Uber messy

Caught a fun phone call from an accountant after this week's column over at the Dom Post (and Christchurch Press, etc) on the court's decision in the Uber case.

If Uber drivers are employees, rather than contractors, as the Court sees things, how will depreciation on their cars be handled? Contractors can count all those expenses against their earnings. Employers will pay you mileage if you use your own car for work purposes, but that seems like a nightmare in this case. Uber would have to start caring about what kind of car you use, where it can otherwise leave it to the driver-partner. 

I'd not thought about that one.

A snippet of what I had thought about:

If the court is right about the law, and it’s more likely to be right about it than I am, then the law is wrong. It makes it impossible to operate models that make both drivers and riders better off. Drivers who prefer an employment arrangement rather than contracting already have an obvious option: send a CV to a traditional taxicab company.

The Government will have to legislate around this mess.

The Government could set a new category into employment law for platform workers so companies could offer benefits without fear of workers being deemed employees, and so workers could maintain valuable flexibility. However, any new set of boundaries between categories will bring its own future challenges.

Alternatively, it could liberalise employment law more broadly. If Uber and its drivers agree that they are in a contracting relationship and nobody is forcing drivers to work with Uber, the courts could be required to recognise voluntary agreements among consenting adults. That approach would be flexible against changes in real-world circumstances, but more at risk of changes in government.

Perhaps the safest option would be a combination of the two. A broadly workable category for platform workers combined with the ability to contract voluntarily could preserve the former against future governments opposed to the latter.

 An ungated version should show up on the Initiative's website in due course.