>Best to operate under the presumption that Uber's contractor-based employment model is legal.

Yes, that's how the law works. If something is in a grey area you can do it until the government tells you not to.

A grey area by definition is where you aren’t sure whether the government has told you not to, so that’s not very useful guidance.

This is the reason why Silicon Valley is losing its reality-distortion field image of disruptive innovators changing the world and being seen as the exploitative assholes on par with - or exceeding the cocaine-addled "greed is good" finance bros from the 80s. The attitude and attendant results from sloppiness are just begging for legislative clamp-downs similar to what happened with finance.

You can only profitably arbitrage gaps in the law for so long before someone goes too far and there's a scandal or two, and public opinion turns against you, followed by the business-end of legislative attention.

It's hard to call out people for being "exploitative assholes" for disrupting the legacy taxi cartels. The "exploitative assholes" at Uber appeared on the scene because the market demanded something better.

As for the government, they are theoretically supposed to be responsive to the people, and the people have spoken loudly and unequivocally in favor of the "exploitative assholes."

> It's hard to call out people for being "exploitative assholes" for disrupting the legacy taxi cartels.

It really isn't, if you don't fall for the false dilemma: taxi cartels and Uber both exploit their drivers and passengers in different ways.

> ...the people have spoken loudly and unequivocally in favor of the "exploitative assholes."

Public support is turning against tech slowly, and then rapidly. We will deserve it, going by the comments and attitudes I frequently see on HN. While I'm grateful for the high tech salaries, the prospect of wealth attracted a lot of people whose aims start and end with getting rich by any means, and will ruin it for the rest of us.

It wasn't a grey area. The definition of who is an independent contractor vs an employee is pretty clear in US and especially California law. The only grey area is Uber just saying that all of their workers should be considered independent contractors because everything was through an app. Courts didn't buy the "it's OK because of an app" argument, so Uber and Lyft bankrolled a citizen initiative in California to amend the constitution (Prop 22) to declare that workers for app-based ride-sharing and delivery platforms are independent contractors and not employees.

So for years, they operated illegally, gaining market share subsidized by VC funds and wage theft of driver's benefits, then changed the law to legalize what they had been doing from the start.