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...