It took Uber 2 years to acknowledge the fact that, yes, you need insurance when you drive a car commercially.
It will take another few until they’ll acknowledge that their drivers are employees, not contractors, and can demand medical insurance, retirement funds, etc.
All these things used to be provided thanks to regulation, and we’re seeing now how removing the regulation leads to uninsured cars on the roads driven by people earning below minimum wage without any social security.
I agree that Uber is flouting some reasonable, still-relevant regulations[1]. However, the insistence on "Uber needs to provide medical insurance, retirement funds, etc" is ... well, it comes off as a bit quixotic. If you did "lay down the law" one day, does that mean workers magically have all kinds of freebies?
No, it would be paid for out of the same revenues that Ubers drivers are currently being paid with. Instead of "$1/mile", it'll be "$0.30/mile, minimum mile requirement, and you get health insurance". Out of one pocket, into the other.
[1] "If someone is driving for your service, you must verify, not just trust, that they're insured, whether or not you provide that insurance yourself."
Well, how does it work for taxi drivers employed at taxi companies in Germany then?
Mandatory minimum wage, mandatory health insurance, mandatory retirement funds, mandatory unemployment insurance, etc.
Yes, in the end they usually get nothing for doing extra work (just their wage, plus 0€/mile), but that’s most definitely better:
The risk is gone – you don’t have to worry about medical stuff, or anything anymore, even as McDonalds fastfood drone you still have insurance, etc guaranteed.
I get the benefits of having benefits. But even in Germany, independent contractors are "a thing", and there are at least some workers who don't have their employer/main client directly paying for their benefits. And for (at least some of) those cases, we can recognize that it's pointless to make that main client pay for their benefits. Some workers believe they are better of by having contractor status and buying their own benefits, and you would need to find a compelling reason not to let this happen; that's why I'm asking for the logic behind the mandate against it.
When you think someone is flouting a reasonable law, that should directly translate into "here's a collective action problem whose solution they're disrupting".
"X should not be allowed to pollute at Y levels." -> "There is a collective action problem of preventing damage to the environment, which requires that everyone pollute less than Y, even though people privately benefit from doing more."
"Hans should not be allowed to pickpocket the wallets of passersby." -> "There is a collective action problem of ensuring stable property rights, which requires that people respect others' possessions, even though they privately benefit from stealing."
"Uber should buy health insurance for drivers." -> "There is a collective action problem of ????, which requires that Uber buy health insurance for drivers, even though they privately benefit from paying them cash instead."
Note 1: your answer to ???? must not be so broad that it proves you should buy health insurance for every person you buy a service from, including e.g. the independent courier that delivered your package.
Note 2: I made an honest attempt to unravel the logic of "what is the law accomplishing with the employer/contractor boundary", in an attempt to answer that question, in this post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10717768
If you have a better answer, I'm very interested in learning from it.
Well, the German society has decided that yes, you should buy health insurance for every person you buy a service from, including the courier.
The result is subsidized healthcare via a complicated and weird system.
In fact, in Germany the employee always pays the healthcare insurance themselves as solution, but the government subsidizes it.
Sometimes the situation is that, yes, everyone should have something, so the employee/contractor divide makes no sense.
In the Uber/Lyft situation, the drivers should have health insurance through the government, and the car should be insured during the ride or between the rides by the companies.
The issue was about whether you should have to directly buy that courier's health insurance, and German law (as you note) obviates that question. (Though it didn't help to blur the difference between directly buying the courier's insurance vs indirectly via taxes, which was the core distinction the discussion was making.)
So I don't know why you (earlier upthread) thought that the German practice provided any insight into how to resolve the issue, given that US forces some purchasers ("employers") but not others ("customer") to provide certain benefits.
The German model does, however, provide a clean way to "cut" this "Gordian knot".
I get the feeling from Hacker News that in bigger cities there are far, far more people doing Uber full-time-ish than in smaller, population-1-million cities. For those doing it 40 hours a week as their livelihood, I can understand the call for more regulation, etc.
However, by far most of the folks I know doing Uber or Lyft are a lot closer to a contractor in definition.
* They use their own car they've already had before Uber (I.e., they didn't buy it just for Uber as some Uber forum posts talk about)
* They do it part time
* Most are doing it for "something new," when I ask them about it. For example I knew one driver who in her fifties just tried it to be out of the house more.
> * They use their own car they've already had before Uber (I.e., they didn't buy it just for Uber as some Uber forum posts talk about)
Interestingly, buying a car specifically to drive for ridesharing apps would actually be a point in favor of them being a contractor (they're making an investment in their "business")
Great powers are rattling sabers, electric cars are in their infancy, Russia and France are allies, Turkey is sliding into civil war, Japan is on the road of re militarization ...
