Being a contractor doesn't mean you get to pick where you work, it means you get to pick where you work out of the people willing to hire you for contract work. Many companies have different criteria for what they require out of contractors. I don't see this as all that different.
Okay, but none of this is about people who wanted to do work for Uber but didn't. This issue is about people who did in fact do work for Uber. If you never submit any bids and never do any work, you're neither a contractor nor an employee.
>>> except uber/lyft will remove you from the platform if you decline too many rides, thereby only giving the illusion of choice.
I don't see any real difference to that than to someone who was is contractor and maybe did some work, but hasn't responded in a while and the company removes them from the list of people they notify (and fast-track) for bids. If I'm at a company and I have a couple preferred contractors and one hasn't even bothered to reply to my the last few times I contacted them, maybe I'll lose faith in them being responsive while they're on the job.
Any contractor relationship is a two way street. If either side doesn't maintain the relationship, the other side may choose to alter it or cut if off entirely.
Contract work is all about trust. If you show any behavior that makes you look less reliable, are they going to trust you with work? Flipped around, if the company doesn't respond to requests for payment, are you going to want to do work for them? It works both ways.
(The point is moot though because apparently Uber rolled out a feature that allows drivers in California to set their rates).
A fourth contractor thinks the price is too little and rejects it outright.
The fourth contractor has "submitted a lower bid"?
But no, the fourth contractor did not submit a bid at a higher price. They did not submit a bid at all.
I see your point too. Essentially, rather than contractors proposing prices and then clients accepting or moving on, if clients propose prices and then contractors accept or move on, it's still a market with negotiated rates.
Factually incorrect for Uber drivers in CA, the platform no longer penalizes drivers for declining trips and now allows them to pick and choose trips without any impact on driver rating. (I worked in Uber Eng up until the 5/18 layoffs)
At least in Europe all competitors still work with the % of fare calculations.
(While dropping drivers from the platform if they refuse too many rides doesn't make such collusion impossible in theory, it introduces enough individual risk to make such coordination unlikely in practice.)
drivers already have those groups btw. they use to coordinate a LOT of stuff. i've seen a driver on a huge whatsapp group where they basically tried to set some areas to surge so they could earn more money.
I took a flyaway to Union Station and then got an Uber from there for $15.
Oh the humanity, how will they manage? They only have like the entire dataset of all rides ever taken plus a world class data science team plus a ton of market power. Will they be able to negotiate on equal footing rate with cab-drivers?
> Drivers then could, over their local "$city Uber drivers" FB/WhatsApp group, agree to not take any ride below $X,
This is, of course, illegal.
>This is, of course, illegal.
What law does this break?
In general, price fixing of the cost of labour is only found to be illegal price fixing when the people fixing the price are not (or not only) employees/workers. Which isn't the case here.
Firstly, if you consider that Uber is only an intermediary and nothing else, then the consumer is the employer. Making this collective bargaining, Employers are consumers in the labour market. Price fixing is always against the interests of a pure consumer, including collective bargaining. Unions are beneficial because (and only if) the vast majority are workers much moreso than consumers.
Secondly, as we have seen, since the money is paid to Uber, and Uber decides how much the rides cost and to who they are assigned when, as well as the fact as Uber pays drivers, and in combination with the fact that drivers are the core business of Uber, they are indeed employees, and this is collective bargaining.
In both cases, it is collective bargaining. If the consumer is the rider, and they directly pay with a cut to Uber the fare, as well as decide the price they are offering and control how the ride goes, then the driver is the employee. In the real world and according to California statute, the driver is the employee (of Uber).
Therefore, it is collective bargaining.
The price of rides is determined by the market. Uber arguably has the least say of the three stakeholders – their goal is to merely "make the market". Riders demand low-prices, drivers demand high ones. Uber doesn't really "choose" a price, they just find the happy medium that the market demands.
Uber pays drivers in the same way that Stripe "pays" me when I make a sale of my app – that is to say, not at all. Stripe pays me, but they are clearly not my employer. Uber is collecting payments and then disbursing them, as literally any marketplace does. Does Steam "employ" all the game developers that sell on their platform? Does Etsy employ all the independent makers? Apple's App Store? Twitch? Amazon? Patreon?
The core business of Uber is an app/marketplace for transport, not drivers. This is obvious when you consider the fact that Uber also provides things like scooters and e-bikes through their app (and in London, now boat services!), which obviously don't involve mostly independent driver-contractors.
To compare this to Steam again – the core business of Steam is not "game developers", even though their core business would not exist without game developers. Their business is a marketplace. I actually really like the Steam comparison because it literally ticks all the same boxes you are ticking for Uber: they set prices, accept/disburse payments, and wouldn't exist without 3rd parties and their labor. But nobody is claiming that Steam should start paying health/holidy/etc benefits for all the indie game developers that sell games on their platform.
There is a huge difference between this and an Uber driver. All Uber drivers are commodified, there is no distinction between them outside what Uber itself does. Uber's drivers have no control over how they do their job. Uber's drivers have no control over the fares they charge outside accept/refuse. If the three welders were indistinguishable from each other, and all had the same entity decide vast amounts of how they do their job and for how much, then yes, it would be simply collective bargaining.
Once again, there is massive strawman going on here that you are perpetuating. I'm not saying that it isn't price-fixing. All collective bargaining is price fixing. All of it, without exception. As a society, we allow workers to engage in price fixing because workers have very low individual power and it is in our collective interest for workers to negotiate together. That is the point I'm trying to get across. All square are rectangles, not all rectangles are squares. All collective bargaining is price-fixing, not all price-fixing is collective bargaining.
>The price of rides is determined by the market. Uber arguably has the least say of the three stakeholders – their goal is to merely "make the market". Riders demand low-prices, drivers demand high ones. Uber doesn't really "choose" a price, they just find the happy medium that the market demands.
This is ridiculous on its face. Unless there is a mechanism on Uber for drivers to bid on rides, then fare prices are not fair market prices negotiated between drivers and riders, but instead prices decided between Uber and riders. Uber very certainly chooses a price, and the riders don't. They do not participate in market pricing any more than a factory worker threatening to quit their job contributes to increasing the price of a widget. Most importantly, Uber does not allow the drivers to even know the actual price the riders pay, so this is just ridiculous.
>Uber pays drivers in the same way that Stripe "pays" me when I make a sale of my app – that is to say, not at all. Stripe pays me, but they are clearly not my employer. Uber is collecting payments and then disbursing them, as literally any marketplace does. Does Steam "employ" all the game developers that sell on their platform? Does Etsy employ all the independent makers? Apple's App Store? Twitch? Amazon? Patreon?
If Stripe told you exactly which app to make and how, and did not let you explicitly state which price you would sell the app for, and did not even let you know which price consumers were paying, had a variable cut that is obscure to you, did not let you market your apps individually, and only gave you the option to either make the app or not, then you would be an employee of Stripe, yes. If Steam told you which app to make and how, which price it would give you, didn't tell you how much they would charge customers, and didn't differentiate you from other gamedevs then yes, you would be an employee of Steam. Rinse and repeat.
The core business of Uber, in revenue and valuation, is 100% to provide rides for people. Scooters and bikes are a drop in the bucket, and technically come from an acquisition and thus are not a core business. This is like saying that the core business of Apple isn't to make iPhones, it's connect consumers with engineers and factory workers that make phones. Except the consumers don't choose which engineers make them, how much they are paid, or even really differentiate them before paying at all.
>To compare this to Steam again – the core business of Steam is not "game developers", even though their core business would not exist without game developers. Their business is a marketplace. I actually really like the Steam comparison because it literally ticks all the same boxes you are ticking for Uber: they set prices, accept/disburse payments, and wouldn't exist without 3rd parties and their labor. But nobody is claiming that Steam should start paying health/holidy/etc benefits for all the indie game developers that sell games on their platform.
Steam does not set prices. Steam lets the gamedevs/publishers decide of they price they want. Steam lets you market yourself. Steam does not tell you what game you should make (what route you should take), they do not tell you which programming languages you can use (which cars you can use), and does not rely on contractors for its core business (Steam does not rely on one-person indie game developers for their core business). Steam is incomparable to Uber. The idea of why Uber doesn't let you use any car, by the way, is in order not to damage their brand. Because you, as a driver, represent Uber, and they know it. In a way, your most important asset, Uber's brand, is not owned by you but by Uber - you then generate profit from someone else's capital for a wage - an employee.
2. I am not perpetuating a straw man that "all collective bargaining is price-fixing". I am arguing that in this particular case, this is the bad one (price fixing), not the good one (collective bargaining). This is because the drivers (not Uber) have monopoly power in the market. The disagreement is stemming from the fact that you believe that any action taken by "labor" cannot be price-fixing, which I disagree with.
3. "This is ridiculous on its face." It is not ridiculous. This is called supply-and-demand and it actually works quite well for pricing things. If Uber "sets" the price too high, riders will not use the service. If they "set" the price too low, drivers will not want to participate and then you don't have a market. Again, the price is "set" at whatever value riders are willing to pay and drivers are willing to accept. Anything else and the system fundamentally doesn't work.
4. At least in California:
a. you choose which rides you want. you are not forced to take certain rides ("make a certain app").
b. drivers can set prices
c. the Uber cut is not obscure (pretty sure it's always been 30%). The time this doesn't apply is when Uber gives both counterparties a great deal by paying the driver more and charging the rider less and using VC money to split the difference.
d. you can ride for Lyft as well, or be a private car for hire without a ride-sharing app ("market yourself")
e. my option with Stripe is "sell my app using them or not", ditto for Steam. Can I sell it without them? Sure. Just like a driver can sell private car-for-hire services without Uber.
5. You might want to break it to a number of companies that some of their core businesses don't actually exist because they came out of acquisitions. Regardless, that wasn't my point. Investors invested in a ride-sharing app. Uber makes money because they have an app. Without the app (but 1000s of drivers) they would not have a business. They would literally be a cab company. But actually they wouldn't be because they don't have any medallions, which you need if you're not connecting riders directly to drivers with... your app. The core business is definitely the app. That's how Lyft can also exist in the same space with the same drivers. Because their business is in making an app that enables a marketplace for ride-sharing, just like Uber. But it's a different app. But the same drivers. Given your assertions, I guess they're pretty lucky to exist in an industry where you could have 100 competing ride-sharing apps, but because "the drivers are their core business", they will all do just fine because they all have drivers!
6. Most of this is addressed in 4. For the rest of it, you're just tacking on more and more made-up criteria that obviously don't apply. If I hire a guy to mow my lawn, I can stipulate that he uses an electric mower. Maybe this is because I care about the environment, don't like gas fumes, or want to look fancy in front of my neighbors. My reasons are my own and he is still an independent contractor. Likewise, Apple forces you to develop in a certain way for the App Store – still a marketplace. They require you to adhere to certain standards of app design/development – ya know, so you don't hurt their brand. Steam could (does?) do that too, and it wouldn't make them not a marketplace. I also notice you ignored Etsy/Twitch, which most certainly do rely on one-person delivery for their core business.
This rating is given by Uber only. It is a single number, with nothing else. This is literal commodification, the exact same way that housing or vegetables are com modified following a grade or a rating. When drivers will be able to market themselves and make a case for themselves it will be something else. A synthetic, numerical rating is literally a hallmark of commodification.
>2. I am not perpetuating a straw man that "all collective bargaining is price-fixing". I am arguing that in this particular case, this is the bad one (price fixing), not the good one (collective bargaining). This is because the drivers (not Uber) have monopoly power in the market. The disagreement is stemming from the fact that you believe that any action taken by "labor" cannot be price-fixing, which I disagree with.
I've written about a dozen times. All collective bargaining is price fixing. Your argument that I am saying that it's not or that I am applying an inconsistent standard is literally a strawman.
>3. "This is ridiculous on its face." It is not ridiculous. This is called supply-and-demand and it actually works quite well for pricing things. If Uber "sets" the price too high, riders will not use the service. If they "set" the price too low, drivers will not want to participate and then you don't have a market. Again, the price is "set" at whatever value riders are willing to pay and drivers are willing to accept. Anything else and the system fundamentally doesn't work.
It is indeed ridiculous. It isn't the drivers negotiating with the riders, it is Uber negotiating with the riders. This is absolutely crucial. The driver has only the option to refuse work. This is, quite literally, how being an employee works. You have no input over the price of the good, you can only refuse or accept the job at the price and in a perfect frictionless vacuum your refusal or acceptance is perfectly mirrored in the end price. Which it isn't in practice for endless reasons, and certainly not in Uber where the margin Uber takes is a secret that no one knows and that varies instantly.
>a. you choose which rides you want. you are not forced to take certain rides ("make a certain app").
If you are an employee, you also aren't forced to make a certain app. You can refuse and either be assigned something else (that you didn't decide), or be fired. If you were a developer on Steam for example, you would be able to make any software, in any way you like, and charge exactly how much you like. All things you can't do on Uber. The right of refusal is also key to being an employee. Contractors, in general, have more than the right of refusal - they decide how the job is done.
>drivers can set prices
Only in California, in a transparent attempt to skirt the letter of the law, and only very, very indirectly through a multiplier.
>the Uber cut is not obscure (pretty sure it's always been 30%). The time this doesn't apply is when Uber gives both counterparties a great deal by paying the driver more and charging the rider less and using VC money to split the difference.
Not always! Uber claims that their cut is around 25-30%. You have to trust them, and independent analysis shows that the cut can exceed 50% in some cases : https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/uber-and-lyfts-c.... In any case, the algorithm used to calculate the fare charged to the rider and credited to the driver is different, so there can never be a fixed cut. It is obscure, and you can never know.
>my option with Stripe is "sell my app using them or not", ditto for Steam. Can I sell it without them? Sure. Just like a driver can sell private car-for-hire services without Uber.
On Stripe, you can sell almost anything. On Steam, you can sell any software at all. On Uber, you can only do the specific trip that Uber wants you to do at the price that Uber decided to offer you, and only in the specific route that is calculated, only in the specific allowed vehicles.
>You might want to break it to a number of companies that some of their core businesses don't actually exist because they came out of acquisitions. Regardless, that wasn't my point. Investors invested in a ride-sharing app. Uber makes money because they have an app. Without the app (but 1000s of drivers) they would not have a business. They would literally be a cab company. But actually they wouldn't be because they don't have any medallions, which you need if you're not connecting riders directly to drivers with... your app. The core business is definitely the app. That's how Lyft can also exist in the same space with the same drivers. Because their business is in making an app that enables a marketplace for ride-sharing, just like Uber. But it's a different app. But the same drivers. Given your assertions, I guess they're pretty lucky to exist in an industry where you could have 100 competing ride-sharing apps, but because "the drivers are their core business", they will all do just fine because they all have drivers!
Does Uber not have a contractual relationship with Uber drivers in which they must complete a ride? Does Uber not spend the vast majority of their revenue in this contractual relationship? Then it is core to their business. If Uber's job was only to connect riders to drivers, then the contractual obligation would be between drivers and riders, and not between drivers and Uber. This is as absurd as claiming that the core business of Microsoft is to connect users of operating systems with programmers. It isn't, it's to sell software, because the engineers have an obligation towards Microsoft.
>If I hire a guy to mow my lawn, I can stipulate that he uses an electric mower. Maybe this is because I care about the environment, don't like gas fumes, or want to look fancy in front of my neighbors. My reasons are my own and he is still an independent contractor.
If you hire a guy to mow your lawn, tell him exactly how to do it, specify the equipment with which you do so, and if he has no lawn-mowing practice, then yes he is your employee. Furthermore, you seem to be missing the fact that Uber drivers are contractors of Uber, not contractors to the riders.
This is, of course, illegal."
Although I am not 100% certain on this, I think that these kinds of anti-trust laws only apply when certain companies have huge amounts of market power. I believe that certain "anti-competitive" behavior would not be illegal, if done by a whole bunch of small contractors.
The obvious example would be unions that do this. But it is possible that this is a special exception to the law.
Obviously you may stop working with a person if their prices are too high or because quality of their work is shit.
However if you use this as a pretence for firing contractors, but the real reason you are firing them is because of their sex / gender / race - that would be illegal.
In the same vein, if you fire contractors for doing things that are none of your business, and it is common knowledge that you do that and exercise control you should not have over them, then a court may decide that in fact the relationship is not that of a contractor. That in fact this is nothing more than a legal fiction created for the purpose of tax avoidance or similar.
Like what?
I'm pretty sure you can put all the terms you want in a contractual relationship. Even things that are none of your business (as long as not protected class).
An employee is just a contractor with additional rules.
If you accept, you just set your own rate.