22nd February 2021 | Uber | Women
Uber drivers are workers. With rights; Women leave the workforce
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#1: Uber drivers are workers, with rights
Uber has finally lost its case in the UK Supreme Court, in which it was appealing against a series of rulings in lower courts that its drivers were self-employed works, not contractors. This is important for several reasons. First, once the Supreme Court has ruled, there’s nowhere else to go; second, the ruling will be used as precedent in other cases where gig workers are arguing their legal status; third, the ruling was unanimous, so there’s no legal doubt about the case; and fourth, it drives a coach and horses through Uber’s business model. Which is why Uber has fought the case line by line through the English legal system since 2016, while simultaneously insisting that it applies to only a small number of drivers.
So it’s worth just teasing out what matters about the case, courtesy of a good piece in Wired.
The UK has three main categories of employment, from employees, with most rights, through workers, to self-employed contractors, who have fewest. Uber has always insisted that its drivers are self-employed.
The Supreme Court, found this not to be the case, for multiple reasons:
Uber sets the fare price, so dictates how much drivers are paid for the work they do.
Uber imposes contracts and terms of service and drivers have no say in them.
Once logged onto the Uber app, the driver’s choice is constrained by Uber by monitoring their acceptance rate and potentially imposing "penalties" if too many trips are declined.
Uber exercises "significant control" over the way in which drivers deliver their services.
And Uber restricts communications between passenger and driver to the minimum necessary to perform the particular trip, and actively prevents drivers from establishing a relationship with a passenger beyond an individual ride.
In truth, this case was only ever likely to go one way, after the similar Pimlico Plumbers ruling in 2018. If Uber drivers are workers, they will have
the right to be paid national minimum wage, to be given the statutory minimum level of paid holiday and rest breaks, to be protected from unlawful discrimination and whistleblowing in the workplace, and not to be treated less favourably if they work part time. They may also be entitled to maternity and paternity pay and statutory sick pay.
We can expect some weaselling from Uber while they try to find ways to comply with the ruling without wrecking their business model, and the article has some immediate examples of this. But just paying minimum wage to its 60,000 drivers in the UK will have a financial impact, given that the company has said publicly that it is trying to squeeze driver rates to reduce losses.
Minimum wage would likely also cover waiting time. And the company could now have to charge VAT on fares. The ruling may also inform the next case coming Uber’s way—which is from drivers who say they’ve been “fired by algorithm”.
And the other five million gig economy workers in the UK—some of whom will be properly self-employed—have a clear set of legal yardsticks to assess whether they are workers or not.
Outside of the UK, the Supreme Court judgement will be read in the EU, where policy makers and regulators are wrestling with the same issue, and Uber is lobbying hard.
But it’s also a reminder that a lot of the claims made for the ‘gig economy’ are just rhetoric that acts as a cover for extracting value from workers, which are good for the company but not that good for everyone else. I think we might look back at a moment where weak labour markets, Silicon Valley bloviation and loose venture capital money created a business model with too many external costs to be viable in the long-term.
If you want to go deeper into the legal story of the case, Wired had a long read on this a couple of years ago.
Hanna Rosin, who, a decade ago, wrote an optimistic book about the surge of women in the workplace, has been looking at American data about the rapid decline of the number of women in work because of the pandemic. The figures are stark. During the pandemic, women’s participation levels in the US economy have retreated to levels last seen in 1988, more than 30 years ago.
Misty Heggeness, a research economist at the U.S. Census Bureau, has been tracking young families week by week, state by state. “The impact on short-term work productivity and engagement appeared to be borne entirely on the backs of mothers of school-age children,” she reported. There is real pathos and humanity behind these numbers. Two heterosexual working parents decide to scrape by for the year rather than let their children miss out…. Neither of them wants to quit, but it’s understood between them that she could better handle the blow.
It’s US data, so the impact is likely to be sharper there than in countries with better social protection, but the underlying story is likely to be similar elsewhere. Nor is it likely to be a blip: many of the jobs that women tend to do, for example in the retail and service sectors, might to be slow to come back, if ever.
But there’s a bigger problem that sits behind this. The difference in hourly pay between men and women is bad enough, but the difference in lifetime pay is further widened by interruptions to working life:
One study found that women who took just one year out of the workforce had annual earnings that were 39 percent lower than those of women who didn’t. Black women, for example, have higher rates of work participation than white women, but they have much higher rates of work disruptions.
Her conclusion: we could be at the start of “a backward cascade” for women’s earnings and women’s participation in the workforce.
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