Is there any reason to believe the ride sharing companies won't reorganize their drivers using a similar model to what Amazon uses for their delivery drivers: contract to external firms that employ drivers so the parent entity is absolved of responsibility?
I think the answer may be "yes" effectively if it leads to establishing companies of contractors but not without side effects in themselves - like most regulations really.
If gig economies lead to working with companies instead of individuals that would lead to two distinct branches.
* A self established one would give more regulatory surface for things like training and background check requirements. Not as easy to sign up before any added regulations. Constituents would get more of a pure cut. The barriers to entry would make their labor slightly more valuable.
* A traditional company which hires employees. They would have a middleman to make signing up easier but likely less flexibility - which doesn't matter as much to fulltimers anyway.
It likely result in a less flexible market with more barriers to entry but it would solve some problems and act as a framework to add more solutions and problems for better or worse. It could be abused to create cartels again or responsibly handle externalities without unduly privileging - it depends on how the tool is used.
Second order effects are likely a labor pool that cannot rise and fall as quickly which would stabilize prices for the labor supply and turn instability into a company liability as they may be left with a choice of paying for idle labor for availability and meeting demand for sure or risking being unable to fulfill demand.
That said I wouldn't be surprised if widespread roll out of these sorts of laws caused a gig economy bubble to burst - especially given how many are doing a VC dumping strategy of losing money on transactions.
I don't really have strong feelings as to what would be the best nor consider myself above an amateur commentator.
Does it matter who the employees are employed by? All rules for an employer apply just as well for the employing company as they would for Amazon if they employed them directly.
Uber agrees to pay X rate currently to drivers. A law is passed that makes X rate even more unprofitable.
Uber then engages the services of an external company which provides labor at a lower rate, fires all of the current Uber drivers, and encourages them to work for the new external company.
The external company, if sued, does not have the resources that Uber has, and simply goes bankrupt. The drivers are encouraged to work for yet another new company.
This process continues for a while as ride quality and driver satisfaction all suffers. Uber gets to lengthen the runway a bit longer, and either a miracle happens and the company continues operations or some other competitor swallows the market.
Interesting, in Brazil all the companies in the chain are liable in a labor-related law suit. Before the 2017 Labor Reform[1], frivolous law suits by former employees were a billionaire market because it used to be a risk-free gamble - after the reform the litigant is liable for exaggerated claims and there was a 46% drop in labor cases[2].
When I look at any market where the labor code is excessively protective, I see high unemployment rates specially among the young - Brazil, Spain, France[3]... I don't know about causation but clearly there is a correlation between employee over-protection and unemployment rates. I think it is the law of unintended consequences[4] in action: the legislator intention was good (protecting employee) but the net result is negative.
There is definitely a causation for high unemployment by such laws. But it actually goes even deeper.
In France for example, it is difficult for a company to fire an employee once they are legally hired.
Oracle, for example, has a policy of initiating an "intra-country transfer" where the employee is mandated to relocate from Paris to Montpellier. Not everyone wants to uproot their family like that. And then if they do accept the move, next year Oracle will relocate them to Bordeaux...
As I understood, once you hire someone in France the labor code makes it virtually impossible to terminate the contract.
In Brazil employers have to pay a fine if they fire a worker without a "fair cause" (~ 3.2% over the sum of all compensation paid to the employee while they worked for you), so the longer someone worked for you the more expensive it gets to fire them.
The law allows for veil piercing in situations like that, meaning they could skip the temporary intermediaries and just treat Uber as the employer.
Believe it or not, they did think of issues like this when drafting the law. Especially since almost all of these other issues brought up in the comments are decades old and already addressed by existing labor laws.
That was not immediately known to me, because in New York where my family member is a lawyer, something like the following will happen:
Company X owns Company Y. Company Y builds an apartment building of low quality and hides the defects. They sell the apartments to individual buyers.
The individual buyers sue Company X years later upon finding the defects. The judge throws out the lawsuit and says "you can only sue Company Y, because that is the legal entity who built the building."
The only issue is that Company Y is several million dollars in debt to Company X and has absolutely no way of repaying anyone who sues Company Y.
Others are pointing out the problem with staffing companies too, but this reminds me of my experience (different countries, so YMMV). This means that even though "The law allows for veil piercing" there's a huge maybe there, companies unloading their liability know this and have great lawyers. So IF a lawsuit gets to the real employer it's only after a LONG legal process, so not worth as much.
There is also another reason: If Uber employs the driver and he/she acts unprofessionally, then it's a lot of work to fire him/her before they can hire someone else. (Uber does not want to drag passengers into any type of litigation)
If Uber deals with many companies, they can just reduce demand at the company with the bad driver and increase demand at another one. The company with the bad driver can then retrench him, saying they need to cut someone.
(Disclaimer, I know very little about Uber and the US and it may not work for them specifically. But the idea certainly applies to other companies)
yup it does, just like contractor employees at amazon/google/tech company of choice don't get any of the nice benefits or perks of working at the client company, these guys won't get anything.
Those employees can't sue the client company, they can only sue contractor company - that suddenly goes poof and doesn't pay out anything when a dispute happens. Good luck forming a union coz then the company will go poof too
It basically just moves the onus onto the employee willing to sign up for a shit job with no perks and absolves the govt/client company.
> Good luck forming a union coz then the company will go poof too
The answer to this is to form a bigger union so that only the bigger contracting companies can survive, and then have high-paid union executives who can negotiate large industry-wide contracts between employer and labor provider that provide some minimal level of protections but largely protect the status quo.
Then, those in the employer camp can donate to conservative causes complaining about unions and regulation, and those in the labor provider camp can donate to progressive causes complaining about evil corporations and lack of worker rights.
From here, the leaders in the two factions will variously ping pong and vacillate and make various and sundry unfruitful negotiations while taking the advice from various lobbyists about how they might improve the state of affairs and generally enrich themselves through back channel dealings with their benefactors from either camp.
That’s partially true. The contract company can’t fully go poof every time there is a minor lawsuit and the company needs to still pay the state all the fees for unemployment and insurance that all companies have to pay. In the end the employees get workman’s comp, min wage and unemployment insurance but the state gets to collect a bunch of fees that they are owed.
Uber has no USP except the network effect. They are just a taxi company with an app essentially (givent that their self driving efforts havn't fruited at all yet). If they outsource the competency of drivers to an external provider then they are just a taxi company with an app and not even their own driver network, making them even more vulnerable to someone else coming with a better app and using the same driver provider. Customers are the fastest to migrate when price is the main factor and the barrier to switch to a different app is literally just a few clicks in the app store.
He's just talking about a legal reorganization. "Uber Drivers LLC" contracts the employees which is wholly owned by Uber. I don't see how this would actually help them though. Under the new law, Amazon Flex drivers are also categorized as full time employees and the child company would still bear the costs of that
They’re actually talking about Amazon’s delivery service partner program. It’s where Amazon helps people setup independently owned delivery businesses. https://logistics.amazon.com/
Somebody like WorkforceLogic, ManPower or other temp agency would just handle employment, background verification, compliance and 1099s, they're unlikely to start building apps around their own networks.
Uber doesn't want drivers classified as employees so they don't have to pay minimum wage, provide employee benefits, pay payroll taxes, or otherwise comply with the law vis-a-vis employees.
Yet, it is one thing for Uber to hire drivers as contractors individually where Uber has full control over the terms, in other words no driver is in a position to negotiate their contract with Uber...it is an entirely different thing for the drivers to be organized and those organized drivers now be in a position to negotiate (almost like a union).
I think the last thing Uber would do is assist the drivers in organizing...its not just the ability for them to negotiate with Uber collectively either, at that point said driver contracting firm(s) would then be in a position to launch their own ride-share app to compete, unlike say these Amazon driver firms would can't just launch an Amazon competitor.
In my country, working as an Uber driver gets you a good salary. I think it's around 1000€ (minimum wage being less than 500€). Is it different in USA? Do they get less than minimum wage for 8 hours?
According to one analysis [1], working for Uber pays $8.80-$11 per hour (after subtracting car related expenses).
The federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr. But certain cities are much higher, for example New York City is $15.00. In San Francisco, it’s $15.59.
Also worth mentioning that most of these averages are not taken from drivers working full-time (40 hours per week). So while they may be able to make near minimum wage on an hourly basis, they may not be able to achieve that hourly rate for a full 40 hours per week due to fluctuating demand for rides.
Companies are not required to offer health insurance to part-time employees. Employers with more than 50 employees are required to offer health insurance to full time employees.
The crux of the interpretation is what constitutes an hour of work.
Once the ride starts with a paying client in the car, the hourly earnings are easily above minimum wage.
But what about the time spent logged into the app waiting for a ride? If you take a standpoint that's friendly to Uber, that is not billable time - the driver could potentially be working in other capacity (including doing gigs for direct and indirect competitors, like Lyft, Postmates, TaskRabbit, etc.) If you take a standpoint that's employee-friendly, this is similar to a store register clerk being by the register with no customers in the store - they're still present to perform their duties when necessary and therefore must be compensated.
How are you measuring the hours exactly? Just time when a passenger is in the car? Time on the way to pick up the passenger until you drop them off? All the time logged in and looking for a rides?
How do you factor in the car related expenses? And what about depreciation and other expenses beyond the direct out of pocket costs?
It is certainly possible to spend more than 8 hours trying to get rides, and end up with less than 8 hours worth of minimum wage pay after subtracting vehicle costs.
Seems fair to me no one wants to deal with the bureaucracy of employing people or being employed why not out source that to a third party?
The main problem Americans seem to face with gig economy is the lack of health care but thats americas problem you can't blame employers or employees for it.
Where I live the gig works make about or a little less than the minimum wage after expenses for vehicles. This doesn't include saving for retirement, healthcare, workmans comp, disability insurance, or a bunch of other things.
Basically, even if healthcare were taken care of the amount they make would not be a living wage.
I would argue that every job designed to be ones full time job while they are at a life phase where they have to be roughly self sufficient should have a wage that enables them to do so. Or, they need to go do something else.
This is not every job. It is the situation for many in the gig economy.
The reason people don't go do something else more often is something I would love to see studied.
Why shouldn't every job supply a living wage? You realize what your proposing is a net societal negative, right?
If a person has X amount in their savings and their job is not a living wage, then by definition they are likely going to have to rely on their savings to make up the wage differences. This is kind of a bad thing for capitalistic-based societies because you need people to consume, and if you have a large amount of people unable to consume then that negatively impacts the free market.
It's also bad because it places stress on other parts of society. No healthcare means when you eventually get sick or injured the hospital has to take on those costs, which means people pay more while destroying the lives of said injured or sick person.
People will have to make up the wage differential somehow, which also means that underclass of workers is more easily exploitable and/or pushed into illegal behaviors in order to survive.
Healthcare, Insurance, Repairs to machinery, Discrimination - There a TON of problems with the gig economy that are being "subsidized" by investors right now.
So perhaps each Uber Driver could be given the tools to form their own LLC, where they are an employee of that LLC, and that LLC contracts with Uber and potentially other gig services. It could be completely automated for them.
Even if it is automated, that is an $800 out of pocket expense every year for LLC fees, and more complex accounting requirements. It's not worth the effort unless you are making significant money or are serious about your business
Moving Day is an example of something I thought was normal but only realized was a local custom when I moved to another country.
Frozen thinly-sliced fondue meat (beef, pork, turkey) being available at any grocery store was another one. Fondue in a pot of beef broth is a popular dish for dinner parties in Québec since it scales no matter how many guests you have and each guest can eat however much or little they want. In the US the closest I can find is beef bulgogi from a Korean grocery store.
What are some examples of things you thought were "normal" until you moved elsewhere?
>What are some examples of things you thought were "normal" until you moved elsewhere?
Where I come from, the UK, all the entrances to your house, your flat, and shops that don't have automatic/sliding doors would open _inwards_. You'd push a door to enter. Now I live in Finland an doors open outwards.
There are a ton of tiny differences I've noticed since moving from the UK to Finland, another example would be that light-switches turn on/off in the opposite direction to that I'd expect.
That said though I've started taking a lot of these things for granted now, so it is actually quite hard to think of more examples!
One thing I'll never take for granted is that the majority of flats here in Helsinki have their laundry-machines in the bathroom. In the UK the washing-machine would ALWAYS be in the kitchen, or in a dedicated laundry area if the house was large/modern enough.
(Also the UK would have all rooms of a house be carpetted, barring a reasonably modern trend of solid-wooden floors. In Finland houses are universally carpet-free, although people frequently use rugs.)
What an interesting contrast. I wonder if there's some regional difference in behaviour, or if it's just a case of mandating something which seems superficially beneficial.
To be clear, if it's an emergency door in a large building where a crush could occur, it will open outwards. But most residential buildings aren't big enough to require that, except for large tower blocks.
Which makes sense, until you get to fire-exit doors in the UK, which all open outwards in work buildings, which they have to by law if the building contains a certain number of people. Hence many small shops/offices will have exceptions.
Also from the UK, and lived in Finland for a year. This surprised me massively when I moved considering the possibility of the door being blocked by snow on the outside.
You also get the great drying cupboards above sinks (and correspondingly, kitchen sinks without a window directly above them)
I've lived in a couple of flats in Sweden that did it that way, mainly because the bathrooms are so small there is no space there for a washing machine.
Although by far the most common solution is to have no washing machine in the flat and a shared washing machine in the basement
In Montreal, people line up in a neat straight long single file to board a bus, or for other kinds of queues. In many other parts of Canada/US, people either huddle around the entrance ready to push in or reluctantly make a disorganized line.
Switching to Brazil, I have a long list of things that people from the US or Canada would think of as normal, but don't exist in Brazil or are very rare (like garburators, limousines, and bathtubs -- not kidding about bathtubs!):
Well I only moved across the country (NH to CA), so the biggest differences I’ve noticed have been in dialect and food.
People think I’m quaint for using “wicked” as an adverb here, but the local “hella” is both less emphatic and used slightly differently. And my accent probably comes off as “old-fashioned”.
Part of it is just moving from a rural area to a suburban one, but at least among my friends & family back home, it was pretty normal to make a whole meal, or a substantial part of it, from home-grown, homemade, wild-caught, or foraged foods. I would’ve expected to see more of that here in CA considering its agricultural fertility, but I have to go out of my way to visit farmer’s markets or “localvore” restaurants. In New England it was just around—my family would grow/make/catch/find/harvest stuff and swap it with friends, neighbors, and coworkers. You knew someone who kept chickens, so you’d take some eggs off their hands so they wouldn’t go to waste; your garden produced far too many green beans, so you’d give them away—that sort of thing.
Yeah, SF bay area, although I didn’t actually hear “hella” that much until I started spending time in Reno, NV, where my partner is from. Most of my coworkers have been from elsewhere in the country & world.
So I live in Canada, but grew up in Australia. In Canada, you inherit the fridge and washer/dryer of the apartment when you move in. Back in Australia, fridges and washer/dryers are often things you need to bring along on your own. They're big items, I much prefer them coming with the property (if they don't suck, which in places I've lived, often they have!)
I visited a friend who had moved to Europe when I was in high school. I was astounded when I learned that German apartments came with no appliances, and if I recall correctly, things like counters were also brought with.
It makes sense if you are planning on living somewhere for a long time, but it blew my mind. In my experience people didn't even move their appliances when they sold their house and moved to a new one.
Yeah, everything in Germany seems to be set so that you don't move (and I'm not just talking about houses, but pretty much every other type of contract) for a long time.
Also for some reason they love integrated appliances. It seems their biggest fear is someone walking into their kitchen and finding a fridge there.
In German cities with tense housing markets you are usually required to buy off the kitchen furniture and appliances from the previous tenant, who usually overcharges insanely. Otherwise you would just not be forwarded to the landlord.
Also, these days a nice kitchen is an important status symbol for when you have guests over. So many Germans prefer to get new and personalized kitchen equipment when they move in. Knowing of course that later they will be able to sell it at little loss.
My place had a kitchen with fridge when I moved in. A lot of places on the market now have too.
New and renovated places often don't have a kitchen, but there are some that do. When you rent a place that had a former Tennant you often buy the installed kitchen from them.
That's the situation I experienced in Munich since 2009 - may be different in other places and may be changing from how it was before.
There is definitely a growing amount of places coming with a complete set of furniture - but that's just a trick to increase rent. It circumvents a law that regulates how much more expensive you can make a place for a new Tennant. Everybody hates those places.
Agreed... I got screwed in Amsterdam over that. In NL you can lease the furniture for 20% it’s value yearly - and the actual contract was worded such that the furniture should have been Vitsoe collection rather than IKEA. The worst was that the landlord couldn’t be bothered to fix isolation and the boiler thermostat because we’d be paying for the energy regardless; the final settlement was brutal (always take over the energy contracts, always.)
Are you from the midwest? This construction seems to be regional. Say this in much of the country and they'll wait expectantly for you to finish your sentence.
> Back in Australia, fridges and washer/dryers are often things you need to bring along on your own.
Note though that a lot of apartments come with dryers. Apartment buildings' bylaws often preventing hanging washing on balconies, so I suspect they're legally required to offer an alternative.
I'm an Aussie also living in Canada. Out of curiosity, where are you? I'm in Whitehorse. Every time I go back to Australia it feels dull in comparison to Western Canada.
Another Aussie in Toronto. I’ve found the driving here quite a contrast to back home. Drivers tend to veer all over the road, and don’t really indicate. Love the relatively small number of speed cameras though, Australia is getting a bit out of control with the whole multinova thing.
In the Netherlands you are often expected to remove/install floor when you move. Also, interestingly, no warm water in toilets in there either.
The weirdest discrepancy between US/Can and Europe is the amount of water in and the size of toilets.
It is, takes about a weekend with two people. But it is compensated by renter's protection, so almost every lease in the Netherlands is permanent, even if the owner sells the house. Typically, people stay in a rental for quite a while.
Singapore - No hot water in kitchens. I thought I just had a weird apartment, but everyone swears, that outside of a few expat focussed house/apartments, 90+% of the country doesn't have hot water in the kitchen.
I feel you (from Quebec too, working abroad). The thing that shocked me the most in europe is the lack of facial tissues, cleaning stuff and many other things we generally have in the pharmacies.
In North America there's more space, and I think pharmacies are larger. The European pharmacies I've seen would have had to ditch 5% of their medications if they wanted to make space for a shelf of tissue boxes.
I'm speaking of Germany, but I think it is similar in other European countries. We consider a pharmacy to solely be a place to get medicine from, which is not allowed to be sold in other kinds of stores. They are usually located in smaller buildings where there is not much space to sell anything else (at least nothing big; most have some non-medicine but body-related products taking little space).
The "pharmacies" that are actually middle-sized grocery stores with a medicine counter used to baffle me a lot for the first times I was in the US. It felt really weird to go there not needing any medicine, just to buy drinks or food.
Indeed, if they had a pharmacy counter, where one could get prescription medicine, they would be pretty close to the American pharmacies. I never thought about that...
I think the reason why they don't is that pharmacies are pretty strictly regulated in Germany. They must be directly owned and supervised by a licensed pharmacist, and a single pharmacist may only own a small number of them (something like 3 or 4, a small number so he actually has a chance of supervising them personally). This prevents "chain pharmacies" from operating here, but it's probably also a huge hurdle when it comes to chain-style drugstores wanting to operate a pharmacy section - I guess the entire drugstore would either have to be owned by a pharmacist in that case, or the pharmacy would have to be operated as a separate entity (with a separate checkout process) inside of the same building, which is something that is pretty frequently seen in German shopping malls or those mall-like sections in front of big grocery superstores where smaller merchants can rent shop space.
Yes we still have independent pharmacies that are medicine only, but a very large portion of them have been superceded by Walgreens and CVS which are 60% pharmacy/health and 40% a convenience store.
It is quite nice to pick up a can of soup and some orange juice while you're buying decongestants and whatever else. This model is better for the rural and spread-out US where everything is so far apart.
But a pharmacy is for medication. Tissues aren't medication, can't be predescribed by a doctor and can't be ingested.
It's also not created by a health company, it's not required to be sterilised, ... In the end, you can even use toilet paper, if you have no tissues and it will make no difference.
Renter's protection. Any lease in the Netherlands was permanent until the renter left. Most still are. Living 30 years in the same rental is not exceptional.
The small city I grew up around has a weeklong street festival that is a primary fundraiser for all charitable groups within 50 miles - every church and marching band and sports club political group has a food booth, Boy Scouts sell parking, etc. Move away and get confused at everyone having these small anemic standalone pancake breakfasts and ice cream socials, find out the Fall Festival is like the second biggest street fair in the US after Mardi Gras.
My wife grew up in St. Louis and assumed that basically all white people were Catholic and that you have to tell a joke to get candy when you are going door to door on Halloween.
Jaywalking isn't a thing here. You can just walk across any road that's not a motorway, as long as you don't get hit by anything.
Same with Simple trespass. Although that's the case in a lot of places.
I have used ASCET, another model-based design tool. It exports the models as XML and has a separate executable that diffs the XML and renders the diagram with red outlines around the changes so you can click down into the details of the changes.
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I heard the story of the Exeter research on NPR while driving back from the airport at night last year at it floored me! I never realized that other people could actually picture images in their minds. I also thought this was entirely metaphorical. I wrote to the researchers back then to be included in further research.
I'm a computer engineer.
Anyone know if there a community group of people with aphantasia?
Google Photos is still missing a lot of functionality of Picasa. For year I've been uploading pictures to an album named with the current year. My parents and in-laws can check the pictures of the kids when they like. The Photos upload activity on Android doesn't have a selector for the album like the Picasa upload did.
There still doesn't seem to be a way to interact with Google Photos through scripts. Search for "google photos api" and the first link is still the Picasa Web Albums Data API...
Did you end up changing your routine or did you stick to it? I started stronglifts 5x5 a few months ago and the weights are heavy enough now that I'm failing sets in most exercises each session. It's hard to get the motivation to keep going.
The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality instructed Flint residents to flush their tap for 2 minutes before sampling the water which under-represented the amount of lead in the water. The EPA doesn't explicitly forbid flushing but doesn't recommend it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/us/amazon-delivery-driver...