> But please no hourly pay.

You might be willing to work for less than minimum wage, but in reality minimum wages exist because without them they create a race-to-the-bottom for workers, and it's very hard to write a policy that's something like "you can pay a person less if they are enjoying it and are reading a book and not really doing that much".

Waiting time is a regular part of jobs and we pay for it in other career paths - can you imagine if everyone only had to pay security guards for the time spent apprehending thief's and they got no pay for all the waiting around reading newspapers they do?

This is basically the line of reasoning that changed my opinion on this issue. Previously I thought, well it's up to people when they want to work and how much for.

The problem with that is these services are only viable because there is a core of drivers that work long hours and have this as their primary source of income. Part time casual drivers are also an important part of what makes services like this effective, but without the core drivers there's no service. What's happening at the moment is that the low expectations of the casual drivers is under cutting the livelihoods and bargaining power of core drivers. That's not an equitable state of affairs.

Yeah, its the comparison between those who are there to skim of the limited hours of top demand or don't care about making reasonable living out of it. And those that can't find other work and want to earn reasonable living doing reasonable hours.

So then what happens is these drivers move onto other employment, which then increases the rate they pay, which then attracts people back.

This is also gig work, the person that made a full time job from gig work didn’t understand what gig work is in the first place.

Fair enough, but gig work is still work. They're still doing a job, and so the standard expectations of a liveable wage and fair treatment should apply, as for any job.

I'm a lot more relaxed about minimum wages and such than I used to be. Here in the UK we've ramped up minimum wages over the last decade or so and the feared impact on jobs for low wage earners never materialised.

I'm a conservative and free market liberal because I'm primarily interested in what works. Ideology be damned, and I've been slapped in the face by a reality check that actually some basic wage floor rules and employment standards work just fine. Those minimum wage rises? Conservative government.

So kill the innovation Uber created so someone that misunderstood what gig work was can force a full time job out of it? Uber may as well shut down because they will be just the same as a taxi. Why would I use them if they’re more expensive?

It was meant to be something someone did on the side. It paid well so people turned it into a full time job.

Then if these people are really poor they can get free heath insurance right? And they have a retirement account through the gov right? What other benefits do they need? All those garbage/useless mental health services the code shops push around?

>Can you imagine if everyone only had to pay security guards for the time spent apprehending thief's and they got no pay for all the waiting around reading newspapers they do?

Yes, it's called a commission. Many jobs pay that way.

Making a comparison between a security guard and an Uber driver is like making a comparaison between a limo chauffer and a bounty hunter. It's an unnecessary and convoluted analogy given the differences in goals. Regular taxi drivers are paid per ride (i.e. a commission) and Uber drivers are taxi drivers without the medallions. I don't see how one would take issue with Uber drivers doing what taxi drivers do while simultaneously operating as rational actors by undercutting the competition on price.

> Yes, it's called a commission. Many jobs pay that way.

Well in the case of commissions for employees in Europe you still have to guarantee a minimum wage and fill any gap between commission payments and the minimum wage.

> Making a comparison between a security guard and an Uber driver is like making a comparaison between a limo chauffer and a bounty hunter.

Well, the bounty hunter comparison depends on if you are an employee or if you are self-employed. Let's remember the precedent for uber drivers being employees has already been established in European/Dutch courts.

If a bounty hunter is an employee in Europe (i.e. working for a bounty hunting firm rather than owning one), if any commissions don't make their wage up to the minimum wage they will have to be paid the difference by the employer. The worked hours for bounty hunting include any waiting time on the job. I don't see why Uber should be exempt from this rule when every other industry, including the traditional taxi industry, has to follow it.

It sounds like you have another source of income. If you were in the middle of a good chapter you could turn down a ride. I don't think you're exactly the kind of driver these companies are looking for, but if they were I think they'd have a hard time finding enough of you.

I feel like being able to monetize your freetime is a luxury a society can't afford when your leisure activity could be someone's job. You could spent time volunteering, like meals on wheels or something. But instead you're driving down the labor rate, as a hobby.

That sounds harsh and I don't want you to feel personally attacked, so I'll just it's cool, no one's perfect. But jobs need to pay live able wages, IMHO.

> It sounds like you have another source of income. [...] I don't think you're exactly the kind of driver these companies are looking for

Uber/Lyft have said on various occasions that the majority of drivers are part-timer/casual. While being able to read books between trips might seem a bit of a privileged situation, many who do Uber for supplemental income don't have room to engage in luxury.

I personally know of someone who does deliveries as a side gig from a restaurant job (which is already grueling on its own) because they really need the extra cash and there's literally nothing else on the job market with the flexibility of gig economy stints.

what i liked about the gig economy was having the freedom to get what i had to get done without being micromanaged. there is a large portion of gig workers who don’t want to be a standard worker because it cuts into that freedom. so i can see both sides of the argument but for me delivering food was a lot better than waiting tables. way too much stress serving and having management try to control you at every step in the day. so hoping this new trend doesn’t undermine something special about gig work. it was my main source of income while in college and it was perfect for that. i could sign in, make money and then go back home and work on what i had to get done, real jobs often are not flexible and kinda hold you back in life because you have less time to better yourself due yo requirements with work hours etc

In your case they would give you a "0 hour contract". You choose your hours but still have protections like an enployee.

As independent contractor Uber was handing off every risk associated with running a business to their drivers.

In that situation a "0 hour contract" would mean Uber has to pay for all of their benefits even if they don't work at all. A net negative for uber, so the 0 hour contract isn't created. The only way this changes while not ensuring uber loses money on their drivers is if they operate like a regular company and have both part-time and full-time employees, with 20 hour minimums for part-timers.

What kind of benefits do you mean? It’s a very common construction in The Netherlands.

when people are on 0 hour contracts, the company still has to pay social insurance for the employee. Some of which are not bound to the hours worked.

Also, a 0 hour contract is a iffy construct. If someone can show they worked N hours on the regular, they have the right to get a contract on the amount of hours they worked. Also, 0 hour contracts are only allowed for a limited number of times afaik. (2x up to one year i believe).

They can employ drivers and still give them the freedom to accept or decline tides as they wish.

I think the conundrum is that either Uber pays for downtime (employee model) or it doesn't (contractor model). It's literally impossible to be actively driving passengers for a solid 40 hours a week while maintaining reasonable work hours. For the model that pays for downtime, it needs to make it up somehow since it wouldn't be able to afford people just sitting around doing nothing in the middle of nowhere. Typically, this is accomplished by mandating employees to be "clocked in", unable to refuse rides, and chasing some sort of quota. I'd be curious to hear about different options.

At least how I see it, many of the problems are that the company is not giving the protections that they've historically supposed to have given. I think one option is to extricate those protections from the employers and bring them to a different level. It could be a union, it could be a local/regional/national/(dare I say global) government, it could be some other org that provides those services. Then the employer could still give the flexibility and not have to worry about providing those extra benefits.

What's blocking them from doing metrics based payment, but with employee like protections? Pay people for the time they mark themselves "available" (regardless of if there's any rides), and require that drivers take anything you give them while they are available. I imagine you could put in a cap and a floor if you really wanted to. You could even allow drivers to reject a certain percentage of rides if you felt like it.

The point wouldn't be to control the drivers, but for uber to assume some of the risk.

Ultimately there is no such thing as driver protections. Either they bring in more money than they are paid or they are going to be out of work (either by being fired, or the company going under).

A company isn't going to let people just do whatever if the company is assuming risks. For example, say demand peaks at 7-9am and 4-6pm. The company could simply dictate that that's the only times you can work (because the full time old-timer high earners already took all other time slots). But maybe you're a stay-at-home parent and only have free time during school hours, so for you, that's objectively a worse deal, since you get to take home $0 as opposed to whatever you could make under a work-at-any-time model.

Or maybe the company tells you that you can't work on-and-off around your town like you used to, due to existing driver saturation, and they tell you that you have to drive to the downtown of the nearby metropolitan city for a shift (many full time drivers I've talked to actually do this today to get better on-the-clock volume).

Or maybe you just can't work at all because there's enough drivers on the road today already.

There's a million scenarios like these.

As a thought exercise, you could go out and drive an Uber casually for a couple of hours, and simultaneously pay yourself whatever amount you think is fair, out of your own pocket. The gist is to track your on-the-clock time and mileage (which is fairly easy w/ the app), and then work out the math to figure out how much the rides should've cost to pay the amount you decided. If the exercise comes out to charging $40 for 10 min rides to account for suboptimal downtime, or you're finding that you need to work a 12 hour day to hit a similar income threshold as a full timer elsewhere, you can be sure that you've neglected some important aspect of the unit economics math and you would've failed at being Uber.

> Ultimately there is no such thing as driver protections. Either they bring in more money than they are paid or they are going to be out of work (either by being fired, or the company going under).

If we’re starting off with that as a belief why have any regulations at all?

> A company isn't going to let people just do whatever if the company is assuming risks.

Companies routinely do that. Hell sometimes that is the entire reason for employing a specific person, is to let them do what they want and then reap the economic benefit from owning the outcome.

Regulations or no regulations, that's just a fact. You can't have a company paying out more than it intakes, that's just basic math.

People are so quick to say "oh just raise wages" as if Uber/etc never contemplated the idea (recall we're talking about the company that popularized the idea of surge pricing for rides), but I don't think many of the armchair analysts have put an ounce of thought into what actually happens when you dictate monetary factors (let alone the gradient of effects relative to different degrees of change). Uber/Lyft were fairly clear about potential impact of employment mandates on service reliability when prop 22 was making the rounds, and I find it curious that there's simultaneously a sentiment that pre-uber service availability was crap and a sentiment that one just ought to raise prices and somehow people will get to eat their cake and have it too.

> Companies routinely do that

You're giving an apples-to-oranges example and you know it. Hiring Rob Pike vs letting unskilled drivers sit idly on company dime are completely different scenarios. The latter group doesn't even generate leads (unlike cabs being hailed off the street).

GP wants the option to decline rides even while available - you’d be taking that option away. I doubt GP is alone in this.

I think there are quite a few options. It took me about a minute to think of the below, so I'm sure with the resources of Uber they can come up with something better:

- Driver 'clocks in' when they are in the app and ready to receive rides.

- They get paid as normal, however there is a guaranteed minimum which means that they will get paid the minimum wage.

- Driver can decline rides, but there is a % threshold at which point they can be performance managed if required (i.e. warnings for declining too many rides and then removed if required).

- Driver clocks out when they are no longer wanting to receive rides. 3 declines in a row or something similar automatically ends shift. Shift can also be ended due to low demand, unless the driver has signed up for a particular shift ahead of time.

That's not particularly great, and I'm sure some people will have builds/other suggestions, but Uber is a 76 billion dollar company, I'm sure they can come up with something better and a way of operating within labour laws.

> but Uber is a 76 billion dollar company, I'm sure they can come up with something better and a way of operating within labour laws.

That's a good point. If those 10x engineers can't figure out a way to make it legal and ethical, maybe it's not good.

I think part of the problem is the market, for some markets. The new law would not affect NYC or dense urban areas because there is lots of order liquidity there. But what about rural Pennsylvania? (Ask me how I know? Hint: management consulting air dropped to remote client location)

When i'm in rural areas, there are often no taxis and one will show up an hour after you call, maybe. Without order liquidity, it is infeasible to maintain supply. Which company (or person) would stand ready to ride just in case an order came thru once every 4 or 5 hours?

The current market response to this is simply not supporting the market. The alternative is Uber where presumably the person is doing their yard work and jumps and does a ride if one happens to pop up. I cannot imagine Uber will sponsor idle wages in rural regions where you get an order or two a day.

> Without order liquidity, it is infeasible to maintain supply. Which company (or person) would stand ready to ride just in case an order came thru once every 4 or 5 hours?

The only solution here is if the ride is absurdly high, to the point where you break even with drivers in the nearest high-population city, which people also don't want since they'd be paying multiple hundreds of dollars for a ride. At that point, people will just get a car.

The issue with uber is that it's compensating for a lack of public transportation that takes you exactly where you want to end up at (or public transportation at all in most of the U.S.). Maybe the only way car-on-demand is profitable is if (A) we get self-driving cars, or (B) the government creates their own system with lower fares and runs it at a pure loss with no profitability in mind.

I think even absurdly priced rides dont work beyond a certain level of illiquidity. Matching price to order is just too spotty. A perfect example is landing in an airport on a late flight -- i've waited 45min for a taxi at Delta Terminal in NYC. As a business customer, I would have paid $100 or even $200 for a ride that cold night. Most business travelers are cost elastic, esp post-travel. Except there is no way to broadcast that willingness to pay to cab companies, esp at an off-terminal like Delta Terminal. I dont think people realize how truly game-changing Uber and surge pricing was.

> I cannot imagine Uber will sponsor idle wages in rural regions where you get an order or two a day.

If Uber can't operate while paying minimum wage then maybe they shouldn't be operating.

Every other company has to work out how to pay minimum wage. An unprofitable rural convenience store doesn't get to pay its clerks less because the sales aren't high enough, so I fail to see why it should be different for Uber and their drivers.

I mostly agree with you -- but a more apt analogy would be if clerks could work from home and had the option of choosing their shifts in 20-30 minute slots and they could continue watching TV at home (or whatever) if they werent called...so basically a babysitter might be a better example. Should babysitters be paid for 40hr weeks just in case we need one in the middle of the week for 2hrs?

To be fair, an appropriate Uber setup here would also require that drivers know the destination beforehand and get compensated if the ride is cancelled and have the ability to decline rides.

The problem for both babysitters and uber drivers in low-usage areas is that there is NO economic model that allows for 40hr workweeks once population (or usage) declines sufficiently. All these gig models work very well in the city but totally break down as you go to rare use areas. A new model is required -- i'm not saying Uber is it, but Uber is closest.

Anyone who isnt in an urban environment, or who's landed at an airport at 2am knows this is a problem. We just need a way to fairly compensate people to solve it.

I mostly agree with you too - however I think there is a subtle difference between an employee explicitly wanting to work these incredibly short shifts, and an employer mandating it.

I.e in your example, where someone wants to work in 30 minute increments and that is the staff member's choice and the employer is happy, then fine.

However it would be unreasonable for an employer to say to a staff member "I'm only going to pay you in 30 minute increments, and after each 30 minutes you can go watch TV, but if a customer arrives when you are on break I want you to run back to work straight away to staff the till, and I'm not going to pay you for the time watching TV".

It's reasonable to ask the Babysitter to work part-time and have fairly short shifts. An example of being unreasonable would be to say that they have to take calls during the day with customers and they will only be paid the minutes talking to customers. It's worth saying the laws here change if you are an employee vs sole-trader, and most babysitters would not be classed as an employee while Uber drivers are.

If the babysitter is an employee of a babysitting bureau, sure. If they're an independent contractor, negotiating babysitting contracts on their own, no (well, strictly speaking, they are at that point their own boss and can decide if they want to pay themselves for downtime or not).

For any situation in-between, the answer probably ends somewhere on the spectrum between "yes" and "no".

Yes, that would be technically possible. But it will not happen because of how the incentives are set up. If Uber now has to bear the cost of being an employer, it will need to exercise its power over the employee drivers and force them to work.

Will need to, or will feel justified in doing so?

Well, 'need' can be synonymous with 'not burn money in a way that leads to bankruptcy'. Uber is largely an uneconomical business that won't work if they end up having to keep their <10 hours a week drivers AND pay benefits.

No, rules should be made so people doing it full time for a living should get a living.