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posted by janrinok on Wednesday January 01 2020, @03:21AM   Printer-friendly
from the goes-for-popcorn dept.

Uber sues California to block gig-worker law going into effect this week:

Ride-hailing service Uber filed a lawsuit Monday against the state of California, alleging a landmark gig-worker law set to go into effect is unconstitutional. The lawsuit seeks to block AB 5, which has the potential to upend gig economy companies such as Uber and Lyft.

The complaint, which also lists Postmates as a plaintiff, argues that the law unfairly targets workers and companies in the on-demand economy, treating them differently than traditional employees and threatening their flexibility.

In September, California became the first state to pass a law aimed at protecting gig worker rights, which forces Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Postmates and other gig economy companies reclassify their workers as employees. Using independent contractors allows the companies to shift many costs to the workers.

The lawsuit says the law arbitrarily exempts dozens of occupations, including direct salespeople, travel agents, grant writers, commercial fishermen and construction truck drivers, among others.

"There is no rhyme or reason to these nonsensical exemptions, and some are so ill-defined or entirely undefined that it is impossible to discern what they include or exclude," says the complaint (see below), which was filed in a Los Angeles federal court.

Postmates and Uber v State of California on Scribd


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday January 01 2020, @03:33PM (3 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 01 2020, @03:33PM (#938225)

    What does this law actually fix?

    There's no barrier to entry in that there's a huge supply of car owners and drivers, so in the short term everyone can / should be a taxi driver.

    The medium and long term costs are huge in that you need some kind of safety check to protect the public from criminal or incompetent or uninsured unbonded drivers. You certainly can't trust an app company skimming off a commission, LOL, like expecting General Motors or maybe Budweiser to be the sole enforcer of drunk driving laws. And given an infinite supply to drivers, we "need" a minimum wage equivalent to limit supply and keep prices up because there's always too many people willing to work under desperate conditions of no car insurance no medical insurance no retirement no financial safety cushion, and bad money always pushes out good money so EVERYONE who drives a taxi has to live under those conditions as long as there's at least some willing to live under those conditions.

    The reasons people will work for practically nothing and won't essentially unionize vary. First of all there's people who are really stupid and don't account for all the costs, you see them ranting about the only cost per mile of driving being gasoline, as if new cars and maintenance and repairs and insurance are free. Secondly you have people who see it as a profitable hobby; well, it pays better than painting W40K figurines even if its only pennies per hour of actual profit, and if they're lonely, its cheaper to chat people up as an uber driver than while sitting at a sports bar. Thirdly you have people who are incredibly desperate and need that heroin or meth fix and they'll quite literally destroy themselves for their next fix. Forthly you have people with bad impulse control and bad time preference psychology where they'll just chase numbers, even if those numbers don't improve their life; see MMORPG and some questionable financial industry personnel.

    Finally the whole corporate structure is pretty much a startup scam waiting to collapse, which is funny when it happens to pirate apparel stores and cup cake stores and fro yo stores, but when a major mode of transportation operates in a monopoly fashion and is careening toward the ditch of suddenly shutting down in the future, thats a significant governmental public policy problem in that 10K small business taxi owners cannot spring up overnight when uber/lyft finally collapse. Really their business model is nonsense... we should be a monopoly because we're middlemen because ... um ... Its not that in the long run uber and lyft are doomed to suffer the outcome of myspace or sears; the actual governmental problem is the general public is doomed to suffer something like the outcome of amtrak and passenger trains except it affects WAY higher percentage of the general public. So what happens financially to a city when there's literally no taxi service after dotcom implosion 2.0 for a couple weeks / months? There's people who's economic and medical livelihood depend on taxi service. Like... activate the national guard infantry battalions to drive infinite number of grandmas to wallgreens for her heart meds on top of ancient M113s and newer oil leaking humvees? How many drunken college students can you fit in (on top of?) a MRAP at bar close time?

    Its like arguing why we can't replace marriage with a modern web app like tinder and prostitution. I mean, who needs all this elaborate stuff when we can just click an app to acquire a similar service? Well, in the very short term, sounds like a great profit opportunity for a monopoly app provider, but in the medium to long term that leads to immense costs socially and financially.

    Likewise we have zoning laws for operating hotels, chemical plants, and livestock farms, but there's always people looking out for themselves or some corporation, trying to get rid of any of that regulation so they can completely F over everyone else around them. F you I got mine, type of thinking.

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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday January 01 2020, @03:41PM (1 child)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 01 2020, @03:41PM (#938231)

    And I hate to reply to a reply but this shitstorm originally came from AC asking why his hyper specialized skilled craftsman contractor should be categorized with essentially untrained unskilled manual laborer like taxi driver.

    I have no idea what AC's contractor dude does at home with a computer; If its gold farming on WoW then the government probably should crack down (although gold farming is ALMOST enough of a skilled profession to be "ok"). If its doing something highly skilled like designing microwave waveguide terminations using ansys hfss software, thats so obscure and highly skilled and rare that the overall employment marketplace isn't going to collapse due to a flood of untrained labor trying to design radar antenna components. That used to pay pretty well as I recall. Or if the computer dude is hacking on java android apps under contract, I assure you thats pretty well paid right now and there is no overload of untrained personnel making apps (well... maybe there are a few too many unskilled java devs... or maybe java kills brain cells, as many honestly believe).

    Anyway there's a big difference in economic behavior between a highly skilled professional craftsman industry and a grunt manual labor equivalent like unlicensed taxi driving. The economy and people in it will be just fine if AC's computer dude doesn't work for Boeing or Google, but "the system" is pretty F'd if any random moron can GTA3-style play taxi driver with no training or oversight.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday January 01 2020, @03:55PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 01 2020, @03:55PM (#938240) Journal

      but "the system" is pretty F'd if any random moron can GTA3-style play taxi driver with no training or oversight.

      Why should we care about "the system"? After all, this has been going on for years and the "F'd" has yet to happen.

  • (Score: 0, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday January 01 2020, @04:15PM

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Wednesday January 01 2020, @04:15PM (#938248) Homepage

    " The reasons people will work for practically nothing and won't essentially unionize vary. "

    It's because they let in too many goddamn illegals, who are willing to live 5-in-a-room, and don't deport them. With mandatory E-verify, the problem would correct itself.

    And if your garden-variety bulbhead-run yellow taxi services decided to actually show up when you request them, and showed up in less than an hour when you did, we wouldn't even be discussing Uber or Lyft at all. What exactly are those bulbheads doing when they're ignoring your calls? No fucking joke, lining up all their yellow cars up in some parking lot and shooting dice.