While it's true that the law doesn't force companies to assign shifts to employees, in practice, it's always the case.

The reason is because ultimately, scheduling shifts is going to be both easier to manage and more cost efficient than letting employees choose their own schedule.

Uber has a good idea of how many drivers they need at any given time. This ideal distribution of supply will never align perfectly with the supply pool's natural scheduling preferences. You can try to use economic incentives to force these two distributions to overlap, or you can just exert control (that you rightfully have over employees) and force your employees to work when you need them.

If scheduling shifts were better for Uber and Lyft, they would have done it already.

You can't legally schedule shifts for independent contractors.

Are you sure about that? Because I worked with other contractors and they also had a schedule like me. The main difference was that they didn't get any benefits and could be let go immediately.

but you're saying shifts are scheduled because it is easier for companies. And that's actually true, if people work at the same time, it's easier to cooperate if a manager likes to micromanage it is also easier look at their screen making sure they are working.

The thing is that Uber et al prefers if there is no schedule and law actually doesn't stand in the way of that.

> But Uber/Lyft/Doordash etc can give them autonomy, they can make them true contractors.

How? As far as I understand, this is literally impossible with AB5, unless they get an exemption like all the other contractor-based industries.

They could make drivers independent, allow them receive payments directly (if they chose so) and instead charge them for using their apps. Kind of like it is normally done.