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Uber Sues City of Seattle To Block Landmark Driver Union Ordinance (geekwire.com)
Seattle's landmark law that lets drivers for ride-hailing companies decide if they want to bargain collectively was set to go into effect today, but an Uber subsidiary has sued to block key rules of the ordinance governing which drivers get to vote on unionization and other key rules. From a report: Uber subsidiary Rasier filed a petition in King County Superior Court Tuesday to block recently-published rules from Seattle's department of Finance and Administrative Services that cover issues like which drivers get a say in whether they want to unionize, working conditions subject to bargaining and how an organization gets certified to represent drivers exclusively. In court documents, Uber called the city's process flawed and asked the court to suspend the new rules. Uber wants the city to go back and tweak the rules so that they better reflect driver conditions in the ride-hailing industry. "The City failed to provide comprehensive rules and disregarded the facts and circumstances of drivers and the industry," according to Uber's petition. "Moreover, the Cityâ(TM)s rules are inconsistent with fundamental labor law principles ensuring every worker has a voice in whether to be represented by a labor organization."
You don't usually win fighting city hall...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
How Democrat, and how terribly 19th century of you.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There will be one Uber union worker to put the car in gear while another union worker supervises. The union worker who steers the car will be entitled to 20 minute breaks every 45 minutes. The union worker who presses the brake and gas pedals will only be allowed to work on certain 'certified' models of cars. And all 4 of them will retire on full benefits after 10 years.
after all Uber is already making lots of money from the cities where they are allowed to operate
No, they aren't. Unless you count "spending way more in costs than you generate in revenue" as "making money".
In terms of employees taxi companies are highly exploitive of workers, vastly more so than Uber. Uber drivers can choose where and when they want to work with complete freedom. How is that not giving an inherent advantage to taxi companies that can order drivers to service unpopular locations?
Taxi drivers can actually earn a living wage.
Seattle is not in Oregon.
We took on the WTO and we won.
Bears of little brain.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Uber is losing money
The fact that they are losing money overall says nothing about them MAKING money in any one area to begin with. It simply means they have more overhead still. I said nothing about profit.
In any case it doesn't change my main point at all. In fact it makes the point stronger, in Ubers desire to turn a profit they will want to grow as fast as possible with cars that have as little overhead as possible. They can grow much faster by pushing automated cars into a market they aren't allowed to operate in today than by adding such cars to existing cities where they would be competing against their own drivers for work.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
For one, this is about Seattle. Seattle is in Washington (State), not Oregon.
Second, Unions, like most organized groups of humans, can be good or bad, depending on who is running them, and how accountable the membership holds them. There are many unions whose members are quite pleased with them, because they believe they gain more in terms of improved wages and benefits than they pay in terms of union dues.
And more importantly, this does not impose a union on these drivers - it merely grants them the choice of whether or not they want one.
Stop already. We aren't even close to real autonomous cars.
We are just years away from cars that work extremely well within a defined target area, like a city, or a narrowly defined route, like trucking - so companies like Uber will be the first to self driving cars and trucks on a wide scale.
I agree general purpose fully autonomous cars are a ways off more. But not as far off as you think, research has increased dramatically in this regard and huge leaps are being made every year now. Maybe ten years but probably not that long. It's only ten years because most car companies are so slow to design the bodies....
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How can Uber have standing in a court case about regulations for employees, when the swear blind that the drivers they are employing are not employees?
All hail the new Robber Barons!
That would be the unions of today, who steal from their members to give to themselves. Why do you think so many unions make it MANDATORY for workers to become members?
If a union was useful to a worker, workers would be eager to join instead of being forced to. Being forced to pay for an organization that provides no goods or services to you is the LITERAL DEFINITION of robbery.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Life must be hard for you. Going to a restaurant and seeing people use salt from a shaker when you did not use, yet help pay for. Or seeing your neighbor family rescued by the fire department when your house was not on fire.
They set wage levels and even collude to drive down wages[*]. When they set pay levels for a company they are collective bargaining, for management and the stock holders, as much as a union does. Why shouldn't human beings be allowed to do so as well? Or are they not people too?
[*] see the Apple, Google, HP wage collusion case.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I'm forced to pay taxes. I may not agree with what my government does with the money. But I don't question the fairness of paying my share of taxes.
Exactly. We don't live in a vacuum and the day of the self-sufficient "rugged individualist" is over for 99.9999% of the population. We all have to pay for things that we personally may not want, but other people are saying the exact same thing about things we do want.
We're all in this together, like it or not and just because Joe Blow doesn't want to pay for a school or a library or other service that he may not use directly doesn't mean that making him pay for it is evil or wrong- other members of the society he lives in may need it.
The fact is that we all need to share the burden in order to provide a certain standard of living for the society in which we live.
If you literally live 100% off the grid and NEVER use a road or any centrally operated service (electricity, food, water, hospitals, police, etc), then you might have a case for not paying taxes. But I don't think those people really exist anymore. Even if they do, unless they're living a 17th century lifestyle they're still using the fruits of society's labor.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
If you hate unions so much, why didn't YOU sue to prevent drivers from unionizing? I assume that you don't employ drivers, therefore you've got exactly as much standing as a company like Uber that doesn't employ drivers.
Uber's response is pants-on-head retarded for a company that is trying to insist it has no employees. Their correct course of action would be to absolutely ignore everything this "union" does, and continue with whatever click-through agreement that drivers agree to in order to drive for Uber, because without employees, there is literally nothing the "union" can do other than whine and beg their members to quit driving for Uber.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The problem is that an Uber ride is fundamentally no different to any other taxi ride in terms of cost. The reason why an Uber journey is cheaper than a regular taxi journey is that the Uber journey is effectively subsidised by Uber investors and the driver/owner of the car who doesn't know his/her true costs.
Uber's business model is fundamentally flawed. They have no competitive advantage over normal taxis except the ability to bilk investors in California out of their money.
Let's say Uber perfects the driverless taxi: their model has always been to push the cost of vehicle ownership onto their drivers. Are they going to suddenly change that and buy a fleet of cars? Can they buy a fleet of driverless cars more cheaply and quickly than a large taxi company that already has all the necessary support and maintenance facilities in place?
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
And yet, in the UK where it is illegal to make union membership compulsory, unions seem to work better. If people see the unions working on their behalf, then they're generally happy to pay the dues (sure, you get a few freeloaders, but not enough to break the system). If a union is not representing the interests of the majority of its members, then it will quickly see its funding dry up. Importantly, voluntarily paying union dues is a big signal to the employer that the union actually does have negotiating power: it implies that the the union is trusted by the majority of the employees to bargain on their behalf. In many places, you have two or more competing unions (though the law says that any deal reached by one union must be offered to all employees, irrespective of whether they are members of that union) and so not only does a union have to represent its members' interests to retain its income, it has to represent those interests better than the competition.
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