv wrote:
| > I don't know how could they ever prevent this gig from
| becoming a full-time job for most drivers
|
| Pricing (and marketing, and UX, and features) that
| transparently informs that offering rides it is not long-term
| profitable, it only makes sense as cost savings for inevitable
| drives, similar to BlaBlaCar or Waze Carpool.
|
| But this would have hampered their growth, so they didn't.
| Ride-sharing (fake proposition) isn't really that big of a
| market as urban mobility in general (target proposition)
| sktrdie wrote:
| Bit out of context but I just came back from US (living in
| Netherlands). Holy flipping hell that place is full of cars.
| Literally everywhere. I mean I understand using a car upstate New
| York where things are further apart and everyone has a huge
| isolated villa. But do you really need 4 lane roads in freaking
| manhattan?
|
| Seems like regulating "car stuff" in general is always a good
| thing if you ask me.
| airza wrote:
| There is a great youtube channel called "Not just bikes" which
| talks about urban planning in the netherlands and how it
| results in much more livable cities than the US.
| scrollaway wrote:
| My god, you weren't kidding! I've been watching his videos
| since seeing your comment. His intro video immediately
| signals the fantastic quality of the channel. So far the guy
| did get me excited about sidewalks.
|
| https://youtu.be/9OfBpQgLXUc
| paul_f wrote:
| Keep in mind, the Netherlands is the flattest country on
| Earth. If livable == mostly bicycles, it might be a somewhat
| unique situation. I am from Atlanta, GA, which is literally
| built on top of the Eastern Continental divide. There are no
| flat spots.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| I'm in Trondheim, Norway. There are few flat spots. It is
| livable - livable doesn't mean mostly bicycles.
|
| I walk most places: There are walking paths and crosswalks
| lots of places. I have nearby grocery stores in a short
| walking distance (10 minutes or less). Lots of folks ride
| bikes, and an amount of those folks put on studded tires in
| the winter. I simply do not as it is literally an uphill
| battle and I didn't grow up in a mountainous region. I can
| rent a manual bicycle or an electric scooter and be safe
| while riding.
|
| I can take public transport both across town and out of
| town. I have choices: There is a small tram line for some
| parts of town. Busses go both in town and between towns. I
| can take a train through much of Norway (from up north to
| Oslo) or over to Sweden if I want. Taxis exist, too, and
| they are clean. (Illegal taxis are here too, but I've never
| used them).
|
| And sure, there are cars and they are convenient - and like
| the US, you probably need one if you live in the
| countryside. But I can get by just fine without a license,
| too.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| This map of cyle paths in Europe tells you everything:
|
| https://imgur.com/Fkye6Nt
| gpvos wrote:
| That's not really about cities, more about cycle paths
| between them. But there's a relation of course.
| xvector wrote:
| Seconded, amazing channel that describes why American cities
| are a disaster.
|
| I've lived in a walkable area and QoL goes up immensely. No
| amount of money or luxury in an American suburb will compare.
| There is _nothing_ like the sheer convenience of being able
| to get your groceries in a 3 minute walk.
| Robelius wrote:
| Adding "City Beautiful" to the list of channels if you
| enjoy "Not Just Bikes"! It talks more generally about city
| planning/urban design, but satisfies the same itch of
| content.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| I visited the Netherlands a couple years ago and the
| convenience and practicality of the public transportation was
| eye opening. I sure wish we had something like that in the US!
| But it would cost money, money paid by taxes, which means that
| rich people would have to pay more than they benefit, so
| politically it's impossible. In America we try to push all
| social costs to the individual, which in practice means the
| middle class and the poor. Therefore because the public
| transportation is so bad, only people who can't afford cars use
| it, which means you have lots of homeless people using the bus
| as a dry place to take a nap, and so forth. It's usually dirty
| and the bus is always late. So it has a really bad reputation.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I can't understand who would _want_ to drive in Manhattan. Like
| where are they coming from and where are they going? Where do
| they intend to park when they get there? It wouldn 't occur to
| me in a million years to attempt to drive into a metropolis
| like that. I see normal private cars driving through New York
| and London and can't imagine who is in them and what they're
| attempting to do that means their best route is _through a
| city_.
| brnt wrote:
| Isn't the car proven to be the slowest form of transport in
| Manhattan anyways? Or at least, not faster than the metro,
| and not (significantly) faster than a bike? I recall a
| similar study about London putting the average velocity of a
| car solidly on-par with the average cycle velocity.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Where is everyone parking? Like you can't just pull up
| outside a shop on Regent's Street, park your car, pop in to
| grab something, and then come out again. So who are all
| these people driving up and down it?
|
| I can't imagine the logic of thinking 'I need to go into
| central London to do something today... I know I'll drive'.
| Not even just from an environmental standpoint - even
| without that the stress of navigating London and parking
| and then leaving your car in such a busy place.
| dagw wrote:
| _I need to go into central London to do something
| today... I know I 'll drive_
|
| A few years ago I arrived in London at Paddington station
| and was late for meeting on the other side of the city.
| I'd been told that taking the Tube could take up to 30
| minutes (including changes), so I decided to grab a Taxi.
| I arrived at my meeting 40 minutes later.
| h1srf wrote:
| It depends on where you're going to/from and at what time.
| During rush hour, yeah the subway is faster than taking a
| cab for my pre-Covid 35 or so block commute. There are some
| routes that require a bus transfer or a lot of walking that
| may be faster by car even in rush hour traffic. For example
| going from East Harlem to Chelsea where you're either
| transferring a few times or walking quite a bit.
| volkl48 wrote:
| I'm from New Jersey originally and have lot of family out on
| Long Island. Driving into or through Manhattan is very
| frequently (although not necessarily at rush hour) the most
| sensible choice, from both a time and cost perspective.
|
| ---------------
|
| High commuter rail costs - If you have 2+ people in the car,
| it's likely equal cost at worst to drive if your origin point
| is beyond the reach of the subway. This is especially true if
| you wish to go across the metro and therefore get to pay per-
| person fares on more than one commuter rail system. Going
| from 15mi West of Manhattan (NJ burbs) to 15mi East of
| Manhattan (Nassau County), will run you about $50 per person
| round-trip. It's not hard to see why no one would take
| commuter rail with their family of 4 for that trip even if
| they live next to a CR station and their family on the other
| side does as well, $200 is a lot of money.
|
| Parking - There's tons of (typically underground) garages in
| NYC and particularly Manhattan. While you may get gouged if
| you just randomly turn in to the first garage you see and pay
| the walkup rate, some minor research on rates can easily get
| you somewhere to park for $20-35 for a full day in Manhattan.
| 2 seconds on Spothero and I could park right next to Penn
| Station 9am-9pm today for ~$22, and that's not a rare
| exception. This was the case before those services as well,
| it just required more knowledge of where to look for deals.
|
| Scheduling - Off-peak/late-night frequencies are limited and
| service is often much slower. PATH (a subway with limited
| reach) to NJ runs 24/7, but late night you're looking at
| 40min between trains and the trip time often gains 5-10min as
| well between maintenance and a less direct routing. And if
| you don't live next to it's limited reach, you're still
| driving after that. On the actual commuter rail last trip is
| typically ~1AM and the last few trains of the night have
| 1-1.5hrs between trains on many lines. I could be back home
| by car before I even get on the train in Penn Station if I'm
| particularly unlucky on timing for when the concert I'm
| seeing ends.
|
| Infrastructure - There's 4 roads to get across the Hudson
| from NJ in the region, and 2 of them go into Manhattan. Not
| hard for an accident or minor disruption to make going
| through Manhattan the only way you're getting across to go to
| the other side in a sane period of time. The limitations of
| NYC's "ring" roads also mean you can't necessarily easily
| just go the longer way around the opposite side of the metro.
|
| There's plenty of areas even within NYC that are poorly
| served by transit services, to say nothing of the suburbs.
| When the trip takes 4 transfers to get there, it's a lot less
| appealing to take and a lot more at risk of issues, even if
| it should work in theory.
|
| -----------------
|
| I am not suggesting cars are the ideal mode of travel, and
| I'd like to see further investment in broadening both the
| reach and service levels of transit services, as well as re-
| examining fare pricing, but with the current
| systems/infrastructure being what they are.....yes, there are
| lots of trips where the sensible choice is to drive.
| sbilstein wrote:
| I dunno, I liked living in Manhattan and driving into nature
| every other weekend with my dog and wife. Turns out Zipcar is
| pretty shit overall if you actually like going to places.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| > I can't understand who would want to drive in Manhattan.
|
| I think the idea is that people will drive if their tolerance
| level for slowness is satisfied. So the amount of traffic
| will always be high enough to look acceptable for some
| people, unacceptable for others.
|
| As for parking, in London there are definitely parking lots
| scattered around the city - can't speak for New York though.
|
| > Like where are they coming from and where are they going?
|
| Probably going between their homes and family / friends /
| shops / entertainment venues / restaurants.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Probably going between their homes and family / friends /
| shops / entertainment venues / restaurants.
|
| But in cities these places don't have parking outside. So
| where are they parking?
| volkl48 wrote:
| There's in excess of 100,000 public off-street parking
| spaces in Manhattan below 60th St (as of 2009 - Manhattan
| Core Parking Study). Plus street parking.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > There's in excess of 100,000 public off-street parking
| spaces in Manhattan
|
| Ah I had no idea and would never have guessed that -
| thanks.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| > But in cities these places don't have parking outside.
|
| You won't always be able to park right outside your
| destination, but between street parking and garages
| there's definitely parking in many places.
| phicoh wrote:
| It would be interesting to have statistics on the number of
| cars driving through a city center compared to the number of
| people living and working there.
|
| My guess is that even if people living there use a car once a
| year, you end up with a huge number of cars every day.
| jokoon wrote:
| I'm french, I really don't know how the US are going to get out
| of cars, it's going to be incredibly hard or impossible.
|
| Mandatory ride sharing by taxing gas, or heavily subsidizing
| public transport?
|
| Uber would have an unique opportunity to group rides for small
| busses.
| refurb wrote:
| I love the US car culture. I've lived in places where car
| ownership is more restricted and I feel well...poor.
| maccolgan wrote:
| You absolutely do need 4 lane roads in Manhattan.
| qntty wrote:
| Really you don't even really need cars in Manhattan, except
| for delivery trucks and other exceptional cases. They should
| ban them.
| elgfare wrote:
| Uber says the majority of drivers don't want this, which I'd call
| bs on, but has anyone heard from actual drivers what they want?
| kfk wrote:
| I think Uber might be right here. EU labor laws protect a few
| but over a certain salary they are not very appealing. In Italy
| paying a net salary of 2,000 euros will cost the company 6000+.
| Things included like pension are not worth their cost, a
| private pension is better and cheaper, same for health
| services. It's unfortunate but it's true.
| brnt wrote:
| I've never heard anyone here in the EU argue this. Including
| people over a certain salary. It is, after all, in the
| interest of the wealthy too that everyone is OK and doesn't
| need to live in the streets and cause crime, necessitating
| guns and whatnot as they do in the US.
|
| Paying your tax and premiums is way cheaper and much more
| pleasant.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Yes this.. We don't want ultracapitalism here. I make more
| than average but I'm totally fine with paying taxes. The
| safety net is there for me too. Capitalism is good but
| there must be a balance.
|
| To an American it may sound communist (though technically
| it's more socialist) but it's our country, we can choose
| the system we want. And we've done an OK job IMO (In fact I
| wish things were a bit more socialist - this abuse of the
| ZZP concept has been going on for far too long).
| pault wrote:
| Decades of cold war propaganda have confused the issue in
| the US. When you say socialism, they think you are
| talking about USSR-style authoritarian communism. It's
| asurd and exasperating, but it won't go away until the
| boomer generati on loses political influence. It's also
| highly partisan, and in today's atmosphere of cultural
| warfare, that makes it a non-starter. Half the country
| won't wear a mask because Donald Trump wanted to deny the
| pandemic during his reelection campaign. What hope is
| there for something as radical as changing the entire
| foundation of society?
| Loic wrote:
| For the company it costs more money, but for the employee,
| you are way better being employed than contractor.
|
| This is not a surprise, this extra money is effectively
| bringing the employee health insurance, pension, invalidity
| pension, unemployment benefit, maximum number of hours to
| work per week, paid vacations, etc.
|
| If you need to pay it out of your pocket, it turns out to be
| the same.
|
| In the "old" Europe, the net salary is basically 50% of the
| cost for the company, sometimes a bit more, sometimes less
| depending of marital status, country, etc. But this is a good
| rule of thumb.
| bserge wrote:
| I can see the future: "New EU law: for every multipurpose
| robot in operation, the company must employ one human" :D
| consumer451 wrote:
| Well, maybe something more along the lines of a
| contribution towards UBI, or similar. This is a concept I
| first heard come out of the US, from Musk maybe?
| watt wrote:
| From the strikes of train driver's unions in Germany, I
| think that's where it is headed. "You can automate trains
| if you like, but the whole current workforce still must
| stay employed."
| laurent92 wrote:
| > this extra money is effectively bringing the employee
| health insurance, pension, invalidity pension, unemployment
| benefit,
|
| Yes, but about half that money gets "lost on the way". You
| don't contribute for yourself. You contribute for "others",
| but "others" is defined with very specific conditions so
| you can never be part of them. It's a way to take money
| from the people who sweat and eventually die at their
| workplace and give it to people who are preferred by (place
| the government of the moment here).
|
| Redistribution in Europe is a racial program.
|
| PS: I had a friend who went paraplegic and he was surprised
| that, after a life of donating 63% of his revenue to social
| contributions, his disability indemnity was...
|
| 923EUR.
|
| Per month.
|
| Including the part with which he's supposed to use to buy a
| disabled-compatible kitchen and the part that he's supposed
| to use to hire domestic help. 923EUR!!! He's paid the state
| >2500EUR per month for 15 years!!! He's basically in
| poverty now.
|
| The rest of the social contributions goes to muslims.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads into political or
| ideological flamewar, and especially not religious or
| race flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and it
| destroys what it is for.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Edit: when an account crosses into using HN primarily for
| ideological battle, that's when we ban it - regardless of
| which ideology it's battling for or against. So please
| don't do that. Again: it's not what this site is for, and
| it destroys what it is for.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=co
| mme...
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| I have paid the ridiculous charge from Rome's airport to the
| city, it's interesting how many measures airports like Rome,
| Madrid, Barcelona have to take to keep Uber out as good as
| possible. I still agree with the Dutch court. First, EU has a
| goal to somewhat harmonize some laws and taxes. Europe should
| not simply allow any company to come along and undermine
| everything. If Europe let's this happen, the consequence is
| very simple, in case the drivers don't make ends meet, they
| will claim it from social services, making me the guy who
| pays for that. So taxpayers are subsidiaries to uebers
| shenanigans, no thanks. I support the European tax system and
| social policies, but I am not gonna pay the SV salaries for
| some "wise guys", I prefer the taxes invested in
| infrastructure, health care, the useful things, including
| pensions.if I would prefer the US model, I would go and live
| there.
| crote wrote:
| A bit off-topic, but why would you take a taxi for that
| trip? A train to the city leaves evert 15 minutes and costs
| you only EUR14. By car it's a 30km ride!
|
| This is true for basically every single European city.
| Public transport is of such high quality that taking a taxi
| simply doesn't make sense.
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| Was cold after cross continent flight and just missed the
| train by a few minutes, was also pretty late, place
| looked abandoned, had a bit too much luggage and had no
| idea how to get to my destination. Any other
| circumstances, I would take the train.
| maccolgan wrote:
| Why yes let's just remove the ability of people to take a
| market-priced car ride... Have you considered the private
| space that a car affords? (albeit shared with the driver)
| bserge wrote:
| > claim it from social services
|
| You say it like they just walk in, ask for money and get
| it. It's really much harder, practically impossible if
| you're not on some priority list (with kids, disability,
| single mother, etc).
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| I know, it takes time to claim it, and this actually
| infuriates me even more, because all the cla procedures
| are handled by expensive government staff, of course this
| is due to security checks, to exclude fraudulent claims.
| All paid for by taxpayers so Uber can burn another
| buck(they're still never profitable are they, tells me
| everything about the business model). The good thing is,
| once it works, it works.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| It's probably worth noting that the EU has nothing to do
| with this. These are policies of individual countries, EU
| has very little if anything to do with taxes, pensions or
| health care.
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| It's true that the EU has no federal executive body,
| however, no country can simply go and set corporate taxes
| to 0 without an uproar. the cross border phone network is
| unified for example. The were Cyprus and Malta selling
| passports to the highest bidders without due diligence
| done,kickbacks and honey traps, you name it, it happened.
| https://euobserver.com/justice/149810
|
| There is a limit on how much can and can't be done within
| the EU, it's not a gravy train buffet. There is peer
| pressure and potential, let's call it cascading effect.
| Some lawmaker will hear about this and try to get it
| passed in another country as well. I struggle to think of
| one state which would simply accept Uber as some great
| Enterprise idea, look at the history here https://en.m.wi
| kipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_ridesharing_comp... Most
| places banned and this bit. In December 2017, the
| European Court of Justice ruled that Uber is a transport
| company, subject to local transport regulation in
| European Union member states, rather than an information
| society service as Uber had argued.[99]
|
| So at best, tolerated for the time being.
|
| In Europe, working without full compensation is typically
| called illicit work(instead of side gig), not extremely
| frowned upon, but the main job has to have proper
| compensation. It very normal and expected to get 4 weeks
| paid holidays or more, sick days covered, insurance in
| most places, pension contributions etc. Uber tells you to
| get a car, petrol, pay insurance and take jobs when
| available, and get none of the above, who are they
| kidding.
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| > In Italy paying a net salary of 2,000 euros will cost the
| company 6000+.
|
| I dispute this number. Do you have a source for this?
| aeyes wrote:
| I don't know much about Italy but should be pretty similar
| to Germany where we generally say the employer pays double.
| Example person unmarried, no kids, 35.
|
| - net: 2000EUR
|
| - gross: 3100EUR
|
| - company cost: 3850EUR
| killtimeatwork wrote:
| In Poland, it's like this, for an country-wide-average
| salary:
|
| - net: 4300 PLN - gross: 6000 PLN - total employer cost:
| 7200 PLN
|
| So, the total tax burden is around 40%.
|
| What gets neglected in these discussions though is that
| everything employer pays is counted as a cost he can
| write off from revenue to decrease his profit taxes
| (assuming company makes profit!). So, the effective cost
| on employer side is lower than 7200 PLN - naive
| calculation, assuming 15% profit taxes, would make it
| 0.85 * 7200 PLN = 6100 PLN.
| 988747 wrote:
| Salaries are always considered the cost of doing
| business, so I'm not sure what your point is here. What
| is important is that many people can't wrap their head
| around the fact that this additonal 1200 PLN which is
| labeled as "employer contribution" to social security is
| in fact part of their salary. So people do not realize
| that their tax burden is 40%, they think it is just 29%.
|
| Also, to make it worse, once you get your 4300 PLN salary
| into your bank account, you pay on average 16% VAT on
| every purchase (8-23%, depending on the item bought). So
| in reality your net salary is 4300*0.84 = 3612, making
| total tax burden almost 50%.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| That may be the case but you can't just decide as an employer
| that you don't want to honour an employee's rights.
|
| If things don't add up or can be done a cheaper way, talk to
| the government. Don't stop obeying the law.
| ihalip wrote:
| No way taxes are 66% of the gross salary.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > No way taxes are 66% of the gross salary.
|
| In EU countries, there are _many_ taxes that do not carry
| the official name "tax".
|
| Much easier that way to get the people to swallow the pill.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| That's not just taxes, he/she is including pension,
| healthcare etc. on top of not just employee but also
| employer taxes.
| chongli wrote:
| Since the pension is mandatory it's essentially a tax to
| pay for a government provided pension. Same goes for
| everything else.
| Kiro wrote:
| Social security fees are added on top of gross salary (and
| normally not visible on your payslip) so it's not a tax per
| se but still a cost for the company.
| eplanit wrote:
| Uber drivers I've asked have, without exception, said that they
| oppose these moves to make them employees. I ask almost every
| one whose car I get in.
| tgv wrote:
| It isn't (only) about what the actual drivers want. I'm sure
| they also want more money, but Uber isn't going to give it to
| them. It's also about fair competition, health and unemployment
| insurance, pension, etc.
| refurb wrote:
| What a bizarre mentality. "I don't care if this is what you
| want, you cant have it"
| tgv wrote:
| Give me your money. Now why don't you?
|
| You're protecting your own interests. The state has to
| protect everyone's interests; and there's always an
| international aspect, at least in the EU. That goes beyond
| than what short-sighted and possibly "primed" employees
| might think they want.
| kmlx wrote:
| > The state has to protect everyone's interests
|
| i don't think this is correct. the state only protects
| their own interests. do these align with the general
| populace? sometimes they do, other times they don't.
| refurb wrote:
| Ahhh.... Protecting workers from their own stupidity. Got
| it.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I read an econ paper describing how uber drivers were making
| much less than they thought after taking into account gas and
| maintenance costs. I'm usually pretty against paternalism, but
| they made a really compelling case that uber drivers who were
| actually making less than minimum wage thought they were making
| $15-20. I'm not sure they know what's best for them.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Yeah, actually, I bring this topic up with almost every uber
| driver whose car I get into, and they tell me they do NOT want
| to change the freelance arrangement. My brother in law drives
| for Uber and tells me virtually no one he knows wants it
| changed either.
| krickkrack wrote:
| It's interesting to me that, generally speaking, both Uber and
| it's drivers are fine with the way things are, entering into a
| mutually agreed upon contract...
|
| Only to have people who have no skin in the game tell them both
| what they have to do... because it's 'the right thing'.
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| That's not the whole picture, though. You can't bring a bull to
| a full dance club and do a rodeo, just because you and the bull
| mutually agree. There is collateral damage here, taxpayers
| paying the social expenses meant to be paid by Uber and the
| unemployment money and services for the taxi drivers pushed
| into unemployment by the Uber money burning scheme for
| predatory pricing practices is something that is not mutually
| agreed upon with the governments. Uber is dancing on a thin
| thread on this
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/001985...
|
| So the government imposed a bit of a less radical change, as
| predatory pricing consists of predating(done) and
| recoupment(not happened yet). This is the legal term for
| Microsoft embrace, extend, extinguish practice.
| Pete-Codes wrote:
| Nice one Dutchies
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| The thing that interests me here is company valuation. The base
| idea is that you predict the future profits of a company and NPV
| that down to today, and that's how much the total share price
| should be.
|
| This of course is tricky, but at some point all the big
| regulatory arbitrage plays (uber, airbnb) etc were obvious for
| what they were - and I am not sure they got adjusted. In other
| words short term competition and PR played as big a role it seems
| in valuation models as did "can airbnb keep renting out against
| local laws"
|
| I have not dug into their IPO documents but it must be in there.
|
| But once you are worth a gazillion dollars regulators have an
| uphill struggle.
|
| The thing is short selling is such a poor way to signal criticism
| of the company. Investing is a default optimistic thing.
|
| And I am not sure there is an alternative. Some kind of anti-
| investment?
| t0mas88 wrote:
| > I have not dug into their IPO documents but it must be in
| there.
|
| Any IPO document I've seen had several pages of future risks,
| so I'm almost certain that Uber has put the regulatory thing
| somewhere in that chapter.
| Iolaum wrote:
| Maybe invest elsewhere? (Assuming qualified choices can be
| found.)
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| But that's not the point - I mean if _everyone_ did then the
| company would get the point. But look at Climate change. FOr
| decades its been "ignore the tree huggers" - but imagine
| there was an investment vehicle that was "anti-Exxon" - its
| hard to stand up at the AGM and say "just tree huggers" when
| there is a Trillion dollars of bets against you.
|
| I don't think there is any possible such vehicle.
|
| I just kind of wish there was.
|
| A way of allowing the market to take care of externalities.
|
| All we have is regulation, and as a fan of markets, that kind
| of annoys me. (or rather, I recognise that markets are after
| all dependant on the existence of government (as opposed to
| the right-wing style if only governments did not exist
| markets would take over). And am annoyed that this market has
| not been created.)
| Proven wrote:
| Nonsense. The government has no right to decide how consenting
| private parties arrange their relationship.
| Grimm1 wrote:
| Legitimate question, will Uber shut down it's Dutch operations
| now? Will this cost them more money than it's worth to operate
| there, and would they shutdown to send a message to other nations
| about there intent should similar rulings be made?
|
| Uber's margins have always been super thin, I would imagine this
| makes them squarely unprofitable in the Dutch market.
| maccolgan wrote:
| Uber has done that before, I'd not be surprised
| alkonaut wrote:
| If other taxi companies can operate under these terms then so
| can Uber. The margins are thin for other taxi companies too.
|
| The question is perhaps: is Uber interested in being just
| another taxi company, withut much of a disruptive edge?
| Traster wrote:
| This is what is likely to happen to Uber almost everywhere
| eventually. Courts will slowly re-impose the workers rights
| that Uber set out to avoid, the cost of an uber ride will go
| up, which will shift riders back to more traditional transport
| - busses, trains, bicycles and cars. Leaving a much smaller,
| much less powerful Uber. Without the scale and the price making
| power, Uber will see its value massively massively drop
| shrinking to the value of a large taxi company (albeit one
| that's throwing huge amounts of money away on extremely
| expensive silicon valley engineers)
| maccolgan wrote:
| And in the background, consumers get fucked.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| Your convenience does not matter if employees are being
| exploited.
| maccolgan wrote:
| Who decides what's exploitation? Me? You? The drivers?
| Uber? The court system? Who may be right or wrong?
| kazen44 wrote:
| usually the legal branch of a country.
|
| You know, the legal definition of what is exploitative
| labour and what isn't.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > Will this cost them more money than it's worth to operate
| there
|
| But isn't that already the case? I not sure Uber is making a
| profit anywhere in the world, so maybe they don't care if they
| lose $0.58 or $0.75 per ride?
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