Some taxi companies have abused the independent contractor status as well and went through the same kind of trial in court. Here's an example: https://hrdailyadvisor.blr.com/2017/12/12/taxi-drivers-emplo...
'Radio' calls and calls they've privately arranged with customers as well.
>Taxis have regulations set by an organisation.
That would be local by-law in most cases.
>Taxis (in most places) have rules that say they must take the most efficient route.
You can't intentionally ripoff customers but the fastest route and the cheapest are often different. You can take whatever route you want as long as the customer is cool with it.
>In most places, taxis aren't allowed to refuse a customer based on destination.
You absolutely can refuse a customer as long as it's not descriminatory, like most other businesses.
>Does that mean that a taxi driver is an employee?
Some drivers are employees, some are best compared to franchisees and others are totally independent.
Depends on your jurisdiction.
For example, taxi drivers in Chicago were notorious for refusing to take people on trips that were too short, or too far out of the CBD. Sometimes they'd even refuse to take people from downtown to the airport because if traffic is bad, or there was a long wait in the staging area at the airport, it would cut into their profits.
Chicago made that behavior illegal. It still happens occasionally. But if you know the law, you can do what I do and sit in the cab and refuse to get out while offering to call the police to have an officer explain the rules to the driver.
Just a few days ago I had some drunk customers screaming at me in my cab and shaking my seat under the impression I was legally required to drive them. They earned a very long walk home to think about it.
I had a nearly identical situation when I Ubered. In spite of multiple warnings, their behavior didn't improve. When I dropped them off in the middle of nowhere they insisted that I was required by law to carry them. Nope. I'm not a public bus.
In my experience, the first thing that happens when anyone calls Uber with a complaint is they get their fare refunded. That's usually enough to cool most people off.
Are you sure this is the law in France? And remember that Uber operates in several countries. When discussions about this happens we have to remember that each country have it's own rules and laws, and we cannot expect that the law in your country is the only law exists.
I doubt federal law covers taxi regulations in any country, it's generally local by-law or equivalent. The regulations are going to be different in Paris than they are in Lyon.
"Art. 39. É vedado ao fornecedor de produtos ou serviços, dentre outras práticas abusivas:
[...]
IX - recusar a venda de bens ou a prestação de serviços, diretamente a quem se disponha a adquiri-los mediante pronto pagamento, ressalvados os casos de intermediação regulados em leis especiais"
In a free translation:
"Art. 39. The supplier of products or services is prohibited, among other abusive practices:
[...]
IX - to refuse the sale of goods or the provision of services, directly to anyone who is willing to acquire them upon prompt payment, except in cases of intermediation regulated in special laws"
This is just an example of how the law structure can be so different between countries. Brazil as France are based on the civil law, instead of common law as in the United States.
I really don't know how is in France and I am not saying it is like Brazil. I'm just saying that with so many countries in the world doesn't make sense to expect the rest of the world to be like your home.
[1] http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/_Ato2011-2014/2011/Lei/...
I'm a taxi driver speaking generally about the differences in our job vs. Uber drivers. I will now step back and let the software developers argue about things they know nothing about.
None of the people who make the taxi regulations (or the passengers who invent their own in the back seat) would accept that person if it was their own car, but taxi drivers are seen as contemptible and unworthy of basic human decency by a staggering portion of the population. I am a white driver so I get treated much better than most, but it's still mind blowing to see. I understand why taxi drivers start to give 0 f's after a while.
I agree, we should pay taxi drivers a living wage so that this can't happen.
The drivers this affects most are the ones who are self-employed. You could increase fare prices but riders would just go to ride-sharing platforms where the drivers have less overhead due to less regulation.
What municipalities (or whatever jurisdiction is responsible) need to do is relax taxi regulations so taxi drivers can be more competitive with ride-sharing apps (or the opposite and hold Uber/Lyft to the same standards).
A customer can hand me cash and nobody gets a piece except the government. An Uber driver cannot accept cash or payment outside the Uber app or they will be fired.
What Uber forbids is building up such a clientele from customers it brought through the app.
Depending on the local jursidiction, they might be absolutely free to do street pickups.
For example in Finland someone driving for Uber could pickup someone from the street.
There is no ability to use the Uber platform for hailed or other ad-hoc rides, they must be ordered through the platform and all payments must go through Uber.
Uber provides the commercial insurance to drivers they need when carrying passengers, for example (pretty sure they do this in all areas they operate, but I'll wait with bated breath to be told they don't in Bulgaria). If a taxi driver who also worked for Uber picked up a hailed ride it would not cover them.
Uber provides some insurance in _most_ countries they operate in, but it's quite often the case that this is not enough and that other insurance (usually specific for their classification e.g. Taxi Driver insurance, or VTC insurance) is required. So your point on insurance is quite moot.
What's actually interesting is that some of Uber's competitors do have a street-hailing functionality, where the app essentially works as a virtual card terminal for hand-hailed rides. Cool!
My point is even the French classify rideshare drivers and taxi drivers differently, per your own admission.
What I wanted to establish here is that 1) Conditions for driving for a ridehailing platform differ massively by city or by country. 2) I do not know of any countries which classify "uber drivers' as any form of legal classification. There might be a distinction between taxis, and other forms of "private for hire transport services", which is again an argument for treating these as independent contractors.
You've made some reasonable points for sure. The universal difference between traditional taxi drivers and Uber drivers that I want to reiterate is that truly self-employed taxi drivers are paid directly by customers, whereas Uber drivers are always paid exclusively by Uber. That, I feel, is a very important distinction when comparing their employment status.
Here in Ontario rideshare drivers and taxi drivers both have different legal status. Most legislation is on the municipal level but there is provincial law as well that makes the distinction.
Independent contractor status is a really finicky thing to define and, in the end, it's a status that mostly deprives employees of rights in favor of an employer so any "grey" usage of it should be highly suspect.
Uber's model prohibits drivers from subcontracting (transferring) their rides to others, which pierces the veil of 'independent contractor': either a contractor can subcontract, or they're not a contractor.
Caveat: This is not at all a complete argument for or against taxis or gig economy, but is meant to show how a division exists between the two to permit further consideration of the ruling.
That's not really the case in a lot of places - drivers 'rent' medallions from Taxi companies, as the medallions cost many times the annual income of a driver. Although, their value is droppnig due to ridesharing apps.
[1]
It's called Uber Pool, and Lyft Line.
Now it's more correct to call it a "ride hailing" platform, but the original term still sticks.
Anecdotally, the taxi company owning the medallion are not allowed to rent them: so instead they rent cars to their contractors, and lend the medallions to their renters.
This doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. I often work as a contractor. If I decided one morning to send a friend into a clients office to fulfil my duties, I would not even expect them to be able to gain entry to the building.
It’s a pretty ridiculous assertion to claim that you must be able to sub-contract to be a contractor, and I’d be surprised if there was even one jurisdiction in the world where that was true. It would mean you could never screen contractors.
I think trying to determine if someone is an employee based on if they receive cash from customers is a pretty arbitrary line that seems to exclude some pretty valid definitions of independent contractors like temporary workers and sales consultants.
In my experience they just step outside and wave one down.
As for taking the most efficient route, a driver purposely taking a longer route you didn't ask for to scam you out of your money is just that, a scam. So it's illegal on that basis alone.
They key difference with a lot of these taxi restrictions is they are set by the government to protect consumers. The government imposing uniform standards on taxi drivers through legislation is not at all the same thing as private companies doing so on drivers while weaseling out of employment requirements. The government can set lots of restrictions on how jobs are done without requiring employment contracts with those workers; private companies do not have those same powers. Hell, the government can execute people; there's no expected parity here whatsoever.
In Europe? (or France in this particular case) yes absolutely. I've never been to a European country where taxi drivers are not employees of regular taxi companies receiving salaries.
Yes it does, and a lot of them are employees.
The cab company leases the medallions and has some store of medallions it owns. It buys and maintains the cars and runs the dispatching service.
The medallions is suppposed to be nontransferrable and free, you would only need to pass some certification tests, but there are ridiculous levels of corruption, and a pinch of violence here and there (For example drivers in certain spots violently banning others from using the same spots, even with guns if they think is needed).
Here Taxi Mafia runs strong, but is still made of individuals, not companies.
The owner/recipient of the medallion agrees to certain work conditions/obligations (non-discrimination, destination-blindness, accept credit cards, sometimes provide wheelchair amenities, etc.) and receives certain privileges (limited monopoly, right to pick up anyone on the street, right to use taxi lanes and taxi files, etc.). Whether the drivers actually meet the obligations is often a matter of lack of enforcement and what the driver can get away with, but it really is a quid-pro-quo of rights and responsibilities.
Medallions ended up being owned by taxi companies who rented them out to contractors or employees, so the relationship between the medallion owner and the driver (2 private parties) depended on how they set up the contract (and both kinds exist). And of course, private parties abuse independent contractors and employment contracts all the time, so it's really a gray area in practice. But regardless of who is paying whom, the driver should adhere to the medallion rules while driving/waiting on fares.
When looking at taxi and ride sharing, it helps to have a brief history of the industry:
- Before medallions, anyone could call themselves a driver, and pick up anyone for any price--true market competition. Of course, abuse and discrimination was rampant, riders were vulnerable, and too many drivers would drive the offered price so low only the desperate in dilapidated/dangerous vehicles would compete.
- Regulation in the form of medallions and meters came along with the idea of promoting mobility. Limit the number of drivers and set the fares so that someone working full-time can make a decent living, make sure they have safe vehicles and not criminal drivers, mandate shortest routes and non-discrimination. In the best of all worlds, there is a competent fleet of drivers, and people can get around the city and suburbs as needed.
- Because this is not the best of all worlds, taxis became sleazy and abusive, the medallion owners exploited their drivers (both employees or contractors), and regulatory capture ensured that the customer protection obligations were no longer enforced.
- Uber and others exploited the loophole of the radio-taxi: you phone in and get a taxi dispatched to your location. Except with mobile phones, that's like standing on the curb and hailing a taxi, which was the artificial monopoly given to taxi medallions. Frankly, I think ride-hailing apps should've been regulated on that alone, but because the whole industry had such a bad reputation and entrenched interests, everyone was happy to find a way around them.
- As the middle-men, the ride-hailing companies are trying to set themselves up to get the best of both worlds: set prices and make sure drivers aren't really free, but also not have any of the responsibilities of keeping ride-for-hire on the road or promoting mobility.
Another side of this whole contractor/employee debate is the destination-blindness. As a driver, you don't want to drive the unprofitable fares, either too short or too long to the suburbs without a return fare. In order to be appealing to riders, Uber et al. have to hide this from the drivers, otherwise the drivers would refuse more rides. If all drivers became true contractors free to set rates and pick-and-choose any ride, we'd be back to the original unregulated situation (race to the bottom). So the companies get why the regulations exist, but if the drivers were employees, then the companies would have to bear the cost of the unprofitable fares. So they make the drivers feel like contractors to bear that cost for them.
Why not?
Not disagreeing with the absurdity of this, but aren't taxi drivers usually employees when there's a centralized call number to hail a cab? That, or they are truly independent. So I don't see the argument here.
Does that mean that a taxi driver is an employee? Of course not.