Seems a fair judgement since all the restriction make the drivers effectively work as employees:
> Drivers who use the Uber application do not build up their own clientele, do not freely set their rates, and do not determine the terms and conditions of providing their transportation service. The company imposes the itinerary and the driver’s fare is adjusted if this itinerary is not followed. The destination is unknown to the driver, thereby revealing that the driver cannot freely choose the route that suits him/her...
Doesn't all of this also apply to taxis? Taxis pick up at taxi ranks or off the street. Taxis have regulations set by an organisation. Taxis (in most places) have rules that say they must take the most efficient route. In most places, taxis aren't allowed to refuse a customer based on destination.
Does that mean that a taxi driver is an employee? Of course not.
'Radio' calls and calls they've privately arranged with customers as well.
>Taxis have regulations set by an organisation.
That would be local by-law in most cases.
>Taxis (in most places) have rules that say they must take the most efficient route.
You can't intentionally ripoff customers but the fastest route and the cheapest are often different. You can take whatever route you want as long as the customer is cool with it.
>In most places, taxis aren't allowed to refuse a customer based on destination.
You absolutely can refuse a customer as long as it's not descriminatory, like most other businesses.
>Does that mean that a taxi driver is an employee?
Some drivers are employees, some are best compared to franchisees and others are totally independent.
You absolutely can refuse a customer as long as it's not descriminatory, like most other businesses.
Depends on your jurisdiction.
For example, taxi drivers in Chicago were notorious for refusing to take people on trips that were too short, or too far out of the CBD. Sometimes they'd even refuse to take people from downtown to the airport because if traffic is bad, or there was a long wait in the staging area at the airport, it would cut into their profits.
Chicago made that behavior illegal. It still happens occasionally. But if you know the law, you can do what I do and sit in the cab and refuse to get out while offering to call the police to have an officer explain the rules to the driver.
That's a fair point, they forbid you refusing short trips most places I'm familiar with. I wasn't really thinking about that in this case, mostly people asking you to take them sketchy places or belligerent customers which are the only reasons I consider it. An important distinction is it's local law that forbids that, not a company policy like with Uber.
Just a few days ago I had some drunk customers screaming at me in my cab and shaking my seat under the impression I was legally required to drive them. They earned a very long walk home to think about it.
Just a few days ago I had some drunk customers screaming at me in my cab and shaking my seat under the impression I was legally required to drive them. They earned a very long walk home to think about it.
I had a nearly identical situation when I Ubered. In spite of multiple warnings, their behavior didn't improve. When I dropped them off in the middle of nowhere they insisted that I was required by law to carry them. Nope. I'm not a public bus.
The pax make a lot of threats about reporting me to Uber and the police and whatnot, but as far as I know, nothing became of it. I never heard anything, and I never got anything deducted from my earnings, as far as I noticed.
In my experience, the first thing that happens when anyone calls Uber with a complaint is they get their fare refunded. That's usually enough to cool most people off.
> You absolutely can refuse a customer as long as it's not descriminatory, like most other businesses.
Are you sure this is the law in France?
And remember that Uber operates in several countries. When discussions about this happens we have to remember that each country have it's own rules and laws, and we cannot expect that the law in your country is the only law exists.
>we cannot expect that the law in your country is the only law exists.
I doubt federal law covers taxi regulations in any country, it's generally local by-law or equivalent. The regulations are going to be different in Paris than they are in Lyon.
In Brazil the federal law L12468 [1] regulates the taxi driver profession.
The federal law L8078 [2], known as the Consumer Protection Code, protects (as the name says) the consumer in any transaction, be it products or services.
The section 39 subsection 9 states that:
"Art. 39. É vedado ao fornecedor de produtos ou serviços, dentre outras práticas abusivas:
[...]
IX - recusar a venda de bens ou a prestação de serviços, diretamente a quem se disponha a adquiri-los mediante pronto pagamento, ressalvados os casos de intermediação regulados em leis especiais"
In a free translation:
"Art. 39. The supplier of products or services is prohibited, among other abusive practices:
[...]
IX - to refuse the sale of goods or the provision of services, directly to anyone who is willing to acquire them upon prompt payment, except in cases of intermediation regulated in special laws"
This is just an example of how the law structure can be so different between countries. Brazil as France are based on the civil law, instead of common law as in the United States.
I really don't know how is in France and I am not saying it is like Brazil. I'm just saying that with so many countries in the world doesn't make sense to expect the rest of the world to be like your home.
I find it amusing that in the course of chiding me for allegedly assuming laws are the same in all countries you assumed I'm American (I'm not).
I'm a taxi driver speaking generally about the differences in our job vs. Uber drivers. I will now step back and let the software developers argue about things they know nothing about.
I know very little about it but it seems a pretty idiotic sector with strange rules in every village. In NL they will deliver 12 euro worth of food for free 25 km away. A 500 meter taxi ride will cost at least 10 euro. 100 euro for 50 km. I read stories about other places where prices are so low they cant realistically pay for the car.
It's pretty common everywhere. Imagine waiting (potentially hours) queued in a taxi stand for a fare, only to get somebody with a $5 trip who's rude and smells like they haven't showered in a decade.
None of the people who make the taxi regulations (or the passengers who invent their own in the back seat) would accept that person if it was their own car, but taxi drivers are seen as contemptible and unworthy of basic human decency by a staggering portion of the population. I am a white driver so I get treated much better than most, but it's still mind blowing to see. I understand why taxi drivers start to give 0 f's after a while.
>Imagine waiting (potentially hours) queued in a taxi stand for a fare, only to get somebody with a $5 trip who's rude and smells like they haven't showered in a decade.
I agree, we should pay taxi drivers a living wage so that this can't happen.
>we should pay taxi drivers a living wage so that this can't happen.
The drivers this affects most are the ones who are self-employed. You could increase fare prices but riders would just go to ride-sharing platforms where the drivers have less overhead due to less regulation.
What municipalities (or whatever jurisdiction is responsible) need to do is relax taxi regulations so taxi drivers can be more competitive with ride-sharing apps (or the opposite and hold Uber/Lyft to the same standards).
Taxi drivers can pick up anyone on their own terms (with some limitations from local laws). Uber drivers on the other hand can only legally pick up rides dispatched from Uber or another ride-sharing app. That's all they're insured for and that's all local laws will allow because they don't have status as licensed taxi drivers in a licensed vehicle.
A customer can hand me cash and nobody gets a piece except the government. An Uber driver cannot accept cash or payment outside the Uber app or they will be fired.
(French) VTC may actually pick up anyone on their own terms providing the ride was booked in advance by the customer (ie. they can't pick someone in the street). The customer may order through a ride-sharing app, or through any other means, eg. by phone, email, whatever.
What Uber forbids is building up such a clientele from customers it brought through the app.
What are you talking about? Maybe you are referencing how Uber works in the some American state? This is France and that's not how the regulation works there. US-centrisism at it's finest.
Uber drivers can't pick up hailed rides anywhere. That has nothing to do with the jurisdiction, it's simply not a function of the app. If they did, they would be taxi drivers.
I think you're coming from a completely wrong view point. There are no "Uber drivers" these are taxi drivers that choose to (at times) use the Uber app to get clients.
Depending on the local jursidiction, they might be absolutely free to do street pickups.
For example in Finland someone driving for Uber could pickup someone from the street.
They may be free to do it under local law, but they would not be doing it as an Uber driver, they would be doing so as a taxi driver.
There is no ability to use the Uber platform for hailed or other ad-hoc rides, they must be ordered through the platform and all payments must go through Uber.
Uber provides the commercial insurance to drivers they need when carrying passengers, for example (pretty sure they do this in all areas they operate, but I'll wait with bated breath to be told they don't in Bulgaria). If a taxi driver who also worked for Uber picked up a hailed ride it would not cover them.
Exactly, so we agree on the point - there are no 'uber drivers' per se, they are just contractors driving a car and intermittently using services to find clientele.
Uber provides some insurance in _most_ countries they operate in, but it's quite often the case that this is not enough and that other insurance (usually specific for their classification e.g. Taxi Driver insurance, or VTC insurance) is required. So your point on insurance is quite moot.
What's actually interesting is that some of Uber's competitors do have a street-hailing functionality, where the app essentially works as a virtual card terminal for hand-hailed rides. Cool!
Yes, your point? You need different insurance if you're going to be driving 10 hours per day instead of just to work, and from work. Who would have guessed?
My apologies, I think I started off on a bit of a negative tone because I might have mistakenly analyzed your comments as a bit pompous and disrespectful as well. If that was not your intention, my bad. I should always better assume best intentions, not to mention discuss is always more productive if we stay on a positive tone.
What I wanted to establish here is that
1) Conditions for driving for a ridehailing platform differ massively by city or by country.
2) I do not know of any countries which classify "uber drivers' as any form of legal classification. There might be a distinction between taxis, and other forms of "private for hire transport services", which is again an argument for treating these as independent contractors.
I drive a taxi in a rich community 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. Trust me when I say any pompousness was beaten out of me some time ago. :)
You've made some reasonable points for sure. The universal difference between traditional taxi drivers and Uber drivers that I want to reiterate is that truly self-employed taxi drivers are paid directly by customers, whereas Uber drivers are always paid exclusively by Uber. That, I feel, is a very important distinction when comparing their employment status.
Here in Ontario rideshare drivers and taxi drivers both have different legal status. Most legislation is on the municipal level but there is provincial law as well that makes the distinction.
Taxi drivers are almost certainly mostly employees. "Contactor" is a kinda arbitrary employee status which has some theoretical usages - but most of the time it's just abused to deny employment benefits from employees.
That sounds pretty strong as an indicator they were legitimately contractors - but it's always a complex question. Specifics like: would the drivers be punished or penalized for not showing up for work?, is there an employee conduct agreement the dispatch center enforces and how does it enforce that?, how does a driver qualify for eligibility to rent - can anyone with a cab license freely rent or is there an interview beyond that?
Independent contractor status is a really finicky thing to define and, in the end, it's a status that mostly deprives employees of rights in favor of an employer so any "grey" usage of it should be highly suspect.
Traditional taxi drivers own their taxi medallions and may transfer those medallions to other drivers, which provides one key aspect of their "independent" contractor state: If the cab company mistreats them, they can take their medallion elsewhere.
Uber's model prohibits drivers from subcontracting (transferring) their rides to others, which pierces the veil of 'independent contractor': either a contractor can subcontract, or they're not a contractor.
Caveat: This is not at all a complete argument for or against taxis or gig economy, but is meant to show how a division exists between the two to permit further consideration of the ruling.
> Traditional taxi drivers own their taxi medallions
That's not really the case in a lot of places - drivers 'rent' medallions from Taxi companies, as the medallions cost many times the annual income of a driver. Although, their value is droppnig due to ridesharing apps.
Yes you can, I turn on Uber Driver every night on my commute home from work and they only give me riders heading in the same direction. You can do this up to twice a day on Uber.
You certainly can, at least in some of their markets. The vast majority of my Uber/Lyft rides are carpool rides, frequently there are 3 of us in the car with the driver.
The same system exist in France: taxi driver must own a medallion ('plaque') which they purchase from someone retiring, rent from a taxi company, or get issued by the city (this is theoretical in large cities: very few new medallions are created).
Anecdotally, the taxi company owning the medallion are not allowed to rent them: so instead they rent cars to their contractors, and lend the medallions to their renters.
> either a contractor can subcontract, or they're not a contractor.
This doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. I often work as a contractor. If I decided one morning to send a friend into a clients office to fulfil my duties, I would not even expect them to be able to gain entry to the building.
I’ve been both a contractor directly for companies, and contracted through contracting companies (being an employee for a contracting company is usually called being a consultant, which I’ve also been). In either case I would not assume that I could arbitrarily sub-contract my work out to others.
In which jurisdiction? How many tests are there? How many do you have to pass?
It’s a pretty ridiculous assertion to claim that you must be able to sub-contract to be a contractor, and I’d be surprised if there was even one jurisdiction in the world where that was true. It would mean you could never screen contractors.
Depends on jurisdiction but practically, yes, and in fact in California the EDD was systematically suing local governments to convert taxi drivers into employees (and to recapture lost taxes they would have billed had they been employees) until Uber blew that system out of the water. Source: was taxi driver in SF / CA during that time. And as a practical matter, yes these folks met all the checkboxes of being employee despite the assertion otherwise by taxi companies and cities.
Taxis are paid directly by their customers, so one of the criterions does not apply. (Note that some taxis are employees of taxi companies, but they need not be, as far as the regulation at hand is concerned.)
Whose employee? That of the taxi organisation which regulates them, but doesn't actually pay them? That of each of individual customer, who are the ones who pay them?
Does this reasoning mean that all waiters are independent contractors? They collect cash directly from the customer and reserve a portion of that before passing it on to their employer (the tip) - taxi drivers (who are members of a firm) due end up paying the firm dues for the service of having a pooled call center and possibly maintenance services.
I think trying to determine if someone is an employee based on if they receive cash from customers is a pretty arbitrary line that seems to exclude some pretty valid definitions of independent contractors like temporary workers and sales consultants.
And that is part of the reason many people also criticizes the tipping system in US/Canada. An arguably broken system from another industry doesn't make for a good comparison.
I am purely speaking from my own experience and I can't speak absolutely... but every city I've ever lived in has had a few random cabbies driving around that are far outnumbered by the cab companies - whether this is yellow cab or something random like Boston's Metro Cab[1]. If you ever need to call and schedule a cab to the airport you'll be calling into a dispatch center - rather than just arranging it with a dude. My impression is that street hires are a pretty small proportion of the taxi market.
No, you don't understand. They are customers of the dispatch company. They pay the dispatch company licensing fees and rent. Totally different, way more exploitative and way more legal arrangement.
Where, in France? Considering they are employees in the Benelux I find that implausible. Especially considering that the OP is about a French court saying that Uber was just trying to find a loophole so they wouldn't have to treat their employees like any normal taxi company.
I think that's a mis-categorization - I do agree that these exist (and a lot of them fall into the "airport taxi" class since that's a reliable place to get business) and a cab operating in such a manner sounds plausible to be an independent contractor. But organizations like Yellow Cab exist and is the way most folks hail a cab, even at hotels - when you ask the concierge to get a cab for you they'll almost certainly call a local company and ask for a cab to be sent over - someone actually needs to be monitoring that phone, and the logistics of each cabbie having a phone in the car is kinda crazy "Oh ernie is currently driving someone, bart might be available I'll call him" so there is a central dispatching center with a few employees that just help make sure that the cabs are well distributed to quickly respond to calls.
I said they never had radios in the past. These aren't radio taxes. They pick people up from the side of the road. That's most taxies in my experience.
Lots of taxi drivers are owner-operators, and many others lease medallions/vehicles but otherwise do their own thing.
As for taking the most efficient route, a driver purposely taking a longer route you didn't ask for to scam you out of your money is just that, a scam. So it's illegal on that basis alone.
They key difference with a lot of these taxi restrictions is they are set by the government to protect consumers. The government imposing uniform standards on taxi drivers through legislation is not at all the same thing as private companies doing so on drivers while weaseling out of employment requirements. The government can set lots of restrictions on how jobs are done without requiring employment contracts with those workers; private companies do not have those same powers. Hell, the government can execute people; there's no expected parity here whatsoever.
>Does that mean that a taxi driver is an employee?
In Europe? (or France in this particular case) yes absolutely. I've never been to a European country where taxi drivers are not employees of regular taxi companies receiving salaries.
no, most are independent contractors who lease the cab and the medallion from the taxi company. If you have your own medallion, you lease that to the cab company (so you are making money from it even when you are not working, which you can't do 24/7). Cabbies have always been independent contractors with very few exceptions.
The cab company leases the medallions and has some store of medallions it owns. It buys and maintains the cars and runs the dispatching service.
I am from Brazil, here taxi drivers usually own the medallion and the cab...
The medallions is suppposed to be nontransferrable and free, you would only need to pass some certification tests, but there are ridiculous levels of corruption, and a pinch of violence here and there (For example drivers in certain spots violently banning others from using the same spots, even with guns if they think is needed).
Here Taxi Mafia runs strong, but is still made of individuals, not companies.
Conceptually, a taxi is a regulated industry. The regulation created by the government sets the work conditions, and the taxi medallion is the contract between the taxi provider and the government. In a way, it's different from both the contractor and employee status which is usually between 2 private parties.
The owner/recipient of the medallion agrees to certain work conditions/obligations (non-discrimination, destination-blindness, accept credit cards, sometimes provide wheelchair amenities, etc.) and receives certain privileges (limited monopoly, right to pick up anyone on the street, right to use taxi lanes and taxi files, etc.). Whether the drivers actually meet the obligations is often a matter of lack of enforcement and what the driver can get away with, but it really is a quid-pro-quo of rights and responsibilities.
Medallions ended up being owned by taxi companies who rented them out to contractors or employees, so the relationship between the medallion owner and the driver (2 private parties) depended on how they set up the contract (and both kinds exist). And of course, private parties abuse independent contractors and employment contracts all the time, so it's really a gray area in practice. But regardless of who is paying whom, the driver should adhere to the medallion rules while driving/waiting on fares.
When looking at taxi and ride sharing, it helps to have a brief history of the industry:
- Before medallions, anyone could call themselves a driver, and pick up anyone for any price--true market competition. Of course, abuse and discrimination was rampant, riders were vulnerable, and too many drivers would drive the offered price so low only the desperate in dilapidated/dangerous vehicles would compete.
- Regulation in the form of medallions and meters came along with the idea of promoting mobility. Limit the number of drivers and set the fares so that someone working full-time can make a decent living, make sure they have safe vehicles and not criminal drivers, mandate shortest routes and non-discrimination. In the best of all worlds, there is a competent fleet of drivers, and people can get around the city and suburbs as needed.
- Because this is not the best of all worlds, taxis became sleazy and abusive, the medallion owners exploited their drivers (both employees or contractors), and regulatory capture ensured that the customer protection obligations were no longer enforced.
- Uber and others exploited the loophole of the radio-taxi: you phone in and get a taxi dispatched to your location. Except with mobile phones, that's like standing on the curb and hailing a taxi, which was the artificial monopoly given to taxi medallions. Frankly, I think ride-hailing apps should've been regulated on that alone, but because the whole industry had such a bad reputation and entrenched interests, everyone was happy to find a way around them.
- As the middle-men, the ride-hailing companies are trying to set themselves up to get the best of both worlds: set prices and make sure drivers aren't really free, but also not have any of the responsibilities of keeping ride-for-hire on the road or promoting mobility.
Another side of this whole contractor/employee debate is the destination-blindness. As a driver, you don't want to drive the unprofitable fares, either too short or too long to the suburbs without a return fare. In order to be appealing to riders, Uber et al. have to hide this from the drivers, otherwise the drivers would refuse more rides. If all drivers became true contractors free to set rates and pick-and-choose any ride, we'd be back to the original unregulated situation (race to the bottom). So the companies get why the regulations exist, but if the drivers were employees, then the companies would have to bear the cost of the unprofitable fares. So they make the drivers feel like contractors to bear that cost for them.
Most taxi drivers in the U.S. should be classified as employees. Where they drive a company managed car (under a company owned medallion), work certain hours.
>Does that mean that a taxi driver is an employee? Of course not.
Not disagreeing with the absurdity of this, but aren't taxi drivers usually employees when there's a centralized call number to hail a cab? That, or they are truly independent. So I don't see the argument here.
The (press release of the) judgement does not address a key counter argument: a large majority of drivers work for several platforms simultaneously. Even if that particular driver did not, he obviously had that possibility: the switching cost are negligible for a driver.
Source/disclaimer: used to work for a direct Uber competitor in France.
Having more than one job doesn't mean I'm necessarily self employed. I could work at a supermarket during the mornings, and a cornershop in the evenings, and still be an employee in both cases.
In the case of a driver, they get the ability to dynamically pick their rides in real time, and choose from the different apps the one that pays the most.
There's a paradox in this: Uber and its competitors would ideally like their drivers to be 100% committed; yet they also need the drivers to be able to work for several apps as a defense against requalification as an employee.
No, they simply don't allow drivers to work for competitors with a simple trick: designated routes. Working within the same day on different apps is not enough, it has to be different apps => multiple clients => one trip.
If an Uber driver were to pickup a Lyft user on a trip and to drop them off away from the main algorithmicly imposed road. Uber would warn the driver within a few days, regardless of client reviews.
I was not clear enough: indeed, they can't drive simultaneously different clients (from different apps). Instead, while they are waiting for a new client, they have several apps open, and if they get ride propositions from different apps, they pick the most lucrative one.
I don’t see why the same couldn’t apply to supermarket employees, where you can dynamically choose your shifts in real time and pick the highest of all the available work.
I mean there are even a number of worker supply firms out there that provide workers on this basis. A business needs people to clean floors, they issue a request to their supplier and they supply the nearest, cheapest available workers.
I'd say the only way to "simultaneously" work for both is to have a rider from more than one service in the car at the same time. Probably 0% chance they'd have an overlapping route, so you'd have to go off-route for one of them, and I'm sure that wouldn't go well. But for all the drivers I've seen that use more than one service to find riders, never seen this happen.
Just curious, when are you "working" for uber or lyft? I'm honestly not sure how it works. Do you collect an hourly wage when you are waiting? Or do you only collect money when you actively driving a passenger?
Having multiple jobs doesn't indicate self-employment autonomy, neither does it remove the overriding conditions the person is subject to with each employer (in this case: building own clientele, setting rates and other key terms of providing transportation service).
The driver does however set their own hours, can go online and offline at choosing, can reject or choose a ride if they wish, and can freely choose the method by which they fulfill a ride (there is no set route a driver must take).
They're not free to choose the method of fulfillment at all. They can't stop at 7-11 on the way, nor can they complete the route with a rickshaw, nor can they subcontract it. They can't pick up additional passengers except by Uber's explicit permission.
That freedom reduces to "they're free to optimize the route to get there quickly" which is a freedom you have at just about any job. I can decide how to code most efficiently, but does that really make me more contractor-like?
I don't think that allowing drivers to freely set their rates is necessarily a good thing. It "costs" money for an Uber driver to wait for a ride, so they're incentivized to undercut the competition in order to get more rides.
Most of the contract work is of this nature. The major differentiation between contract worker and employee is "work at will" i.e. there are no expectations for fixed hours indefinitely. If you can't get fired because of not showing up at work, then you are not really employed.
> Drivers who use the Uber application do not build up their own clientele, do not freely set their rates, and do not determine the terms and conditions of providing their transportation service. The company imposes the itinerary and the driver’s fare is adjusted if this itinerary is not followed. The destination is unknown to the driver, thereby revealing that the driver cannot freely choose the route that suits him/her...