Uber Contract 'Gibberish', Says MP Investigating Gig Economy (theguardian.com) 90
A committee of MPs has lambasted Uber's contracts with drivers as "gibberish" and "almost unintelligible" as the company attempts to ensure its drivers remain self-employed. From a report: Frank Field, chair of the work and pensions select committee that is carrying out an investigation into the so-called gig economy, said: "Quite frankly the Uber contract is gibberish. They are well aware that many, if not most, of their drivers speak English as a second language -- they recently lost a court case trying to escape Transport for London's new English testing rules for private hire drivers -- yet their contract is almost unintelligible." [...] Publishing full details of Uber's contract terms, along with those for the takeaway courier firm Deliveroo and Amazon, Field said all three used some kind of "egregious clause" which attempted to prevent people challenging their "self-employed" designation, although neither Uber's nor Amazon's contract went as far as Deliveroo's, in the committee's view.
When will they learn? (Score:4, Interesting)
Law overrides contracts, less the law specifically states it can be contracted out of.
Perhaps there should be penalties for putting in clauses that contradict law. The companies put them in to scare people in to not exercising their legal rights, knowing they're not enforceable.
I wonder if it would be covered under existing "obtaining by deception" or "loss by deception" laws...
Re: When will they learn? (Score:1)
Don't let Roman.mir know you just dissed the contract.
He will fume in rage. Impotent, futile, rage.
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I haven't seen him since we last fucked him without lube for his admitting to age discrimination. Has he shown up since then?
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You mean the resident tax-record proven right person, you fucking nitwit?
Come back when you have an actual case, you street-corner nitwit.
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There is a contract law that covers this situation. Basically if a contract is bad enough, they grab it, rip in into a thousand tiny pieces and bin it, figuratively speaking. Then the court works through proper remuneration for the service provided, generally speaking this will go against those who produced the contract. Similarly ambiguous or contradictory contact conditions are always meant to go against those who produced the contract, their contract, their responsibility for failure. However US courts a
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Does the US have "MP"s? Other than Military Police?
Did you fail to notice that this is the UK?
For consumer contracts, UK law requires that they be 'plain and intelligible language'. [plainenglish.co.uk] But these are not consumer contracts.
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Member of Parliament. Approximately at the same level of government as an American member of Congress (though due to the forms of government being different, their powers and responsibilities don't exactly equate.)
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...unfortunately taking to the high court will mean loss against a major corporation no matter how fanciful the interpretation has to be by the high court
Actually, in the current term, businesses wins against non-business petitioners a little under 2/3rds of the time[1]. So your conception of "no matter how fanciful" is at least a few orders of magnitudes off of the facts.
[1] Epstein, Landes and Posner, How Business Fares in the Supreme Court, 97 Minn. L. Rev. 1431 (2013) PDF [minnesotalawreview.org].
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Generally the tactic is to assume most of the little parties won't take you to court, most of the rest will accept a hush-up settlement, and the few remaining who go to court is a reasonable business expense. So that 1/3 who win against large corporations are a small fragment of total parties affected by contracts.
And corporate lawyers aren't really so great from what I've seen. There is a lot of rote work by underworked and underpaid underlings. I've heard from engineering contractors relating stories a
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Law overrides contracts, less the law specifically states it can be contracted out of.
Perhaps there should be penalties for putting in clauses that contradict law. The companies put them in to scare people in to not exercising their legal rights, knowing they're not enforceable.
I wonder if it would be covered under existing "obtaining by deception" or "loss by deception" laws...
You mean like employment contracts? Good luck with that.
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Employment law is supposed to be heavily in favour of the employee.
The Jig Is Up On The "Gig" Economy (Score:3)
The jig is up on the "gig" economy. I can't wait for it to completely collapse. I hope the short-term rental economy goes next.
Re:The Jig Is Up On The "Gig" Economy (Score:5, Insightful)
> The 'gig economy' is here as the last attempt of the free market to address the collapsing actual economy
Dude, not even close. The 'gig' economy is a new generation of hucksters trying to figure out how to pay people even less to perform services on their behalf without having to bow to things like "regulation" and "laws", or have "employees" who do the actual service delivery to their "customers". The last two are in quotes because the Gig Economy actors pretend they are only facilitating a transaction between two external parties - 'Really !!! We have no skin in the game, we're just taking a modest commission hooking up these two people who want to exchange money for a service! We have no employees, there's no regulation that applies to us!'
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"the manufacturing jobs didn't leave because people refused to work in it, it left because of regulations and taxes"
It left because greedy fucks who were doing quite well decided to go somewhere where they could treat foreign workers the same or worse than they'd treated domestic workers of previous generations.
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I like greedy people who build stuff, run businesses, manufacture something, produce something, move something, do anything as long as it is needed by the people (as should be obvious from profits) and as long as the business has nothing to do with any government and does not use government to oppress others.
I am happy for the people who found a way to avoid oppression by moving their businesses somewhere far away from those who want to oppress them. You are saying "greedy fucks" while talking about people
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I am happy for the people who found a way to avoid oppression by moving their businesses somewhere far away from those who want to oppress them.
You think it's business being oppressed? They move their manufacturing to third world countries with lax labor and environmental protection laws, so they can make an extra billion on top of their 10 billion in revenue (note: numbers pulled right from my ass, but you get the idea), while buying off, I mean lobbying congress people to enact business friendly trade deals, and you think they're oppressed. Got it.
You are saying "greedy fucks" while talking about people that produce but you are not saying "greedy fucks" while talking about people who want to take away from those who produce. This shows a certain ... level of agenda that has nothing to do with the word or concept of greed, it has to do with the concept of entitlement to other people's productive life.
I'm sorry, who's doing the producing here? Are the top level managers, owners and stock holders d
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"avoid oppression by moving their businesses somewhere far away from those who want to oppress them"
Wow. Just wow. Nice to the the downtrodden 0.1% have such devoted fans. How ever would they survive?
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Everything about your chain of logic here is sound except the last step; you fail basic conceptualization of the situation if you don't realize that manufacturing jobs only left for foreign shores because of removal of regulations that restricted off-shoring such work. Frankly this is such a fundamentally inaccurate view of reality that, considering the relative coherency of the rest of your argument, I'm left with only the conclusion that you're either a paid shill or just an remorselessly evil asshat.
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Well, you are wrong. Manufacturing jobs left because the money of the system, within which they used to operate became obviously worthless once the government dropped the pretence of the money being backed by anything that can be produced by work as opposed to by the will of the collective.
Once the money itself is compromised that way there are 2 things to consider: why did it get to be compromised and what is the perspective once it is compromised?
The money got compromised because over time the State bec
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Mind you, I could still be wrong. There's no reason these two states of being have to be mutually exclusive.
...
Well, you are wrong.
I just wanted to make sure everyone else was following along with this conversation.
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The UK has never had regulations that say things in general have to be manufactured in the UK. I can't believe it is any different for the USA. Companies have moved manufacturing jobs abroad because it is cheaper to do it there.
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Its the "cheaper" bit that's the problem. Labor of course has always been cheaper in (certain) foreign countries, but that's compensated for by import tariffs. If those import tariffs are removed (or even significantly decreased) by trade deals, then suddenly manufacturers are free to relocate as they see fit with little or no detriment.
That's Trump's big argument for renegotiating NAFTA. He figures that if he shuts down much of NAFTA and can re-impose high tariffs on things like automobile imports then
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It doesn't matter who was saying what, the manufacturing jobs didn't leave because people refused to work in it, it left because of regulations and taxes.
More nuanced is manufacturing left because they found people in developing countries who are willing to do the job for less than people in rich countries. People in rich countries refused to work for very low wages, people in poorer countries were willing to work for very low wages. Why they were willing is another issue entirely (the low wages beat their other alternatives, e.g. subsistence farming).
Taxes and regulations also figure in. It's a pain to work across continents and countries but if it's a ton
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I think you're missing something important, which is the value of being able to work whenever you damn-well feel like it and take a vacation whenever you damn-well feel like it and not be accountable to anyone else's schedule.
Let's do an experiment, take a worker in any other sector: retail/food/engineering/medicine, you name it. Now tell that person that they are going to move to a system where they can chose when to go to work and when to leave, with 15-minute granularity and no advance notice whatsoever.
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Actually, no. Many gig economy companies will charge their staff a fee for finding replacement cover.
https://www.theguardian.com/bu... [theguardian.com]
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>Let's do an experiment, take a worker in any other sector: retail/food/engineering/medicine, you name it. Now tell that person that they are going to move to a system where they can chose when to go to work and when to leave, with 15-minute granularity and no advance notice whatsoever. Of course, their wages will scale only with the time they actually spend working. Now ask them what that sort of flexibility would be worth to them.
Want to take the afternoon off to watch your nephew's baseball game -- it costs you exactly one afternoon of wages. Want to take the weekend to attend your college friend's wedding -- it costs you exactly one weekend of wages. Want to sign out of your job for 3 months while you backpack SE Asia and then come back and continue like nothing happened -- it costs you exactly 3 months of wages.
I'm quite fortunate that my boss is understanding, and I could probably do the above if we weren't swamped with work and if it wasn't too overlapped with my teammates (6-person team, so 2 of us leaving for the same week would be bad but not fatal). Most workers, especially in retail/food sectors closest in wage level to Uber can't dream of it. If your boss at Starbucks says you work on Saturday, your sister's birthday party will just have to wait (or you can swap).
Hell, even with my understanding boss and cushy job, I would absolutely love an arrangement where I make my pro-rated salary for every week (!) I want to work and can take unlimited pro-rated vacation without a single thought.
That's fine. I'll stick with my 5 weeks of actual PAID vacation (currently 3 weeks vacation with 2 weeks of paid personal time off that you accrue every year and can bank, earning 1 more week of vacation this year and 1 more week in 5 years) that I can already take any time I want because I don't have bosses that are dicks and my coworkers can cover the slack (although if you took a whole month off at a time you would be kind of an asshole, they can handle a week or two at a time). Oh yes, and this job is
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I mean, your excellent salaried job is excellent.
Now consider people in the same wage range as Uber drivers -- baristas at Starbucks, retail clerks, administrative assistants, office managers. Not quite as low as fast-food but also not excellent salaried jobs like yours.
Those people might in fact value the same kind of flexibility you have, and so far we have not been able to create working structures for them that provide anything like it. The idea that you could drop in to for your retail job whenever you
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I'm not sure where you live, but where I live office managers and administrative assistants are generally on salary and have benefits, paid vacation etc.
And even the retail clerks and baristas bank vacation pay by law. They may not get dental and vision care, etc but they get paid for taking their time off.
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I think you're missing something important, which is the value of being able to work whenever you damn-well feel like it and take a vacation whenever you damn-well feel like it and not be accountable to anyone else's schedule.
Let's do an experiment, take a worker in any other sector: retail/food/engineering/medicine, you name it. Now tell that person that they are going to move to a system where they can chose when to go to work and when to leave, with 15-minute granularity and no advance notice whatsoever. Of course, their wages will scale only with the time they actually spend working. Now ask them what that sort of flexibility would be worth to them.
Want to take the afternoon off to watch your nephew's baseball game -- it costs you exactly one afternoon of wages. Want to take the weekend to attend your college friend's wedding -- it costs you exactly one weekend of wages. Want to sign out of your job for 3 months while you backpack SE Asia and then come back and continue like nothing happened -- it costs you exactly 3 months of wages.
I'm quite fortunate that my boss is understanding, and I could probably do the above if we weren't swamped with work and if it wasn't too overlapped with my teammates (6-person team, so 2 of us leaving for the same week would be bad but not fatal). Most workers, especially in retail/food sectors closest in wage level to Uber can't dream of it. If your boss at Starbucks says you work on Saturday, your sister's birthday party will just have to wait (or you can swap).
Hell, even with my understanding boss and cushy job, I would absolutely love an arrangement where I make my pro-rated salary for every week (!) I want to work and can take unlimited pro-rated vacation without a single thought.
The difference is right here in your post. A job that you can walk away from with little consequence or inconvenience is a job in which you have little value or responsibility. You personally can't just do that because you are on a team, with responsibilities and deliverables. You are skilled and are probably well paid. I would like to have more flexibility too. But I can, with some notice, take time off without giving up any money. I don't have to choose between watching my son's baseball game and ma
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That's 100% correct.
I think the point is that, if you're going to work a lower-wage job that's easily replaceable by anyone else that knows how to drive (or whatever else the next gig economy thing is), the least society could do in terms of non-monetary compensation is to offer you the flexibility that we can afford by having a huge pool of replacements. At this wage
In other words, it's not enough to just look at wages. I'm well-paid but there are other non-monterary components of my jobs.
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Exactly, there is a reason most IT work in my area is outsourced to "consulting companies" who pay pennies on the dollar for overworked 1099 "subcontractors" who get screwed out of benefits and overtime pay. And if convenient and feasible they'll outsource everything they can to India and use 1099 monkeys here as a pair of cheap hands.
There is a reason I bailed on the entire field.
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If gig economy collapses due to lack of interest by people taking gigs, then you would have a point. That's not what will happen, instead of that the gig economy will collapse the good old fashion way: by regulations and taxes preventing it from existing. It will be sued out of existence, we can't allow any freedom so we can't have an economy at all, we already killed off most of the real economy and all that is left is 'gig'. Kill that off, it doesn't matter. Of-course gig economy cannot plug the holes,
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The law does not deserve any respect, why shouldn't it be broken? The law stopped deserving respect once the law became compromised. The law is not based on a set of strict rules (the Constitution), instead it is open to interpretation to the benefit of those currently in power and those buying the said power.
The law today does not warrant respect.
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The law does not deserve any respect, why shouldn't it be broken? The law stopped deserving respect once the law became compromised. The law is not based on a set of strict rules (the Constitution), instead it is open to interpretation to the benefit of those currently in power and those buying the said power.
The law today does not warrant respect.
The law is so much more than the Constitution. The Constitution provides a framework for the delegation and separation of powers between the branches of the Federal government and between the Federal and State governments. There are no regulations in the Constitution. Most laws and regulations have nothing to do with Constitutionality.
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The law today does not warrant respect.
Let me guess, you probably still "respect" the laws about not stealing or murdering though?
The law is not based on a set of strict rules
Real life is, indeed, more complicated than a "Hello World" program.
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The jig is up on the "gig" economy. I can't wait for it to completely collapse. I hope the short-term rental economy goes next.
I think people miss the point of the gig economy. The big win isn't that you're hiring contractors with unconventional hours. The win is you don't have to raise capital to start your business. The gig employees bring their own capital with them. Uber doesn't have to invest in a fleet of cars, Airbnb doesn't have to buy a lot of real estate, and so forth. It makes it much, much cheaper to run the company because your capital outlay is so much lower. You can also grow much faster than a traditionally financed
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Warlords relied on violence — living (and dying) by the proverbial sword.
No, it is not, actually. What is illegal is to hold anyone as slave (except as punishment for a crime) — contract or not. But Uber is not doing anything of the kind, the contracts are "at will", breakable by either side. No, what these drivers now want — with encourag
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Look up "Pinkerton" to remind yourself why it's still a relevant comparison and what governments are protecting us from in the workplace. “You could not run a coal company without machine guns" - Richard Mellon, 1925, is a quote that is also relevant.
I do indeed prefer a State to a Kingdom or Oligarchy.
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Machine guns are still required — only it is the government's police, not "Pinkerton", that use them. And it is far from obvious, this is an improvement — for any abuse by the Pinkerton employees, a BLM agitator could list 5 abuses by cops (before realizing, you and him are on the same Socialist sid
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Of course, it is! It has a subject ("This") and a verb ("is") [really-learn-english.com].
You, dufus, attempted to contrast "State" (government) vs. "Kingdom" or "Oligarchy" — not realizing, Monarchy et. al are still governments. That's why I closed with the (perfectly complete) sentence: "This is not even wrong".
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Ah yes, I forgot that democracy and the ideals of a Republic are "socialist" now. We should just follow "might is right" should we?
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Either way, be it the warlords of the dark ages or armed enforcers of the modernity, the distinct attribute is violence. And Uber manifestly does not use it — nor is it even alleged to use it.
You think the only type of violence is physical? Uber recently increased their percentage of each ride while dropping the price. I'm not saying that's violence necessarily. But it's kind of a crappy thing to do, and the drivers have no say about it.
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No, it is not, actually. What is illegal is to hold anyone as slave (except as punishment for a crime) — contract or not. But Uber is not doing anything of the kind, the contracts are "at will", breakable by either side.
In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges.
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You give the government license to weigh in on a contract as soon as you rely on the courts to help you enforce it.
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Frankly, I don't see, how the two things are related in the slightest. A judge may think a contract was unfair (or stupid), but it is still valid — as long as entered into willingly and in good faith by both sides...
Re: Statist assault on free enterprise (Score:1)
A judge may think a contract was unfair (or stupid), but it is still valid â" as long as entered into willingly and in good faith by both sides...
You just implied two conditions of unfairness, which among others, judges use to invalidate contracts.
Kinda destroying your own arguments here.
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Frankly, I don't see, how the two things are related in the slightest. A judge may think a contract was unfair (or stupid), but it is still valid — as long as entered into willingly and in good faith by both sides...
Oh, so you do think the courts should be able to weigh in on a contract.
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Consider, without the government, there would be no such thing as a corporation in the first place.
Moving past that, the public good is to be the paramount consideration of government. So contracts against the public good may not be enforced. That's why you cannot be forced to commit a crime to fulfill a contract, even if it wasn't a crime when the contract was signed. It's also why contracts of adhesion have limited enforcement and vague language interpreted in the favor of the other party.
You spoke of wil
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WTF is it any concern of the government, what sort of contract free citizens of able body and sound mind enter into with each other?
Here's a better question: is someone in poverty truly free?
If the conservatives had their way (Score:1)
If the conservatives had their way, then ALL companies would be like that.
You know, small governement, little to no legislation, the free market will fix itself and bla bla bla.
Too bad neocons, libertarianism has already been tried. It was called feudalism, corporatism and fascism. And every time it was a disaster.
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While I'm certainly no hard core conservative, your examples are.. not even misleading they're just flat out wrong.
Feudalism? As in when local warlords continually fight over chunks of land and the peasants are little better than slaves? Pretty sure there's not much freedom in a market that's basically "give me all your stuff or I'll kill you and your family and maybe your entire village."
Corporatism isn't even a real thing. Its a derogatory term for our current system since it sometimes (well OK, often)
Something I don't get (Score:2)
My only question is: I've watched about a dozen of these "Gig Economy" companies get shut down because they were obviously employers. Uber's doing the exact same thing. How are they surviving? Are the CEOs/Investors just that much better connected?
I have an idea (Score:1)
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Or gleefully sign away, knowing that under the law it's unenforceable.
Given that contracts are often discussed at great length in court cases by trained legal professionals I think it's reasonable to suggest that nobody can understand a contract, and so you're effectively saying that nobody should ever sign one.
I'm fairly sure I don't correctly interpret multiple legal terms in contracts that I sign. I avoid having to pay thousands of pounds to lawyers every time I sign up for a new TV, telephone, power or
Well that's one thing that MPs are expert on (Score:2)
Uber is ethically unfit as a business (Score:1)
From my short time with Uber I realized their ethics are at zero and they pride themselves at skirting regulations and laws. It's almost an obsession with them to try and out play outside the rules. Case in point is current litigation Waymo has against their former engineer and Uber. Can't wait until Uber totally self destructs which is almost a given.