FWIW, it's exactly what I've heard when talking to Uber drivers in London. One guy used to work as a minicab driver; he prefers Uber because he can choose his hours, doesn't get cut out of lucrative jobs to the benefit of the company owner's nephew, and feels safer at night due to the rating system.

None of which is prevented by making Uber comply with the law.

The issue is that they're not treating them as contractors when it benefits Uber, but are treating them as contractors when it benefits Uber.

They need to pick on or the other. If one of those options does not work with the features Uber wants to provide, then they have to make a choice.

There will clearly be fewer driving opportunities if a minimum wage is instituted. There's an economic cost to be paid for price floors. They invariably increase the amount of supply left unutilized. If they didn't you could increase aggregate-demand/GDP simply by raising the minimum wage.

There is a substantial cost to society in subsidizing low paying companies by making it possible for people to survive well enough on these low salaries that they are willing to take these jobs too, in harming companies that innovate in other ways in favor of companies that exploit the opportunity to offer low pay.

We're incentivising companies to squeeze salaries instead of innovating. To me that is the exact opposite of what we should do. If anything, minimum wage should be pushed higher and higher at above inflation, as an incentive to invest in labor saving measures.

There's no reason why we should encourage wasting human capacity by making it easy to exploit people for low wages.

(Yes, this would mean dealing with unemployment by e.g. reducing working time and/or basic income variations or similar)

This is too important a topic to treat with such glibness. If I'm wrong please prove me wrong, with some economic theory or data.

You make assessments with no basis and you want others to answer to you with economic theory and data?

EDIT: Parent comments have been heavily edited.

I at least provide reasoning for my position. It's basic economic theory that wages are set by supply and demand. Demand only increases in the aggregate from increase in productivity. Creating a mandatory price floor simply leads to less than all of the supply being consumed (which means higher unemployment). That's what price floors do. What they don't do is raise aggregate demand (meaning they don't increase total wages paid out).

>>This has nothing to do with price floors.

The quintessential labour standard is a minimum wage, which is a price floor. This has everything to do with price floors. In fact all labour standards can be assigned a monetary value and the combined value can be considered a price-including-benefits floor.

>>you're assuming that workers have a choice regarding where to work. That is simply wrong.

I don't understand. Why do you believe they don't have a choice?

>>So wrong that I understood your comment was a joke.

I'm certain you were trying to mock me.

This has nothing to do with price floors. In your first message, you're assuming that workers have a choice regarding where to work. That is simply wrong. So wrong that I understood your comment was a joke.