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The Uber Economy Needs a New Category of Worker
An anonymous reader writes: Uber headlines a new group of companies building out the so-called "sharing economy," in which people can easily hop in and out of employment modes. Somebody can suddenly start hiring out his driving services to others, taking breaks and setting hours as he prefers, and then just as quickly stop participating forever. An article at NY Magazine says we need to define a new class of worker to fit Uber drivers and similar at-will employees. "According to American employment law, though, our driver must be one or the other, a 1099 contractor or a W2 employee. And the gulf between the two in terms of mandated government protections and benefits is as wide as the line between them is blurry. As such, thousands of on-demand-economy employees and scads of lawyers are at war in court to determine what camp our average driver should fall into. ... It might be time for a new standard that splits the difference between the two — a 'dependent contractor,' as some labor experts call it — that would be better for businesses, consumers, and all those workers themselves."
Why is a third category of worker needed? What are the benefits and down sides? Is this going to be exploited by walmart the way they give their workers 34 hours per week to avoid giving them benefits?
The legal distinction boils down to control. If the employer can control the person, they are an employee. Otherwise, they are an independent contractor. By control, we mean the ability to direct the work. This classification works just fine for Uber. Can they control how the drivers provide their services to Uber's customers? Uber's desire is to have the driver classified as someone to whom they refer work. This is a farce.
The article mentions that the drivers can accept or decline the work and set their own hours. So what? That's part of the "employment package" so to speak. When the driver does accept a job, they are required to conform to Uber's policies and perform the job under Uber's control. That's an employee!
Uber is concerned about their bottom line given the recent California decision classifying one of the drivers as an employee. They will be forced to comply with a host of employment laws. To carve out another category of employee really adds nothing to the discussion and muddies the waters with regards to legal classifications that have worked very well for decades.
Look, I get that these guys are trying to do something new. And for that I applaud them and their efforts. However until there are new laws supporting the sort of things they're trying to do they need to follow the current laws especially regarding employment.
Just because you came up with a new way to run things doesn't mean that the rest of it like it or agree that's the way the world should work. Especially when it seems like all you're doing is trying to dodge current legal frameworks without any good reason for doing so.
People who do small side jobs (including myself occasionally) often aim for cash payment to avoid government reporting (especially so-called "self-employment" taxes); it's been called "working under the table" forever. Or if you do regular contract work (which I also do), you get an LLC, go the 1099 route and bury as many expenses you can against the LLC to avoid reporting much of a profit (because profit=taxes). Both routes are common and well-accepted.
>> dependent contractor
Please [diety], no. We just got done with this fight. If you define the terms of success and let me pick how it's done within certain standards of quality, I'm a contractor, and I'll take cash. If you ALSO want me to behave like an employee, controlling my hours, sitting through useless HR presentations, and acting like an agent of a corporation, then I'm an employee and I want the full benefit package. It's pretty black-and-white and has never really been an issue in the dozens of contracts I've been involved in.
Independent contractors. Plain and simple. Now, the IRS will probably need another army of folks to go after those no reporting enough of their income. Perhaps the army of IRS workers can be borrowed from the ACA group.
We don't need categories. All these situations are voluntary and should be handled by contract. Stop creating regulations that make it harder for people to get a little income.
try an old one: Migrant worker.
With all of the liabilities of a small business owner and none of the benefits.
Yes, that's the category that corporate America is working to move all of us into.
Easy as that.
Until then fuck this joke of a company.
"Unlicensed"
- taxi (ride sharing)
- plumber (flow sharing)
- electrician (connection sharing)
- fireman (Jerry, you really have to stop making those 'wee-ooh wee-ooh' sounds while you drive)
"We need workers that have as much rights as machines, make us money, but are never in the way, and require no maintenance"
Well, you can't have both. Either you are a non-profit organisation that facilitates people doing something for each other, or you are a for-profit employer with employees. Uber seems to think that the term "sharing economy" means that everybody "shares" their money towards Uber itself.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Bit of advice. Do not do too much 'under the table' unless you have a good retirement setup.
I have known at least 3 people who did that and screwed themselves when they were 70. As you had no income your SS is crap. Try living in an efficiency apartment with 2 major medical problems and 300 bucks a month coming in.
One guy I know has a small disc marking where his gravesite is. My dad put it there because the dudes nephew decided 4k was better spent on heroin.
The analogy is the actor's agent and the actor. "Find me some work, but I reserve the right not to take the part."
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
Instead of trying to cram-down "flexibility" from above to dodge benefits laws, why not make it compete with first-tier FTE work and benefits.
That is, an employer cannot make someone accept less than FTE as a condition of accepting work, nor be required to accept employment through a third party - for all skill levels.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
How long does a "Uber worker" stay "working?"
Is it a career or is is simply a stop-gap measure to avoid homelessness and hunger?
If Uber, Tesla and Google can find a way to remove the human from their income stream they will.
Everyone else can wither and die.
What is going to happen when coders are replaced by software and there is no longer a customer vase for your "next big app?"
In the UK this would be classed as a "Casual or Irregular Worker" under the following criteria:
https://www.gov.uk/employment-...
Seems to fit what Uber want out of a worker...
The other categories identified by the UK Government are "employee", "shareholding employee", "self employed or contractor", "director" and "office holder".
"Gee, how do we create a legal category for workers that don't have any of the hard-won protections of being employed, but also don't have the flexibility of being contractors? Something like non-skilled dependent slaves that can be hired and fired several times a day, depending on the market?"
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
If America keeps going down this road of temporary/flexible employment the middle class will be totally FUCKED.
I would say working under the table is a little different class; it might be the same ends, getting some extra cash, but working under the table is more like "doing odd jobs." (Tax law already accommodates this; you don't need to give a W2 or 1099 to someone you pay less than $500/year.) On the "employee" side, you just have more flexibility in reporting your income; not reporting is still a violation.
In California, the annual S Corp tax MINIMUM is $800 (plus 1.5% of the net income).
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
In more cases than not, contract work (fixed term) only exists to dodge benefits laws.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
That's what I want in a service my life depends on: here today and gone tomorrow like a fart in the wind.
Capital is still screwing labor. In the 21st century the trendy name is "sharing economy" and "freelance worker".
Stuff that matter? This is an article about some academic excercise in employment law?
I'm fairly certain contingent work existed before Uber.
Why do we need to reinvent this, unless we're simply looking for a new way to reclassify full time employees as contractors?
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
In recent scifi I think this is classed as "turk" work, a unfortunate term based on the scam of the Mechanical Turk, which Amazon also adopted for one of their service offerings.
This term is used in at least the Metatropolis story anthologies by multiple authors (John Scalzi editing) and there's development on the theme in the plot of some stories (Detroit) so I don't want to give too many details.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/...
There's some parallel with "runners" from various cyberpunk scifi and gaming, too: Work for money with little formal relationship with the source of the contracts ("Mr Johnson") and a very simple professional code of ethics.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmw...
http://shadowrun.wikia.com/wik...
Doomo chums!
<script>alert("I never liked JavaScript, really; it just seemed a bad idea.");</script>
How about illegal worker?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
1099 Contractors can't be controlled like a regular employee. You can't train them and you can't direct their behavior (such as work hours, etc) while working. Companies don't like this, as in some of these internet companies are pulling their 1099 employees in as W2 employees so they can control them better. What these finance guys want is a new category where they can control you like a W2 employee but don't have to give you benefits like a 1099. The employer gets the best of both worlds and the employee gets bent over and taken.
I'm sure the people suggesting this would like to see the minimum wage dropped to zero as well so they can make more cash exploiting people.
Perfect time for the fairtax.
The only reason this is a problem is because of the tax implications.
If you ALSO want me to behave like an employee, controlling my hours, sitting through useless HR presentations, and acting like an agent of a corporation, then I'm an employee and I want the full benefit package
Funny, that's exactly what contractors do. I was a contractor for 4 years at a desk where I had to show up in exact hours, attend OIG presentations about sexual harassment and child pornography on business systems, and of course was not allowed to post on Facebook where I work.
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There is no reason why Uber can't have work rules for employee drivers that fit the current Uber business model. They just don't want to pay for benefits and offer employment protection like unemployment compensation and minimum wage. Uber wants to take the profits while transferring all the risk to the driver.
There is no question that the current taxi system is a relic of another time and should be dismantled. But that can be done without dis-empowering the workers. The current trend in the courts is to classify drivers as employees rather than contractors since it is Uber that decides (via their app) when and where the work can be done. A contractor is free to decide when and where the work is done. So Uber does not fit the contractor model.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
>Implying anyone on Slashdot will ever collect from Social Security.
What do think caused all of the stock market crashes: volatility. When you have people with no stability, like say working for a few days, then trying to find another job, they spend most of their time trying to find a job rather than actually working and doing something productive. Worse yet, with this kind of stability, people can not even begin to image of buying a house, a car, and I doubt working day to day, you can even get an apartment.
This form of volatile, "at-will" employment is just INSANE.
YES! Let's create a category where a company is allowed to associate with a worker so temporary they have absolutely no obligation to them whatsoever. The Walmarts and McDonalds of the nation won't start to jump on that AT ALL. Nothing can go wrong!
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Because it still hasn't been conclusively argued or demonstrated that Uber drivers actually are being employed by anyone. If I ran a ride-sharing (or whatever you want to call this Uber/Lyft type thing) service on my Facebook wall, would I be considered an employee of Facebook?
So why is it any different if I find my customers using Uber instead of Facebook? The only thing even remotely resembling an employment relation I can see is between ride-hailer and driver. All Uber does is provide the network for the two to find each other, and it's specious to assume on that basis alone that there's an employment relationship between the company and the hailer.
(If Uber drivers aren't employees, they're not salaried/waged/permanent employees, contract employees, or casual employees. I mention this because there are people in this thread suggesting that casual/temp employment is a suitable classification. It isn't, and it can't be a suitable classification until the existence of an employment relationship is demonstrated.)
Basically, an Uber driver is self-employed. Hiring an Uber driver to drive you around is like hiring a bricklayer to lay you some bricks. There is no employment relation between the worker and hirer.
This is increasingly about billion dollar corporations trying to create a new category of worker which gives them maximum benefit, while giving nothing at all to the employee.
This is entirely about greedy assholes whose business model is reliant on screwing up the labor market so badly they can abuse employees in any way they see fit.
All so that some asshole of a CEO can make millions in bonuses as he works to hype his over-inflated stock so he can cash out and leave someone else holding the bag.
Greedy assholes want the economy to change around them so they can be the best damned greedy assholes possible.
This is just the continuation of the raping of society to benefit a relatively small amount of people, while telling us the lie that somehow that gives us all prosperity.
And this "new class of worker" is pretty much an example of this. We fuck everybody else over so this bullshit libertarian "sharing economy" can be made profitable by assholes who want to bypass both industry regulations and employment laws.
Uber are fucking crooks and liars, pretending like fucking over everybody else is somehow good for us.
American political thought is a fucking venereal disease.
Then more likely you weren't a contractor. You were an employee treated as a contractor.
It's why tax agencies are scrutinizing employment contracts because there are a bunch of differences between a contractor and an employee. And simply calling an employee a contractor doesn't make them one - there are many things a contractor is free to do, and tax agencies look to that.
In other words, most "contractors" are really working in an environment where the employer is just screwing them over - they aren't real contractors.
Uber's probably looking at the same as well - paid indentured servant perhaps? I mean, it isn't that hard to make them real independent contractors - you just have to run the risk that half your Uber drivers might also work for Lyft and competitors. Binding them to Uber and making them follow Uber's way is closer to employee than contractor.
Glad that works for you, but you do realize that there are an awful lot of contractors who sign contracts stipulating that they'll be available certain hours, work in a certain place, and even dress a certain way? You're certainly within your rights to respond to such a contract with, "If you're going to treat me like an employee, then I want the full package." A lot of other people would rather be considered contractors despite the employee-like restrictions. It's not a black-and-white contractor-with-only-acceptance-criteria versus employee-with-working-restrictions choice for everyone.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Funny, that's exactly what contractors do. I was a contractor for 4 years at a desk where I had to show up in exact hours, attend OIG presentations about sexual harassment and child pornography on business systems, and of course was not allowed to post on Facebook where I work.
You weren't a contractor, you were an employee.
If you did that for 4 years, it may be worth your time to open a complaint with the IRS, the company owes you SS contributions and tax payments. You might be shocked how much money it ends up being.
"Dependent contractor" or "Independent contractor"... The government doesn't care if you call them scabs, dickwads, or chodes!
Regardless of your terminology, Uber will end up collecting taxes for their employees. I guarantee it. Uber will be the example!
Too bad they just bought their new huge headquarters because the American taxpayer is going to be the one footing the bill for that shit once they're gone.
We already have this class of worker. It's called a "day laborer". Show up looking for work, or don't, on a day to day basis. Get paid if you show up and somebody has work for you. Drop in and out of the labor pool at will. There's no fancy app to arrange day labor, but apart from that how is driving for Uber any different from hanging around outside Home Depot hoping someone happens by who needs half a dozen cheap construction workers or landscapers?
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
>> fireman (Jerry, you really have to stop making those 'wee-ooh wee-ooh' sounds while you drive)
Where I live we call them "volunteer firefighters" and everyone knows to get their kids away from the streets when the town whistle sounds because a couple of pick-ups with flashing lights on their dashboards will be flying through your residential neighborhood at 3x the speed limit anytime now.
So which party is going to commit political suicide by removing it?
They were talking about it not existing 25 years ago when I started working. Its about 25 years until I start using it. That is not THAT long from now.
For the people who complain about the gray line between the two existing categories - creating a third will not solve that problem. Then you just get two gray lines between three categories. This is sometimes referred to as the conservation of ambiguity.
If you think deeply enough, you will have no single direction for your outrage.
>> So which party is going to commit political suicide by removing it?
I'll bite. I'll bet it's the Democrats, who start to shift more retirement benefits into services (particularly health services, food stamps and housing assistance for the elderly; all such programs currently exist) and away from cash payouts (which will be how they get some Republicans to go along). Long story short, the government will claim that your total benefit continues to increase while your cash payments drop.
(Many corporations have already piloted this model in the last 6 years with "total benefit" statements that show why it's OK there are no raises because the company picked up the tab for health insurance spikes instead, for example.)
No thank you, but you're asking to make the problem worse.
Default to FTE's, and make any lesser form (contract work, third party, and/or combinations) be strictly on no-duress consent.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Then more likely you weren't a contractor. You were an employee treated as a contractor.
It's why tax agencies are scrutinizing employment contracts because there are a bunch of differences between a contractor and an employee.
Well maybe the IRS should scrutinize itself, because guess who hires contractors who must come in between 6am-6pm, span 8 hours, take a half-hour lunch (and it MUST be taken--if you work straight with no lunch, you must stay 8.5 hours and file a 30 minute lunch, and it can't be taken within an hour of arriving or leaving), track your time using only the Deltek software, use their specific tools and software systems, attend sexual harassment training required by HR, attend yearly presentations by the agency's Office of the Inspector General about child pornography and fraud, etc... all while the agency carries no responsibility for your benefits, and has the ability to fire you?
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The IRS hires contractors this way. The IRS also defines, in IRS publications, what a contractor is. Do you not know what OIG is? It's the Office of Inspector General, the law enforcement branch of any government agency. Social Security has OIG, the IRS has its own OIG, your state unemployment agency has its own OIG. These are the people who show up at your house with guns when you lie on your forms and get money that doesn't belong to you.
The IRS, the agency which defines what a contractor is, hires contractors who must work on 6am-6pm flex time, straight 8 hours, with a half hour lunch--if you don't take a lunch, you must work 8.5 hours straight, and file it as 8 hours (you don't get paid that last half hour). They can also fire you, specifically, without eliminating your position. They also don't pay your benefits, because you're a contractor.
I don't work as a contractor anymore because the logistics are annoying.
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A NEW category OF WORKER IE a .... SLAVE!
Incorporating yourself and paying yourself a salary to avoid payroll taxes is likely to attract auditors (well, not this year, the IRS is too poor, but in the future, it will).
If you do this, be sure to contact a tax professional so you know what hoops to jump through to survive an audit.
On the plus side, you can write off the tax professional's fees as a business expense :).
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
With sane courts, if you provide the tools and pick when and where you work, you're a contractor. If you don' supply the tools, or you have to show up and do what you're tasked with, then you're an employee. California has differences deliberately to make farm laborers into "employees" in order to at least get employment taxes out of illegals.
Homeless, or a sub-classification to match the story: Living In Your Car.
We all know what this is really about.
Revenue collection.
It's about the IRS and the state governments not liking that there are 162,037 independent contractors they have to go after for taxes, rather than going after a single choke-point for those same taxes. Thus they would prefer that Uber drivers be employees, rather than contractors.
The answer for Uber is obvious: The cheapest S-corp incorporation runs $39. So to get those 162,037 incorporated as contracting agencies with a single employee would cost $6,319,443.
I'm sure Uber would be happy to pay that out of petty cash. Now the IRS has 162,037 contracting agencies to deal with, all under the total number of employees thresholds that would subject them to most of the government regulations that Uber would be subject to, were they Uber employees.
So they are back in the same regulatory boat they started in, without the ambiguity that regulators are trying to exploit to get their hands on the money, and leaving with exactly the same enforcement issues they wanted to avoid.
They could probably also spin off an "Uber Business Services Division" that charges a flat fee for:
Business license
Business name and/or DBA registration
Account for taxes
Sales tax account
Federal and State Tax ID
Business checking credit accounts
Merchant account (to process credit cards) (or used the new "Uber Payment Provider Gateway" instead)
Insurance (business, liability, property, if applicable)
Accounting software (or use the new "Uber Books" online accounting system)
Or they could just create a damn franchising company, and make them all franchisees, with Uber's take coming as franchise fees.
P.S.: I suggested a similar approach to AirB&B to incorporate them all as actual B&B's...
If you're doing the business in California, then California gets their taxes. In order to do business in California, you'd have to register as a "foreign corporation" (i.e. one that is not incorporated in CA). And guess what, the Franchise Tax Board wants to see your $800+1.5% too.
And, as a business operating in California, don't forget you need to pay personal property tax (approx 1% per year) on all business property. That gets down to stuff like the chair you're sitting on (which you can depreciate, of course), your computer, the paper in your printer, etc.. This applies whether you incorporated in CA or elsewhere.
There may be other reasons to incorporate elsewhere. You might be able to use your incorporation state as a legal venue for interpretation of contracts and various regulatory matters. Delaware has fairly light requirements on reporting, for instance.
Not necessarily, this is almost exactly how it works on Federal Contracts. You work in the federal building on their networks, etc. You have core hours you have to adhere too, but you can be fully 1099 with no problem.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Unless the client hired you directly and you billed them for your time, you were an employee of the staffing agency that placed you.
What A New Class Of Worker Could Mean For The Future Of Labor
But while a third classification sounds progressive, nobody’s really sure what it would mean in practice. The hope is to find find a way to distribute the responsibility of employment over multiple employers, making it possible for them to jointly contribute to a single benefits package that is linked to the individual, wherever that person happens to be working at any given time.
When I see lines like "...that would be better for businesses, consumers, and all those workers themselves." I get VERY skeptical. Rarely do we all win.
Uber has all the smell and feel of Wiley Coyote staying in air by running fast enough and not looking down. Drivers are not making good enough wages once you factor in depreciation and other costs. A whole bunch of the usual costs of doing business are being swept under the rug, such as benefits, unemployment protection, and social security payments. Of these part time drivers who come and go, it means someone else is footing those bills (like their main employer, or the worker when their car dies).
1099 contractors are already an abused definition, just as exempt is. Adding more categories is just going to make it easier for corporations to arbitrage people's desire to put food on the table.
Initially, it's casual labor. Join the line at the edge of the Home Depot parking lot or sign up with Uber.
It's also what craft (not manufacturing) unions were for. Hiring halls and all that were to make it easier for employers to get labor under standardized conditions, with the union handling the administrative details and (often) the benefits. Of course, that got a bit out of hand and people began treating them as casual labor (see above) killing off the unions.
In a fair world, none of this should have any relevance to whether one is an "employee" or "contractor". In the past, as an employee I have had huge freedom to work my own hours, and as a contractor, I have worked under a rigidly controlled corporate structure with fixed hours and so on. It all depends on the situation, such as whether regular employees need to have you available during their working hours.
A key difference as I see it is that if you are a contractor, you should be paid at least the loaded rate (i.e. with benefits) of an employee doing the same work. If you aren't, the company is screwing you. And yes, I'm sure many companies are screwing many "contractors" who aren't in a good position to bargain. But I think that should be a primary part of the test of whether a "contractor" is really an employee.
A "aharing economy" is a socialist one. That is not acceptable. For all you people that want that, understand that's not what America was founded on, and we are willing to fight. Many people are willing to fight with military force.
Stop infringing on constitutional rights.
Stop trying to control all aspects of our lives.
Stop trying to obstruct our freedom.
Leave us alone, and people will leave you alone. It's pretty simple.
The real difference is just how you file taxes. It's even a stretch trying to say it's efficiency--it used to take 4 people of diverse skillsets to run a data center, but better management practices and software platforms have left us 80% idle, so we have 4 people contract out to 5 companies and replace 20 workers; but then you have contractor who work 40 hours each week at one desk at one business.
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Uber ist just the fairly short transition phase.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
but on the plus side they'll be negotiating a higher salary for you since they get a cut.
Are you sure? Maybe it's more likely that these agencies are going to compete against each other, and will offer lower rates than their competition.
I feel we need either a negative income tax or a basic income.
For a negative income tax...
If Poverty Level > Federal AGI, then (Poverty Level - Federal AGI) / 2 = Credit
For citizens and permanent residences only. For those who are 22+ years old.
The divide by 2 thing is to incentivize working still as it doesn't completely fill the gap to get out of poverty.
For a basic income...
For citizens and permanent residents only.
22-65, $500/person/month and $750/couple/month
21-, $250/person/month
66+, $750/person/month or $1125/person/month or social security, whichever is higher
The 1.5 multiplier assumes less expenses when a married couple lives together. Although, someone can avoid that by simply not getting married I guess.
I figure this would be beneficial towards the homeless, especially if four homeless individuals were to pool their money and live together.
This wouldn't be a replacement for SNAP. If it were, I'd add a flat $200/person/month into those figures above.
This would need to be adjusted annually for inflation.
So as a dependent contractor I get all the financial risk with the added benefit that I can pick and choose my own hours.
Sounds like a good way to skirt the protections of labor laws to me.
I was thinking the same thing when I came in here. There's a class of casual employee that has always existed. Jobs to small, too fleeting to go through the hassle of determining SSN and full withholding, issuing cheque, etc. In many cases, employers simply ignore the law and pay cash. Small job contractors are happy to accept payment under the table to avoid reporting income. With the new economy and Uber-like employees the situation has escalated to the point where it cannot be ignored. At the very least, Uber must be able to report aggregate income for its contractors. It may seem like an intrusion to have the government know all this, but paying taxes is everyone's duty and I kind of like the roads and air traffic control and other benefits that it pays for.
It's okay guys, I got this one:
"Student Athlete"
"Gee, you're a month away from losing your home and your baby's sick? Here, sign this contract." is not duress.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Damnit
STOP shifting focus to the top of the page when I am trying to fucking read the comments. 4th time in 2 stories. If we lose our place I guess we will stick around longer eh? Bastards. The new ads are NOT THAT FUCKING important :/
We already have a third category ...
http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self-Employed/Statutory-Employees
So like sharecropping?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
This is a "contractor" that has one "contract" with one company, and possesses none of the infrastructure or expertise generally associated with operating an actual "business," meaning that they are, in fact, *dependent* on this *particular* contract and its stability for most or all of their income and livelihood, without the ability to easily find or draw others, particularly if they are to avoid putting this primary and essential (for them) contract at risk.
In fact, there is a word for this relationship already: employment.
What is being suggested here could just as easily be rephrased as "it's time for a new kind of relationship, 'employee without benefits that is not subject to federal labor laws.'"
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Drivers are not making good enough wages once you factor in depreciation and other costs.
Let's assume this is true, for the sake of argument. It isn't, as published financials demonstrate, but let's ignore them as propaganda, and assume your statement is true.
Your argument boils down to:
(1) Uber drivers are bad at math
(2) I am better at math, so I can see how they are being cheated
(3) Uber drivers must be protected by society from being bad at math
(4) Despite the fact that society condones state run lotteries, which are a tax on people who are bad at math
Is there anything I have missed?
In the Uber model, you are the lottery ticket, and Uber is the gambler.
In your analogy, Uber is the state and the driver is the gambler.
Only it isn't gambling, if the slot machine always pays out to the gambler.
but can't let this slide. A _good_ Uber driver makes about $15/hr after accounting for the cost of driving. That's not even $30k/year. Dude, they're not anywhere near the level's your thinking about, nor will they ever be. If they worked 80 hours a week (which would be incredibly dangerous) they _might_ clear $60k... You've spent too much time in cushy Computer Science and/or engineering gigs. These folks don't have anything to save. The best of the best barely qualify as "Working Poor"...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The rest of us don't pay taxes for the fun of it. Tax evasion is a cowardly, anti-social and selfish crime.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it