Posts by BenWilson
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber driver, in reply to goforit,
You need an employment agreement, the PSL holder needs a wage book as legally you can only work for wages and the PSL holder needs to collect the PAYE off you and pay the IRD monthly.
I would be surprised if any Uber drivers are working in this way. Paying a driver a wage would be extremely difficult if you don't book them work yourself. They could easily just sit their car down in an area of low demand and get paid a wage for doing nothing. I understand this is already a perverse outcome of the guaranteed minimum hourly rates.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber driver, in reply to goforit,
You're asking a very hard question goforit. It's likely that what you're saying is technically correct, but, like the metering, it borders on the unenforceable, because it involves an enforcement officer reading an employment contract on the side of the road. Believe me, this one has me worried. It was not like I didn't ask for advice on this when considering the options presented to me upon signing up to Uber. Their advice was quite literally useless. It depended on who you spoke to. NZTA were more helpful, and it seemed to me like what you're saying was their line. But hundreds upon hundreds of drivers had been signed up in the way I did it, and not being a lawyer, I could not be sure of the truth of the matter.
At the end of the day, I'd rather work under contract than as an employee in this situation, because it seemed to protect my rights better, was a much simpler arrangement by far. I may be quite wrong about this. I was certainly not in a position to spend money on legal advice to get to the bottom of it, and the Uber staff's position that no one had ever even been checked out on this aspect of the compliance in all of their time operating in NZ was something that I, in a position of total weakness, was prepared to take at face value. Obviously I've come to doubt their honesty in all matters of advice on the legality of their operations, otherwise I would not have written this blog in the first place.
So yes, I think that it's possible, on reflection, that in order to only be that little bit uncompliant (running a meter), rather than only a little bit more (some strange part of employment law that I don't understand at all), I would probably have been better to get my own PSL, at a further cost of $450, another police check, another set of exams, and another delay of unknown length, before I could hit the road to earn what is turning out to be little more than minimum wage. It is possible that the business model of several of the PSL licence holders is illegal. These questions are above my pay grade and I welcome expert opinion on them.
As far as I'm aware, in recent days enforcement officers have been targeting Uber drivers at the airport. None of them have reported having their employment documentation checked. The checks have been limited to what it is practical for the officers to check: Driver Licence. P Endorsement. TSL displayed. COF current. Log book in order.
Enforcement officers are not lawyers either. I think the idea of them reading an employment contract and then following up with some kind of tax audit to discover the truth of your employment status is just one of those laws that was never well conceived, and would be held in reserve only in cases where they pretty much wanted to throw the entire book at you. The other ones are much more clearly related to public safety, are more easily checked, and thus much lower hanging fruit.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber driver, in reply to goforit,
There is no legal way to bypass the PSL, goforit. You either get one yourself by passing the Knowledge of Law and Practice course, getting police vetted again, and paying for it. Or you work under someone else's one, carrying with you proof of your arrangement with that party.
Or you drive without it, and risk a huge fine.
I've heard that today, the Police are carefully checking for this and other things on all Ubers passing through Auckland Airport. Make sure you are compliant. Don't forget the logbook. Really important.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber driver, in reply to BenWilson,
Not Not Agreed, isn’t Agreed To Not. I was there. I minuted the damned meeting, it never happened.
Gah, too clever by half. First not should be "Note".
We barely discussed going on strike. That's way too premature.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber driver, in reply to BeShakey,
Way back I did some work for the Ministry of Transport because someone noticed that sharing a ride…
That’s interesting, BeShakey. How long ago was that? What was your involvement?
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber driver, in reply to Alfie,
I can tell you for sure, that the Uber drivers have not agreed to strike. Not Not Agreed, isn't Agreed To Not. I was there. I minuted the damned meeting, it never happened.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber driver, in reply to Moz,
But I’m sure Andrew Geddis will explain how that would exceed their powers, leading Idiot/Savant to ask how that would be unusual.
Classic! First laugh I've had today, thanks!
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Hard News: The place where things happen…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Yeah, that's a great speech.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber driver, in reply to Bob van Ruyssevelt,
Yes, the rider app can be used to find Ubers. I'm not even sure that we do disappear when we have passengers. At least, several times I've watched the rider app whilst on a fare, and a ghost car has shadowed me miles out into the burbs - I presume it's my time lagged location.
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Yes, in case it wasn’t clear, I think Uber’s defence that they are now “Ridesharing” is total bullshit. The law in NZ is clear. If you drive for hire or reward, you must have a P Endorsement. It really is that simple. Uber thinks that some weasel words about my endless stream of payments being in some way a sharing of costs with riders, rather than an income, will fool people. They will get literally no support from anyone, any where, any time on that. No rider is going to accept getting into an Uber and having me telling them that since we’re now ride sharing, I’ll pick the destination.
And yeah right the drivers agree to it. It's like we're driving to all corners of the city for hours on end purely for the fun of it. It can be fun, but it's still work. And when it's not fun, which occasionally happens, it's definitely work.
Hell, Uber puts huge pressure on drivers to accept as many jobs as possible. We don't even know the destination until the passenger gets in and we start the trip. At that point, refusing the trip is very difficult, involves a lot of mucking around. If you do it frequently, Uber will cancel your account. Also, they put big pressure on you to accept trips where the origin is a long way from you. Refuse (by which I mean "fail to accept" because it works by offering the ride to you, with 15 seconds to decide if you want it) too many of those, and you will deactivated as well.
I don't have a problem with these rules, they're part of what makes Uber so reliable and fast to come. But I refuse to accept that what I'm doing is therefore "ridesharing", as if I have some say in the matter of destinations. Often, I want to go home and a ride out West would be a good thing to get. Instead, I get a ride way out in the opposite direction. If I refuse that, I get downrated by the customer, and if it happens frequently, Uber would deactivate my account.
There is no mechanism for me to even register my desire to go West to end my shift. Nor any way to even signal that I am nearing the time I must take a mandated break, so that I am only really available for short trips. If I'm at 5 hours and a trip comes in that somewhere 45 minutes away in South Auckland, I'm in violation of the law for 15 minutes of that trip. Then I have to take my break in the back blocks of South Auckland, potentially just sitting on the side of the road waiting half an hour in the middle of the night. Yeah, right, I "shared" the cost of that.They’re playing fast and loose with the term. Yes, riders in the Uber can share. But they do that with taxis now, always have. That does NOT stop the taxi driver being in the situation of earning an income from the work. There’s no way that what is happening with the tens of thousands of Uber trips every night is ridesharing, except in the irrelevant sense that is already completely covered by our laws. It’s even covered in a lot of detail for taxis, there’s a lot of rules about how strangers in their cabs can have their fares split and what the driver can or can’t do as a result.