Uber Driver Classification

Uber is the client, not the person the driver picks up. The drivers are contractors, and they contract to Uber (or Lyft, etc) to do some job, in this case driving some person to a destination.Each requested ride is a new job. The contractor can choose to not take that job, for any number of reasons.The fact that the job has a set rate is not abnormal at all. The fact that the client will “punish” you for not being available is also not abnormal at all.Additionally, the contractors are a

It might just be due to the labor laws that define what a contractor and an employee are, and how taxi drivers and uber drivers are thus classified. You might check into those!

Drivers are contractors to Uber and Lyft, not the General Public. Uber is their customer.

As Uber will happily insist to you, "drivers aren't employees of Uber".

Uber's drivers are not workers. /s

... and no one dares to claim independent taxi operators are employees. They are service providers - they own the equipment and work on their own hours, subject to regulated price. The same goes to Uber, all they did was to change dispatch.

People are free to work for whatever company they want, but where I live they still have to provide predictable schedules, pay a living wage, sick leave, provide paid holidays etc.I'd be completely cool with Ubers business model if they simply followed local regulations for taxi services (insurance etc) and guaranteed a living wage and a predictable schedule.They are a taxi company and as such they are an employer. Dodging that responsibility by claiming your drivers are self employed

Every single taxi driver is a contractor - why do you think Uber should be different?

There are some other excellent explanations in this thread, but it boils down to the idea that if drivers are employees, the company starts to care about how much they work. For example, if they work more than 40 hours in a single week, they need overtime pay. That means that a driver today who decides to work 80 hours one week and take a vacation the next would (if classified as an employee) be costing Uber a lot of money, so they will probably need to ban that behavior to stay competitive. Fro

Drivers are on all of the ride sharing apps, simultaneously. A driver sees two ride requests - one from Lyft and one from Uber - and selects the one paying more.At that point, I don't understand how could anyone argue they are an employee (in the traditional sense of the word) of either company.