
Uber loses latest legal bid over driver rights - clouddrover
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46617584
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thatoneuser
“Drivers... want to keep the freedom to choose if, when and where they drive.”
“If drivers were classified as workers they would inevitably lose some of the
freedom and flexibility that comes with being their own boss."

Lol. These companies are still pushing this blatantly false propaganda that
you can “make $25+ an hour” and that you’re free to just pop in and out if the
system whenever you want to achieve that. Here’s the reality - you’re only
going to make that kind of money on a few select hours. Namely - late nights,
early mornings, and weekends (again mostly nights). The reality is most hours
of the week you may be looking at making <$15 an hour, and that’s before you
consider wear and tear, gas, extra insurance, tickets (given enough time you
will get fined doing this kind of work one way or another), and all the other
little costs that come up (bring tissues and water bottles and candy for your
passengers!).

There’s virtually no freedom in this unless you’re literally just trying to
make beer money for a night and work for 2-3 hours a week. If you depend on
this for consistent work (read: not a career, but a full time fill in between
jobs) - you’re going to be raked over the coals. You don’t get a choice in
when or where you work. Hell you don’t even really have the choice to decline
rides unless you’re willing to drive all the way to a person (up to 15 mins
away), THEN the app tells you where you’re headed, and at that point you
probably have a person standing there looking at you. You can drive away and
cancel, but these companies know that the empathetic nature of most people
makes that extremely painful. Plus you’ve wasted your time and gas (unpaid)
getting here, so you’re paying for this “freedom”. You can’t set boundaries
for where you work - you might end up hours from home and again, you now have
to subsidize the cost of getting home again.

So basically every claim these companies make about the value they give to
their workers is bullshit. You don’t control “if” you drive, any more than you
control “if” you eat. You don’t control where you drive... pretty much at all.
And you don’t control “when” you drive unless you’re willing to work below
minimum wage. I would love if these assholes get buried and have to pay back
all the drivers historically for the wages they deserve and give compensation
for the psychological manipulation they’ve orchestrated. I can’t believe that
in 2018 we still permit these shenanigans that systemically restructure
themselves to squeeze through clearly illegal employment methods that would be
handled in any other industry.

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deogeo
> "If drivers were classified as workers they would inevitably lose some of
> the freedom and flexibility that comes with being their own boss."

Does the law actually mandate that employers offer less freedom and
flexibility if someone is classified as a worker? Because from my vague
familiarity with it, it does nothing of the sort, and this statement by Uber
is misleading well beyond the point of lying. After all, isn't it precisely
the lack of said "freedom and flexibility" that got their contractors
classified as workers in the first place?

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cjlars
I'm many US states, loss of flexibility is the likely outcome. For example, in
California you cannot pay someone for a shift lasting less than two hours. You
can send them home if there's no work, but you still owe them at least two, if
not four hours worth of pay. So if a driver wants to knock out a few trips
while he/she has some time to kill, that would functionally be illegal due to
the cost burden. Current employment law assumes scheduled shifts, so the
"drive when you want" option would likely fall apart when Uber is given the
legal right to dictate that X number of drivers will be working peak hours.

