Gig platforms: Uber and Lyft vs. California
A judge in California last week handed Uber and Lyft a crucial setback in “a court battle the gig industry can’t afford to lose,” said Clare Roth in Bloomberg.com. In unambiguous terms, Judge Ethan Schulman in San Francisco dispatched the ride-sharing companies’ effort to exempt themselves from a new state law reclassifying their drivers as employees rather than contractors. Uber and Lyft argued that their drivers aren’t “employees” because they’re not “transportation companies” but platforms that facilitate an exchange between customers and sole proprietors. Schulman called this “nonsense.”
Gig economy workers do deserve a better deal, and I understand why many people want to blame us, said Dara Khosrowshahi, the chief executive officer of Uber, in The New York Times. But their problem isn’t us or other gig economy platforms. It’s an “outdated and unfair” employment system. “Uber is ready, right now, to pay more to give drivers new benefits and protections.” Our drivers are limited by a binary model that forces them to choose between a safety net and the freedom to set their own schedules. The solution is not to make them employees but to require a gig-economy company to establish a fund that will cover time off, subsidized health insurance, and other benefits our workers want.
Uber has gutted driver protections at every turn, said Shoshana Wodinsky in Gizmodo.com, and now claims the problem is the government. Khosrowshahi knows that many Uber drivers work 40, 50, or 60 hours a week, and it’s Uber that’s “dictating the level of flexibility of its own platform.” Now he wants to give drivers a bit more cash, while having Uber rewrite labor law “in its own image.” Indeed, it’s no surprise that Uber wants to foist its own government mandates on us, said Timothy Carney in WashingtonExaminer .com. This is a “tried and true tactic” of businesses hoping to kill smaller competitors and create barriers to entry. Uber knows it could get that benefits fund filled with a “snap of its fingers,” while Lyft and Via would have a harder time. Tobacco companies, tax preparers, and Facebook have all tried similar “regulatory robbery.”
Whether it involves competitors or the public, bullying is Uber’s stock-in-trade, said Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times. Now it’s threatening to pull out of California. The state should call its bluff. This decision wasn’t a “bolt from the blue.” Uber claims that it’s too burdensome to comply with a ruling that’s been expected since 2018. “What was Uber waiting for?” Beats me, but it would surely miss not having access to Los Angeles and San Francisco, two of Uber’s five largest markets.