What you're talking about is "waiting to be engaged" versus "engaged to wait."
The drivers are not on set schedules and have no obligation to the company except for the time between accepting a fare and dropping them off. If the drivers were required to return to a staging area and wait for a call the they'd need compensation. But they're not. They can do whatever they want at that point.
When I worked retail I wasn't paid for the time between my shift's end and the next one beginning, but that's what you're arguing for in this case.
He didn't sit around waiting for a job. He'd go about his business and when his phone pinged he'd decide in the moment if he wanted to do the job.
Sometimes we'd be watching TV and his phone would ping and he'd get up to leave. Sometimes he wasn't interested and he'd let someone else get it.
The issue with Uber, Lyft, etc isn't that they treat their drivers as contractors. People who have they option of when, where, and whether to work and are paid per task aren't employees. The problem is the pay is terrible for what they're doing.
I work in the development department of a tiny city that's surrounded by a major city on all sides. It's an enclave for the super-rich, with the average new house here costing over 10 times that of the surrounding area.
There's actually sections in city code regarding the regulation of servant's quarters.
The houses are mostly owned by shell corporations designed to hide the identity of the actual residents. But I know who a lot of them are, and you've definitely heard some of the names, though a lot of the obscenely-rich work hard to start out of the press. There's a billionaire here whose picture I cannot find anywhere online.
Among my many duties, I review the plans for all the houses coming in.
They have sooo much security. You just don't know about it. There's multiple panic rooms, security offices, popup bollards, bulletproof windows, and more.
There are no sidewalks or parks. No sightlines from the street to the house. They build "water features" (moats) and plant vegetative screening to make accessing the house impractical except through the gate - some of which have guardhouses.
By changing workplaces twice I tripled my income in under 2 years. The biggest thing that happened is that I was promoted to a much more senior position 6 months into the middle workplace, but they screwed me on the salary thinking that because it was a big bump from my lower position it would keep me around.
So I did that job for a year and got hired for the same job elsewhere for a 50% pay increase.
But the choices we have in a general election are:
Vote for the candidate you hate least
Not vote at all and accept whatever the worst candidates are doing to you
Vote for a fairytale candidate (this and option 2 have identical results)
Violent uprising
The Trump cult is hard at work on options 1 and 4 while deploying millions of bots and thousands of bad actors to encourage everyone else to go with options 2 and 3.
It’s a percentage that nominally increases as wealth goes up.
Poor people need to spend a higher percentage of their income meeting basic needs, so having them pay the same percentage as the wealthy puts a higher burden on the poor.
In top of that, the wealthy are able to put a higher percentage of their income in things like investments, which are taxed at a lower rate (to encourage investing in the economy over hoarding wealth), so a flat rate tax would be effectively a regressive tax.
I used to have an extension that hid ads from me, but in the background clicked on every one. I’m super annoyed that I forgot the name of it.
It made the sites I visited more money and hid the ads from me while hurting the advertisers (by costing more money) and ad networks (by screwing with the value proposition from advertising). It was great!
This time is different. The new business model isn’t selling homes - it’s single family rental.
I coordinate all development projects in one of the fastest-growing cities in the county, and 100% of new single-family projects proposed since 2021 have been build-for-rent.
Why sell someone a house when you can rent it to them forever AND increase the price every year.
I’m not saying a crash definitely won’t happen, but these BFR projects are a different beast than what we had in 2008. There are lots of reasons this isn’t as financially risky.
The biggest factor is how they’re being financed. They’re mostly doing public financing where the lender is the municipality and it’s paid back with extra taxes attached to the development agreement. The interest in these deals is usually 0%. The idea is that the government makes is money off of the tax money from the residents.
If the development falls through the government will just put a tax lien on the property for the past-due portion of the 25-year 0% deal that will be bought up cheap and fast by the next group.
A more elegant solution would be to slap on a massive tax for houses that are not the primary homestead of the owner. Make it possible for companies to build and sell, but make it super expensive to sit on them or rent them out.
With houses being sold at 3x what they were just a few years ago in my area, it’s more profitable to leave half the houses empty than to sell them at a reasonable cost.
In Houston, by the time you’ve paid for the parking and the light rail ticket you’ve spent more than you would paying for extra gas and for a space in the parking garage at your destination.
So public transit ends up costing more AND adds 30-60 minutes to the commute, plus a 5-block walk in 115°. Why wouldn’t I take my air-conditioned recliner?
I was so annoyed in high school though, because I actually did have a biology teacher who was the opposite. That boogeyman anti-faith “evolutionist” strawman.
He openly polled the class and asked each student, row by row, if they were religious, and that they had to choose between “make believe” and science.
It pissed me off not so much because of what he did, but that he proved that there really were science teachers like that, and all the anti-science conservative families whose children took his class would be using that story as an example of the “evil anti-God agenda” of science educators.
It’s so, so frustrating that so many places require a job to be posted even when there’s an internal candidate and it’s already been decided. I work in government where we’re often hard-required to post all jobs and it sucks to see so many people applying for a job when I know they absolutely will not be considered for the role.
In my experience, a majority of job postings are essentially fake because it’s already been decided, and I hate it.
Uber and Lyft now required to pay Massachusetts rideshare drivers $32 an hour ( www.theverge.com )
Pillaging by the Super-Rich Will Continue Until the Working Class Revolts ( www.commondreams.org )
xkcd #2948: Electric vs Gas ( xkcd.com )
Alt text:...
Employees Who Stay In Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less ( www.forbes.com )
The starting salary for a new American Airlines flight attendant is low enough to qualify for food stamps in some states ( fortune.com )
xkcd #2914: Eclipse Coolnesss ( imgs.xkcd.com )
xkcd.com/2914...
One Mississippi ( lemmy.ml )
The infamous amazon Union busting video ( m.youtube.com )
Up yours Google ( lemmy.ml )
Unions work. That's why the corporations don't like them. ( lemmy.world )
Homes "unaffordable" in 99% of nation for average American ( www.cbsnews.com )
xkcd #2832: Urban Planning Opinion Progression ( imgs.xkcd.com )
xkcd.com/2832/...
31-year-old teacher quit her job. Now she works at Costco—and boosted her income by 50%: ‘I've never been happier' (these are not feel good stories, this is sad) ( www.nbclosangeles.com )
Bosses and workers still can’t agree on whether the commute is part of the work day, and it’s creating a $578 billion productivity problem ( fortune.com )
there is Indeed a problem ( lemmy.world )