Uber and Lyft ordered by California judge to classify drivers as employees
Lots of HN comments are here like &quot;I know people who prefer to be contractors&quot;, &quot;My sister&#x27;s neighbours little brother actually doesn&#x27;t want to be treated with respect by Uber&quot;, blah<p>This is utter nonsense. Being a contractor means being self employed. You don&#x27;t get paid leave or sick pay. It&#x27;s a risk taking and doesn&#x27;t make any sense in the gig economy where the wages are close to minimum rates.<p>If you are truly self employed then you have a skill which you can market, you can charge fees which allows one to put money aside for things like unpaid leave or sick days.<p>If you are truly self employed then part of your job is building customer relationship, building up recurring customers, increasing your business through marketing, word of mouth, etc.<p>You actually have to do entrepreneurial shit.<p>Uber drivers are NONE of this.<p>They clock into an app which belongs to someone else and they have no share in. They can&#x27;t hand out business cards to customers or market their services on a board somewhere. They sit and wait until their master (Uber&#x2F;Lyft) assigns a ride to them. Then they have merely the chance to accept&#x2F;decline it. They can&#x27;t even negotiate their own fees. That itself is fucked up. It&#x27;s complete nonsense in extremely disingenuous by anyone here to suggest that an Uber driver is a self employed contractor and that this is good for them. They get paid shit and can&#x27;t save up like a real self employed person, because they also have no say in the ride prices.<p>Fuck the gig economy. All gig workers are slaves and we should treat each other with more dignity and upgrade them to employees. It&#x27;s our bloody duty as a decent human being.