from Hacker News

Uber drivers consider legal action

by rb2e on 11/6/15, 2:06 PM with 68 comments

  • by will_brown on 11/6/15, 3:13 PM

    Always with the employee/contractor issue...

    It has always been my prediction that there is a legal action lurking in the shadows that will ultimately be the undoing of the ~$50B unicorn, but employee/contractor is not it (these can be resolved moving forward with jurisdiction specific revisions to driver agreements and tweaks to the actual process to ensure compliance on a jurisdictional basis).

    However, the legal action to ruin the company? My guess is a class action of drivers who have been arrested/criminally charged while serving as UBER drivers. Moreover, I believe such a case would open up a can of worms including: 1. UBER recruiting/paying bonuses to drivers to leave counties where ride sharing is legal to drive in counties where ride sharing is illegal, subsequently resulting in criminal charges; and 2. UBER's payment of criminal defense counsel for said drivers (which on its face may not seem problematic, but I would be willing to bet not a single lawyer paid by UBER to represent the drivers ever once advised the drivers they may have civil causes of action against UBER).

  • by VincentEvans on 11/6/15, 3:49 PM

    Does anyone else consider 20% (soon 25%) cut excessive?

    Personally i think driving for Uber is nearly pointless - the costs of operating a vehicle make this occupation very unattractive. But i think the 20% rent makes it even worse.

    Many of legal problems Uber faces could be avoided if they simply charged drivers a fixed subscription fee to be "listed" with the service. 100$/month? 10$/day? I don't know, but i can't shake the feeling that this service is crap work and it has a lot to do with greed.

  • by blisterpeanuts on 11/6/15, 2:38 PM

    The drivers who would rather be employees--which Uber claims are a small minority--might be better off finding a traditional job with a livery service. The whole point of Uber and its ilk, or so I thought, was to "crowd-source" transportation using ride sharing. It's not "sharing" if they're employees.

    Amazon Flex is going to crowd-source deliveries by engaging tens of thousands of individuals to drop off packages in their neighborhoods. Does that mean Amazon must automatically hire tens of thousands of employees, with all the paperwork and overhead, even if some of them only deliver an occasional package?

    This whole approach probably needs to be hashed out in the courts, but my gut feeling is that some people are wanting to have their cake and eat it too--the ease and flexibility of self-employment combined with the benefits of full time employment.

  • by zeveb on 11/6/15, 3:35 PM

    They existed and fed themselves before Uber existed; they freely chose to join Uber as contractors; now they want to break the contract they have and be employees. How does this seem right?

  • by nns on 11/6/15, 3:04 PM

    For someone wanting to start an on-demand service, what would be the correct way to design their app so that you could meaningfully link requester to providers?

  • by rm_-rf_slash on 11/6/15, 2:48 PM

    We need a third class of employment, the employee-contractor. It is one thing for independent contractors to provide a service for a company without necessarily being employed by the company, like a software consultant, but when a business cannot exist without so-called independent contractors (unless they're hired outright), then they ought to be responsible for some of the cost, such as gasoline or repairs, but at the same time, their contract can be canceled at any time by the employer. That gives the employer flexibility and the employer-contractors stability.

  • by dheera on 11/6/15, 4:17 PM

    I'm not sure about "paid time off". It's not a salaried job in the first place -- you work as little or as much as you want, and take vacation whenever and however much you want. However, give them a time/distance-wise wage increase to get to an equilibrium point where most drivers are generally happy in life with the amount of unpaid time they can feasibly take off.

  • by throwaway049 on 11/6/15, 2:59 PM

    BBC headline is a little misleading. According to the article, legal action has already been taken. Cases have been submitted to the London Central Employment Tribunal.

  • by miguelrochefort on 11/6/15, 2:32 PM

    That clearly is the future of employment.

    Better get used to it now.