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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.
Didn't slashdot used to love uber?
And by bribes, you mean licensing fees and driver qualification tests that Uber cheerfully ignores despite the regulations predating both this Web company and the Internet itself. As a German citizen who cares about rudimentary quality control, good riddance.
The hell with capitalism it only brings greater and greater misery to the people! The hell with the bosses and their governments and their wars! Long live Lenin and Trotsky!
Yes commrade, after Ubergate the mechanisms of the state will melt aways and we will all become Uber comrades. Everyone will be required to drive and to be a passenger.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
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Not to mention an element of safety for the general public and the people in the industry, as well as equal opportunity for anyone to be a customer; not just the more profitable.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Reading TFA on the indianna contractor who sued the basis of his suit is that
1) Uber requires him to bring and maintain his own tools
2) expects him to work a certain number of contracted hours.
As far as I know that's exactly the dividing line between contractor and employee. According to the IRS If you hire a maid, then it's an employee if the employer supplies the tools and otherwise its could be claimed to be a contractor.
Now the part about Tips is intriguing. I wonder why drivers don't tell their passengers that. Thus I'm skeptical.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Please. Uber is an overhyped taxi service. They have all this PR horseshit that says they are revolutionizing personal transportation with "ride sharing" and a bunch of very stupid people invested waaaayyyyyy too much money in it.
It's gotten to the point where I hear Silicon Valley and IPO in the same sentence, I just ignore it as bullshit. I haven't been wrong yet and I doubt I ever will. There's too much "stupid money" there.
On your own private road, you might have a point. But chances are you'll be a on public road. You need permit, insurance, and to pay any applicable toll and/or tax.
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?
What you are describing is Blablacar, which is very popular in Europe, and is legal. Unlike Über, it is an actual ride-sharing service. If you are a driver, you log in, put details of your journey, and if other people want to go the same way, they can join you and pay a proportion of the petrol money.
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.
this may be true in the state, but in Germany everybody can be a taxi driver. All you need is 1) a taxi driver license (it is different exams to the normal one) anybody can take the exams, 2) an insurance on the car which makes it a commercial car 3) if you do pay per kilometer a counter which is verified to be working and properly counting kilometer/seconds of wait by a german institution ("geeicht" - calibration) and 4) no prison sentence for certain crime IIRC.
That is it. there is no medaillon no other artificial limitation by existing companies and . In fact one of the driver which I used to take (before he switched of job) was a normal person which had a normal car, and just a official distance table (he had no counter).
Basically Uber does not want to respect those minimal alws NONE of which are to protect local non-existant monopoly, all of which are to protect the consumers. But Uber feel it is "über alles" (pun intended) and now Germany told him "get out". Look possibly your taxi are bad in the state, but in Germany I have only very good one, since everybody can go into the business, those who don't do a good job simply get less and less fares.
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Uber is not banned in France, and it most probably won't be. Uber was fined because of UberPop, a service that connected "drivers" with no training and no business license with customers. UberPop was illegal from the get go, I have no idea what went through the mind of the executives in charge when they launched this service. The regular Uber service (with professionnal drivers) works just fine.
Nobox: Only simple products.
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.
I think it's rather the reverse. If you're going to classify us as contractors, you need to give us all the benefits that independent business men have. Uber drivers should be able to set their own price, accept tips for their work that don't go to uber, etc.
The only interaction at that point between uber and the driver should be "Uber: we're going to charge you a finders fee of $x per mile for a passenger; Driver: Okay, I'm willing to pay you that".
Yes it's this arbitrage around the law that is exactly the issue. it shows up in other ways. The pure Food and drink act, pharmaceutical quality, and other protections are circumvented when vendors outside the country can mail their products into the country.
Aliexpress and Ebay would lose a lot of sellers if there were a way to enforce the accurate marking of Customs duties on the outside of the millions of e-packet shipments from china direct to consumers.
It's a puzzle whether one should give up enforcing anything, say it's broken by the disruption of the internet, or crack down.
Uber is an interesting case mainly because it is possible to crackdown.
The contrary argument is a more subtle one. Many markets are strangled by regulations. Take in point google's entry into the underworld of payday lending. What' their first move? to push for legislation to regulate payday lending, and to ban payday lending ads on their own site. Megacorps actually love expensive regulations because it creates barriers to market entry that can only be solved by sheer size of operations to ammortize the administration costs. The taxi cab companies thus have an entrenched position created by the regulations they must obey.
Yet taken individually those regs protect consumers. Yet what they protect against may be an edge case. e.g. background checks may not really be effective or necessary for nearly every driver. On the otherhand they probably do weed out a very tiny number of people who shouldn't be entrusted with passenger safety.
Then there's the grey transition zone between carpooling, hitchhiking, and uber. That probably can be figured out with a brightline formula to make this less gray. But until that happens Uber has a wedge and an appeal to personal enterpirse and sticking it to the large entrenched companies, and the city-renenue machines of taxi taxes.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
All of them? When I contract, I tell my prospective customers my rate and they can either work with me, offer a different rate, or look for a different contractor. Uber drivers don't have this flexibility.
-Chris
OK, so tell uber your price and work out a deal. After all, your customer is uber and they hire you to be a driver.
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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Public maintenance of roads didn't start out as a justification for government bullying road users. We don't need to agree to be bullied to use our own public roads.
Luckily it is a privilege, revokable upon abuse. If you want to live someplace where drivers aren't required to be licensed or insured, vehicles don't have to meet safety standards, and all problems will be solved with libertarian fairy dust (civil law suits), please tell me about places where this has been tried and how it is working out.
As a German citizen who cares about rudimentary quality control
...this seems redundant ....
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.
(if Uber's lawyers are right, and they aren't a transportation company this indicates contractor; if anyone sane is right and they sell cab rides it indicates employee).
This is actually a tricky business.
What if I have 40,000 licensed, independent cab services all comprised of one sole-proprietorship cab driver in New York City? Nobody knows to call 1-800-one-of-40,000-cab-drivers. I create a sort of portal that not only lists all of them, but will locate one, hail him via a smart phone app, and connect the passenger (buyer) with the cab operator (seller). Am I *also* a cab service, or am I supplying the service of locating a cab service?
That's kind of like Travelocity (compare airline rates) or Hotels.com (compare hotel rates), isn't it?
Now what if I do the same with ride-share drivers who aren't cabs, and provide the value-add service of background checks and insurance? I provide no transportation infrastructure (the drivers own their equipment); am I a transportation service, an information service, or an insurance reseller?
The thing is we've already defined travel agencies who appear to sell air travel and hotels as "Travel Agencies" and specifically not as airlines, even if you're using them to find airlines and they're getting a cut from the airline for the customer referral. We're trying to not do that with Uber and Lyft, even though the so-called employee is being referred to a customer by *both* Uber and Lyft, and using the same equipment for both so-called employers.
So is Expedia.com an airline? Is that sane?
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