Oh, come on. Would you accept the phrasing, "Uber has shifted risk away from themselves and toward its drivers"? Which 99% of English speakers would read as equivalent to "Uber pushed risk to its drivers."
That's just factual, not some hidden communist rhetoric.
What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
I really hate the trend of libertarianism inventing its own political correctness, policing regular speech with well-known meanings ("pushing risk") for hidden accusations of oppression and slavery.
With a conventional taxi company, if something bad happens, you deal with the taxi company, get compensation, etc etc
With Uber, they wash their hands of it and say it's all the individual drivers fault. So now the drivers have to deal with any bad stuff, and their insurance companies as well.
This is Uber, pushing the risk onto drivers, so it can make more money.
>With a conventional taxi company, if something bad happens, you deal with the taxi company, get compensation, etc etc
In many places, if something bad happens with your taxi ride, you're still dealing with just the taxi driver. They are independent contractors in many places.
I'm not sure what the makeup is of employees vs. independent contractors, but they are definitely out there in significant numbers. In NYC, for example, most are independent contractors, and this has resulted in a whole mess of problems ( http://nypost.com/2015/01/22/1-5m-in-taxi-drivers-money-held... )
pro tip: If you don't want to cover your own liability, don't drive for Uber. I have to have liability insurance for my office, $50/mo or whatever. I could have chosen to forgo it but that would have been stupid wouldn't it?
Some people would "consensually" trade both their kidneys for a hot meal. A company offering this deal would be exploiting the inability of these people to properly assess risk, and would be acting unethically.
Choices take place within causality. Causal language can and should be applied to choices. If your politics appears to require a spooky metaphysical sort of free will and your ethics fail to align with the real world of cause-and-effect, then they are wrong.
An infinite number of theories of causality can be applied to any situation. This is why much of human thought, and some brands of political theory and law assume the ideal of "free will". To determine the actual "cause" of any event in the way you would like to interpret it, you would have to be omniscient.
Oh, come on. Would you accept the phrasing, "Uber has shifted risk away from themselves and toward its drivers"? Which 99% of English speakers would read as equivalent to "Uber pushed risk to its drivers."
That's just factual, not some hidden communist rhetoric.