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Government Transportation Technology

The Uber Economy Needs a New Category of Worker 273

Posted by Soulskill from the slave-kings-of-roadistan dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Uber headlines a new group of companies building out the so-called "sharing economy," in which people can easily hop in and out of employment modes. Somebody can suddenly start hiring out his driving services to others, taking breaks and setting hours as he prefers, and then just as quickly stop participating forever. An article at NY Magazine says we need to define a new class of worker to fit Uber drivers and similar at-will employees. "According to American employment law, though, our driver must be one or the other, a 1099 contractor or a W2 employee. And the gulf between the two in terms of mandated government protections and benefits is as wide as the line between them is blurry. As such, thousands of on-demand-economy employees and scads of lawyers are at war in court to determine what camp our average driver should fall into. ... It might be time for a new standard that splits the difference between the two — a 'dependent contractor,' as some labor experts call it — that would be better for businesses, consumers, and all those workers themselves."
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The Uber Economy Needs a New Category of Worker More

The Uber Economy Needs a New Category of Worker

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  • No, these companies need to follow the law (Score:5, Insightful)

    by H3lldr0p ( 40304 ) on Friday July 10, 2015 @10:14AM (#50081963) Homepage

    Look, I get that these guys are trying to do something new. And for that I applaud them and their efforts. However until there are new laws supporting the sort of things they're trying to do they need to follow the current laws especially regarding employment.

    Just because you came up with a new way to run things doesn't mean that the rest of it like it or agree that's the way the world should work. Especially when it seems like all you're doing is trying to dodge current legal frameworks without any good reason for doing so.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by bluefoxlucid ( 723572 )

      Just because you came up with a new way to run things doesn't mean that the rest of it like it or agree that's the way the world should work.

      Yes, but you can fuck off, anyway. The employees like it, the customers like it, and nobody who didn't voluntarily put themselves in this situation is affected by it, save for the raw dynamics of business (i.e. some other company is capturing your market better than you, so you're losing business and they're gaining business; this is why the RIAA wants rights-enforcement jurisdiction over RIAA-independent artists, not just those who sign with one of the RIAA labels). Complaining that you don't agree with

      • "The employees like it, the customers like it" By that reasoning, it should be legal to sell narcotics on the street.

        • Re:No, these companies need to follow the law (Score:4, Insightful)

          by FlyHelicopters ( 1540845 ) on Friday July 10, 2015 @11:07AM (#50082423)

          "The employees like it, the customers like it" By that reasoning, it should be legal to sell narcotics on the street.

          Yes, it probably should be... and I don't like that either, but our current war on drugs is stupid, expensive, and isn't remotely preventing it anyway...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by TWX ( 665546 )
          Between blatantly violating the laws covering passenger livery and blatantly violating the laws covering employee compensation, Uber and its ilk are looking more and more like organized crime than like a lawful-evil taxi company.

        • Perhaps it should! What matter of reasoning is it that you don't like a behavior, and so others shouldn't be allowed to engage in said behavior? Before you know it, we'll live in homes we buy outright, but our neighbors will tell us what color to paint the door and what type of mailbox to install!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by khallow ( 566160 )
      Where is this "need" you speak of? I don't "need" Uber to follow bad law.

    • Look, I get that these guys are trying to do something new. And for that I applaud them and their efforts. However until there are new laws supporting the sort of things they're trying to do they need to follow the current laws especially regarding employment.

      Like say threats?

      "An Uber driver left a woman a voicemail message threatening to "cut [her] neck" if she cancelled a taxi with him again."
      http://www.independent.co.uk/n... [independent.co.uk]

      They have been suspended, whatever that means in Uber world.

  • In the past this has been working under the table (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Friday July 10, 2015 @10:16AM (#50081981)

    People who do small side jobs (including myself occasionally) often aim for cash payment to avoid government reporting (especially so-called "self-employment" taxes); it's been called "working under the table" forever. Or if you do regular contract work (which I also do), you get an LLC, go the 1099 route and bury as many expenses you can against the LLC to avoid reporting much of a profit (because profit=taxes). Both routes are common and well-accepted.

    >> dependent contractor

    Please [diety], no. We just got done with this fight. If you define the terms of success and let me pick how it's done within certain standards of quality, I'm a contractor, and I'll take cash. If you ALSO want me to behave like an employee, controlling my hours, sitting through useless HR presentations, and acting like an agent of a corporation, then I'm an employee and I want the full benefit package. It's pretty black-and-white and has never really been an issue in the dozens of contracts I've been involved in.

    • I would say working under the table is a little different class; it might be the same ends, getting some extra cash, but working under the table is more like "doing odd jobs." (Tax law already accommodates this; you don't need to give a W2 or 1099 to someone you pay less than $500/year.) On the "employee" side, you just have more flexibility in reporting your income; not reporting is still a violation.

    • If you ALSO want me to behave like an employee, controlling my hours, sitting through useless HR presentations, and acting like an agent of a corporation, then I'm an employee and I want the full benefit package

      Funny, that's exactly what contractors do. I was a contractor for 4 years at a desk where I had to show up in exact hours, attend OIG presentations about sexual harassment and child pornography on business systems, and of course was not allowed to post on Facebook where I work.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Funny, that's exactly what contractors do. I was a contractor for 4 years at a desk where I had to show up in exact hours, attend OIG presentations about sexual harassment and child pornography on business systems, and of course was not allowed to post on Facebook where I work.

        Then more likely you weren't a contractor. You were an employee treated as a contractor.

        It's why tax agencies are scrutinizing employment contracts because there are a bunch of differences between a contractor and an employee. And si

        • Then more likely you weren't a contractor. You were an employee treated as a contractor.

          It's why tax agencies are scrutinizing employment contracts because there are a bunch of differences between a contractor and an employee.

          Well maybe the IRS should scrutinize itself, because guess who hires contractors who must come in between 6am-6pm, span 8 hours, take a half-hour lunch (and it MUST be taken--if you work straight with no lunch, you must stay 8.5 hours and file a 30 minute lunch, and it can't be taken within an hour of arriving or leaving), track your time using only the Deltek software, use their specific tools and software systems, attend sexual harassment training required by HR, attend yearly presentations by the agency

        • Funny, that's exactly what contractors do. I was a contractor for 4 years at a desk where I had to show up in exact hours, attend OIG presentations about sexual harassment and child pornography on business systems, and of course was not allowed to post on Facebook where I work.

          Then more likely you weren't a contractor. You were an employee treated as a contractor.

          Not necessarily, this is almost exactly how it works on Federal Contracts. You work in the federal building on their networks, etc. You have

      • Funny, that's exactly what contractors do. I was a contractor for 4 years at a desk where I had to show up in exact hours, attend OIG presentations about sexual harassment and child pornography on business systems, and of course was not allowed to post on Facebook where I work.

        You weren't a contractor, you were an employee.

        If you did that for 4 years, it may be worth your time to open a complaint with the IRS, the company owes you SS contributions and tax payments. You might be shocked how much money it ends up being.

        • The IRS hires contractors this way. The IRS also defines, in IRS publications, what a contractor is. Do you not know what OIG is? It's the Office of Inspector General, the law enforcement branch of any government agency. Social Security has OIG, the IRS has its own OIG, your state unemployment agency has its own OIG. These are the people who show up at your house with guns when you lie on your forms and get money that doesn't belong to you.

          The IRS, the agency which defines what a contractor is, hires

    • If you ALSO want me to behave like an employee, controlling my hours, sitting through useless HR presentations, and acting like an agent of a corporation, then I'm an employee and I want the full benefit package. It's pretty black-and-white and has never really been an issue in the dozens of contracts I've been involved in.

      Glad that works for you, but you do realize that there are an awful lot of contractors who sign contracts stipulating that they'll be available certain hours, work in a certain place, and

  • Independent contractors. Plain and simple. Now, the IRS will probably need another army of folks to go after those no reporting enough of their income. Perhaps the army of IRS workers can be borrowed from the ACA group.

  • No! (Score:2, Informative)

    by digsbo ( 1292334 )
    We don't need categories. All these situations are voluntary and should be handled by contract. Stop creating regulations that make it harder for people to get a little income.
  • try an old one: Migrant worker.

  • "We need workers that have as much rights as machines, make us money, but are never in the way, and require no maintenance"

    Well, you can't have both. Either you are a non-profit organisation that facilitates people doing something for each other, or you are a for-profit employer with employees. Uber seems to think that the term "sharing economy" means that everybody "shares" their money towards Uber itself.

  • Uber as the Agent (Score:3)

    by willworkforbeer ( 924558 ) on Friday July 10, 2015 @10:29AM (#50082083)
    The analogy is the actor's agent and the actor. "Find me some work, but I reserve the right not to take the part."

  • In the UK this would be classed as a "Casual or Irregular Worker" under the following criteria:

    Casual or irregular work

    Someone is likely to be a worker if most of these apply:

    they occasionally do work for a specific business

    the business doesn’t have to offer them work and they don’t have to accept it - they only work when they want to

    their contract with the business uses terms like ‘casual’, ‘freelance’, ‘zero hours’, ‘as required’ or something

  • "Gee, how do we create a legal category for workers that don't have any of the hard-won protections of being employed, but also don't have the flexibility of being contractors? Something like non-skilled dependent slaves that can be hired and fired several times a day, depending on the market?"

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by tmosley ( 996283 )
      "don't have the flexibility of being contractors?"

      What, exactly, is your malfunction? Uber requires that you take one trip once every 180 days to stay active. Not exactly suffering from a lack of flexibility there.

      Now they do get to arbitrarily set rates, which I don't like. Which is why I don't drive for them.
  • That's what I want in a service my life depends on: here today and gone tomorrow like a fart in the wind.

  • Stuff that matter? This is an article about some academic excercise in employment law?

  • I'm fairly certain contingent work [wikipedia.org] existed before Uber.

    Why do we need to reinvent this, unless we're simply looking for a new way to reclassify full time employees as contractors?

  • In recent scifi I think this is classed as "turk" work, a unfortunate term based on the scam of the Mechanical Turk, which Amazon also adopted for one of their service offerings.

    This term is used in at least the Metatropolis story anthologies by multiple authors (John Scalzi editing) and there's development on the theme in the plot of some stories (Detroit) so I don't want to give too many details.

    http://www.goodreads.com/book/... [goodreads.com]

    There's some parallel with "runners" from various cyberpunk scifi and gaming,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rwa2 ( 4391 ) *

      Yeah, I was thinking that too! The stories from Metatropolis were sort of the polar opposite of the world of Snow Crash, where the only workers left worked on big government projects to unwittingly destroy humanity as we know it (or well, at least just the CS nerds)

      I do kinda think this is the way of the future, though, whether we like it or not. Used to be that you got a job with one employer for life, and a 30-year mortgage to tie you down and help maintain "stability" in the economy.

      But to some extent

  • How about illegal worker?

  • NOOOOOO!!!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by halfdan the black ( 638018 ) on Friday July 10, 2015 @11:01AM (#50082375)
    I can think of few things that can destroy an economy faster than having a large amount of workers with ZERO job stability.

    What do think caused all of the stock market crashes: volatility. When you have people with no stability, like say working for a few days, then trying to find another job, they spend most of their time trying to find a job rather than actually working and doing something productive. Worse yet, with this kind of stability, people can not even begin to image of buying a house, a car, and I doubt working day to day, you can even get an apartment.

    This form of volatile, "at-will" employment is just INSANE.

  • YES! Let's create a category where a company is allowed to associate with a worker so temporary they have absolutely no obligation to them whatsoever. The Walmarts and McDonalds of the nation won't start to jump on that AT ALL. Nothing can go wrong!

    • McDonald's have experimented with this - people forced to clock out when the restaurant was empty because "they weren't working".

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by suutar ( 1860506 )

        When I was working at BK, there were times I'd have rather done that than do the cleaning, but I don't recall a time when neither was needed except during some severe weather where we wound up just closing early for safety reasons (blackouts and hot grease do not go well together).

  • We already have this class of worker. It's called a "day laborer" [wikipedia.org]. Show up looking for work, or don't, on a day to day basis. Get paid if you show up and somebody has work for you. Drop in and out of the labor pool at will. There's no fancy app to arrange day labor, but apart from that how is driving for Uber any different from hanging around outside Home Depot hoping someone happens by who needs half a dozen cheap construction workers or landscapers?

    • We already have this class of worker. It's called a "day laborer" [wikipedia.org].

      In a population of day laborers, who has the steady income required to get a mortgage? Nobody, that's who. Who's putting away money to give their children a better future? Nobody! What a great system!

  • For the people who complain about the gray line between the two existing categories - creating a third will not solve that problem. Then you just get two gray lines between three categories. This is sometimes referred to as the conservation of ambiguity.

  • Homeless, or a sub-classification to match the story: Living In Your Car.

  • We all know what this is really about. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tlambert ( 566799 ) on Friday July 10, 2015 @12:23PM (#50083193)

    We all know what this is really about.

    Revenue collection.

    It's about the IRS and the state governments not liking that there are 162,037 independent contractors they have to go after for taxes, rather than going after a single choke-point for those same taxes. Thus they would prefer that Uber drivers be employees, rather than contractors.

    The answer for Uber is obvious: The cheapest S-corp incorporation runs $39. So to get those 162,037 incorporated as contracting agencies with a single employee would cost $6,319,443.

    I'm sure Uber would be happy to pay that out of petty cash. Now the IRS has 162,037 contracting agencies to deal with, all under the total number of employees thresholds that would subject them to most of the government regulations that Uber would be subject to, were they Uber employees.

    So they are back in the same regulatory boat they started in, without the ambiguity that regulators are trying to exploit to get their hands on the money, and leaving with exactly the same enforcement issues they wanted to avoid.

    They could probably also spin off an "Uber Business Services Division" that charges a flat fee for:

    Business license
    Business name and/or DBA registration
    Account for taxes
    Sales tax account
    Federal and State Tax ID
    Business checking credit accounts
    Merchant account (to process credit cards) (or used the new "Uber Payment Provider Gateway" instead)
    Insurance (business, liability, property, if applicable)
    Accounting software (or use the new "Uber Books" online accounting system)

    Or they could just create a damn franchising company, and make them all franchisees, with Uber's take coming as franchise fees.

    P.S.: I suggested a similar approach to AirB&B to incorporate them all as actual B&B's...

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