Anecdotally:

100% counter to what virtually every Lyft driver who drives full-time has told me.

Data-wise:

Where is your evidence? I thought that by now, the free market would have solved all of the above problems?

Philosophically:

No one's job should be dependent on tips. Tips ALWAYS are filtered via biases that tap into sexism, racism, xenophobia, and never a financially responsible way of building an economy.

Vote no Prop 22, otherwise you are bailing out failed companies that work on unreliable business models.

How do so many programmers commenting online, who can easily make $150k+ if not $350k+ a year, feel so qualified to weigh in on what’s right and wrong for low skilled, low wage workers, when it goes specifically against these people’s own wishes?

Is it a matter of guilt? You feel guilty for having a decent paying job when not everybody does, and this seems like a silver bullet to fix everything?

A majority of drivers support prop 22, I don’t understand how more people don’t weigh that into their decision making. To you, you want to stick it to the greedy bastards at Uber by forcing this law through, and if it runs them out of business all the better. Have you considered there are millions of drivers that would actually like to keep their ability to work, and this is not just a big virtue signaling exercise to them like it is to you?

It's similar to a lot of the people voting yes on 23: they want to stick it to the dialysis companies. I get that, but how is the prime consideration here not patient care? Drives me crazy how people will gleefully ignore the potential patient effect in favor of "punishing" corporations.

> Anecdotally:

Just before...

> Data-wise:

> Where is your evidence?

Too ironic.

> Vote no Prop 22, otherwise you are bailing out failed companies that work on unreliable business models.

I love this. You're conflating a business model that doesn't work under a set of (possibly) onerous regulations to a failed business model. Who has it failed for? And don't say investors, because these are smart people who believe there is a path to profitability.

Do you have a response aside from "too ironic"?

Uber hasn't made any profit yet. They are a worldwide operating player for years now and didn't have single profitable quarter. Do you call this sustainable? VC money and not paying benefits for their drivers is the only thing keeping it alive.

...no?

I wasn't making a specific claim, so didn't find the need to present data, you know, for the claim I'm not making.

> I love this. You're conflating a business model that doesn't work under a set of (possibly) onerous regulations to a failed business model. Who has it failed for? And don't say investors, because these are smart people who believe there is a path to profitability.

It's a failed business model because it cannot operate once these companies are asked to pay living wages - which they don't. Hence...failed. If I were to open up a factory and paid my workers $0.50/hour and then got shut down for not paying minimum wage; the burden of that failure would be on me, not the state that's asking me to pay minimum wage.

Who cares about investors?

Are you aware that the majority of drivers don't drive full time? If full time drivers don't like it or don't make enough they should apply for employment at a company that meets their needs. A lot of service workers depend on tips.

The service industry underpaying their workers shouldn't be an excuse for expanding the practice. The tip economy should be rolled back, not allowed to spread.

> A lot of service workers depend on tips.

This isn't a good argument that tips are a beneficial practice.

But service workers are also usually employees and have disability and unemployment insurance. They also often pick their shift times. You can have flexibility without being a contractor.

Bartenders, and waiters heavily dependent on tips. As non American visiting it is always taxing for me to figure what to tip.

I am more accustomed to price including the waiters salary and rarely only tipping when service is truly exceptional.

This is also the reason I and many others prefer ride shares, price is transparent and upfront, in traditional taxies the negotiations depends on your local knowledge, knowledge of drivers' language etc and your people skills and it takes effort.

In regular taxis there is no negotiation. The meter says a number, you pay that number, and if the driver doesn't like it, that's their problem

You have only travelled in nice places then.

A standard practice in many many places to take the unfamiliar passenger for a ride, taking the longer route, or going in circles just to run up the meter.

While with gps and smartphones going in circles has come down, taking a different route, or other more subtle meter running happens still.

It can be a lot worse with straight up cheating too. I have seen souped up meters which are not directly connected to odometers etc.

I have also seen places where if you don't know the language and/or localite they will demand more than the meter and create a scene get nearby friends to support them.

When running late to airport or someplace urgent pretending no change to charge more .

The list of tricks go on, ridesharing did away with a lot of that.

P.S. it is not all taxi drivers are evil or something, plenty of them have been really helpful in tough spots even the ones who ripped me off have come back to return a valuable item I missed.

I should have mentioned that your city matters. Fresno and Modesto absolutely suck for drivers. Not sure why anyone drives there.

I hope 22 passes.

The current incentive structure between drivers, riders, and Uber is really good.

The ability to scale up and down quickly based on demand, surge pricing, incentive to give more rides to make more, not wait around etc.

This legislation seems like it’ll make things worse for most people, except people interested in doing the minimum number of fares possible to not get fired (and the teamsters pushing the legislation for their own power).

Rides will be more expensive, harder to get, current issues with drivers not showing up or canceling will likely be worse.

Good drivers that work part time end up screwed. Taxis sucked - I’d rather not go back to that because of some grudge against tech companies held by people that don’t know what they’re talking about.

>current issues with drivers not showing up or canceling will likely be worse.

I can see how it might raise the price of worse rides but why would it cause more no-shows/cancelling?

As employees, drivers would still get their $15/hour even if they're idle.

Right now,uber doesn't really care about minimizing a drivers idle time,but they'd need to otherwise. Prop 22 would still pay drivers a floor of 120% * minimum wage while they're actually driving in exchange for unpaid idle time,that 20% is a lower bound for how much they'll need to reduce the pool of drivers.

As a response, Uber/Lyft will need to either start assigning shifts or add a limit to the # of drivers that can be clocked in. I know they punish drivers that skip a ton of consecutive passengers, but they'll need to take into account the fact that a driver at 3am probably only needs to skip one or two passengers to get paid for the full hour.

The idea is they’ll be an incentive to do the minimum amount of rides to remain employed.

I’ve already had drivers accept my ride and then just sit waiting or drive around aimlessly waiting for me to cancel so I’ll be charged for it.

I suspect this will be more common if giving rides is not directly tied to making money.

Ah you're assuming the apps will go the salaried route. My assumption is they'll do the work to classify drivers as proper contractors instead.

Yeah, it’s hard to predict the outcome/knock-on effects without knowing more specifics so it’s definitely possible I’m wrong about that bit.

I generally think it’s a bad idea though. I’d like to think I could be persuaded otherwise, but the arguments I heard in favor of AB5 or no on 22 didn’t seem that strong.

The sense I got from friends voting no was it was mostly driven by anti-Uber motivated reasoning without much thought about existing incentives and unexpected negative consequences.

The sense I took away from reading about AB5 was that it’s a push to get drivers marked as employees so the teamsters could unionize them and collect fees.

Basically a political battle behind the scenes is the real fight and this other stuff is just confusing the issue.

In that context Yes on 22 seemed like a good option.

7/8 needed to modify things. Fuck this over reach. That simple thing will kill the bill. Right/left friends that is a power grab gone too far.

It's essentially a proposition to repeal a law passed by the legislature. Obviously the legislature doesn't like it, or the original law wouldn't have passed. If it wasn't essentially unmodifiable then the legislature would just annul it via amendment. There didn't need to be a measure allowing to be amended by the legislature at all, the 7/8th requirement is just in there to allow the legislature to do non-contentious fixup changes.

Often propositions require a new proposition to change, so 7/8ths is actually more permissive than normal.

That said, I think the proposition system is often problematic and I typically default to no. Though this time 22 and a few others seemed important enough for yes.

"Up to 70% of drivers are like me and do a good job, like the freedom to work when and where they want, and would like you to vote yes on Prop 22 if you are in California."

Do you work for a PR company?

No, I just really love be bopping around California doing ride share now that I am retired from computer programming. Napa Valley wine country is fun. I take breaks and go swimming in the Russian river when I'm not taking people up the river to float down. California meddling politicians and unions want to ruin it for me.

I went through my comment history and there's nothing I want to hide so I'd be happy to identify myself, not to argue, but to share my experience. I am not doing rideshare right now because I'm 63 and Covid is surging, but I may do it again once there is a vaccine. I highly recommend it to any out of work programmers in Silicon Valley. I've had several chances to network if I was looking for a job.

Maybe if they were paid enough, and/or had to vie for a limited supply of drivers, they'd turn on AC, clean their car, do short rides, etc.

People forget that when Uber was charging a fair price, the rides and drivers were nice. The race to the bottom has squeezed a lot of the good drivers out of the normal tier, and now you get busted vehicles with dirty interiors, and drivers not suited for driving OR hospitality.

Some people are bad at their jobs. Every company has great workers, adequate workers and subpar workers. Why should Lyft and Uber be any different?

Its not different. But its also not the reason for why their business model is unsustainable, great straw man though.

It seems to me their business model depends on replacing drivers with self-driving cars. This is not that discussion.

You are correct. It relies on replacing the drivers they are exploiting with robots that don't require a living wage. This is absolutely that discussion, like it or not.

On that front, after I retired, I applied at Waymo as a safety driver but didn't get hired because some idiot almost hit me during the test drive while blasting his way onto the hwy 101 while merging. I did learn some interesting things though. I'd been watching Waymo cars in Mountain View for awhile. They were hiring new drivers because they needed a second driver to keep the first one awake! Apparently having the driver on camera all the time was not enough. Let's just say I'm highly skeptical that the recent opening of Waymo to the public in Arizona is not some Potemkin Village operation.

With all due respect, my experience has been the complete opposite of yours. Do you by chance have any evidence for these claims or are they simply your best guess asserted as fact?

Ok tell us about your experience and add to the conversation. These passive aggressive comments do not provide anything and I'm sure they are against this community rules.

You said "my experience." I'd be glad to talk to you if you are a driver. I've done over 2000 rides (not a lot compared to other drivers I know) all over California. My anecdotal evidence isn't nonsense.

I did 2000 rides in a year. That works out to be about 8 rides a day. That doesn't seem so far fetched. You've already made up your mind so I don't know why you bother making comments to me.

Accusing people of being shills is against the HackerNews guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.

I'm a retired programmer working in Silicon Valley. I'm like a kid in a candy store in some regards, such as I picked up one of the top VR developers in the world at the San Jose Convention Center and gave him a long ride. He was excited to talk about VR and convinced me to buy what he was working on. I did! I wouldn't be a shill if Uber/Lyft paid me. There's no fun in that. As I mentioned elsewhere, I really like messing around with their algorithms to see how they work. You can't subvert real enthusiasm, but nice try!

Don't be a passive aggressive asshole.

Why is that an unbelievable number? Uber has been around for a decade now, surely there’s been ample time?

The number of rides isn't unbelievable. What is unbelievable is that 2000 rides by 1 person would render a data set that would scientifically support even a fraction of the claims in his original post.

OK, but we were always talking about anecdotal data in casual conversation right, not hardcore scientific analysis? I think even the original poster acknowledged that.

No he did not acknowledge that, please quote him if I missed it somehow. He presented a long list, as fact, and when questioned for a source he dodged the question, then when asked again he claimed he drove a lot one year. But the claims he's making are about other drivers and factors he simply could not determine as a single driver in a limited region. The original post, as it was written is absolute useless ignorance at best and active disinformation at worst.

You said to him:

> I'll ask it again and if you answer, I'll gladly answer yours as well.

You should hold up your end of the bargain.

Here is my problem with it (and I am generally in support of models of work that depend less on strict employer-employee relationships).

First, tailoring these rules for people like yourself who are retired (and presumably drive some on the side for fun / a bit of extra cash) has a similar effect to treating fast food jobs as being for teenagers working on the side when they go to school. It is both unrealistic, because most people doing those jobs use them as their primary sources of income, and encourages an attitude that they're not "real" jobs so they don't require this kind or protection.

Second and probably more relevant, the entire framework that governs relationships between either contractors and their customers / suppliers vs employees and their employers assumes that you are one or the other. For instance, in California, everyone gets a minimum of three days sick leave. That could have been setup to leave employers out of it and directly pay out something that has been deemed a social good from general taxation. The way it has been setup is that employers have to provide it. Those are basically the same (since society collectively pays for it either way) as long as everyone is an employee either directly or for a subcontractor.

A society decides that they want to assure certain things because they want them for themselves and each other or because they have decided that it is utility maximise to share everyone's downside risks. [I know that's not how most people think but it does provide a strong theoretical argument against self-insurance]. In the system currently operating in California, and indeed in most of those parts of the world where these protections have been agreed, the way we deliver them administratively is through mandates on employers. That's why we think of them as employment rights.

The problem then with the "gig economy" is that our system is not setup to deliver these minimum rights that we've agreed on as anything other than employment rights. So if we want to keep them, we can either:

-Radically transform the system in order to reach a "new settlement" where any rights we collectively want to be assured are handled by the state directly, and let the gig economy do whatever (since all work relationships will be effectively on the same terms regardless of whether they are "jobs" or not). That would mean barely any "employment rights" because if there was something we collectively wanted to safeguard we would collectively pay for it directly.

-Restrict what kind of work task we allow to be delivered without it becoming a "job" in the legal sense.

I would prefer option 1 but I am also a pragmatist and my second preference if we don't do that is to force certain relationships to be classified as employment in order to ensure that what we call "employment rights" are safeguarded.

Only the first few bullets seem to be all that relevant here.

Ok so Uber has to show that ride information,"bad drivers" decline that work and your pay goes up on long rides you already take. Why are you opposed?

I'm not sure why people have a hard time believing that some drivers should do something else. Not everyone is cut out for it. It takes a lot to get fired (deactivated) by Lyft or Uber. Meantime, the bad drivers just struggle along loudly complaining.

I know you may find this hard to believe, but some people like to help other people and be of service. I drive where I want and when I want. I don't have to pick anyone up. That's going to change if we have to be employees. Taking away freedom and forcing employees to follow restrictive rules is how to breed resentment. You're going to miss Lyft and Uber when it is gone and turns into a taxi company.

I think your situation as retired sv programmer might be very different to someone who drives Uber to make ends meet.

That's very true but the majority of the drivers are part timers like me. What will eventually evolve I think is a two tiered situation, where full timer employees will be held to a schedule and directed in their job in exchange for benefits while more casual people like me will be free without benefits.

Please try to be civil. This language is unbecoming.

And how can we know that you're not a shill?

I'm enthusiastic about the software that Uber and Lyft are developing to make this whole thing work so beautifully. I catch their algorithms making mistakes sometimes. I catch them doing something sneaky sometimes (Lyft more than Uber.) I have some ideas on how to make it work better. I've done 2000 rides and picked up some really interesting people. I like to go to different cities and try them out. It's fun. If my enthusiasm makes me a shill, then so be it.

Fair enough. Let me restate my concern in less fraught terms:

> "Up to 70% of drivers are like me and ... would like you to vote yes on Prop 22 if you are in California."

This is a claim that has been widely promulgated by the big gig-economy companies in a wide-ranging PR campaign. Do you have any actual independently-verifiable data to support it, or are you just blindly repeating it to advance a political agenda that you just happen to support?

Cursory glance at the comment history seems to argue otherwise, no?

Lyft is sneaky. They sent me to a cemetary next to a busy area once when I was on the hwy going home and then cancelled the ride once I got to the cemetery. Then they messaged me and said as long as I was in a busy area, why didn't I wait? The thing that pissed me off was the algorithm actually directed me to drive into a cemetary on a dark night, as if someone was there waiting for me. Of course I didn't go in the cemetery. Another time Lyft indicated there was a busy bonus area a couple miles from the airport. I went there and waited and then noticed other drivers waiting. It wasn't a busy area. What Lyft was doing was parking us there because the airport waiting lot was full. Lyft also has several times cancelled trips right when I got there so I don't get paid. Uber doesn't play tricks like this. However, people who take Lyft are usually nicer people. Does it seem like a shill would say stuff like this? If you think so, then I can't help you.

Thousands of rides is not "without even a shred of data". You, on the other hand, have no data, yet seem to be very outspoken on the topic. If anyone is a bot in this conversation, it is you.

Oh I have like 9000 rides, so since I claim that it must be true and now my opinions turn to facts according to you. Cool.

And we both know you're lying.

I am aware but if you actually look at the comments the author is posting about being an uber driver for 5 months or more interspersed with what seem like substantive comments.

How do we know you’re not a shill? What does this question do other than lower the level of discourse in the community?

The OP repeated a claim being made by the large gig companies without providing any references or actual data. If anything is lowering the level of discourse here it is parroting a politically-loaded factual claim ("Up to 70% of drivers are like me and ... would like you to vote yes on Prop 22 if you are in California.") without citing any independently verifiable data to support it.

Asking how we can know the OP is not a shill just seemed like a less long-winded way to make that point. It was late.

My feeling on this sort of thing is that you can find a real person who supports virtually any political position. In opinion polling, 40% of the state’s voters support prop 22. That’s millions of people, and it shouldn’t be hard to believe that some of them are are techie Lyft drivers commenting here. Accusing them of being shills is bad argumentation and violates the rules of the community. They did already explain that they are driving for these companies, which is a good explanation for why they would know stats that the companies are peddling.

Mindfully exercising theory of mind to figure out why someone might honestly have a different opinion is always a useful practice. In the context of a debate, it will help you argue more convincingly. If you’re just trying to understand what’s happening in public opinion, it helps develop a more accurate world model.

As I was trying to clarify in my first reply to you, I was not taking the OP to task for expressing an opinion. I was taking him to task for making a factual claim without evidence, a factual claim that also happens to part of a PR campaign funded by one of the parties in the dispute. That makes the claim a priori suspect, and repeating it without a reference subject to valid criticism.

I will own the fact that I phrased my criticism inartfully at first (it was late), but I stand behind its substance as clarified here.

Most of the bullet points you listed are not a sign of bad drivers. Even you, were you a taxi driver, wouldn't take a long drive out of town if you weren't paid for the trip back, for example.

And yes, "my car my rules" because that is their car, and Uber imposes severe penalties for bad reviews.

"bad drivers" as in "not making money" drivers. When you go out of town you stay there and take rides or set your direction home and pick up rides in that direction. Drivers who say they don't get paid coming back are ignorant.

> When you go out of town you stay there

Stay as in? Spend the night? Just stay there on the curb side hoping for a chance that someone will need a ride back? How is that "making money"?

> or set your direction home and pick up rides in that direction

Drivers already do that. Additionally,

- A driver who lives west of town will not pick a ride to the east of town on the off chance that there will be a ride back if only he stays there long enough.

- A driver only needs to go home at the end of their shift. So why would he pick rides in the direction of his home at any other time? Hoping for a chance to pick a ride on the way back?

> Drivers who say they don't get paid coming back are ignorant.

As I've just demonstrated, it's not the drivers who are ignorant.

Or the drivers could be paid a wage and it wouldn't be a problem. It sounds like the current system for compensating drivers creates an incentive for bad service in this instance, not good.

How is taking rides on the way home bad service? Why should I get the same wage as a sub par driver?

>How is taking rides on the way home bad service Does uber guarantee that there will be paying rides to bring you back home? Otherwise you are driving on your own dime

>Why should I get the same wage as a sub par driver Because that's not how the world works. It isn't some meritocratic paradise that fairly pays people for their work. Besides, nothing says uber can't pay you more for being a better fully employed driver. If you truly are a better driver, surely you could get a raise right?

As someone said (quoting from memory) "The greatest con corporate America has pulled is that poor people don't ask for better wages and job conditions, but get triggered when someone else asks for that".