Like every other team that hangs Division Champion banners (also known as all of them)? It’s not their fault they played in a shit division for a decade and change.

Ahem

Yea, the guy with the best playoff SV% in NHL history is such a regular-season showboat.

Because he’s Braden Holtby?

How dense are you? I am not, nor have I ever, argued the union would argue for shift work. Uber would demand shift work to control labor costs, because letting employees set their own hours while entitled to a minimum wage is equivalent to writing a blank check. But without shift work, Uber’s surge model goes kaputt.…

Uber’s value proposition right now: “Work whenever the price is attractive enough to be worth your time. We don’t really care.”

Yes, I’m sure New York City has kept the number of taxi medallions static for decades out of an overwhelming concern for safety.

What is so baffling about an employer on the hook for minimum wages + benefits being stingier with hours than one who is not—how else do you imagine Uber would manage its labor costs if it has to pay a minimum wage+fringe benefits?

I’m perfectly happy to have a conversation about creating a new employment classification between employee and contractor to account for situations like Uber. But if cab companies are going to be used as a baseline for the discussion, or even have a seat at the table—yea, I would rather trust the unfettered free…

The encumbrances a cab company bears vs. Uber are significantly different. Not all of these encumbrances are necessary. It’s possible to meet somewhere in the middle. Let’s do that.

More importantly, should they be treated as traditional employees? The employee/contractor distinction isn’t some immutable law of the universe—we’re all ultimately arguing about how to adapt existing labor law to account for a new market model.

An apt comparison might be owning a restaurant, while next door a guy builds a warehouse with a grill out back and lets college kids wait tables as “contractors” while only paying tips.

You’re moving the goalposts. You said the review system proves that separate rides aren’t separate jobs of the sort an individual contractor takes on. But on Thumbtack, general contractors are reviewed as general contractors, electricians as electricians, etc. The fact that the market-maker provides an information…

The animating purpose of modern taxi regulation is to artificially restrict supply, though, so demanding Uber drivers to comply with the regulations is self-defeating.

They probably pay some sort of licensing/medallion fee, but that’s just dividing the spoils of a government-imposed cartel. Not exactly a net benefit to society.

The whole argument for Uber drivers being contractors rests on the idea that each individual ride they give is a unique job unrelated to any other tasks, past or present, which they perform(ed) under Uber’s purview. The fact that Uber has a rating system is proof positive that this is not the case.

The dirty little secret is that being able to choose who to work with is a valuable feature as well. It may suck when black people have to wait a few extra minutes, but that’s just the flipside of a coin that lets women avoid picking up men.

Well, it would skim loads of private money for left-wing political organizing. That’s not nothing.

Despite having driver GPS info hitting their servers every minute, the Uber support team gave me the corporate equivalent of a “that sucks dude”.Uber incentivizes dangerous driving, and provides no oversite.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯