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posted by janrinok on Sunday February 11 2018, @05:24PM   Printer-friendly
from the losing-track-of-these-company-names dept.

In what is believed to be the first gig economy case to be fully decided on the merits, Grubhub has beaten back a labor lawsuit filed by one of its former drivers.

In a court opinion released Thursday by US Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley, "the Court finds that Grubhub has satisfied its burden of showing that Mr. Lawson was properly classified as an independent contractor."

Both sides had agreed that Judge Corley, rather than a jury, would decide the case in her San Francisco federal courtroom. She heard closing arguments in late October 2017.

[...] Part of what may have doomed Lawson's own case was that, in Judge Corley's estimation, in addition to working for other gig economy companies while simultaneously working for Grubhub, he was fundamentally "not credible."

[...] Lawson, by his own admission, "gamed the app" by scheduling himself for a work shift (a "block" in company parlance) but received few, if any, actual delivery orders by putting his phone in airplane mode, among other tactics.

"Mr. Lawson's claimed ignorance of his dishonest conduct is not credible," Judge Corley wrote. "Mr. Lawson would remember if after he filed this lawsuit against Grubhub he cheated Grubhub. If he had not moved his smart phone to airplane mode, intentionally toggled available late, or deliberately engaged in other conduct to get paid for doing nothing he would have denied doing so at trial. But he did not."

[...] Michael LeRoy, a professor of labor law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told Ars that the case has "limited precedential value."

"Going forward," he emailed, "lawyers who bring these types of lawsuits should have reservations about pushing too far or long with a plaintiff who can be shown to cheat and who gives sworn deposition or trial testimony that is not credible."

Ars Technica


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Sunday February 11 2018, @10:44PM (1 child)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday February 11 2018, @10:44PM (#636471) Journal

    (1) the principal retains pervasive control over the operation as a whole

    Uber doesn't control when or how much drivers work, or who else (like Lyft) that they solicit contract work for, doesn't control drivers' vehicles or their behavior, and doesn't control ratings of passengers. It takes a lot more than just running an app to get people from point A to point B. While others have noted that Uber retains a degree of overall control of the operation, that control doesn't extend to control over their drivers' operations, including whether or not they work for other ride hailing services at the same time.

    (2) the worker's duties are an integral part of the operation,

    As others have noted, the worker can decide on the spur of the moment to just stop driving for Uber without notifying Uber, and this is a planned feature of the relationship.

    (3) the nature of the work makes detailed control unnecessary.

    Work is issued by Uber at a high level of detail.

    While I see the point of your post, something similar can be said of most contract work for a business. Overall control is not pervasive control. IF you getting paid, you're doing something important though not necessarily integral. And detailed control is kind of opposite of how a lot of contract work goes (you contract out precisely because you don't want detailed control over work that you don't understand, for example).

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  • (Score: 1) by Sulla on Monday February 12 2018, @03:31AM

    by Sulla (5173) on Monday February 12 2018, @03:31AM (#636560) Journal

    California's laws as to what determines employee vs contractor seem to indicate less people would be employees than the fed? Or maybe the other way around? If I recall the feds stipulation is that if the company controls when you show up for work, where you show up for work, and how long you work, you are an employee. I guess calis rule is pretty much the same but said different..

    To me Uber is pretty clearly not an employer, the drivers are contractors that control their own schedule. Uber exists as a middleman to link people who want to go from place to place and drivers.

    --
    Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam