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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 12 2018, @10:11PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 12 2018, @10:11PM (#636851)

    California is dependent on the rest of the country for water

    You're talking about -Southern- California.

    ...but we still produce manufactured goods for the rest of the nation, are a major handler of imported goods via our ports, and refine a lot of petroleum for the western states.
    We also export electricity to Arizona (where Big Electricity has stymied the uptake of solar capture).

    Yeah, -SoCal- is a net importer of water.
    We started out with engineer William Mulholland getting water from Mono Lake in Kern County (which might be considered part of SoCal).

    ...but there's no particularly good reason for our dependency.

    We do have folks who came here from elsewhere who just HAVE to have a big green lawn.
    The City of Santa Ana, when it did a rework of a major street, put in Astroturf where there had been grass.
    During our extended drought, some folks have taken to using a water-based paint solution to make their brown grass green.
    ...and the natural foliage for this area is succulents (aloe vera, cactus, etc.)--many of which are edible and/or otherwise useful (e.g. medicines).

    Going back several years, you might remember that guy in Orange County who got in a pissing match with the gov't of the City of Orange when he xeriscaped his front lawn. [google.com]
    Eventually, he lost that case.
    The let's-mandate-the-use-of-extravagant-amounts-of-water folks are looking really stupid these day.

    ...and we've got a big giant ocean right next to us.
    The City of Huntington Beach is kicking around the idea of a desalination plant.
    (I don't agree with their choice of a vendor with a troublesome history, but I can easily imagine a point in the near future when the notion of such a facility can be shown to have considerable merit.)

    Some cities are already turning black water (sewage) into potable water.
    Now, they've stopped 1 step short and are only using that to e.g. water golf courses and parks.

    ...and when it rains here, the big concrete ditches that we call rivers are just swollen with water flow--and most of that goes right out to the sea.

    -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]