>Experts said that there is nothing in the bill that requires employees to work set shifts, and that Uber and Lyft are legally entitled to continue allowing drivers to make their own scheduling decisions.

Well yeah, it doesn't force them to. Who are these "experts"? If Uber takes on 100,000 new employees and all of the costs that go along with them, why wouldn't they also manage them like... employees? You can't have it both ways.

There are plenty of companies who have successfully figured out the whole part-time flexible employee thing. I quit my last company, but they didn't want to lose me, so they wanted to keep me on as a flexible-part-timer and I didn't even have a set amount of hours I needed to work every week. As long as I was working less then something like 30 hours a week then they didn't need to provide me additional benefits like insurance and what not. This isn't rocket science. If Uber and Lyft are using public utilities/infrastructure for profit(like roads), then they should be obligated to pay the government to use that infrastructure to get their jobs done. If you don't work for Uber or are a shareholder, do you want to subsidize their business with tax payer money?

Every single business uses the roads or benefits from them, and we pay for them mostly through gas/diesel tax, tolls, property taxes, and vehicle registration fees.

You aren’t subsidizing Uber/Lyft just by letting them use the roads like everyone else.

>If Uber and Lyft are using public utilities/infrastructure for profit(like roads), then they should be obligated to pay the government to use that infrastructure to get their jobs done. If you don't work for Uber or are a shareholder, do you want to subsidize their business with tax payer money?

Can you quantify (ballpark) the amount of money we're losing out on currently as far as roads and associated infrastructure goes? I imagine it's near zero as payroll taxes don't fund those, and the contractors are still paying taxes.

> payroll taxes don't fund those

It's kind of silly to make the distinction between which taxes fund which programs. It's completely arbitrary. Dollar bills are dollar bills

But for the fact that those dollars literally do not pay for roads and, when roads need to be built, those dollars will not be appropriated to do so. Other than that you're right of course, totally silly, what was I thinking.

This is like if I portion out my income and say "money from gig A goes to bills, money from gig B goes to savings"

At the end of the day if bills get bigger I can always pull money from gig B because I own the income stream. Just because I can currently accurately apply these arbitrary labels doesn't mean those labels aren't arbitrary, and it doesn't dictate what I will do with that money in the future.

It would be a bad idea for the owner of the income streams to actually make spending decisions based on the size of each income stream. You should always choose the expenditure with the highest expected value.

If they're doing it because it makes them more efficient or profitable, it makes sense. If they're just doing it to punish the state for changing the rules... well, that's their prerogative, but if it makes them less efficient they will lose ground to competitors.

They're doing it because their current business model will no longer be legal and they now have to optimize to a new set of laws. They aren't doing this to be more efficient, this will be less efficient than their existing system. But it very well may be the most efficient way to handle it under the new regulations.

Increased pay and more time off!

I think, really, progress often comes when a side of a contested issue gets it two ways.

Which of course, I don't mean that one side getting it both ways is always progress, just that it's not a real argument.

Because Uber has been arguing that people work for them because of the flexibility? So when they don't offer it, people won't work for them, employed or not?

This is such a weird response. Like Uber would institute some schedule out of spite, and why even.

It's not out of spite. Healthcare is a fixed cost for employees. Overtime costs more per hour in pay. Undertime costs more per hour because the same fixed costs are divided over fewer hours. If Uber has to pay fixed costs, they have a greater incentive to minimize undertime.

It's not 'weird' at all; if Uber is employing you you will need to maintain a certain number of hours / week. They will likely reduce the number of drivers that they have, but now they also need to ensure that the schedule is covered. Seems like common sense really, has nothing to do with spite, not sure where you came up with that.

because then those drivers would go work for lyft or some other company that doesn't do it? I mean this is why we want competition.

It wont be possible for any taxi company to provide minimum hourly wages without enforcing peoples schedules. I mean, a group of drivers could choose to drive only between 22-06 during weekdays and thus get paid minimum wage for basically sleeping in their car.

> It wont be possible for any taxi company to provide minimum hourly wages without enforcing peoples schedules.

Sure, they have to control how many people are on-pay at any given time. That doesn't require preset schedule; you can have a combination of:

(1) Minimum hourly wage,

(2) Dynamic, demand-based minimum targets and maximum on-payroll quota, where additional drivers aren't permitted to come on-shift of the current quota is reached.

(3) Dynamic, automatic, first-come first-served offers of above-minimum pay if current local staffing is below the minimum target.

No set shifts are required.

Lyft would likely do the same thing, since they’re already employees...

Absent that flexibility many people wouldn't be working at all. Both because their life situations don't allow them to take another job as employees, and because the companies' labor needs do not justify the cost of adding additional employees.

> Uber and Lyft have repeatedly warned that they will have to start scheduling drivers in advance if they are employees, reducing drivers’ ability to work when and where they want.

>Experts said that there is nothing in the bill that requires employees to work set shifts, and that Uber and Lyft are legally entitled to continue allowing drivers to make their own scheduling decisions.

>In practice, Uber and Lyft might choose to limit the number of drivers who can work during slow hours or in less busy markets, where drivers may not generate enough in fares to justify their payroll costs as employees. That could lead to a reduced need for drivers over all.

>But Veena Dubal, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, said it would still generally be advantageous for Uber and Lyft to rely on incentives like bonus pay to ensure they had enough drivers on the road to adjust to customer demand much more nimbly than if they scheduled drivers in advance.

I think the experts cited in this article are not getting at the crux of the problem. Offering employee benefits means that each driver has an overhead cost to the rideshare company. Drivers need to generate a minimum amount of revenue for rideshare company, otherwise the driver is a net loss for the company. So Uber and Lyft are going to have to start scheduling drivers to generate a certain threshold of revenue, and if drivers don't meet that they'll be let go.

If you want to encourage drivers to drive enough to offset overhead costs, there are other ways besides traditional advance time-slot based scheduling. For example: (these are not mutually exclusive)

- Setup incentives (e.g. bonuses) so that drivers get paid better after they have offset the overhead costs for a month. Perhaps this could be setup as a sliding scale or threshold system.

- Reward (but do not mandate) drivers for scheduling certain times/dates in advance (e.g. to optimize driver supply)

> Setup incentives (e.g. bonuses) so that drivers get paid better after they have offset the overhead costs for a month.

A bonus increases cost, meaning the drivers need to work even more hours.

> Reward (but do not mandate) drivers for scheduling certain times/dates in advance (e.g. to optimize driver supply)

Again, offering rewards to drivers for driving in certain scheduled times means that drivers need to bring in even more revenue to break even to offset the price of these rewards. Either that, or the overall average pay is reduced during non-peak hours to offset the cost of rewards.

I think it's more likely is that this takes the form of Uber and Lyft giving drivers blocks of time during which they need to drive, and quotas to meet. Paying drivers during non-peak hours, and giving benefits to drivers that are not bringing in much money are things that ride share companies are going to have to take steps to avoid. If drivers start getting employee benefits, then it's a largely inevitable consequence that they'll lose the flexibility provided by contract work.

Re: "I think it's more likely is that..."

I'm struck by how many times you refer to rather blunt instruments (e.g. "scheduling drivers in advance" / "blocks of time in which they need to drive" / "quotas to meet"). There is a much wider canvas of tools available to guide and shape behavior, as I would guess you understand. (You seem to use language like an economist or business analyst, so you likely know about various incentive structures.)

Given how cutting-edge and innovative the ride-sharing companies claim to be, I don't think they can also authentically claim that they cannot find smart, incentive-based ways to work within slight adjustments to the business and regulatory environment. Market-making and matching algorithms are powerful, interesting, and applicable here, in a wide variety of regulatory configurations. In my view, the "ride-sharing" companies (after all, the driver is "sharing" her car with the passenger... right!) should leverage their people and infrastructure as a competitive advantage and, well, innovate.

They are employees now they don't like the shift they get fired.

Well, that's one (unnecessarily rigid) way to structure it, one that (in the language of economics), is inefficient, meaning that it misses out on possibilities for gains for both sides.

To be clear, I don't necessarily advocate for classical libertarian views of economics. [1] I also think in terms of balancing economic power (i.e. leverage) with goals of promoting human prosperity. Just because a company finds market success (temporarily [2]) in no way gives them moral or political authority to define ethical concerns. They exist in a broader context of social expectations, which must include norms around how people are treated.

[1] I like the quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." To put a point on it, don't blindly follow the tenants of an overly simplistic theory of economics (libertarianism) when it clearly doesn't ring true to your own conscience.

[2] I say "temporarily" because let's remember that most businesses only last a small number of years relative to the length of written history.

Of course they don't have to schedule them. But if Uber has to take them on as employees, then Uber might reasonably want to take advantage of their right as an employer to force them to work certain shifts.

They may take a path of having employees be scheduled who opt in to have their hours/time be scheduled and get guaranteed hours/rides.

If you don't opt in to be scheduled you may be lower on the priority list and not have as many rides, but your flexibility still is in your own hands.

It would give incentive on the individual to want to opt in for the hours at the loss of personal freedom if that is what they want to choose.