I feel like it's pretty clear that gig economy jobs don't neatly fit in either of the existing categories of workers: they're not quite employees (you can clearly work or not work whenever you want) or contractors (you clearly have very little negotiating power or information in choosing your work or guaranteeing your wages). Attempts to munge them into one of those categories are just doomed; a new category is needed.
Failing that, if they are to be counted as individual contractors they should be able to negotiate like those: without one-sided deceptive deals.
Ridesharing companies, Labor, and the California legislature missed an opportunity to identify a third type of employee. The truth is always somewhere in the middle, and the most objective truth (to me) suggests that rideshare drivers honestly sit somewhere between employees and contractors.
The politics of what has occurred here is probably the pendulum swinging too far, but in the right direction: the classification of 'contractor' just isn't correct to describe these workers, and the legislature did its best to rectify that.
Lyft and Uber put forward good faith proposals [1] to fix this...They did bring a lot of labor groups in on the last year and worked with the government for that.
my experience is that this is hardly ever true in politics. Legislators are generally balancing what they think is right (or what they think voters think is right) with what is in their own self interest (such as getting re-elected). As a result, they most often do their best to serve their own self-interest first and foremost. They raarely try to rectify something if rectifying it is at odds with their self-interest.
Rectifying this situation would likely involve some third category "somewhere in the middle", but that's not what we got.
They would be more like contractors if economies of scale favored open cross compatible ride sharing platforms, instead of proprietary institutions and and oligopoly.
If there were 10 ridesharing apps, and any customer could reach any driver using a different app, would you still consider the driver as having not negotiation power? The driver could uncheck "allow riders from uber" if they didnt want uber provided leads. Ride hailing should be as open as SMS, and then drivers AND passengers would gain power in the relationship. By using government to benefit consumers and shun proprietary lockin, the issues could be solved without creating a new employee class. The root need for that class in the first place is Ubers anti-competitive side.
I'm thinking more like email, ActivityPub, XMPP, or hate to say it, blockchain. There doesnt need to be an aggregator App if its a federated protocol or a shared database. A blockchain would be a central store of truth regarding ride history and reputation. Your reputation would build across access clients. If a client doesnt keep innovating, and there is demand for more features, newer ones would come along, without throwing away the database and starting over.
> they're not quite employees (you can clearly work or not work whenever you want)
You can work only when the platform routes a job to you, not “whenever you want”. It's on-demand temporary work with a faster “job is available, do you accept it?” cycle than most, but the general idea of such on-demand work as regular W-2 employment has been around for a long time.
You are just repeating the Uber party line that somehow "employment" is antithetical to flexible work hours.
It's frightening to see people just lap that up because it happens to coincide with their day job. But nothing in labor law prevents a company like Uber from "disrupting work" and offering that flexibility to employees.
The current employee model as codified in our tax and legal system definitely has lots of assumptions around only having a single W2 employer. Certaintly not impossible, but definitely not a good fit.
I agree with the OP, and I am not just "repeating the Uber party line". I believe 3 categories of work are needed:
1. Employee (e.g. current W2), where you have a single full-time employer who is primarily responsible for your wages and benefits.
2. Independent Contractor, where the IC has full control over their rates, where they do the work, their tools, etc.
3. "Flexible" employee, where the employee has full control over their hours and availability, and to work for multiple employers, but doesn't have control over rates or how the work is done.
> The current employee model as codified in our tax and legal system definitely has lots of assumptions around only having a single W2 employer.
No, it doesn't; multiple W-2 employees is a common thing and the law has no assumptions that conflict with it.
(Multiple full-time W-2 employers, maybe, are something of an issue, but not merely multiple W-2 employers.)
> "Flexible" employee, where the employee has full control over their hours and availability, and to work for multiple employers, but doesn't have control over rates or how the work is done.
This seems like regular on-demand temp work, where pretty much every feature of that is routine, and has always been W-2. Sure, technology including platforms like Uber, et al., make it practical to have more rapid offer/accept cycles and finer-grained work assignments, but they don't fundamentally change the nature of on-demand temp work in a way which requires any different treatment legally than such work has historically been given.
Many people have multiple jobs (even full-time jobs) and receive multiple W2s in the mail every year. I'm not an expert in employment law but I haven't seen evidence that the current multi-job system isn't workable here. You can have multiple part time jobs, and if one job goes over a certain threshold of hours then they have to provide you benefits. If you have multiple full-time jobs, all of them are required to offer you participation in employer-sponsored benefits, although you typically only pick one. Is that not how it works?
Uber and lyft and DoorDash etc aren’t paid as wall clock hours though. You can be “clocked in” to as many as you want at once. One drive you might be working for Uber and the very next might be some Postmates order. Maybe even both on the same trip.
Focusing on wall clock hours doesn’t make sense for these kinds of jobs.
1. It's not like it would be difficult to track all of the little chunks of time worked and add them all up. Everything is automated anyway, and nobody is filing time cards.
2. In the end, the wall clock is how workers experience time when they're out doing work for these companies. They get their bike out and go deliver food for a few hours, or get in their car and drive around the city picking up and dropping off passengers. It's not clear to me that the interstitial minutes between gigs should be considered free time for the workers that goes uncompensated. If they drop off a passenger and pick up a new one within five or ten minutes, they've been working continuously. They haven't had a chance to go home and take their socks off and relax. They're working. It seems like a step backwards for everyone's mental well-being to use technology to clock the exact minutes that they produce value for the company, and cut off their pay the instant they stop producing. It's like a widget assembly line monitored by cameras where workers get automatically clocked in only when they're physically touching the widgets, so that if they sit up to stretch, or walk over to the cabinet to grab a different tool, or even if the conveyor belt is sending the next widget over to be worked on, they stop getting paid. I wouldn't want to work like that.
3. The fact that someone can be doing work for multiple companies at the same time doesn't seem like such a big problem to me. If they're on a segment of a route in which they're simultaneously delivering a passenger and someone's lunch, they should get paid for both. And the same contiguous-time rules I mentioned in #2 above can apply - as long as they're continuously picking up lunches and passengers within a certain interval, they're working two jobs.
in response to 2 and 3: What about the status quo where gig workers are running 2-5 apps at once. If they are payed between trips, do they collect minimum wage from all companies?
The simple solution is to ban the use of contractor workers in the taxi industry. It's too precarious of a job, and one that many people rely on for a sole source of income.
This would take the pressure of other industries that use independent contractors, such as tech.
Right now a couple of bad actors like Uber, are ruining the independent contractor category of work. Forcing states to put more laws in place.
Failing that, if they are to be counted as individual contractors they should be able to negotiate like those: without one-sided deceptive deals.