This is a bad comment. The OP had a valuable point that applies to companies inside and outside of this "gray area[]". You're just making a tired and repetitive dig at Uber itself. It may be that Uber's gig economy model has important downsides of its own, but the salient problem is of private control of what's become public infrastructure, and that has nothing to do with Uber being cancer or something.
Did Uber not do exactly what op said? Aggressively grow to capture markets before the legal system could react? How is that a bad comment? I mean, the original article is about Uber. How is op in the wrong by describing exactly the business model they adopted?
The OP isn't wrong: the problem is that his point is irrelevant. The real question, to which nobody has an answer, is this: what do we do as a society when a small number of private companies corner the market for an essential part of modern life and then institute arbitrary criteria for refusing service to people? How this situation came about doesn't matter. Uber making all drivers full employees would not change the dynamic one bit.
Complaining about Uber's employment model instead of discussing this really important control question just annoys me. It deflects a potentially interesting conversation into grievance-airing about gig jobs.
It’s irrelevant that a company is able to skirt regulation? Would Uber be in the position to “institute arbitrary criteria” if they had to compete in an environment with proper governance being in place?
The crux of your argument is we shouldn’t care about how we get there but what happens next or essentially, how do we react.
If you want to solve a problem, identify and fix the root cause instead of reactively applying some patch to cover the bleeding.
Getting “annoyed” at someone discussing the root cause is misguided.
On the contrary, we need to really understand how we got here first, in order to be able to recognize patterns of the problem and determine how to avoid it in the future.
As the saying goes, those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.
It's somewhat relevant because it was plain as a day through continued behaviour that Uber is a sociopathic company. So while not all companies would follow the mechanic in question, and different companies may follow it at different pace, it was always obvious that Uber will screw riders over as soon as possible.
Fair point. I was a bit easy to comment. But there's a public side to my point. Services can be wiped with such business models which is detrimental to society. Amazon pushed a lot of people aside, now their prices are all but guaranteed to be fair.
