Uber loses New Zealand appeal, court rules drivers are employees not contractors

Employees might not get to claim the cost of their car (loan and depreciation), but contractors will. Healthcare doesn't come into it, NZ has government provided healthcare.

While you don't get vacation, you get to claim a lot of expenses.

In New Zealand, it's pretty much "at-will" anyways, with the cost of removing an employee typically being 3-months wages.

Personally, being a contractor was much more profitable than being an employee, even if I was on the same wage.

There is a model where a driver picks up the uber app and drives a couple times a month because it's a way to earn beer money once in a while. What percentage of trips do we think are driven by drivers like this? I bet a small percentage, maybe less than 1%.

Once a driver starts driving more than 30 hours a week for Uber, they're effectively Uber Drivers, and the employment concept starts to make sense.

The primary "innovation" of Uber is political, not technological. They've managed to circumvent labor protections and at the same time position themselves as the middleman between drivers and riders.

In another Universe, a technology company would develop software that taxi companies can use to provide the same services that Uber does. But that wouldn't be as profitable as there wouldn't be scope for labor exploitation.

Something that has been baffling me is how Uber is not in panic mode and it's market price not affected by Waymo?

I've always been skeptical [of self driving] but at this point (after having a few rides with Waymo) it appears that the folks at Alphabet have figured it out already and are coming for Uber. Why is not that affecting Uber's price?

New Zealand (where I live) has changed the law before to make employees contractors because of either corruption or economic necessity depending on which side of the fence you stand

Weta Digital had people building models on "at will" contracts and not paid very much. They were working on a film for Warner Brothers (if memory serves, I am not looking this up)

A contractor was fired and took a case that since they: worked only for Weta, only on Weta equipment, and for all the working hours there were for Weta they were an employee of Weta (that is the law here - until then)

The employee won.

Peter Jackson and Richard Taylor are very rich, very entitled, and Warner threatened to throw their toys across the room and the government changed the law so that any artist, or computer programmer working on a movie or a computer game had no employment rights....

I doubt that will happen this time. I do not think Uber wants to pay enough.

Between this and the Australian government's ruling on after-hours emails, seems like ANZAC countries still maintain worker's rights.

I'm surprised, and somewhat disappointed, that no state/country has created a formal third class of worker. There's obviously some type of gig-worker role that is neither employee nor contractor.

This is really good. Quite a lot of 'disruptive' business lately are actually just going around the laws, and sometimes borderline exploiting people.

From my experience, in big cities, Deliveroo and similar apps riders are mostly half legal young immigrants not realizing (at first) that they are being exploited and that they take quite some work risks without any coverage at all. But hey, at least we can have a Big Mac delivered to one's door for almost nothing.

Uber drivers, by any reasonable standard, are contractors not employees. Uber does not, to the best of my knowledge, tell them when or where to drive nor does it force them to pick up passengers. That's the distinction between contractor and employee.

Declaring Uber drivers to be employees seems to be a political move, likely lobbied for by low wage employers that are being forced to offer higher wages because many of their former minimum wage employees are now contractors for apps.