The real problem here is that benefits such as health insurance and retirement savings depend on being an employee. Those benefits should be decoupled.
Totally agree. I used to love contracting as a programmer and with Obamacare, I could count on getting medical benefits. Unfortunately, it became impossible to work for most companies because they fear contractors being re-classified as employees by the government. Now I work as an employee and have to suffer through company "culture", annual reviews, pretend loyalty and other BS instead of just charging for my services.
id argue that during the Obama administration steps were taken in the right direction to try to ween insurance companies off the employed/insured racket, but presently outside of this setup theres limited ability for real people to acquire health insurance on their own for a reasonable rate.
Part of this is due to the obstinate nature of some 8 US states that refuse to expand medicare, and part of it is due to multiple healthcare providers such as Kaiser walking out of the open marketplaces proposed by the Obama administration during his term. Then you have to look at what states are explicitly willing to cover as part of their expansion, or rather, what they wont cover. Abortion and contraceptive birth control come to mind, and certainly during the open drafting of the ACA these were outright muddled or restricted in nature. This means private/corporate insured people always have access to family planning, while those on the open market do not. It poses an uncomfortable class delineation.
If i had to postulate as to how US Healthcare will eventually reform, it would be with a whimper. Medicare will soon become large enough that the contraceptive mandate wont matter. Corporations (uber, lyft, amazon) are all becoming fairly callous to the idea that employees get anything at all, let alone healthcare, so its possible they will simply force the states hand.
> Part of this is due to the obstinate nature of some 8 US states that refuse to expand medicare
Medicaid, not Medicare. Medicaid is the federally-subsidized state-run program for the medically indigent.
> part of it is due to multiple healthcare providers such as Kaiser walking out of the open marketplaces proposed by the Obama administration during his term
Kaiser has ACA plans at all levels from Bronze to Platinum in the California exchanges. If they've walked away in other states, it's probably because of state policy, not a fundamental corporate opposition to participating in ACA exchanges.
I don't know (re: Canada) but given you can be an Uber driver and do other driving jobs too (I think?) there's no exclusivity, which I think is what delineates the contractor types.
If there were a middle ground between independent contractors and employees, where such "dependent contractors" e.g. worked exclusively for one client, I'd bet some drivers would pick teams.
A middle ground for contractors makes sense. It makes more sense than the status quo, where ersatz employees get no benefits. And it makes more sense than the Californian law, which effectively outlaws freelancing and part-time contracting.
Such a middle ground relationship would involve some obligations of employment (e.g. re-imbursement for expenses, paid sick leave and time off, basic health benefits) but not all (e.g. no retirement accounts, limited dismissal recourse, no training), just as it would entail some of the restrictions of employment (e.g. exclusivity), but not all of them (e.g. no gardening leaves, corporate NDAs, time management, et cetera).
I can only speak for Germany, here "Uber’s ride-hailing business works exclusively with professional and licensed private-hire vehicle (PHV) companies"[1]
Not sure how that plays out in terms of dependent contractors.
At the same time they just got hit with another ban in relation with their app[1]
So, I'm looking forward to the onslaught of insightful, balanced, and deliberative discussion that will accompany this article.
Idea for HN: the balance of downvotes and upvotes on an article is a useful piece of information in and of itself. It might not be a good idea to show that on each particular article, but an end-of-year analysis of what words in an article title often corresponded to lots of downvotes (relative to the upvotes), would be an interesting way to measure which topics are currently hot-button issues.
The idea that an "insightful, balanced, and deliberative" discussion should happen implies that the topic is either unfamiliar and requiring exploration, or is somehow otherwise of indeterminate status with respect to norms, morality or consequences.
At this point, if someone isn't at least dubious of Uber and the gig economy's value, given everything that's been publicly determined about them, I don't feel like I have a lot of time to waste on a "balanced" discussion.
An "insightful, balanced, and deliberative" discussion is able to determine the truth about a matter more effectively than one imbalanced, that is not deliberative or insightful. So even if you have an opinion on a topic, it is a useful way to proceed to discuss it if you are wanting to gain some insight.
If you're not wanting to learn anything from the discussion, why even have it? It's not as if a flame thread on the internet is going to actually convince anyone of anything, or really accomplish much of anything.
Readit News
They're primarily fighting this because the employment-related taxes and costs are expensive.
What Uber/Lyft want is a new class of contractor that allows them to provide benefits to their workers without paying the taxes.
Part of this is due to the obstinate nature of some 8 US states that refuse to expand medicare, and part of it is due to multiple healthcare providers such as Kaiser walking out of the open marketplaces proposed by the Obama administration during his term. Then you have to look at what states are explicitly willing to cover as part of their expansion, or rather, what they wont cover. Abortion and contraceptive birth control come to mind, and certainly during the open drafting of the ACA these were outright muddled or restricted in nature. This means private/corporate insured people always have access to family planning, while those on the open market do not. It poses an uncomfortable class delineation.
If i had to postulate as to how US Healthcare will eventually reform, it would be with a whimper. Medicare will soon become large enough that the contraceptive mandate wont matter. Corporations (uber, lyft, amazon) are all becoming fairly callous to the idea that employees get anything at all, let alone healthcare, so its possible they will simply force the states hand.
Medicaid, not Medicare. Medicaid is the federally-subsidized state-run program for the medically indigent.
> part of it is due to multiple healthcare providers such as Kaiser walking out of the open marketplaces proposed by the Obama administration during his term
Kaiser has ACA plans at all levels from Bronze to Platinum in the California exchanges. If they've walked away in other states, it's probably because of state policy, not a fundamental corporate opposition to participating in ACA exchanges.
Does anyone know how well that works out in practice? Are Uber drivers dependent contractors in these countries?
If there were a middle ground between independent contractors and employees, where such "dependent contractors" e.g. worked exclusively for one client, I'd bet some drivers would pick teams.
A middle ground for contractors makes sense. It makes more sense than the status quo, where ersatz employees get no benefits. And it makes more sense than the Californian law, which effectively outlaws freelancing and part-time contracting.
Such a middle ground relationship would involve some obligations of employment (e.g. re-imbursement for expenses, paid sick leave and time off, basic health benefits) but not all (e.g. no retirement accounts, limited dismissal recourse, no training), just as it would entail some of the restrictions of employment (e.g. exclusivity), but not all of them (e.g. no gardening leaves, corporate NDAs, time management, et cetera).
Not sure how that plays out in terms of dependent contractors.
At the same time they just got hit with another ban in relation with their app[1]
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/19/ubers-ride-hailing-busines...
Idea for HN: the balance of downvotes and upvotes on an article is a useful piece of information in and of itself. It might not be a good idea to show that on each particular article, but an end-of-year analysis of what words in an article title often corresponded to lots of downvotes (relative to the upvotes), would be an interesting way to measure which topics are currently hot-button issues.
At this point, if someone isn't at least dubious of Uber and the gig economy's value, given everything that's been publicly determined about them, I don't feel like I have a lot of time to waste on a "balanced" discussion.
If you're not wanting to learn anything from the discussion, why even have it? It's not as if a flame thread on the internet is going to actually convince anyone of anything, or really accomplish much of anything.
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