There are some consequences. If they will be hired as employees it will be first with a temporary contract. Since
there is a limitation to renewal of fixed term contracts,
after a certain period the employment is seen as an indefinite employment contract rather than a new fixed term agreement. Meaning then they could not be fired something Uber will not want. The limit is 3 years or 3 contract renewals:
Are some of these drivers not working for other companies also? In that case they really are freelancers/entrepreneurs not employees...I think the decision will be appealed.
As some Dutch media, (not all), persist on their annoying habit of copy pasting ANP press releases and not doing much of real journalism...or not linking to original sources even if you paid for their subscription services...I am adding some original resources here:
The Netherlands Trade Union Confederation (FNV) has around 1 million members,
is both a trade union federation and a trade union and launched the lawsuit.
> Are some of these drivers not working for other companies also? In that case they really are freelancers/entrepreneurs not employees...I think the decision will be appealed.
That's a pretty bad test on it's own. Plenty of people working in restaurants work for multiple companies, they're still employees.
> Plenty of people working in restaurants work for multiple companies, they're still employees.
And do they cook one food order at a restaurant they work for, then 15 minutes later walk across the street and cook for a competing restaurant for 30 minutes, and then immediately walk back across the street and cook a food order for the other restaurant? No, of course that's not normal.
This will ultimately accelerate the ability of the strongest companies to destroy their competition and potential competition. If Uber doesn't bleed to death financially first, that will be Uber due to their global scale.
Uber may not realize it because they're stupid, but this bolsters survival of the strongest in the segment. They can easily kill off competition using this by eating the labor supply. Someone that would have previously worked for multiple companies - trivially flipping between services as it was most ideal for the driver to grab a fare - will no longer be available for multiple companies at the same time. They'll now largely hold a normal job and will not want to work for multiple companies, pulling two shifts per day. Sure, there may be exceptions of drivers that want to pull a weekend job with another service or work two jobs per day, but exceptions is all they'll be. This will narrow the market winners dramatically and quickly.
Monopolize the market, consume the labor supply, raise passenger fees, lean in to killing off the competition. It's super simple.
If I were Uber I'd abuse the stock market for funding to pay artificially high wages to the labor supply (get all the best drivers), and I'd hire more drivers than I absolutely need (deprive the competition), and begin this killing process immediately. I'd go one market to the next, using Uber's market cap as the funding base to monopolize each market. This type of ruling makes labor supply a competitive advantage to whichever company can acquire the most and best drivers. A global ride hailing app will be advantaged over the smaller local/regional competition accordingly.
The next ride hailing app in the market that wants to get started will find no available labor supply to compete with. Welcome to competition stagnation.
And of course then the moronic regulators will come back around, having created a monster, and they'll have to pursue anti-trust (or the equivalent) against the market winner they helped to cause.
> And do they cook one food order at a restaurant they work for, then 15 minutes later walk across the street and cook for a competing restaurant for 30 minutes, and then immediately walk back across the street and cook a food order for the other restaurant? No, of course that's not normal.
As a former Lyft/uber driver this is absolutely correct. It gets even hairier: suppose you are sitting on both apps (or even more) waiting for a ride. Do you get to double-bill two companies for minimum wage hours?
I think what is going happen is if Uber and Lyft are forced to recategorize as employees, they get to do something like "compel drivers to wear a uniform", so like a polo with the brand on it, and prohibit wearing of competitors logo. Or prohibit displaying competitor logo on the car (displaying is a legal requirement in many jurisdictions). In the end the take-home for the driver is going to be worse.
I'm quite frankly surprised that Uber didn't preempt the legislation by creating a class of driver that is an employee, putting these sorts of onerous restrictions on the driver, plus other ones like "you must start and end at central processing center, drive an uber-owned car", "requiring shifts on ADA-compliant vehicles", "being required to comply with an uber-generated shift schedule", in exchange for bare minimum wage and benefits.
Is Uber the only rideshare company available in Europe? In America, every rideshare car has uber and lyft stickers, at a minimum. Just about every driver keeps both apps open and takes rides from wherever they come in.
I think GP has a good point, I took a slightly america-centric POV on the issue; topic is specifically about Dutch legal system. Nonetheless the end bit about 'strategies' is likely to be applicable across jurisdictions.
> It gets even hairier: suppose you are sitting on both apps (or even more) waiting for a ride. Do you get to double-bill two companies for minimum wage hours?
IMO this is a no-brainer, the answer is yes, double-bill. The same applies if you get two remote jobs, you bill both.
I don't think it'd be strictly illegal, they'd just have grounds to fire you if you ever refused a ride (that goes for both Uber/Lyft).
Maybe fraud and breach of contract if, in the full-time contract, it says "you affirm you do not have another full-time job that will interfere with this job".
IANAL, but my understanding is: Double-billing hours is probably illegal, but many remote programmers likely have two "full time", salaried, jobs with no stipulation about "you must work X hours"... at the very least a legal grey area, and if you breach some contract clause, you are most likely in breach of contract, which is a civil suit, and most likely you'll just be dismissed, no severance will be offered, and they might try to take away any unexercised options grants.
This is not just programmers by the way. I know of people in other professions doing this. And as long as there isn't a conflict based on anything you signed or company policy I'm not sure a company has recourse beyond terminating you
Again, I don't do it because I can't handle the stress of two jobs, but I don't begrudge those who can
Assuming (which is very safe in most cases) that the employment contract has something in it that is being violated by double-dipping, it is both garden variety fraud (in many cases state and therefore dependent on the state laws in question), and in some cases federal depending on the circumstances. In the jurisdictions where fraud against an employer is based on the amount of money at play, it's still almost always going to be a felony because it takes very little time to reach the common thresholds (e.g. $1k) when double-dipping.
Additionally, it's a pretty obvious opening to a lawsuit in at least most jurisdictions for breach of fiduciary duty (under the duty of loyalty -- Google this + your own jurisdiction for more details on what it covers where you are) and breach of contract.
Now, the employer probably won't sue or prosecute in most circumstances, so you may get away with it. But that's some high-stakes roulette, especially since you're not going to get UI if you get fired for gross misconduct and you're not going to get a good recommendation.
> They can easily kill off competition using this by eating the labor supply.
I'm not at all sure they can. You haven't really explained here why Uber is apparently capable of hiring all drivers and starving the labor pool, yet Applebees can't use the same strategy for cooks, or Amazon the same strategy for warehouse workers or software engineers.
Calling them "moronic regulators" without explaining why the same model that works in other markets can't work in this one isn't all that compelling.
There are meaningful alternatives for your examples. If you didn't want to work at Applebees, you could work at Chilis.
Right now, I would be willing to bet that a large majority of Lyft drivers also drive for Uber. Uber is so much larger that there is no real alternative. If the law makes it so that drivers can choose only one rideshare app, they will all choose Uber because its bigger.
This is an extraordinary claim, this has never been a problem in a major city in recorded history.
The idea that Uber would pay drivers so much to have extra drivers just sitting around doing nothing is absurd. The idea that there would be no suitable drivers left to other firms to hire is absurd.
If any of this claim made sence, then this would have happened 50 years ago, we've had drivers around for a while.
Yet it does not happen in haulage where drivers are actual professionals, it does not happen for solicitors where labour supply is way more constrained. What do you have to backup your claim?
> this has never been a problem in a major city in recorded history.
This _has_ been the case in major cities around the world before Uber took over. NYC has the yellow cab monopoly. London had the black cab monopoly. These companies grew large enough to buy up all available labor (this was made easier by the medallion system).
Uber is no different. It _already_ has a dominant market position. Other rideshare companies _already_ share their drivers. The amount of drivers who drive for Lyft only is vanishingly small. If you force all those drivers to choose, they will choose Uber and Lyft will die.
"YC has the yellow cab monopoly. London had the black cab monopoly."
Exactly, legislative monopoly - they didn't run out of people with cars willing to drive. You are talking about labour shortage, that's a completely different argument
And there is not (unlike the medallion system, as I understand it) any specific limit on how many can pass The Knowledge (the test you have to do to become a black cab driver; before that, you can get a taxi license and work for a minicab firm). The reason it's not instant is that it is one of those "requires a substantial investment of time" scenarios.
So I don't think painting "London's black cabs" as a monopoly holds water.
Speaking about financials...The court ruled that in certain cases drivers can claim overdue salary. Uber had according to statistics approximately 5,200 drivers in NL on December 2019.
I bet employers are wishing they never got involved in benefits. Now they're just the governments execution arm for social programs and they're stuck forever.
Looking back, the only reason employers started getting involved in Healthcare was because the 1942 Stabilization Act restricted them from raising wages and they had to come up with a more creative way of competing for talent.
Now the ACA forces companies to privide insurance by law. Under Biden's Covid plan they're now going to be the execution arm for vaccine mandates. It's crazy to think that to start a business you need to almost immediately be prepared to be a federal government franchisee.
Considering those same employers also get massive subsidies for every kind of self-inflicted damage, which results in massive C-suit cash-outs and buy-backs, this is the least the commons could hope for.
I guess I was thinking more about small to medium sized businesses. A business with 50-100 employees has to enforce government social programs but there won't be any c-suite golden parachutes.
I wish more people realized how anti-capitalist the current healthcare system is in the U.S.
If you want to encourage business, then remove barriers. Governments should be taking care of healthcare, not businesses.
Businesses should be focused on the core work they do: Running their business. Not on providing health care.
(Same goes, really, for childcare, transportation, and similar benefits that large employers sometimes offer, often because these things are not effectively provided by the government.)
Completely agree. Universal healthcare would empower a lot of entrepreneurs, make it easier to attract talent for smaller companies, and free me of a completely ridiculous amount of paperwork and oversight each year. If someone told me, as a business, I could just pay a tax and know my employees had access to the same quality of care as everyone else, I'd sign up in a heart beat.
Most of those seem decent [1] but mostly related to reducing taxes on income you put into the government social program instead of letting you invest somewhere else. Not sure employers would see the tax breaks as enough justification if they weren't forced.
My point is that it didn't used to be a law. Why can't the government enforce it's own social program and let businesses focus on their primary goal instead of healthcare compliance.
> It's found the most efficient/popular way to do that is through businesses.
Not at all, look up the history of health insurance in America, companies providing it was not by design, it was in fact done to get around government laws on wage caps during the great depression.
Now days the system is entrenched, there are a large # of corrupt players who leech of the healthcare ecosystem in America, and they pay good $ to lobbyists and PR firms to keep things that way.
Right now 1/3rd of health care costs go to working out billing. That type of insane inefficiency would not be tolerated in a true capitalist marketplace. Imagine if Visa charged 33% commission on every sale and then had a law passed saying all purchases had to be done with a Visa card! That'd be an insane drag on the economy, America's GDP would plummet.
But we literally accept that exact scenario with health care costs. (Except for cosmetic procedures, which have a competitive market that has driven technology forward and prices down!)
> Taxi drivers are not knowledge workers, or artists and clearly not entrepreneurs.
> They are easily replaceable "cogs in the machine", like many non-specialised factory workers, office clerks, retail employees and so on.
> There's a reason why humanity introduced protections for vulnerable workers in almost every society.
I appreciate the point you're making, but I also think you are grossly undervaluing the specialisation of cab drivers.
In the UK, the Knowledge [1] is a notoriously arduous exam which certainly makes cab drivers anything but "replaceable 'cogs in the machine'".
In fact, I think the fact that people view these jobs as being replaceable is what leads to their deterioration. Someone who has a GPS but no innate and learned knowledge of the terrain does not provide a service comparable to someone who has a thorough understanding of the domain. And the more people rely on the former, the more they think that that's all there is to it, and so it becomes a race to the bottom of sorts.
I'm not sure if I'm articulating this fully, but basically: jobs such as cab driving require specialisation and skill to be done well, but are often replaced by those without that skill doing freelance driving, which leads to a deterioration of expected service, and people ultimately thinking that the workers are all interchangeable.
I agree uber drivers =/= black cab drivers, but I'd also argue that most people don't want or need a black cab driver today.
What extra services does a black cab driver provide over an Uber driver in London?
- Better knowledge of traffic patterns?
- Ability to recommend places, give you local knowledge
That's all I can really think of. I agree that local knowledge is sometimes useful, but the vast majority of the time I know exactly where I want to go, and if I'm looking for recommendations I'm likely to trust the internet more than a taxi driver.
It's all about the subtle nuance of the service provided. A skilled driver will know which route to take if the passenger wants the absolute quickest route, or if the passenger wants a scenic route, or which cobble-stone roads to avoid if the passenger says they're feeling a bit ill, or hundreds of other such intricacies and peculiarities which come with offering expert service which someone who just has a GPS app on their phone and some free time can't begin to offer.
My point up-thread was that this tier of service used to be more or less the de facto standard of service that you would get for a standard, not a premium, fee. Over time, it has deteriorated and is now the domain of specialty car hire services. I'm not sure that that's a good thing.
My point is that the "standard" fee is premium when compared to Uber which tends to cost half as much in the countries where I tried it.
Aside from solving the trust/scam problem, that's one of the reason why people like Uber - it made 'car as a service' affordable. Without Uber, I might have bought a car, because a factor of 2 completely changes the picture.
>In the UK, the Knowledge [1] is a notoriously arduous exam which certainly makes cab drivers anything but "replaceable 'cogs in the machine'".
>In fact, I think the fact that people view these jobs as being replaceable is what leads to their deterioration.
Uber and the online routing within the app made this obsolete. The jobs that gig economy jobs may be skilled, but these gigs now aren't. The platform took the skill away from the job. The workers are just drones now.
> Taxi drivers are not knowledge workers, or artists and clearly not entrepreneurs.
Of course they're entrepreneurs. They have to own or finance a car. They choose when and where to work and for what company to drive for. They can also work for black car in addition to ride share and can even manage private rides. They have some ability to accept or reject fares.
> There's a reason why humanity introduced protections for vulnerable workers in almost every society.
No one is restricting "knowledge workers" from being able to strike a contract. Why can't we afford the same dignity and respect to "cogs in the machine"? You ever thing these "protections" that "humanity" places on "cogs" can end up hurting them? Like how immigrant taxi drivers in NYC were encouraged to rack up 100k debt to buy medallions
You can choose when and where to work. Most businesses don't have pricing power. There's a market price. They can charge more or less sure but in theory there's a market clearing price, and anything above/below that price will yield suboptimal returns. You're romanticizing the discretion individual businesses have.
There is a very simple litmus test to decide if someone is an entrepreneur or not: do they own the customer relationship? If they do they are an entrepreneur otherwise they aren't. This is the core of the dispute with the app stores and various companies as well: they don't want to end up at the mercy of a third party for their customer relationships.
"Of course they're entrepreneurs. They have to own or finance a car."
When we were taught business in school, it was about setting the price, hiring staff, choosing a target market. You know, thigs that make a business a business.
I am willing to bet my house that there isn't a single business or economics testbook where maintaining a car is even a consideration.
> When we were taught business in school, it was about setting the price, hiring staff, choosing a target market. You know, thigs that make a business a business.
You have a very narrow understanding of business and entrepreneurship. Not all businesses have employees. Every business book will tell you almost all businesses are price takers, not price setters. You can't wave a wand and say "I want to charge X".
The target market could be Uber, Lyft, black car, limo or personal. Maintaining equipment and accounting for depreciation is very important
"You can't wave a wand and say "I want to charge X"
Of course you can! Whether anyone pays is another matter.
"The target market could be Uber"
1 company is a customer, not a market. You are perverting the term to the point where it looses all meaning. It's like Agile - everything is agile now.
"Maintaining equipment and accounting for depreciation is very important"
So is a regular exercise routine, but neither of them defines a business. Are half the country are 'entrepreneurs' now because they have to drive kids to school? This is absurd!
You don't like my criteria, fine, but the only criteria you put forward aren't even relevant to lawyers, accountant and hundreds of other kinds of Real businesses that do have employees, set the price, run their marketing, etc.
Exactly. It's unskilled or semi-skilled work. Treating them the same as freelancers doesn't reflect reality as they have almost no leverage in there situation with their employers.
https://www.tax-consultants-international.com/read/Changes_D...
Are some of these drivers not working for other companies also? In that case they really are freelancers/entrepreneurs not employees...I think the decision will be appealed.