Lyft Loses Effort To Overturn NYC's Driver Wage Law (theverge.com) 179
Lyft's effort to overturn New York City's first-in-the-nation minimum wage law for drivers was blocked by a state judge Wednesday, according to Business Insider . From a report: Judge Andrea Masley ruled that Lyft's lawsuit, which was filed in January, was insufficient to overturn the law that went into effect February. Under the law that went into effect in February, ride-hail companies must pay drivers at least $17.22 an hour after expenses. The pay formula uses a so-called utilization rate, which accounts for the share of time a driver spends with passengers in their vehicles compared to time spent idle and waiting for a fare. Lyft claims that it supports the spirit of the law to raise wages for drivers, but opposes the formula used to ensure higher payouts.
History repeating itself (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:History repeating itself (Score:4, Interesting)
They could just cap the number of hours a professional driver is allowed to drive which is already in the law. So nobody is getting hurt, except the medallion racket.
Re:History repeating itself (Score:4, Informative)
They could just cap the number of hours a professional driver is allowed to drive which is already in the law.
There is a cap on hours, but a single medallion can be used by multiple drivers. So for instance, 3 people could each drive for 8 hours, so the medallion is in use 24/7.
Also, there is no way to enforce the limit on hours, so it doesn't mean much in practice.
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The point is that the limit on hours is a bad excuse to have a medallion scheme, a limit on hours driven per day accomplishes all safety concern, Lyft just avoids the medallion scam.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Limits on hours are easily enforced in the EU. Commercial vehicles are fitted with timers that record how long the driver is driving for. Each driver has a token they insert when driving. Everything is logged.
It's possible to cheap by using someone else's card of course, but it's relatively easy to check if the card in use matches the driver and getting caught is an immediate loss of job and criminal prosecution.
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The argument against the medallion system might very well be valid, but doesn't at all answer the question of why Uber and Lyft are abusive in markets where taxis are pretty much a free market and the medallion system doesn't exist...
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Ignoring the issue of exploitation (Score:2)
And if there are no more jobs available? You too would work for less than minimum wage if it mean food in your belly and a roof over your head vs going hungry and homeless. Thus, laws to prevent businesses from exploiting workers. Laws like a minimum wage for drivers.
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If there was "plenty of work" then wages would be going up from the demand for labor. They're not.
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Capitalism always works when Government gets out of the way.
Only for definitions of 'works' that exclude being good for society.
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The kept lowering prices to try to compete
That is terrible.
But it isn't just a problem in ground transportation. Grocery stores, restaurants, clothing stores, etc., all have problems with competitors lowering prices.
The government needs to do something about this, otherwise it is just a race to the bottom.
Maybe we could set up government panels to set prices and production quotas for each industry.
Why has this never been tried before?
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wage and price controls were widely done during WWII
That was to maximize wartime production by restraining incentives for economic growth in other sectors.
Such policies make no sense in peacetime.
Our modern system of employee health insurance derives directly from WWII practices
The result is a bloated system costing twice what the rest of the developed world pays, with worse outcomes, and with millions left uninsured.
America's system of employer provided healthcare gives us the worst of both capitalism and socialism with the benefits of neither.
Employers acting as middlemen between employees and their doctors makes no sense at all.
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The important part of your history lesson is: Once the government gets involved in a market, that market is screwed. Taxi medallions raised the bar of entry for cab companies. Lyft and Uber came along and started outcompeting Taxis because they didn't have this type of regulation. Now that the government in NY is taking over the ride share industry by setting labor prices, Lyft is doomed to the same fate as Taxi companies.
It feels good to talk about "living wages" and complain about low wages, as though ind
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this mention about medallions, I'm too lazy to research if these are actual existing. I can understand taxi drivers having Class B licenses, be insured (besides usual personal auto insurance), and be part of a licensed business (which uber and lyft are none of the above).
I was thinking if back in the days cabbies could make a good wage? i.e. in the movie Taxi Driver the character accumulates a lot of cash. I found it interesting when interviewing with the cab company the guy asks Travis is he willing to w
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But, but, it's *different* now. It's all with a computer, which will magically deliver all the benefits with none of the down sides.
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What other kind of benefits are there? If you're a capitalist, I mean.
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The downside to that is what to do with the people that bought those taxi tokens that likely cost them more than a house and they only bought with the expectation that they could sell them when they retired.
Laugh at them?
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you mean it's bad for companies that compete with taxis to have to pay like a low-end earning taxi driver? I'm so shocked. They might even have to start charging taxi-company like rates?
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Nobody is forced to drive for Lyft.
Multiple services (Score:4, Insightful)
Is this addressed somehow or this a glaring loophole? Heck if I could make 17*companies*hour, that adds up quick...
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Good for New York (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Good for New York (Score:3)
But how will that enrich the oligarchy while destroying working class families??
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The URL in your .sig leads to a missing page.
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What work are you doing? If it's valuable, you will be making it. If it's not valuable, find a new trade. 40 hours of labor can mean a million different things, most of which are simply not that valuable nor desirable enough to command a price commensurate with living the lifestyle that people are brainwashed into believing they are entitled to here in the US. How about: Cancel your cable and cook your meals at home. That should keep some cash in your pockets until you can learn a valuable skill. Get a libr
Poverty is not a character flaw (Score:2)
Mod Parent Up (Score:2)
Translation (Score:3)
Lyft wants to pay it's drivers less than the law allows. That is, wages so low it's literally criminal.
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So you as a taxpayer enjoy having the safety net (tattered and tiny as it is) used as a supplemental payroll by corporations that have a lot more money than you do?
If an employer can't afford to pay it's employees enough to stay in a condition to continue working, it is a failure from an economic standpoint.
Without the safety net, such an employer would fail anyway. Nobody wants to get a rid from someone who hasn't showered this year and who begs for food and gas money the whole trip.
so new age (Score:2)
Just like the car wash... (Score:2)
A few years ago, the politicians in NYC decided to be magnanimous and "help the little man" and took to pushing through a $15/h minimum/living wage for folks employed in the car wash industry. Car washes in NYC employ (or used to that is) mostly low-skill, immigrant labour. Eventually, the minimum wage law was passed.
The result of the new minimum wage? Some car washes closed down, a lot of workers were laid off and most of the remaining car washes took to automating since the ~$100k investment into automati
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Unregulated, illegal car washing? In an alley? Oh, the horror!
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Re:Ultimate Battle Royale: Musk Vs. NYC (Score:4, Insightful)
Ride share alternatives may or may not be ok with some people. Then there's state laws to consider, which may fine the driver and perhaps passengers. Then there are insurance risks aplenty.
There will be people that will use various phone apps to summon unlicensed (for public transportation) vehicles that will help support slave wages, and huge potential problems if they're in an accident.
It's a complex world, and even though there are those that will live outside the law, they take heavy risks to do so, these days.
When in NYC, I still take a medallion cab. I don't believe robotaxis will hit the streets for a decade, and Elon Musk is a serious braggart.
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No. Not for almost a decade. The hubris that makes people think that AI + deep neural nets + ultrafast LIDAR means enormous safety are full of shit. Enormously safe vehicles are made with eons of both real data, and fantastically complex (albeit finite) data sets. The hardware will be expensive, the logic always maturing, and lawyers salivating.
Read the history of automobiles to understand where we've come, especially the history of car racing.
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I think your criticism is quite valid for most of the self-driving car programs, where they have a few specially equipped test vehicles that drive around California and Arizona. But Tesla has a fleet of half a million vehicles (and expanding) driving around all over the world and gathering data for them. They're getting that massive dataset faster than anyone else, and already have many, many m
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If you disambiguate the contexts of most Tesla drivers, you'll see that they don't match the profile of an autonomous taxi service. Cut away huge swaths of data to compensate for this lack of useful context, and now you have left what every one else has: not enough.
The reactivity of autonomous taxis is also different than regular in-traffic circumstances as well. Slice more from the huge dataset you expostulate.
Yes, the final dataset is finite. It's still vast, and we haven't broached the topic of LIDAR dis
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The next few years should give the answer.
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It's also a pretty standard business model. Professional drivers aren't covered under personal insurance when they drive for an employer, they're covered by the employer's insurance.
In Tesla's business model, their software is the professional driver and they're the employer who carries insurance that covers all of them.
For private owners of automated cars, I wouldn't be surprised if the manufacturers offer their own insurance plans. They're in the best position to assess the risk, and you can be a more com
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Musk reduced some of the complexity by stating explicitly that if a self driving car is involved in an accident and found at fault, Tesla would be the one held responsible.
If only Elon Musk's statement was legally enforceable, like a binding contract or something.
You can bet that Tesla's lawyers will not write the sales contract with this in it, or if there is anything even close they'll spend more money than any claimant has in court proving the car was not at fault.
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Found the Russian Troll.
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He'll be *driving* an Uber when it's all over.
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NYC can't be 'flooded' with driverless cabs unless they replace driven taxis one-for-one.
While that's certainly possible, it's really hard for a company to get enough taxi medallions to start something that radically new. Though I do see that the medallions are down to about $250,000 each; they were over a million at one point.
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Is a driverless cab a taxi? Or is it kind of a rental car? Maybe it's like one of those car share things.
Uber managed to crack New York's taxi regulations with things that are cabs in every way except for the employment model. Driverless taxis surely can sneak past even more easily.
That's only true for monopolies (Score:4, Insightful)
Just ask yourself this: if every wage increase is always passed on to the Consumer how do wages _ever_ go up? As soon as you recognize it's possible for wages to go up in your lifetime you'll realize that the folks spreading the lie that it's impossible for them to do just that are lying to take all the gains for themselves.
Sorta (Score:2)
In the past adding more workers massively increased output and profits. This gave workers enough bargaining power to start forming Unions which in turn lead to rapid wage
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Re: The wages will be passed onto us then. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Sure, why should other people have to survive off of what you will pay? If they serve you then they shouldn't make a comfortable living because you demand slave wages.
There exist today plenty of higher-end choices for groceries, restaurants, retail, and household goods where the employees are paid well and the prices are scaled to match. Everyone on the living wage bandwagon is free to put their own money where their mouth is and patronize those places rather than less expensive options. Do you?
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This is about not wanting to pay enough for an entire industry to survive.
Oxymoron.
We don't need laws to keep industries that are not economically viable. Either the service (or industry) is economically viable, or it is not. The United States is an open market economy. Socialists laws should stay in the EU.
That said, I'm not opposed to a general minimum wage law to avoid exploitation. I'm just opposed to economic laws aimed at a specific industry. Pretty soon we'll be paying farmer subsidies to French farmers as well, only to have their butter destroyed because they produce
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We're also talking contract work here too, NOT W2 wage earners.
With a contract 1099 job, you negotiate your bill rate, and you decide your hours you want to work, etc.
If the bill rate isn't up to what you want, then don't take the job.
This isn't W2 work, where a minimum wage might enter into it....this is contract work, and you figure out if the bill rate is worth it to you, for you to provide equipment and freedom to decide
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But, like any other contractor in the world, if you don't like the terms or bill rate (I've run into people too that didn't want to negotiate to what I thought was a good rate), you can refuse to take the gig.
It's pretty simple really.
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Re: The wages will be passed onto us then. (Score:4, Interesting)
But like miscategorized employees everywhere [shrm.org], that negotiation is a fantasy and they're not contractors in any true sense of the term.
Courts disagree. The TLC disagrees. So yes, it is pretty simple. You get to follow the law whether you agree with it or not.
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I'm guessing your quote here is based on anecdotal evidence......
My anectodal experience on this is that (mine is mostly Uber experience)...certainly that this is NOT the last resort job they take when there is nothing else.
From my speaking with my drivers, I'd say easily that 99% of them say this is just a way they pick up extra money and not their main job.
They pretty much all tell me, they had time off, and
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I'd never considered taxi driver to be a 'real' job either, at least not one someone did solely for their living.
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With a contract 1099 job, you negotiate your bill rate, and you decide your hours you want to work, etc.
Show where that's happening with Lyft and Uber drivers in New York. Go on, I'll wait.
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We're also talking contract work here too, NOT W2 wage earners.
With a contract 1099 job, you negotiate your bill rate
But Lyft drivers can't negotiate their bill rate... so you've just contradicted yourself.
Either that, or Lyft drivers should be considered W2 employees. With the associated financial and legal consequences.
this is contract work, and you figure out if the bill rate is worth it to you
It takes experience and planning to determine reasonable rates for contract work. Those rates are often significantly higher than wages for employees who perform the same type of work.
Lyft, Uber, etc are mostly bilking people who lack the knowledge or skills to determine reasonable contract rates. Very fe
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This isn't about "not wanting to pay a premium". This is about not wanting to pay enough for an entire industry to survive.
Loaded, subjective terms like "premium" and "survival" are very much in the eye of the beholder. I promise you there are plenty of people with lower standards of living than the current crop of rideshare drivers that could not only survive, but would be giddy to make as much as they do.
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They're also free to vote for living wage laws that make those places not "those places rather than less expensive options," and put a halt to the race-to-the-bottom that only a few prize.
Did they? Yes? Then shut it.
Re: The wages will be passed onto us then. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. I'm happy to pay a fair share. You, on the other hand, want people with morals to pay a premium.
Nope. Quite real principles that were enacted into law during the depression. The only thing happening here is that the post-70s slide in the real minimum wage is being reversed. Make America Great Again? You got it.
I don't live in direct opposition to those principles, I vote for them. And doesn't it just piss you off.
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Yep. I'm happy to pay a fair share. You, on the other hand, want people with morals to pay a premium.
I don't "want" anyone to pay more than they're choosing to pay right now, as I'm not the one advocating to change the status quo. What I am saying (which I'm comfortable you really understand) is that those who are saying the status quo should change such that people are forced to pay more money for the same product/service, should put their money where their mouth is and do so themselves. That isn't a complicated concept unless you're trying to make it so.
I don't live in direct opposition to those principles, I vote for them.
Of course you do, on both counts. Talk is chea
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Conveniently you define the status quo as something like the last 5 years, rather than Donald Trump's Golden Age [visualcapitalist.com] of the early 1960s. Why is that?
Laws aren't talk [state.md.us]. You're complaining in article about laws and regulations, not talk. You're advocating for voluntary, individual action to implement a living wage instead of the legally
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Conveniently you define the status quo as [what's happening now], rather than [what happened a long time ago]. Why is that?
Because, inconveniently, that's the very definition [google.com] of the term (as I'm confident you know):
status quo /stades kwo/
noun
the existing state of affairs , especially regarding social or political issues.
And that's the last round of putting the rattle back on the highchair for this thread.
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No, in that case the living wage regulation in TFA is the status quo and you're arguing to revert to the situation prior to the status quo.
"...Lyft's lawsuit, which was filed in January, was insufficient to overturn the law that went into effect February..."
So in sum your argument is that we're all hypocrites who merely talk about changing the status quo, not people subject to living wage laws that are the status quo
Re: The wages will be passed onto us then. (Score:4, Insightful)
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If a small percentage of people voluntarily pay more
It shouldn't be a small percentage if people are being true to their stated beliefs. If there's truly any shot at getting something like this done legislatively, by definition there must be more than 50% support. That should be more than enough critical mass to prove that course of action is the correct one.
If indeed it would be a small percentage of people who actually put enough stock in their own stated beliefs to take action with their own resources rather than simply trying to force others to do so,
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But they'll be happier or whatever and if you include that metric they might be better off. There are lots of people doing altruistic things like giving away all their income except the bare bones costs they have for food and efficiency living. Those people don't feel like they are being penalized.
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Most of the big supermarket chains are heavily unionized. They can afford to pay their workers less than ALDI.
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Not EVERY job is meant to be one you make a living at and support a family/household.
Some are just for side money.
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I don't believe there is a shortage of jobs to be had, that one can choose from.
If you want a W2 job, find one that pays enough. If you'd rather be a contractor, be one...that might involved working more than one job, but working > 1 job is nothing new, people have been doing that for decades.
Right now, unemployment is at a low....and on the news you still hear all jobs can't be filled, so there are jobs to be had out there.
The thi
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The vast majority of folks in the US, don't work for minimum wage, they make more than minimum wage.
So? It doesn't mean more and more people don't have shitty jobs, and more and more people are going on welfare. Has nothing to do with my comment.
And as far as job permanence, you've not been able to rely on that since maybe the 50's?
Nope, my parents had to struggle a little bit because they didn't have educations but my dad went to trade college and got a job that lasted him his lifetime in his 70's. He mostly worked around others who also had good jobs and talked about how it was changing over the years. Back then the average student was able to pay for their education within 3 years and
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Low interest rates are used to artificially prop up the stock market since there are no good investment alternatives like CDs or short term high interest bonds.
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Sure, why should other people have to survive off of what you will pay? If they serve you then they shouldn't make a comfortable living because you demand slave wages.
Get a different job.
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Shall we get rid of the child labor laws as well?
Bravo! You win this entire thread with that comment.
Re: The wages will be passed onto us then. (Score:5, Funny)
I was at the New Yorkers meeting last week and after a short debate it was decided that New Yorkers find you annoying as well.
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