The drivers (and customers) are the hostages. Uber should've been spending the last few months preparing for the possibility of this ruling being enforced. (I suspect they have been, and "oh we'll have to shut down!" is a negotiating tactic.)

Yeah, I’m totally with the drivers on this. Far too often “disruption” actually is a very predatory undertaking, with far too little benefit to society. The organizations behind this are typically very low on FTE, and maximizing shareholder value and profits and “democratizing” the suppliers (ie a race to the bottom for the drivers).

You see it all over the place, and I for one hope that this trend is reversed in the next decade. It’s not good for society as a whole.

Ok. Uber closes down because it's not lucrative anymore. Drivers are out of a job.

Are they better off having no income?

Of course not, that’s the “hostage” part of the grandparent. I’m saying that taxi drivers and delivery services were better off before being “disrupted”. And I’m not talking about CA per se, but generally all western countries Uber operates in.

They may have a case in developing nations, I am not very familiar with the systems over there pre-Uber so I can’t comment on that.

Why were taxi drivers better off? They were also generally not considered employees (in the US). If anything, the appearance of Uber appears to have spurred some action in defence of taxi drivers, long ignored and kept out of the Fair Labor Standards Act and other legislation to protect the rights of workers.

In fact, for example in NYC, they generally had to pay to work, by being forced to rent cars from medallion owners like the charming Evgeny Freidman (aka Taxi King, formerly an owner of 900 cabs, now a convicted felon).

"The average rate a cabbie paid to take a taxi out for a 12-hour shift climbed 11 percent, to about $85, between 1990 and 1993, based on the most recent figures available from the city's Taxi and Limousine Commission. But meter revenue remained steady during the same period. As a result, the average income of drivers was about $19,000 in 1993, the same as in 1986 and less than in the peak years that immediately followed, taxi commission studies show."

https://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/09/nyregion/driving-a-taxi-d...

Don’t you think the power balance between Uber and taxi drivers versus the situation before is different?

I’m aware that the US generally already had a very poor system for taxi drivers, but I don’t believe Uber did not make things better. And don’t forget that Uber also has Uber Eats — delivery drivers are most definitely far worse off with that than when they were working for the restaurants themselves.

> Don’t you think the power balance between Uber and taxi drivers versus the situation before is different?

Yes, Uber is more susceptible to competition than the old taxi companies. Where I live there are already three providers, and I stopped using Uber because the other takes a lower cut from the driver.

In the medallion system, you had to submit to Friedman, because even if another provider offered better conditions, they had a small number of medallions.

Competition between employers helps workers.

> I’m aware that the US generally already had a very poor system for taxi drivers, but I don’t believe Uber did not make things better.

Ok, why?

> And don’t forget that Uber also has Uber Eats — delivery drivers are most definitely far worse off with that than when they were working for the restaurants themselves.

Which restaurant replaces its drivers with UberEats? At least around here, the restaurants that already had drivers kept them, and UberEats even lets clients order from those restaurants and have the delivery be made by their own drivers. They just expanded the labor market to restaurants that did not delivery beforehand. I fail to see how can that be worse than before.

I'm sorry, but I can't possibly humor calling a job you're willingly partaking in a "hostage" situation. If Uber is offering them a better deal than what they were going through, even if it's still a bad one (by your standards), why should we forbid these people from taking it?

I live in a developing nation that takes refugees from communist hellholes and the gig economy is helping them out big time by providing the less advantaged ones with a chance at life, all while improving the lives of its users through the service. And it's not just good economically, by creating new markets they help grow the economy and prevent the spread of xenophobia caused by foreign actors participating in a stagnant economy.

Unless you have solved poverty in your country and no one would ever willingly work in such a job you're only causing harm to other people by strangling Uber and similar companies out of existence.

The power balance between employer (Uber) and their drivers is completely out of balance. To claim that the drivers can just ignore Uber would be false, and neither are they able to effectively unionize because they are not officially employees. As such, they cannot negotiate effectively as a group, which means Uber has all the negotiation power.

Again, I am not saying that this is the same case for developing nations; there maybe was no work and/or ability to unionize in the first place. But for large parts of the world this was the case, and Uber just “disrupted” the negotiation abilities of the drivers.

I believe we’re looking at this from two different points of views, a developing nation vs a developed nation (I’m from The Netherlands).