I think you are conflating two thing: drivers being classified as employees, and being able to pick and choose (with some rules) their hours. Yes, in most cases employers decide to set the work hours, but that is not necessarily a condition of being an employee.
The fight here is not about whether Uber should be setting the hours that their drivers/employees work it is about:
1. Who pays the relevant employment taxes
2. Do the drivers qualify for state/federally mandated benefits like time off, unemployment, workers comp, etc.. (note: all of those things cost money, plus time to administer)
3. Do they come under rules about treating all employees the same (e.g.: do drivers that work full time get the same 401k program as Uber programmers)
All of this is really about Uber and the like trying to shift costs and burdens away from themselves. In many cases trying to eliminate them from their business model. We as a society have put protections in place against this because we saw how horrible things got, and this is an attempt to end-run those protections. I am open to figuring out how we should re-jigger how we run this, but not like this at the expense of workers.
Thank you, this was helpful - I didn't realize (but now that I read it it makes sense) that drivers could still be employees with part time (few hours a week) work. I wonder how much of those costs are fixed vs variable (based on how much a driver works) - one advantage of Uber is that they can surge capacity by having workers that only work a few hours a week.
The fight here is not about whether Uber should be setting the hours that their drivers/employees work it is about: 1. Who pays the relevant employment taxes 2. Do the drivers qualify for state/federally mandated benefits like time off, unemployment, workers comp, etc.. (note: all of those things cost money, plus time to administer) 3. Do they come under rules about treating all employees the same (e.g.: do drivers that work full time get the same 401k program as Uber programmers)
All of this is really about Uber and the like trying to shift costs and burdens away from themselves. In many cases trying to eliminate them from their business model. We as a society have put protections in place against this because we saw how horrible things got, and this is an attempt to end-run those protections. I am open to figuring out how we should re-jigger how we run this, but not like this at the expense of workers.