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Uber Banned in Germany and France, and Faces Lawsuits in Multiple States (nbcnews.com)
An anonymous reader writes that Uber "has suffered double-losses in Europe, as both France and Germany continue to reject the company's validity in their regions." Meanwhile, a Boston Uber driver filed a federal lawsuit on Thursday accusing Uber of illegally classifying drivers as independent contractors to avoid providing full employee benefits. An Indianapolis driver has filed a similar suit, which also complains that Uber won't let them accept tips, and keeps any tips that customer's pay them through Uber's app. And remember when Uber and Lyft left Austin after losing a local election which would've required all their drivers to be fingerprinted? Now two lawsuits charge the companies were required to give 60 days notice to all their employees, and is demanding back pay and benefits.
But an anonymous reader quotes this column from the Los Angeles Times arguing that a federal judge's ultimate question is just "how sleazy" Uber really is. We're familiar with the Uber that talked about responding to bad publicity by digging up dirt on reporters following the company. Also the Uber that allegedly stalked passengers using its service, following their travel routes for the amusement of its party-goers... What about the Uber that secretly investigated a lawyer representing an adversary in a lawsuit, and then lied about it? That's the Uber that Federal Judge Jed S. Rakoff of New York wants to hear a lot more about. On Thursday he ordered Uber to turn over to the other side a pile of documents related to the investigation.
Slashdot reader chasm22 points out that the high-powered investigator hired by Uber is apparently a retired senior CIA officer -- a former chief strategy officer, chief of cyberthreat analysis and chief of counterintelligence.
But an anonymous reader quotes this column from the Los Angeles Times arguing that a federal judge's ultimate question is just "how sleazy" Uber really is. We're familiar with the Uber that talked about responding to bad publicity by digging up dirt on reporters following the company. Also the Uber that allegedly stalked passengers using its service, following their travel routes for the amusement of its party-goers... What about the Uber that secretly investigated a lawyer representing an adversary in a lawsuit, and then lied about it? That's the Uber that Federal Judge Jed S. Rakoff of New York wants to hear a lot more about. On Thursday he ordered Uber to turn over to the other side a pile of documents related to the investigation.
Slashdot reader chasm22 points out that the high-powered investigator hired by Uber is apparently a retired senior CIA officer -- a former chief strategy officer, chief of cyberthreat analysis and chief of counterintelligence.
The problem with capitalism is that a company can be successful even if it's bad for everyone.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Keep the status quo. It is good. Politicians need the bribe money from the taxi cab owners.
Status quo? You mean like paying for proper insurance(commercial and liability), required first aid training, proper drivers licenses, mandatory vehicle inspections, and background checks. Sounds good to me, you don't have a problem with any of that do you? Because Uber sure does, all the while it tries to say it isn't a taxi company because it dispatches taxi's just like a taxi company does.
Om, nomnomnom...
Uber/Airbnb/etc exist because arbitrage around the law allows for lower priced products and increased profits. Never mind that not all laws were created to protect incumbents.
As a side comment: The reflexive anti-government attitudes of many is particularly puzzling in a democracy: you are getting exactly what you voted for; the reason we have such corrupt government is because we keep electing people that explicitly tell us that at the outset! We also elect people that explicitly tell us that they want to break the system and/or do not believe in it. Why are we surprised at the outcomes?
Uber is a cab service. So either we cancel all cab services laws, or Uber complies to them. Having two different rules for similar services, just because one happens to be using a smartphone application and is billing from a foreign country is not a valid reason to have two systems.
If I want to pay my neighbor a few bucks to drive me to the store, that is my right, and his. I don't see why government has any authority over private agreements like this.
Scale
If you want to sell a few of your extra tomatoes to your neighbor, same thing. If you want to plant 1000 acres of tomatoes, get some friends to bundle up the ones you can't eat, and offer them in the grocery store parking lot, then state and federal regulators are going to get interested.
Uber drivers may be 'independent contractors' and 'just doing favors for a few friends,' but Uber itself, as an aggregator of those transactions, is functionally indistinguishable from a taxi company. It's in society's interest that for-hire ride companies maintain high standards for their drivers and vehicles, otherwise known as taxi regulations. Nobody's going to get to bent out of shape if you give your neighbor a ride to the grocery store. They'll get bent out of shape if you claim you have 50 neighbors in different parts of the city who all need rides, today, to different places.
your entire quality of life is based on your job. You're access to housing, health care, education, food. Everything. We've built up a complicated and messy social contract where if you kill yourself for a business they're suppose to take care of you. Uber completely breaks what little truth there was in that. Worse, the drivers after accounting for their low pay and mileage write offs often end up with effectively zero income for tax and welfare purposes. So like Walmart (but more so) the tax payer ends up covering the bill to keep them working. Food stamps (in the more liberal States), free or heavily subsidized health and child care. Uber becomes the biggest welfare recipient in the world. I suspect it's much, much more worse in Europe where the social safety net is much more robust.
Uber is either a race to the bottom, a huge subsidy for the 1% or both. Either way it should be stamped out. There's nothing good here.
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Uber has nothing to do with "competition", let alone a "free market". It deals in "unfair competition", in which it maintains a monopoly on apps and servers, appropriates inflated fees for their electronic service, and uses (underpaid pseudo-entrepreneur) part-timers as throw-away employees to actually drive (and drive out ordinary taxi companies and ordinary taxicab drivers).
The only thing Uber did was to find a regulated market, determine it could make money by an end-run around the regulations, and offer unregulated services by offloading most risks to their pseudo-entrepreneur drivers. In addition they use (apparently successfully) of dog-whistle PR techniques to sell their business model.
Oh, and they also have a standing policy to price-gouge the public as soon as there is any situation that leads to higher than normal demand. Free play of demand and supply they call it. Only ... all of it is hidden within their servers.
And they have a policy to threaten price-comparison sites with legal action (their "terms of service" forbid you to publish any price quotations they make you). They're only pro "free-market" if they stand to make money from it. Not if it brings genuine competition.
Yeah, that doesn't work out too well in reality. Then snowball driver A picks up a ride, but they haven't taken their car in for maintenance, and haven't paid their insurance. Oops, car accident. Well, looks like driver A can't pay for your hospital costs... enjoy your life now.
YES! Someone finally got it!
Uber is trying to merge different ways of doing business, cherry-picking what laws and practices they want to follow, call this "the new sharing economy" and are raking in profits. That it is illegal, immoral and bad practice doesn't matter, as long as they are making money.
Of course no one will use Uber if they were adhering to the laws. It is because they are skirting laws that they can dump prices, set the prices themselves, not pay benefits and expect poor unemployed drivers to work for them since they have little other options. And you, the consumer, are helping Uber in this scam, because you do not care how they conduct their business. It is sad that people that would picket a store that have their clothes made by sweatshops in southeast Asia, accept Uber as their great savior on saturday nights when they want to go home after a party. But, hey, you are wasted by then so I don't expect you to make any good decisions. Luckily for Uber, et al.
Classify the drivers as contractors and allow them to set the price (otherwise Uber is a cartel == illegal practice) or hire them and set the price. This is a simple first step to make Uber a fair player in the taxi/ridesharing/whatever-the-buzzword-of-the-day-is industry.