Gig Economy Workers To Get Employee Rights Under EU Proposals (theguardian.com) 89
Gig economy companies operating in the European Union, such as Uber and Deliveroo, must ensure workers get the minimum wage, access to sick pay, holidays and other employment rights, unless they use genuinely independent contractors, under plans for new laws to crack down on fake self-employment. From a report: Publishing long-awaited draft legislation on Thursday, the European Commission said the burden of proof on employment status would shift to companies, rather than the individuals that work for them. Until now, gig economy workers have had to go to court to prove they are employees, or risk being denied basic rights. Nicolas Schmit, EU commissioner for jobs and social rights, told the Guardian and other European newspapers that internet platforms "have used grey zones in our legislation [and] all possible ambiguities" to develop their business models, resulting in a "misclassification" of millions of workers.
Robot/automation Industries lobbied for this? (Score:1)
They are the big beneficiaries in the long run.
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Creating an impoverished dystopia is a political choice, not a robot vs. human labor cost issue - you can turn it into one, but that is in itself a political choice.
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I know right? We're living in the worst era ever. Everything is always getting worse and worse over time. The longer ago it was, the better it was. People are getting more and more impoverished ever since machines began replacing human labor. The Luddites were right.
https://twitter.com/BillGates/... [twitter.com]
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(you forgot the /s)
No, it just doesn't need to be said, and if you can't get it, then that's your problem.
It's actually, maybe surprisingly to some, more complicated than that! Rejecting or even just skepticism of a particular technological item does not mean one must reject all tech. Just as acceptance or delight in one particular technology doesn't mean one must therefore accept all.
The argument is always fundamentally the same. Basically they see a specific technology as representing some sort of existential threat because it eliminates or reduces the skill required to perform certain tasks, then they complain that there will be some dystopian future as a result of it, then that dystopian future doesn't come and they pick something else to complain about, and then say "this time we'll have a dystopi
Re: Robot/automation Industries lobbied for this? (Score:2)
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Do not think allowing unlimited uber drivers will stop selfdriving cars.
I think legal issues are going to stop self driving cars. If I'm going to be persuaded to buy a self driving car it had better be able to drive from Berlin to Paris with a near 100% guarantee of safety and with me sleeping in the back seat. If that car has an accident that's the manufacturer's fault so he is liable. If that in turn means I'm going to have to sit in the driver's seat for hours on end with my hands on the wheel and my feet on the pedals ready to intervene in case the AI has a brain fart and s
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If they can automate they will, no matter how little humans are paid. If only because you don't have to worry about paying your robots so little they take up arms and revolt
Ok, so let's say they automate until we have 65% unemployment. Who will buy their crap?
Easy, we will build middle-class robots that can afford all the stuff.
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Ok, so let's say they automate until we have 65% unemployment. Who will buy their crap?
It's called a "Welfare State" for a reason.
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That or because everything is so well automated, nobody even needs to work, or even needs money at all for that matter. At that point you can just make a robot that makes robots that make edible food out of any junk you throw at it. Oh and make a robot that makes Mr. Fusions.
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The SDC industry is dominated by Waymo and Tesla. I sincerely doubt that the EU is pandering to American tech giants.
Other big participants are American and Chinese companies such as Apple, Pony.ai, Cruise, Zoox (Amazon), Nvidia, etc. European companies are way down the list, as they seem to always be.
SDCs are coming no matter what. The new EU rules will only slightly increase the cost of human drivers. There is still the cost of recruiting drivers, the management overhead, the legal hassles of dealing
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Thirty years ago, the th industry, MS and Apple,
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employees have flexibility in shifts (Score:1)
employees have flexibility in shifts.
Or do want to be that at 7/11 if it's dead overnight and there is no one coming in you get paid 0/HR
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Yeah. We're going to end up seeing the end of contractors and gig jobs.
I did Uber for a month when I needed extra cash. Adding all these "protections" will just make it harder to get into these positions - or they will limit the hours you can work to keep everyone from reaching fulltime status.
you should be paided for the waiting for an job (Score:2)
you should be paided for the waiting for an job on call part. As well other stuff like after and trip the time to get back to your base area.
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Have you done Uber? You get to chose which deliveries you want to once you become active. I would assume that the moment I am getting paid "hourly" I would rightfully lose that flexibility.
I'd prefer the freedom to pick and chose the deliveries I make.
You also get to decide on the spot if you want to log in to be available and the moment I don't want to be available.
If someone wants to apply to be a non-stop delivery driver at the whims of a company, then by all means pay them hourly, but most people doin
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The bottom line is Uber is a taxi company but doesn't have to deal with all those pesky regulations like background checks on workers, safety inspections on vehicles, applicable permits etc etc. Oh wait Uber is a ride sharing service. Silly me.
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I wouldn't expect an employer to go to the trouble of hiring me full time for a job that I'm only doing when I want.
The flexibility of being able to log in when you want (and if you want) as well as the flexibility to decide which deliveries you want to makes this contract work. If I am an Uber employee, they now have rights over what I do when I am "on the clock."
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If you just did it for extra cash why do you care if they limit your hours?
If your hours are limited, your ability to earn extra cash is also limited.
Many Uber drivers only drive when they have nothing better to do and want the flexibility to choose their own hours.
Many others watch the demand and hop in their cars when they see a price surge. This built-in market response benefits both drivers and riders. The EU regs will make that more difficult.
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[...] they will limit the hours you can work to keep everyone from reaching fulltime status.
You have it backwards. If they control or limit the hours you can work, then that's one indication you are an employee, not a gig worker. True gig workers can work as many or as few hours as they like. Being "fulltime" or not is nothing to do with this.
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In the US, fulltime directly relates to hours for non-salary employees. Since this article is about the EU, I'll defer and assume what you are stating is true for the EU
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All it will do is create a "recruiter" layer like there is for other professional positions.
Then Uber just pays the recruiting firm and they are left with details of paying their people.
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I disagree.
The UK went through this about a decade ago, by implementing the IR35 rules - there were a set of rules which said "if you meet this criteria, you are an employee, if not, you are a contractor or self employed". If you were deemed to be an employee under IR35 rules, your employer had to abide by tax and employment law - ie they paid taxes and NI contributions, gave you sick leave and paid time off etc, and you became a PAYE employee and lost your nice cushy tax dodges.
Now, it did cause a lot of
Re:EU Shows It Doesn't Understand What a Gig Is (Score:5, Insightful)
And those companies can just satisfy the easy-peasy requirements for independent contractors if thats true. The EU understands exactly what a gig is - the company doesn't get to say "you can't work for that other company at the same time" or "you have to do the job in this way" - if they want to they're an employer.
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A contractor's client should reasonably have *some* fliexibility in telling the contractor how the job has to be performed. For example, the client may specify particular codes or standards that have to be maintained. In some cases, but certainly not all, the following of codes or standards might even be legally required,
For a construction job, for example, if the building codes say X, but the client says that they want X + Y which is above and beyond what the local building codes actually require, th
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[...] the company doesn't get to say "you can't work for that other company at the same time" or "you have to do the job in this way" - if they want to they're an employer.
FWIW, here's the full list of proposed things the company doesn't get to control. If two or more of these are controlled, then the presumption is you are an employee, and it's up to the employer to prove you are not,
From https://ec.europa.eu/social/Bl... [europa.eu]
Controlling the performance of work within the meaning of paragraph 1 shall be
understood as fulfilling at least two of the following:
(a) effectively determining, or setting upper limits for the level of remuneration;
(b) requiring the person performing platform work to respect specific binding rules
with regard to appearance, conduct towards the recipient of the service or
performance of the work;
(c) supervising the performance of work or verifying the quality of the results of
the work including by electronic means;
(d) effectively restricting the freedom, including through sanctions, to organise
one’s work, in particular the discretion to choose one’s working hours or
periods of absence, to accept or to refuse tasks or to use subcontractors or
substitutes;
(e) effectively restricting the possibility to build a client base or to perform work
for any third party.
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I don't see how any ride service could provide decent service without doing both:
and
(d) and (e) are easy enough to comply with, and (a) could be done without too much difficulty. But if the regulation says
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the company doesn't get to say "you can't work for that other company at the same time"
They don't say that. It is common for drivers to have the apps open for both Uber and Lyft and accept a gig from whichever comes first.
It isn't clear how that will work under the new EU regulation. If drivers are forced to pick one company, most will pick Uber because it is the biggest, and the competition may fade away.
Naive Libertarian take? (Score:1)
Has it not occurred to you that other cultures might prioritise things differently to you? That your view is nothing special, is not God-given and is not the final word. The EU is perfectly entitled to not be Libertarian if it so wishes. It is not obliged to worship at the altar to Ayn Rand and it has the right to determine for itself what sort of economy it has.
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Reminds me of some places wanting to lower the employment age from 16 to 14 because no one wants to work instead of realizing the real problem. No one wants to work for poverty wages. Yeah let's bring back child labor.
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Not everything has to be a race to the bottom.
And gig work is closer to indentured servitude than contract work.
Re:EU Shows It Doesn't Understand What a Gig Is (Score:5, Insightful)
Essentially the sole purpose of this "Gig Work" in most cases is precisely the circumvention workers rights, minium wage and social contributions. "Flexibility" my rear. Most of these people are, for all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from employees, minus the rights.
Comparable measures for closing that kind of loop hole have been in force on the national level in some countries for ages. Even the UK has their IR35 thing, which is similar in principle. Nothing wrong with that as such, as long as genuine contractors aren't affected.
They don't have flexible work schedules though (Score:1)
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The real minimum wage is $0, which is what happens to many when they are prevented from selling their labor. This leaves people without an ability to improve their skills by en
Re:EU Shows It Doesn't Understand What a Gig Is (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually the EU shows it understands perfectly well what a gig is, and that Uber isn't it. There's a reason Uber has failed nearly every court case that has been brought against it on this topic. The EU is just summarising what the courts already have decided.
in exchange for the flexibility of the work schedule.
I have full flexibility in my work schedule. I am a full time employee with all the rights that come with it. It would appear that *you* don't understand what gig work is.
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Actually the EU shows it understands perfectly well what a gig is, and that Uber isn't it. There's a reason Uber has failed nearly every court case that has been brought against it on this topic. The EU is just summarising what the courts already have decided.
in exchange for the flexibility of the work schedule.
I have full flexibility in my work schedule. I am a full time employee with all the rights that come with it. It would appear that *you* don't understand what gig work is.
As a full-time employee, can you decide your job is boring or that you want to travel for a while? Can you then tell your boss, "Hey, I won't be doing any work for you for a while. Like at least 3 months, but I might not come back at all if I don't feel like it. Just depends"?
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Actually the EU shows it understands perfectly well what a gig is, and that Uber isn't it. There's a reason Uber has failed nearly every court case that has been brought against it on this topic. The EU is just summarising what the courts already have decided.
in exchange for the flexibility of the work schedule.
I have full flexibility in my work schedule. I am a full time employee with all the rights that come with it. It would appear that *you* don't understand what gig work is.
As a full-time employee, can you decide your job is boring or that you want to travel for a while? Can you then tell your boss, "Hey, I won't be doing any work for you for a while. Like at least 3 months, but I might not come back at all if I don't feel like it. Just depends"?
Yes, I can take a sabbatical if I want to. There are also countries that have laws for people that want to switch jobs (through education).
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As a full-time employee, can you decide your job is boring or that you want to travel for a while? Can you then tell your boss
Yes. Up to 7 weeks a year with full pay.
"Hey, I won't be doing any work for you for a while. Like at least 3 months, but I might not come back at all if I don't feel like it. Just depends"?
Yeah, I did that in 2007. Took 6 months off to travel Europe. Came back and restarted my job. The difference is that if I do 3 weeks instead of 3 months I do it on full pay.
Your ability to quit working and quit getting paid does not make you a contractor. It makes you just marginally better than some actual slave.
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As a full-time employee, can you decide your job is boring or that you want to travel for a while? Can you then tell your boss
Yes. Up to 7 weeks a year with full pay.
That sounds like a no, in the context of my question. You are still using a form of Paid Time Off provision. The amount of your annual PTO is higher than most standard USA employees, but it is still a limited quantity contingent on your continued employment. You don't have full flexibility like a gig worker, you just have more flexibility than in the USA.
Someone doing gig jobs like driving for one of transport/delivery networks can work exactly the hours they want, stop any time for whatever length of time,
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The point of the gig economy is to reduce employment costs by making everyone a contractor with no employment rights, paid holiday, pension etc.
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And you don't understand the concept of rights. You can't sign away or waive them.
EU gets it just fine (Score:1)
EU gets it just fine, they just aren't interested. It's a way of taking jobs that can make you a living and turning it into a job that you can't make a living with. EU countries simply aren't interested. These so called 'protections and benefits' are pretty much universally available in the EU, also to people without jobs (like 'gig workers'). Allowing American companies to just forego paying social dues while making people with real jobs pay for the social care of these leeches would be insanity.
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Re:EU Shows It Doesn't Understand What a Gig Is (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole point of the gig work is that the companies don't have to deal with hiring somebody, and the worker foregoes protections and benefits in exchange for the flexibility of the work schedule.
The point of a gig is to lower the transaction cost for short term jobs.
What's actually happening with a lot of companies in the "gig economy" is that these "gigs" are becoming long term primary employment.
The reason that's a problem is that the employee is now dependent on that job for their primary income, and that creates a bunch of additional issues.
- If they get fired they may have serious cashflow issues until they find new employment.
- If they get sick they either can't work or go to work and infect other people.
- If they get ill they can't work and need health coverage.
- The employer has a disproportionate amount of power in the employee/employer relationship.
We've been dealing with these problems since the start of the industrial revolution, which is why for regular employment we have things like sick leave, vacation, employment insurance, laws governing wrongful dismissal, etc, etc.
Give employers a loophole where all those protections go away and you'll start discovering why all those annoying protections came about in the first place.
If you've been driving for Uber for a year, even if it's just 10 hours a week, it's not a gig, it's a job. It might only be a part time job with some extra flexible working hours, but it's a job.
High school students are able to get part time jobs no problem. I don't see why classifying Uber drivers as part-time employees is such a problem.
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The whole point of the gig work is that the companies don't have to deal with hiring somebody, and the worker foregoes protections and benefits in exchange for the flexibility of the work schedule.
Not at all. The whole point of gig work was to exploit the loopholes in the law, made possible through technology, to make money. This was done by, much like every other immoral corporation, internalizing the profits and externalizing the costs. The petrol business externalizes the cost of pollution while internalizing the profit of sales. Gig corporations internalize the fee profits, or cuts, from their totally-not-employees while externalizing all the employee costs and protections. That means totally-not
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So much strawman that they should really unionize.
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So much strawman that they should really unionize.
Was it just me, or did Government Official 1 sound like the start of a pitch to join a pyramid scheme? Not saying Uber and such is a pyramid scheme, but I used to see those ads about town, "Be your own boss! Set your own schedule! Make as much or as little money as you want!"
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There's no way you're as stupid as you're pretending to be here. You know damn well that gig work tends to pay well below minimum wage and have zero stability/benefits/employer accountability to the worker and that full-week jobs at HyperGlobalMegaCorp tend to come with all those things the gig work is missing. If gig work were really a choice made on the worker's free will, people would choose it even if regular employment were an option, which is why all the "gig" providers should be legally required to p
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And if the person doing the work can't afford rent or food then that's their stupid decision, is that what you're saying?
Re: So what? (Score:1)
Yes. Personal autonomy is still a thing.
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Minimum wage is such aming-boggingly stupid thing to apply to this whole cycle, since both sides set prices and chose work so freely.
In capitalism, every worker is forced to sell their labor at a price the market decides under threat of homelessness and possible starvation, it's not exactly a free choice.
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The right to get exploited, the fools who get suckered into these schemes have no idea about business, they all think that revenue = profit, your profit, or what you get to keep is revenue minus expenses, which once calculated is 5/8's of fuck all.
So exactly how do you tell the difference? (Score:2)
A person might repeatedly do the same kind of work for one company, The company accepts work from many other people and the company alone specifies how much they are willing to pay for each given job. People who might be dissatisfied with the amount that a job pays are under no obligation to start any work for them.
The person is entirely free to choose their own schedule, choosing when and how many jobs they are going to take, and supplies all costs of doing the work at their own expense. Is the pers
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The person is entirely free to choose their own schedule
Congrats, you have found *one of* the many requirements for someone to be a contractor. If you meet all the other obligations including but definitely not limited to negotiating and settings rates, liability transfer, and work restrictions that normally are within control of a contractor you may actually be a contractor.
Why?
Definitions exist and are codified in law, it varies from place to place so you'll need to look them up for your specific case. Suffice to say simply choosing when to work does not make some
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None. But that's not Uber's business model. Uber somehow pretends that you are a contractor with the option to take on jobs for 3rd parties, but an employee without the ability to negotiate with said 3rd parties.
You're either a contractor and in control of your jobs, or you're an employee doing work for someone. There is no middle ground. You get classified as one or the other and there are a long list of requirements in order to be classified as a contractor while doing work. The courts have been quite cle
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It was my understanding that if you were an Uber driver, then Uber was your client, and not the passengers. The passengers are simply customers of Uber, not clients of the driver.
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None of what you describe is how 'gig jobs' currently work. So not sure what you're asking it being different to?
If it was just "We want you to do X for Y time for Z money", then that'd be a contract. That's, again, not how gig jobs work, however.
It is however what they pretend to be, and what they're advertised as.
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I think a real contractor comes to a signed agreement for each job. IMHO, "gig workers" are not true contractors with anybody because they have *one* agreement for the company to act as a middleman for finding clients, and they have a general agreement with clients but not a customizable signed agreement with clients.
The last time I had a plumber come out, he was a real contractor. I signed an agreement for *one* job. There was no intermediary, except maybe an online search for plumbers; but Google didn'
Because history (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Because history (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Because history (Score:2, Interesting)
And a lot of people still die trying to break into the USA. How about your workers' paradise?
Re: Because history (Score:3)
By the way, the van drivers are contractors, not employers, and are extorted.
Still a lot of work to do.
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This is a really stupid argument. Even Russia is full of illegal immigrants.
Besides, TFA is about the EU and under what rock have you been hiding to miss the EU refugee crisis? Nothing the USA faces is even remotely comparable on scale.
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Buddy, there were approximately 190.5 million people employed in the EU as of 2020. It doesn't seem that difficult.
Re: the GET to work harder to find a job (Score:2)
Re: the GET to work harder to find a job (Score:2)
A way around this kind of legislation (Score:3)
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That's called a "Taxi company".
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There is a category of employment called self-employed for this particular scenario, so yes, it is possible to be an employee of yourself. I am unsure what happens if you file a case of work-place harassment against yourself though.
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Maslow (Score:2)
"Power has only one duty--to secure the social welfare of the people"--Benjamin Disraeli (b. 1804)
http://www.netmba.com/mgmt/ob/... [netmba.com]