California passes bill that classifies gig economy workers as employees

Re:California passes bill that classifies gig economy worker... by farisjarrah on Wednesday September 11, 2019 @11:32AM (#20941220)

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?

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Re:California passes bill that classifies gig economy worker... by dahdum on Wednesday September 11, 2019 @12:29PM (#20941948)

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.

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Re:California passes bill that classifies gig economy worker... by EpicEng on Wednesday September 11, 2019 @03:03PM (#20943561)

>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.

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Re:California passes bill that classifies gig economy worker... by jonfw on Wednesday September 11, 2019 @03:44PM (#20943894)

> 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

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Re:California passes bill that classifies gig economy worker... by EpicEng on Wednesday September 11, 2019 @04:42PM (#20944454)

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.

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Re:California passes bill that classifies gig economy worker... by jonfw on Wednesday September 11, 2019 @10:03PM (#20947044)

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.

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