When I was in college, I used to work Uber as a side gig. One day, while working, my account was blocked, and I would couldn't pick up any more passengers. I was 2 hours away from home. Apparently, one of the customers had filed a complaint about a missing item (gloves or some bs like that), it was not in my car. My account was blocked until the case was "reviewed". So I had to drive back 2 hours without picking up any passengers. (The passenger later found the item in their bag)
There should be a way to codify law that requires companies to provide compensation for the trouble. Companies far too commonly assume guilty until proven innocent. It puts all the responsibility on the consumer because they want to avoid liabilities.
Yeah the law should be gig work is illegal and the OP should have been classified as a part time or full time worker who would have been paid for the entire time on the clock during the work day, including the time wasted while the company toiled to resolve a customer dispute.
This seems like a perfectly normal consequence of the "at-will" employment resultant from the primary place liberty has in our society. I see nothing wrong with it and think this paradigm should continue and expand. I would say you have as much reason to continue to expect Uber issue you contracts as Uber has that you continue to accept them, namely none at all. A consensual relationship is one that can be terminated at any time without justification.
One day your job is going to be a gig job. Sooner or later. If it happens to be later, are you going to be cool living in a privileged oligarch class that has its boot on the face of humanity?
When your philosophy was developed, if you didn’t like your circumstances you could literally move to the wilderness and make a life for yourself by exploiting unclaimed land. Or if you lived in a different part of the world then nations would go to war with each other over resources.
We don’t live in a world with unclaimed land anymore.
It would be really super duper nice if nations stopped going to war with each other over resources.
We have to figure out how to coexist with each other, and that means treating humans with more dignity than an object that is ruled by an algorithm.
Corporations aren't entitled to liberty. Uber isn't a person, it's a hivemind - if it has to cut off one drone, it doesn't affect the hive. Except drivers aren't drones who can simply accept being liquidated for the good of the hive. Allowing that behavior is anti-liberty - the liquidated driver has had their means of providing for their own liberty revoked by an entity that is private, arbitrary and capricious.
There is very thin line, alas. And it goes to same old "were you really happy to use taxi before uber". In 2 countries where I did live and in many where I used just them, I wasn't happy.
Taxis were as unreliable and untrusworthy and they could be - unpredictable prices, you never know if it will actually come even if company accepted your request, shady city navigation when pay by meter etc.
So I'm all for company like Uber to be able to cut such bad actors very fast to be able to provide good service for customers. But that ability seems like quickly and universally degrades to "we own you and your schedule" attitude by ubers of the world
Probably everyone who has used a Taxi in Germany in the past can tell you how professional, knowledgeable, and safe Taxis were there, and that came through very strong regulations.
Getting a taxi concession was no joke. You literally had to study on the layout of the city. And given that those are European cities, there is no grid system. You also had to know about safety and take first aid courses.
Additionally, taxis require special inspection on top of the rigid inspections necessary for cars in Germany (you wouldn’t want to endanger people with a rust bucket on the autobahn). So yes, they were exceptionally safe.
Taxis are mostly Mercedes in Germany, as traditionally Mercedes had the most experience with taxis, and the proper programs in place for taxi use. When I see a Mercedes E wagon on a freeway, I still think "taxi" (like some think police car when they see a Crown Victoria).
Source: There was a time where I took a taxi almost every day in Germany, and a close family member owns a German taxi concession for many decades now.
Lyft+Uber are an absolute joke in comparison.
(I talk mostly in the past tense, because I haven’t lived in Germany for long now. I don’t know whether the gig economy damaged the enormous quality of taxis over there.)
100% this. I used to love to go to NYC and ride in the taxis. Such interesting people. Now, I get into a car and have to pretend I'm happy there are mints because they don't want to be poorly reviewed. When no one had to care about reviews, people could be real, and occasionally uncomfortable, but always authentic. Those days are long gone and fuck Uber for destroying that.
> Probably everyone who has used a Taxi in Germany in the past can tell you how professional, knowledgeable, and safe Taxis were there, and that came through very strong regulations.
If you required taxi drivers to have a PhD, they would be even better!
> [Ubers] are as unreliable and untrusworthy and they could be - unpredictable prices, you never know if it will actually come even if company accepted your request etc.
Seriously, the number of times I've seen cancellations because the Uber didn't want to go in that direction or that neighborhood... or had unreal surge pricing applied, etc.
And that's today, so I doubt the Seattle change will make much of a difference. Many (not necessarily most. I don't have that data) drivers game the system in its current state.
Sure, but that's somewhat unavoidable. It's not as if cab drivers didn't discriminate on their fares before Uber, or inflate/make up prices via all kinds of underhanded means.
Uber and the like are getting worse, but they're just coming down to the level the taxi industry has been at for most of the last century.
Yes, Uber drivers are constantly canceling rides or just sitting in one spot until I’m forced to cancel myself and then dispute the charge. Thankfully Lyft still exists, I’ve switched to them and haven’t looked back. I can get to where I need to go much faster and more reliably, at roughly the same price or often less.
Yes because Uber didn’t have to actually compete with taxis. They offered a nicer service at a cheap cost and both of these things were an illusion. The price was subsidized and the drivers weren’t required (at the time) to meet any of the regulations that apply to drivers or third party passengers (for good reasons.)
So they replaced one crappy service with another that has a better UX. All other benefits seem to have vanished when forced to actually make money and we’ve seen a ton of rationale for the existing regulations in the process. Similar to Airbnb
I don't disagree with most of that, and I generally try not to use Uber or Lyft these days, but "replace a crappy service with a crappy service with better UX" is... not a bad business model. Almost every time I've taken a normal cab, the car was worse than every Uber I've ever been in, they tried to bully me into paying cash, and half of the time there was a screen in the car showing me ads non-stop, and it still cost more.
I had essentially sworn off of taxis, or even visiting cities where I would need to get a taxi. For all of their supposed regulation, there was almost no other industry I wanted to interact with less.
Uber had a really low bar to clear, and even at increased prices, I'm unsure if it would drive me back to cabs.
Surprising to some, perhaps, but the average Uber ride did not end in violence or a vehicular accident injuring people that had to be prevented by regulation. To the dismay perhaps of taxi/limousine commissioners, the average driver was a relatively decent human being who - given the preexisting apparatus in place to license drivers - did a good job, and cared about his car and his rating on the app to continue to do so. What happened for decades in cities like New York where taxi medallions were so expensive you could retire on their sale was big tech disrupting a dysfunction at its best. As for the cost, I didn't lose any sleep at night worrying that I was subsidized by Saudi Royal Family money. When the prices went up, it was never at a rate much worse than a cab.
Uber still provides a better service for me in areas where I can use it. It's not as cheap, but in the cities I live and travel to taxis are still sketchy and unreliable compared to Uber.
Edit: honestly what is the rationale for the existing regulation?
I see the arguments for regulation around employee protection. But a lot of the licensing regulations seem designed to enforce artificial scarcity and restrict competition. The medallion system in NYC comes to mind. The value of an NYC medallion was insane pre Uber, there's no good reason for that.
Some of the licensing was clearly regulatory capture by existing taxi companies.
> Yes because Uber didn’t have to actually compete with taxis.
Taxis in many cities were/are horrible, Uber is a godsend in cities like Manila where the option is to (a) get ripped off (for sure) by a taxi or (b) use the Uber app and don't get ripped off. It is honestly an improvement. Likewise for didi dache in many Chinese cities where getting ripped off is common.
In Denmark we sort of made it illegal for gig drivers, not for food delivery (unfortunately) but what the “scare” did to taxis was it made them get the same Apps that Uber has.
So now taking a taxi comes with most of the benefits of having Uber, while also having all the benefits that come with the rather highly regulated industry of taxi services.
I guess it’s more expensive, but then, does Uber make money? Because if they don’t, then when will it disappear?
Pre-Uber, I would use taxis when visiting NYC all the time. It was fine; taxis were all over the place, and hailing one was easy. Hotels and some higher-end restaurants would even help line one up for you. Drivers were all over the map, though: some were quiet, some loud, some annoying, some offensive. Most drivers drove aggressively. Some cars were clean, some dirty. The credit card machine was usually "broken" (wink, wink). No good way to get any of this feedback acted on.
In SF (where I've lived since pre-Uber times), taxis were useless. There was pretty much nowhere in the city where you could reliably flag one down. You could call a dispatcher, but the standard answer was "a taxi will pick you up in 20 minutes", and then at least half the time they'd never show up. The rest of the time it'd take at least twice that amount of time.
So I walked or took transit when I had the extra time in my schedule, or I drove. Which sucked in many ways, as parking is annoying in SF, and if I'm going out to drink, it means either carefully controlling how much I drink, and leaving some buffer time at the end of the night to sober up, or leaving my car wherever it is, and hoping I don't get a parking ticket in the morning (a hope that failed often enough to get expensive).
Nowadays I still walk or take transit as much as possible, but I hardly ever drive in the city. Uber/Lyft have completely filled this void. As much as their business practices have been terrible, there's nothing else that fills their niche.
> So I'm all for company like Uber to be able to cut such bad actors very fast to be able to provide good service for customers.
The problem with this is that there's no due process. Some disgruntled rider can be an asshole and rate a driver with 1 star, with a comment about feeling unsafe, and that's it, even if the driver didn't do anything wrong. How is that fair?
Meanwhile, taxis have always had predictable pricing based on tariffs.
Honestly, I think the answer usually is in robust competition.
thing is, with this brave new world of purchasing services through apps and websites, competition is not assured. You will have a very difficult time fighting through the gauntlet of adtech and dark patterns, you might have a hard time getting a fair deal. Do people really get fair pricing getting a hotel, a plane ticket, a rental car, a tow truck or an emergency plumber anymore?
When I was in college and didnt have a car, UBER is one of these things that have improved my quality of live like no other thing. If not for UBER, I would have a miserable existence. Long live UBER.
"Employee benefits? No no, they aren't employees, they are contractors who operate with a dramatically higher degree of autonomy... Except when we fire--er, unilaterally sever relations, because they are being autonomous in ways we wouldn't accept from employees." /s
Our discourse on this topic is horribly stunted by everyone — on both sides — insisting that there are only two God-ordained classes of employment: "employees" and "contractors".
We would have infinitely more sophisticated discourse if we allowed for the possibility that our taxonomy does not capture the reality we live in, where there are intermediate classes of labor which should have some (but not all) the rights, protections, and expectations accorded to full-time employees.
Novel categories for niche situations might be nice to have, but the lack of some Perfect Category isn't the main cause of the disagreements/injustice going around. No matter how many are invented, we'd almost certainly still have the problem of people mis-categorizing for profit.
> Our discourse on this topic is horribly stunted by [...] insisting that there are only two
Most of these cases involve resolving how (or whether) a current situation must be brought into alignment with current laws, rather than how laws could look in 10+ years, so I think it's reasonable for much of the discourse to reflect that.
Sure, we could dramatically overhaul national employment laws and legal theory, but that's not what courts are supposed to do during a lawsuit, and it's usually outside the scope of what many local/state legislatures are prepared and willing to tackle.
The nature of gig work is that you always need to be looking for your next gig. The problem they talk about here is getting cut off from the matchmaking service, not that one customer doesn’t like you.
A lot of drivers I see are on multiple different gig apps they use interchangeably. There are like 3 food delivery apps and then 2 ride sharing apps. Anyone doing gig work full time is probably on all the apps. Also I don’t think they permanently end the relationship until they’ve investigated it. No way they permanently cut drivers just for an accusation of a rider.
That’s obviously a bit different from a regular job.
That's not the case in Finland. In Finland the "independent contractors" who make food deliveries are expected to commit to a certain amount of work at a regular interval (you know, like 8 hours per day for 5 days a week or so).
There is a lot of competition for these courier gigs, so the companies can choose who they allow to get gigs.
The power to completely cut off someone’s access to a service without recourse or explanation, be it email or food delivery or something else, is one of the most horrifying and dystopian realities we as an industry have willed into existence.
Glad to see municipalities finally taking some territory on this, it’s long overdue.
Yes, but remember that the polite fiction of the rideshare companies is that they're providing a service to the drivers by connecting them with riders. So the gp's point is a sound one even in this context.
Gig companies call it a two-sided market place and just use different names to describe “producer” and “consumer”. From this point of view both are users.
I’m wondering if the biggest problem is that at some point in history, losing access to an email account wasn’t the biggest deal - fast forward 20 years and I’d prefer to lose access to my physical mailing address, anything important is sent electronically.
I’m still not sure if there’s anything preventing TLD providers from revoking your domain for any purposes (higher bidder, etc).
I think we're in the worst of both worlds currently. Our online identities are already critically important, yet we're still bound to the physicial address for critical things like banks, employment screening, etc. that refuse to move away from physicial residency check mostly by inertia (I see laws not getting updated as part of that inertia)
There needs to be a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to a US government provided email, electronic money account that can never be blocked from receiving and sending money, and identity verification services as part of everyone’s rights.
> The power to completely cut off someone’s access to a service without recourse or explanation
This is also relevant a different context: Google (or some other similar provider) cutting off your access suddenly, throwing your life suddenly into extreme disarray.
It's actually a lot more thorough than I imagined, especially as it is a city ordinance and not a state law. Gig companies gonna soil themselves trying to work with this. Lots of lawyers getting overtime right now.
Which may not be a bad thing. As other commenter shared anocdote, him getting cut off because of bogus accusation is not nice. If Uber had to eat the loss, instead of carelessly impossing it on their "employees", they could probably do more thorough screening of onboarding employees, which would benefit the customer as well.
Earnestly not trolling, but would that actually benefit the customer? Part of the benefits of a service like Uber is having a lot of people willing and able to drive to/from places all over. If they're rejecting more people and increasing cost due to more thorough screening, the service likely gets worse and costs more, which means less people use it, so less people want to drive for it, and that starts to spiral.
I'm willing to believe that outcome may be better in the abstract, since I'm not a big fan of Uber in the first place, but it's not clear that the average user of Uber wants that trade.
So, I work as a full time employee for a "big tech company located in downtown Seattle", my employer can terminate me anytime, on the spot, for any reason. But if I was a uber driver, I'd receive some "protection", why is that?
When one group of people fight for and/or win new rights, it doesn't mean that people believe that is the only group who deserve those rights. So yes, you should be protected too. Same with those gig workers. We all should be protected and we should celebrate anytime someone gets that protection. We don't have to view the world as a zero-sum game in which someone else getting something means you lose something.
If you're terminated you still get benefits like COBRA healthcare and can in almost all cases file for unemployment (which is money you've already paid into the system anyways). You have protections and a basic safety net. Gig workers have _none_ of that help.
You should probably reflect on why you don't seem to realize the extreme privilege and benefits you have and instead choose to blame or vilify low paid gig workers who are subsidizing and delivering the treats you demand and consume daily.
you receive WAY more protection than an uber driver (even with these rules) - federal law (and probably state?) dictate a whole host of reasons that employees may not be fired for, and there are an army of attorneys who will happily (and are legally empowered to) sue your [former] employer in an actual court (not arbitration), and what's more they'll almost always work on contingency.
Why else would uber be so desparate to prevent their drivers from being classified as employees?
Totally the same context in every way. Those fatcat parasite uber drivers deserve to be taken down a peg eh?
Why isn't the question why you have to live without any sense of security and basic human dignity?
That is essentially the life of a prostitute. You get paid today if you're lucky, and it might even be a lot, but are neither seen as or treated like a human, just a "provider". You give up the autonomy of your own business and the lions share of the rewards for your own work to be a mere employee, in trade for all the same risk as being out there on your own. That's showing 'em.
I would actually be embarrassed to admit that I had so little self esteem and dignity that my uber driver has higher minimum standards for professional relationships than myself, but hey that's just me.
Given that the unemployment rate in the US (at least) is still extremely low (about 3.5%), it’s at least worth considering that if the people working gig jobs wanted full or part-time employment, with the set of trade offs that entails, it’s probably available to them.
Readit News
Company assumed the rider was innocent until proven otherwise. Two way road here, being a middleman-as-a-service.
Also passengers pay you $20 or so for returning an item.
Only situations where they will disable you automatically is when someone complains about safety or violence or something along those lines.
* I worked there from 2016-2020
When you started, "when I was in college..."
I wasn't expecting "I used to work Uber" to follow!
Uber still feels new to me. Haha.
Anyway, on a serious note, that is frustrating...
I'm surprised there is no arbitration...
It's scary to think that someone could knowingly use this against a driver as a cruel joke, or to save face.
I have a mobile app on the Apple app store that makes a little money each month.
I'm anxious that despite thousands of personal investment, Apple can unplug me in an instant... like flushing a parasite out of the Matrix.
When your philosophy was developed, if you didn’t like your circumstances you could literally move to the wilderness and make a life for yourself by exploiting unclaimed land. Or if you lived in a different part of the world then nations would go to war with each other over resources.
We don’t live in a world with unclaimed land anymore.
It would be really super duper nice if nations stopped going to war with each other over resources.
We have to figure out how to coexist with each other, and that means treating humans with more dignity than an object that is ruled by an algorithm.
Since most of us have to work to live is it consensual? I do understand that there are other places to potentially work but that may be limited.
and then let the exception make the rule, since it never will be the same
Dead Comment
Taxis were as unreliable and untrusworthy and they could be - unpredictable prices, you never know if it will actually come even if company accepted your request, shady city navigation when pay by meter etc.
So I'm all for company like Uber to be able to cut such bad actors very fast to be able to provide good service for customers. But that ability seems like quickly and universally degrades to "we own you and your schedule" attitude by ubers of the world
Getting a taxi concession was no joke. You literally had to study on the layout of the city. And given that those are European cities, there is no grid system. You also had to know about safety and take first aid courses.
Additionally, taxis require special inspection on top of the rigid inspections necessary for cars in Germany (you wouldn’t want to endanger people with a rust bucket on the autobahn). So yes, they were exceptionally safe.
Taxis are mostly Mercedes in Germany, as traditionally Mercedes had the most experience with taxis, and the proper programs in place for taxi use. When I see a Mercedes E wagon on a freeway, I still think "taxi" (like some think police car when they see a Crown Victoria).
Source: There was a time where I took a taxi almost every day in Germany, and a close family member owns a German taxi concession for many decades now.
Lyft+Uber are an absolute joke in comparison.
(I talk mostly in the past tense, because I haven’t lived in Germany for long now. I don’t know whether the gig economy damaged the enormous quality of taxis over there.)
If you required taxi drivers to have a PhD, they would be even better!
Seriously, the number of times I've seen cancellations because the Uber didn't want to go in that direction or that neighborhood... or had unreal surge pricing applied, etc.
And that's today, so I doubt the Seattle change will make much of a difference. Many (not necessarily most. I don't have that data) drivers game the system in its current state.
Uber and the like are getting worse, but they're just coming down to the level the taxi industry has been at for most of the last century.
So they replaced one crappy service with another that has a better UX. All other benefits seem to have vanished when forced to actually make money and we’ve seen a ton of rationale for the existing regulations in the process. Similar to Airbnb
I had essentially sworn off of taxis, or even visiting cities where I would need to get a taxi. For all of their supposed regulation, there was almost no other industry I wanted to interact with less.
Uber had a really low bar to clear, and even at increased prices, I'm unsure if it would drive me back to cabs.
Edit: honestly what is the rationale for the existing regulation?
I see the arguments for regulation around employee protection. But a lot of the licensing regulations seem designed to enforce artificial scarcity and restrict competition. The medallion system in NYC comes to mind. The value of an NYC medallion was insane pre Uber, there's no good reason for that.
Some of the licensing was clearly regulatory capture by existing taxi companies.
Taxis in many cities were/are horrible, Uber is a godsend in cities like Manila where the option is to (a) get ripped off (for sure) by a taxi or (b) use the Uber app and don't get ripped off. It is honestly an improvement. Likewise for didi dache in many Chinese cities where getting ripped off is common.
So now taking a taxi comes with most of the benefits of having Uber, while also having all the benefits that come with the rather highly regulated industry of taxi services.
I guess it’s more expensive, but then, does Uber make money? Because if they don’t, then when will it disappear?
Pre-Uber, I would use taxis when visiting NYC all the time. It was fine; taxis were all over the place, and hailing one was easy. Hotels and some higher-end restaurants would even help line one up for you. Drivers were all over the map, though: some were quiet, some loud, some annoying, some offensive. Most drivers drove aggressively. Some cars were clean, some dirty. The credit card machine was usually "broken" (wink, wink). No good way to get any of this feedback acted on.
In SF (where I've lived since pre-Uber times), taxis were useless. There was pretty much nowhere in the city where you could reliably flag one down. You could call a dispatcher, but the standard answer was "a taxi will pick you up in 20 minutes", and then at least half the time they'd never show up. The rest of the time it'd take at least twice that amount of time.
So I walked or took transit when I had the extra time in my schedule, or I drove. Which sucked in many ways, as parking is annoying in SF, and if I'm going out to drink, it means either carefully controlling how much I drink, and leaving some buffer time at the end of the night to sober up, or leaving my car wherever it is, and hoping I don't get a parking ticket in the morning (a hope that failed often enough to get expensive).
Nowadays I still walk or take transit as much as possible, but I hardly ever drive in the city. Uber/Lyft have completely filled this void. As much as their business practices have been terrible, there's nothing else that fills their niche.
> So I'm all for company like Uber to be able to cut such bad actors very fast to be able to provide good service for customers.
The problem with this is that there's no due process. Some disgruntled rider can be an asshole and rate a driver with 1 star, with a comment about feeling unsafe, and that's it, even if the driver didn't do anything wrong. How is that fair?
I find pricing very variable with uber.
Meanwhile, taxis have always had predictable pricing based on tariffs.
Honestly, I think the answer usually is in robust competition.
thing is, with this brave new world of purchasing services through apps and websites, competition is not assured. You will have a very difficult time fighting through the gauntlet of adtech and dark patterns, you might have a hard time getting a fair deal. Do people really get fair pricing getting a hotel, a plane ticket, a rental car, a tow truck or an emergency plumber anymore?
We would have infinitely more sophisticated discourse if we allowed for the possibility that our taxonomy does not capture the reality we live in, where there are intermediate classes of labor which should have some (but not all) the rights, protections, and expectations accorded to full-time employees.
> Our discourse on this topic is horribly stunted by [...] insisting that there are only two
Most of these cases involve resolving how (or whether) a current situation must be brought into alignment with current laws, rather than how laws could look in 10+ years, so I think it's reasonable for much of the discourse to reflect that.
Sure, we could dramatically overhaul national employment laws and legal theory, but that's not what courts are supposed to do during a lawsuit, and it's usually outside the scope of what many local/state legislatures are prepared and willing to tackle.
Some people call that “getting fired.”
Unilaterally firing is much more inline with being a contractor than an employee.
That’s obviously a bit different from a regular job.
There is a lot of competition for these courier gigs, so the companies can choose who they allow to get gigs.
Glad to see municipalities finally taking some territory on this, it’s long overdue.
Edit: typo
This article is about cutting off the workers' employment with the delivery/etc app, not the end users' ability to use the app
I’m still not sure if there’s anything preventing TLD providers from revoking your domain for any purposes (higher bidder, etc).
This is also relevant a different context: Google (or some other similar provider) cutting off your access suddenly, throwing your life suddenly into extreme disarray.
Dead Comment
For example, the ordinance would prohibit deactivating drivers who:
- Fail background checks - Establish a record of traffic infractions - Achieve a 1 star rating - Cherry picking only the best fares.
I'm willing to believe that outcome may be better in the abstract, since I'm not a big fan of Uber in the first place, but it's not clear that the average user of Uber wants that trade.
You should probably reflect on why you don't seem to realize the extreme privilege and benefits you have and instead choose to blame or vilify low paid gig workers who are subsidizing and delivering the treats you demand and consume daily.
Do the gig workers pay in to unemployment?
Do you know for a fact OC uses any of these exploitive services or companies at all?
Why else would uber be so desparate to prevent their drivers from being classified as employees?
Why isn't the question why you have to live without any sense of security and basic human dignity?
That is essentially the life of a prostitute. You get paid today if you're lucky, and it might even be a lot, but are neither seen as or treated like a human, just a "provider". You give up the autonomy of your own business and the lions share of the rewards for your own work to be a mere employee, in trade for all the same risk as being out there on your own. That's showing 'em.
I would actually be embarrassed to admit that I had so little self esteem and dignity that my uber driver has higher minimum standards for professional relationships than myself, but hey that's just me.