Unfortunate consequence of a legacy legal system. Uber drivers are clearly neither quite like employees nor are they entrepreneurs, and the law should come up with a fitting category that ensures they are protected from exploitation but continue to enjoy some of the freedoms associated with the gig economy.
And after you define this mid-point employment classification between traditionally employed and self employed, businesses who hold the leverage will look at the segments from traditionally employed to the new mid-point as we as self-employed to the new midpoint.
They'll then choose which classification gymnastics they can perform under the legal language and optimize on to minimize their labor costs. That'll take a couple years and the law change to catchup to this abusive behavior avoiding the intent of the law will take another 10-30 years, and we'll repeat the process.
We need better definitions for the labor relation that make it difficult to play these optimization games created simply to optimize on labor and more significant consequences for that behavior to encourage businesses to innovate in other areas (like, I don't know, technology, new products, improved products, etc.) instead of simply extracting wealth from their own workforces.
To be fair to Uber they did create new value in finding and scheduling rides/taxies and I think that is a valuable service. That infrastructure and convenience has a cost though. No longer do you need to hail a taxi and deal with trying to pass directions, miscommunication of destination and charge rates and so on. But it seems they've passed many of those costs onto the drivers themselves and probably consumers to assure a certain sort of profit margin per transaction.
The regulations in The Netherlands in this regard have recently (May 20160) been updated to prevent fake freelance/independent status.
There are a bunch of guidelines, but the main factors generally boil down to these questions: Is the employee working for a single employer? How much independence do they have? (e.g. holidays, working hours, etc.)
Were the contract details mandated by the employer? etc.
Its not hard to imagine a software engineer who likes to work a part time job on the weekends, gets to set their own hours as long as they complete assigned tickets, and who negotiated their employment contract aggressively. That person would still be an employee.
Possibly a better option is to remove these categories together. What would happen if we struck the whole concept of "Employment" from the law. As a person you just had the chance to get income. We can retarget all of the laws and benefits previously using Employment to be about income instead. If you make an income you can pay into a pension, pay taxes... Everyone is entitled to some number of vacations and sick days that can not be taken away from a contract. (any contract)
I'm sure there are some complexities due to the weaker relationship between the two, but it seems like it would be beneficial to remove this somewhat artificial cliff between self-employed contractors or employees which is almost certainly more of a septum. (For example freelance picking up jobs posted to a public job board, to a contractor in frequent contracts with multiple companies, to a contractor working with a single company, to an employee which works with one company.)
I agree with you in my area it replaces some FB groups for long distance drives/hitchhiking (a hour or more of driving is not unusual), but not taxis/uber, because the driver sets a price, when they will arrive and where they will meet/drop you (usually a gas station), it is also generally true that it is just gas money (cheaper than a uber fare of the same distance). There is a uber-like service where the passenger makes a fare offer and if I'm not mistaken the driver can make a counter offer, it is called indriver, but I don't know if it exists there.
I fully agree but I don't believe Uber has the best interests of society in mind and care more about their investors.
Exploitation of workers would be a feature to them not a bug.
This is also my stance. Everyone debates whether Uber drivers and gig workers are employees or contractors: They are clearly neither. But people love a dichotomy, I guess.
