Drivers are on all of the ride sharing apps, simultaneously. A driver sees two ride requests - one from Lyft and one from Uber - and selects the one paying more.
At that point, I don't understand how could anyone argue they are an employee (in the traditional sense of the word) of either company.
I believe both Uber and Lyft avoid revealing the destination until a ride is accepted, to stop drivers from cherrypicking the most profitable rides. Therefore there is no way to tell which of the two rides will be paying more.
Uber will warn the driver if a ride is especially long and allow them to decline those, but overall the driver is kept in the dark as to which rides are more profitable.
Additionally, until recently, Uber punished drivers who declined too many rides, either by deprioritizing them, or dropping them altogether.
Valid, but the premise still stands. The driver can sit there on both apps, and just take the first one that pops up. They aren't "working" for either company until they voluntarily choose to take a "contract" (maybe not actually a contract, almost definitely not legally a contract in some technical sense I would understand, but colloquially).
I do support worker's rights heavily in most cases, I just really feel like these rideshare cases (and other similar industries, carefully curated) should be exceptional. It is hard for me to feel like the lack of structure that the driver's operate under is enough to demand full employment rights.
I'm sure that somewhere in their algorithms, there is a way (or a potential way) to discriminate/penalize less active or lapsed drivers when they return to business. But that relatively minor power being said, Uber/Lyft can literally only control their worker's schedules and availability and hours using positive profit reinforcement. Like, are you really an "employee" if you can, without warning or consequence, just not work for a months and then return just as suddenly? I don't know if "contractor" is the right word, maybe this should be considered something new like "micro-contractor" or something, but it operates in a way that is economically and operationally fundamentally different from traditional employers, including taxi companies.
>Uber/Lyft can literally only control their worker's schedules and availability and hours using positive profit reinforcement.
This isn't an acceptable situation because the workers aren't employees. Uber and Lyft can offer below minimum wage to contractors who don't get their "positive profit reinforcement". The contractors will then self-enforce employee-like behaviours in order to get a better wage that still doesn't have to be above minimum wage.
And then a large portion of drivers who only drive as a secondary or supplementary income don't drive, and there is a supply shortage, meaning prices surge.
Minimum wage is the acknowledgement that supply/demand is not sufficient for wage control. Your argument seems more like an argument against minimum wage in general.
You should tell that to the majoroty of (my Seattle) Lyft drivers that bought a Prius just so it could be their primary form of employment. From my personal experience it is only in the Bay Area that people use ride share as a supplemental income.
I've found that all of the Lyft drivers here (also Seattle) that start conversations drive as a side thing. I have no statistics, but it appears you don't either.
There's lots of room for the law to insist that they actually treat the drivers as contractors though. A lot of the controversy comes from attempts to weasel into directing them a great deal while pretending they aren't employees.
Oh yeah. I'm not super informed about the specifics, but I have no doubt that there is some level of exploitation going on which can and should be addressed (as opposed to just sitting in a laissez-faire grey area indefinitely).
It just seems like this is a case where free-market solutions really could be a powerful optimization for just about everyone involved (already the companies are struggling with drivers exploiting the system themselves). There is always regulation necessary, I just hope that this particular business remains pretty fluid compared to most industries.
Part of this stems from my suspicion that the steady-state of driving services will either require a bulk of the labor to be done by people for which driving is not their primary income anyway, or there to be a very large overhead built into the prices.
Even if they aren't picking rides that are the most profitable, the fact that a driver can serve an Uber customer and then a Lyft customer an hour later indicates that these drivers aren't traditional employees.
Now you could classify them as freelancers taking contracts at will, or you could classify them as employees working out with their manager which shifts they will work so they can get to their second job. It's just that the shifts are a few minutes long and spread out throughout the day. To most people the freelance classification probably makes more sense.
This distinction would not make them contractors in CA. All legal, off hours activity is protected including working for a competitor. Even if you are an Uber employee they cannot fire you for moonlighting for Lyft.
> Additionally, until recently, Uber punished drivers who declined too many rides, either by deprioritizing them, or dropping them altogether.
How is that an argument against drivers being contractors? My parents tried to get some contractors to work on the roof of their house. The contractors wouldn't do it. I suspect they may get deprioritized, or dropped altogether, for future roofing work.
Your mistake is in assuming that someone is trying to solve some scholarly distinction between who matches the dictionary definition of either term better.
No. It's a tax construct, and that is the only criteria we should use to measure it.
If I sign up on one of those freelance coding websites and I get no work offered to me, can I claim they need to pay me a minimum wage? What is the difference between that website and Uber that makes them entitled to be treated as employees?
Not that I agree with that, but the usual argument against that is always that on a freelance coding website you set your own price, while it's not possible on Uber.
I don't know enough about many subjects to know the answer to this, but naively if it was that simple wouldn't Uber just let drivers set their own rates if it solved this problem for them?
An Uber driver I had told me he keeps two devices. On one, he checks the uber fares to see if they’re surging. If they are, he’ll swap to uber and take an uber fate. If not, he’ll check lyft. He does this back and forth all night.
I could be a server who works shifts at two restaurants. They both call me the same morning with available shifts that day. I pick the one that usually gives better tips. I’m still an employee of both.
Edit: Guess the Uber shills don’t like it and downvoting is easier than admitting you’re wrong.
Except most restaurants will have a set schedule of shifts and it's typically somewhat rare to get called in on your day off. It would be exceptionally rare to get called in on your day off from both.
For uber/lyft that's not rare at all, that happens multiple times a day if you want to extend the shift analogy to giving someone a ride.
Restaurants do have shifts but no it is not rare to get called on your day off if you’re a good server who is up for additional shifts and does a good job with them. Nor would it be crazy to get called to two at once because often times if it’s a busy day for one it could be a busy day for another.
And again these are irrelevant details. The point remains solid.
Now you're just making things up to support your (incorrect) point. It would be an impossibly rare, uncommon restaurant that would be cool with an employee -- during their shift! -- calling another restaurant where they also work, finding the other restaurant will pay them more to hop on over right that minute, and then following through. That's just not realistic at all, and I'm super disappointed that you're lowering the level of discourse here by insisting on supporting an obviously wrong premise.
Sure, but you don't bring your own table to work. And you don't get to leave in the middle of your shift and go to the other job just because you feel like it.
Yeah and you don't write your own app to do Uber or Lyft and you can't dump a passenger out on the sidewalk to pick up a better ride in the middle of it.
At that point, I don't understand how could anyone argue they are an employee (in the traditional sense of the word) of either company.