Showing posts with label Lyft. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lyft. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 12, 2020

The end of the beginning of the gig economy? Uber, Lyft and California AB5

 The San Francisco Chronicle has the latest news on the most concrete step yet to require Uber and Lyft to shift from a contractor-driver business model to one of driver employees...

Judge says California Uber, Lyft drivers should be employees

by Carolyn Said 

"A San Francisco Superior Court judge on Monday granted California’s request for a preliminary injunction to make the state’s Uber and Lyft drivers into employees. The 34-page order was scathing about the ride-hailing companies’ “prolonged and brazen refusal to comply with California law,” namely AB5, the new gig-work law that makes it harder for companies to claim that workers are independent contractors.

...

"However, it is likely to have little immediate impact.

"Judge Ethan Schulman stayed his injunction for 10 days. The companies will appeal it and seek a longer stay before the 10 days are up. An appeals court likely would hear their emergency motion quickly. Uber said it expects to be granted the longer-term delay and does not anticipate any near-term changes to its business. No matter what, it could not hire tens of thousands of drivers in a matter of days, it said.

...

"AB5 established an ABC test that says workers are employees unless A) they are free from a hiring entity’s control, B) perform work outside the hiring entity’s usual business, and C) have an independent business doing that kind of work.

...

"Along with other gig companies, Uber and Lyft are pursuing a $110 million November ballot measure, Proposition 22, asking California voters to keep drivers as freelancers who are entitled to some earnings guarantees and benefits. DoorDash, Instacart and Postmates, the other Prop. 22 backers, are not named in the California lawsuit but presumably would be affected by whatever precedent it sets. (Uber has purchased Postmates in a deal that will close next year.)"

Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Racial discrimination in Uber and Lyft

Here's an NBER paper that investigates, in connection with Uber and Lyft, some of the issues that crop up in other distributed decision making marketplaces:

Racial and Gender Discrimination in Transportation Network Companies 
Yanbo Ge, Christopher R. Knittel, Don MacKenzie, and Stephen Zoepf
NBER Working Paper No. 22776 October 2016

ABSTRACT Passengers have faced a history of discrimination in transportation systems. Peer transportation companies such as Uber and Lyft present the opportunity to rectify long-standing discrimination or worsen it. We sent passengers in Seattle, WA and Boston, MA to hail nearly 1,500 rides on controlled routes and recorded key performance metrics. Results indicated a pattern of discrimination, which we observed in Seattle through longer waiting times for African American passengers—as much as a 35 percent increase. In Boston, we observed discrimination by Uber drivers via more frequent cancellations against passengers when they used African Americansounding names. Across all trips, the cancellation rate for African American sounding names was more than twice as frequent compared to white sounding names. Male passengers requesting a ride in low-density areas were more than three times as likely to have their trip canceled when they used a African American-sounding name than when they used a white-sounding name. We also find evidence that drivers took female passengers for longer, more expensive, rides in Boston. We observe that removing names from trip booking may alleviate the immediate problem but could introduce other pathways for unequal treatment of passengers.

Yanbo Ge University of Washington Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering yanboge@uw.edu
Christopher R. Knittel MIT Sloan School of Management 100 Main Street, E62-513 Cambridge, MA 02142 and NBER knittel@mit.edu
Don MacKenzie University of Washington Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering dwhm@uw.edu
Stephen Zoepf Stanford University Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS) szoepf@stanford.edu
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See these posts for a related problem of peer to peer discrimination faced by Airbnb:

Airbnb consider market design changes to reduce discrimination