The Uber case: a blow to the gig economy

Yaseen Aslam. James Farrar. “Remember those two names,” said Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian, “because they are giant-killers.” This summer the two men took on not just one £50bn multinational but “an entire business model” when they launched a case against Uber, the minicab-hailing app, at a London employment tribunal. They argued that, as Uber drivers, they should be entitled to the same basic rights as other workers, such as paid holiday, sick pay and the minimum wage. Last week the tribunal agreed, dismissing Uber’s contention that it was just a humble software platform helping to link independent contractors to customers. The landmark ruling, which Uber is set to appeal, is a setback for the so-called “gig economy”, but it’s “a massive boost for all of us who want a fairer jobs market”. Uber interviews and recruits drivers; it fixes their fares, tells them how to do their job and has a disciplinary procedure. It’s perfectly obvious that these people “work for Uber – not the other way round”.

Uber has undoubtedly been gaming our labour laws to a certain extent, said the FT. But in tightening up the rules, we must take care not to regulate such gig economy companies out of existence. They perform a useful service, and many of those who work for them like the freedom that the arrangement offers. Not all of Britain’s 40,000 Uber drivers want to be categorised as workers, agreed Ross Clark in The Spectator. Yes, this would offer them a guaranteed £7.20 an hour and paid holidays. But it would also mean paying higher national insurance contributions and having less flexibility over when they work and take their holidays, making it harder to combine driving a cab with other work.

We should bear in mind the history of music piracy when dealing with Uber, said Hugo Rifkind in The Times. Remember how regulators cracked down on firms such as Napster, which provided platforms for people to share music illegally? That just led to the creation of peer-to-peer services such as Bittorrent, which are impossible to police. If we crush Uber, it could likewise lead to apps that put “drivers directly in touch with customers, with no identifiable middleman”, which would leave us worse off. Never mind not paying the minimum wage; such firms “wouldn’t even be paying tax”. The other consequence of loading too many costs on Uber, said Tom Welsh in The Daily Telegraph, is that it’ll speed up its plans to “dispense with humans entirely”, with driverless taxis. Given that the joy of Uber is as much about meeting interesting drivers “as its low cost and flexibility, that would be a tragedy”.