Because collections of people organized into corporations have greater bargaining power than individuals in negotiations.

Traditionally the answer to that is unions or professional group who can bargain on behalf of all their members, but it's hard to unionize fields with low barriers to entry (and harder when the workers are living paycheck to paycheck and thus can't strike easily), and impossible to unionize independent contractor drivers based on how the laws are written.

> impossible to unionize independent contractor drivers based on how the laws are written.

What laws, don't you have freedom of association in USA? Just create a group, what is stopping you?

Speaking as an ignorant European.

If you're an independent contractor, then joining together with other contractors to demand a higher rate is price fixing. This is generally considered illegal, whereas employee collective bargaining is immune from anti-trust laws.

For more of the legal perspective, see page 9 of: https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU05/20191029/110152/HHRG...

Speaking as someone generally ignorant of unions, I believe the teeth of unions lie in the collective bargaining that comes from making them mandatory. With right-to-work laws in some states (and other countries) this is often not possible, so workers can choose to look out for their immediate interests which undermines the union's power that comes from representing most or all employees. In other words, unions generally require more than just freedom of association or speech.

> I believe the teeth of unions lie in the collective bargaining that comes from making them mandatory

I don't believe that at all, mandatory unions are illegal in Europe yet unions are stronger here. It wouldn't surprise me if making them mandatory actually makes them weaker since workers are so afraid of creating unions that could potentially harm them, while I can always ignore an optional union so they aren't a problem.

I didn't want to make a Europe-wide comparison as the roles of unions and the rates of union membership vary widely across the continent, including several places with lower membership than the US.

I don't think requiring unions is the only way to do it, but the countries that have a high rate of unionization seem to have other incentives in place, such as Sweden and Denmark where unemployment insurance is generally provided through unions in contrast with Norway or France, where this is not the case. The latter countries perhaps consequently have much lower rates of membership, closer to that of the US.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/17/15290674/u...

The market is not fair. People have to eat, and will look for whatever job that can get that will help them eat and provide for their families.

I genuinely don't understand this position. I don't see how replacing a "bad" option with no option helps anyone, especially the people that were willing to take the "bad" option.

The missing link is that you're raising a false dichotomy. Its a sliding scale of profit margin. Instead of bad or none, the choice is more low paying options or fewer higher paying options. Some will receive higher wages, while some opportunities will not be available.

Both sides believe the net benefit backs up their stated position and there's very little compelling data one way or another.

I'm not so sure how false it is. If there were a better option, wouldn't people be using it already? And since they're not, aren't we just... firing them and leaving them to figure it out? Seems heartless. Honestly it comes across as "F the little guy, give me the policy I want." (I'm not accusing you of that, your tone came across as quite polite.)

The goal of regulation is to stop the race of the bottom at some point.

Is it? By regulating, you'll just create an artificial shortage.

This is microeconomics 101.

If you have a competitive equilibrium, you can't improve the situation for consumers and producers by just regulating prices.

the option is to provide the infrastructure for the market to figure out, but you need some baseline first, and we don't have that baseline. Decouple healthcare from having a job and you're already halfway there, like the rest of the world.

banning prostitution is the best example of this dumb line of thinking. If they could do something better they already would be doing it. Replacing a "bad" option with "no" option does not help them.

Prostitution should not be an option for anyone.

How is:

"I was so poor I had to sell my body so as to not starve to death but selling my body made me depressed and so I spent all my money on drugs leaving no money for food, throwing me into a life of starvation."

...better than:

"I was so poor I could not buy food."

...really?

"I was so poor I starved to death."

fixed that for you to make the two sentences equal. Making prostitution illegal doesn't prevent the men and women who sell their bodies from starving to death after they lost their source of income. I'm all for social programs preventing people from starving to death though, that seems like a much better solution than banning prostution.

I think you forget all of the bad things that come with not having any money. Food is critical, and that is just the start.

If the economy cannot support enough reasonable paying jobs with adequate health insurance, then the answer is to re-think how the economy works, not create more garbage jobs that earn miserable livelihoods.

If we did things like abandon employer-subsidized healthcare for a modern single payer system, then maybe it wouldn't be so disadvantageous for drivers to be classified as contractors.

> If the economy cannot support enough reasonable paying jobs with adequate health insurance

I don't see why anyone other than the person doing the work gets to define what "reasonable" or "adequate" is. It also seems completely heartless to me to put people out of work in order to push a political agenda.

Great, let's rethink how the economy works. AB5 does not do that though. It is actually a return to historical norms (in that it mandates foisting the institution of employment on something that is wholly new). AB5 is an incredibly conservative bill seeking to return to the pre-uber status quo. It is not a 'rethinking of the economy'.

I never said it was. I'm not defending AB5. I'm saying that the current situation is untenable, and neither of the solutions being provided to us do anything to solve the problem.

That's a non-existent binary. There are plenty of other options, including regulating rideshare companies to ensure drivers are paid a living wage.

Yeah and what if they won't have a job at all because Uber/Lyft suddenly became too expensive for anyone to use?

If the costs increase dramatically, demand goes down and thus fewer drivers needed, as people look at alternatives like getting their own car, public transportation, bikes, etc.

This is a pretty absurd argument to make when the alternative is quite literally these jobs not existing at all as almost just happened at midnight tonight.

Uber and Lyft shutting down is posturing. I find it quite hard to believe taxi services will become impossible and not simply a bit more expensive.

alternative is to provide healthcare as a human right?

Healthcare should be provided as a human right but this is not accomplishing that.

This jobs will exist one way or the other. If uber is out taxis(or some other third party) will pick up the slack.

> The market is not fair.

What's your definition of "fair"?

No such thing as fair in life. So why have some bureaucrat write laws to dictate fair based on their politics? The market isn’t political.

Having said that, Uber drivers exist because it does provide enough money to have people show up and provide a service. If it didn’t, no one would do the driving. Not to mention most drivers don’t want to be considered employees.

Because a lot of drivers start driving because they already can't find an alternative form of work?

Or they already have another job (or several) that does not pay enough. However, they can't find yet another job with flexible enough hours.

When the job market is garbage, "just let the market solve it" doesn't really cut it.

But Uber/Lyft have nothing to do with the job market being garbage. If anything, they provide options to help ameliorate the situation.

Instead of the government playing court for something nobody wants, maybe they can do their job: set an an appropriate minimum wage, ensure better safety nets so people don’t need 3 jobs, provide better options to employers so jobs aren’t lost, etc.

I don't think the job market being garbage is Ubers problem to solve. If the job market was flourishing drivers would still be "unhappy" with their experience on these platforms and AB5 would likely still be a thing. Uber offers a convenience. I think drivers like that convenience so much so that it prevents them from seeking traditional employment and leads them to want to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Capital has an immense amount of leverage in the market, and the only way for that power to be counteracted at scale is through government action and/or labor organizing. Individuals can't will a reasonable employer into being on their own.

There was a time, not very long ago, when people "chose" to send their 12 year old children into dangerous factories for 12 hours a day. Government rightly restricted corporations from offering that option to desperate people.

You can't let the market decide because the market is doomed (in the treating-people-as-human-beings sense) by the lack of infrastructure in the first place:

- no healthcare means you're a slave of whatever you can find,

- tipping culture means your employer can pay you shit

They can find work elsewhere then?

Unless you are entrepreneur with access to capital, I'm not sure how you can expect individuals to will a good employer into being if none is to be found. Using the government to create better conditions for the working class is a completely reasonable use of the political process.

Right here: https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/jjj

Why aren't they doing that already?

Because Uber is easier.

Didn't we already go through this line of reasoning during the industrial revolution? Didn't we already have our muckraking moments to show exactly why this line of reasoning is full of assumptions, totally devoid and dissociated from the actual reality of people's lives?

Where do people go if Uber does not exist?

You literally just linked a craigslist job listing to show indeed that uber is just a choice and they can take great jobs elsewhere.

Given that the industrial revolution in retrospect has clearly improved the lot of the entire world, comparing uber to the capitalists of the industrial revolution in attempt to castigate them is actually quite laughable.

Those industrialist were doing a great job of putting children in factories!

Before that, children (and their families) were doing backbreaking labour on farms. At least the factories paid better.

Yes, and they were also being exploited under feudal lords. I would hope we can make some kind of progress as a society beyond fuedal times.

Why not let the drivers decide whether they want to be contractors or employees as well?

> Uber/Lyft do not force anyone to hop online.

Yeah, let the drivers eat cake, hmm?

I have always been curious about this. What did the drivers do before these services existed? What prevents them from returning to their previous life if workings for Uber/Lyft is really as bad as I have been told it is? Why did they start driving in the first place?

> Why not let the market decide?

Because we're not monsters.

What does that even mean? We're monsters for giving people choice?

The market has previously decided unsafe factories and child labor is ideal. Often market forces are great but empirically they do not solve every case and as a society we must evaluate each case accordingly.

Cocoa for chocolate, materials for phones, etc show that the market continues to be just fine with practices like child slavery. Alternatives may exist but most companies are still "striving" rather than there.

the hypothesis is being an employee is better for the workers, and if so it's something they'd willingly choose if given the option. The current data says that's not the case, but would be an interesting experiment. If given the choice of the current setup vs one of being an employee, what would drivers choose.

What does "let the market decide" mean except let the poor be at the mercy of the rich?

Where have you been the last 200 years?

The market is great at optimizing certain imbalances, but a large scale imbalance of power between actors is not one of those imbalances.

Free market economics does not and should not apply to labor. These are people, not barrels of oil.

The market is just people and they decided not to openly revolt against government, tacitly approving it doing the work it’s long done of lifting up the bottom of society no one else wants to invest in.

The majority is not high tech types, nor does it need to aspire to be.

How do you separate this all from physical reality so easily?

Economics is not physics. The math is defined by biologically biased humans. Physical reality works how it do regardless of the syntax you want to emit about sound economics.

You really are just asking questions that have been debated forever. The answers haven’t changed. The narrative you would choose to recite isn’t the same as many others. And westerners aren’t a literal majority

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

The employer has dramatically more power in the free market. Especially when backed by endless piles of VC money.

Remember that the free market didn't end child labor, create weekends, or the minimum wage.

It only enabled the technological foundations to do all of the above.

none of those things required technology. pre-industrial society would not have collapsed if laborers had weekends and a minimum wage

How do you know that? Because of industrial revolutions, minimum wage and stuff was even thought about and eventually implemented! Without industries that afforded that, these social policies would have totally collapsed!

Society seems to be progressing just fine with a min. wage and weekends off.

Because markets and private sector can never be wiser than politicians, especially CA politicians.

it's not that simple. by that logic you could say eliminate minimum wage and any other legal employee benefit. companies are in a position of power so they must be regulated

Sure, status quo policy isn't gospel, and a minimum wage isn't necessarily the best solution to the problems it aims to solve.

it's the best because it was chosen by the people of a democracy (more or less). if it's not good they can change it

The democratic process has been known to produce sub-optimal results. The only way to correct those results is to criticize the status quo. This is all part of the democratic process...