Uber Threatens To Shut Down California Business If Appeal Isn't Approved

[Mackin USA]

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/uber-threatens-shut-down-california-business-if-appeal-isnt-approved

Uber has warned that it may need to hike prices up to 111% after a San Francisco judge ruled on Monday that the ride-sharing company, as well as its competitor Lyft, must classify its drivers as employees

[Brad]

>Uber has warned that it may need to hike prices up to 111%

If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's probably a damn duck.  Welcome to the world of running a taxi service.

[ergophobe]

>>walks like a duck

Actually, I would disagree with that.

I used to have someone who regularly fed me subcontract jobs, which I like - I'm willing to take a big pay cut to have someone else deal with clients. I don't consider myself her employee and I don't want to be her employee. But we are both in California and we are in the same sector. Under the new rules, she would therefore have to classify me as an employee. A couple years ago, all her subcontractors were based in California. The new law made that virtually impossible. Now all her subcontractors are Romanian.

Meanwhile, we also live under threat of VRBO and Airbnb having to classify us as employees, which we aren't and do not want to be. It's like someone who sells on Craigslist, Etsy, EBay and Amazone Marketplace having to be classified as an employee of those businesses.

The problem is that in the US, we distribute basic benefits through the employer, which is the stupidest of all possible ways to distribute health insurance and the like (it's a stupid way to distribute anything other than wages and paid sick leave, or at least some incentive that would prevent sick people from showing up at work).

If not for that one thing, the employee/contractor distinction would be meaningless and these laws would be completely unnecessary. We need to solve the benefits problem, not the contractor/employer problem.

[OT: That said, the wildfire analogy falls flat. The author has a gross misunderstanding of wildfire, of what TR and Pinchot actually did and why that failed and was always going to fail, but the author is wedded to a certain ideology and he sees everything through that lens.]