Can the Sharing Economy Provide Good Jobs?

[don]

Re: Selflessness

It looks like Broward and Palm Beach counties are going to roll over on Uber. Fingerprint background checks, chaffeur's license, commercial insurance, may all be waved off to Uber control. "I just want a ride" may rule. (that's how it's pitched here) Uber frankly states that anything less doesn't fit their business model. The elephant in the room on the latter, recently blurted out by frustrated management, was "we have a high driver turnover, making these regulations impractical." For Uber, Airbnb, Lyft, etc. to surf the broken economy for deca-unicorn largess, concealing the down-and-dirty side of the biz would seem essential.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Selflessness

Yeah. Both the distinguished gentlemen from California like Ben Franklin so much, they just can't seem to get enough of little slips of paper with his portrait on them.

Reading this nonsense is enough to make you gag. The Congressmen talk about "The Sharing Economy" but only mention three companies by names specifically, Uber, Lyft, and AirBnB. Funny that. And Lyft was whining about not getting preferential tax treatment like busses and trains in there...as if it were a public service. Gross.

I mean, there's literally a peanut caucus and a bicycle caucus, so why not a California Criminal Enterprise Caucus?

Having been home for a bit and away from home less than usual I've had a chance to get Netflix and watch Breaking Bad.

The "sharing economy caucus" to me sounds like a "better call Saul" billboard. Hand over heaps of grey money in exchange for heaps of legal top cover.

A means to vacuum up sharing economy company campaign contributions.

How much money do taxi companies and limo companies contribute to lawmakers?

How much money do sharing economy stalwarts, founders, employees, investors donate to lawmakers?

i wonder what guidance local law enforcement have in the following two examples:

1) Uber driver pulled over for minor traffic/vehicle infringement while carrying paying passenger

2) solo private/illegal taxi pulled over fir minor traffic/vehicle infringement while carrying paying passenger

[LorenS]

Re: Selflessness

The industry rhetoric could be dismissed as mere semantics if the stakes were not so high for investors (a recent financing round valued Uber at about $51 billion), workers and government authorities involved with industry oversight. As with other hot-button issues — do you say “illegal aliens” or “undocumented immigrants”? — word choice here can offer clues to a person’s stance.

OK,so call them undocumented taxi companies. That or unregulated taxi companies.

One thing we could do is relax the regulations on conventional taxis in every market these geniuses enter. They are, after all, the "next big thing".

One huge issue is mistaking ingenuity with innovation. Smugglers are ingenious, but skirting the rules is not what I'd call innovation, it's an age old trick. To give these guys any credit at all is too much.

On so many fronts our current executive branch sits around twiddling their thumbs as the laws of the land are blatantly disregarded.

I'm pretty sure this is the kind of stuff RICO was written to deal with.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Selflessness

OK,so call them undocumented taxi companies. That or unregulated taxi companies.

One thing we could do is relax the regulations on conventional taxis in every market these geniuses enter. They are, after all, the "next big thing".

One huge issue is mistaking ingenuity with innovation. Smugglers are ingenious, but skirting the rules is not what I'd call innovation, it's an age old trick. To give these guys any credit at all is too much.

On so many fronts our current executive branch sits around twiddling their thumbs as the laws of the land are blatantly disregarded.

I'm pretty sure this is the kind of stuff RICO was written to deal with.

+1

It seems only a matter of time before a tragedy occurs with an Uber driver hurting someone in a way that seems egregious.
It might be an intentional crime or it might be a preventable accident.
Regardless, Uber won't survive the tsunami of bad PR after we are all reminded strongly of why we have these taxi regulations on the books in the first place.

[don]

Re: Selflessness

from last night's county Uber hearing . . . .

"Though Uber adheres to fingerprinting requirements in Columbus and Houston, Uber representatives said they did so before finding out it would be a significant deterrent to drivers, reducing the pool of applicants."

Who knew Uber "contractors" were freedom loving libertarians.

Quip of the night: "I don't believe in electronic hitchhiking, which is basically what Uber is."

Meanwhile, back in San Francisco, the City has closed lower Market Street to cars, due to the high pedestrian/bike casualty rate. A first day response:

"The changes received mostly positive reviews from pedestrians and bicyclists, who noted the absence of Ubers and Lyfts and other ride service cars blocking lanes or double parking on Market."

Ya see, independent contractors carry all the gas/parking overhead, and have to respond to rider requests in seconds - especially tough in a no-phone-while-driving zone. Lower Market houses the Financial District - a ride-rich environment, so these guys have to illegally hover and wait where they can, for a long as they can.

Did I mention the high driver turnover rate and their reluctance to be background checked?

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Selflessness

Oddly enough, today we find the first such tragedy.
This one is not egregious enough to blow up Uber, but it shows the idea.

Uber Driver Accused Of Kidnapping And Raping Female Passenger

He works as a sixth-grade teacher by day.



Andres JaureguiEditor, The Huffington Post



Posted: 08/12/2015 10:29 AM EDT | Edited: 26 minutes ago
A South Carolina sixth-grade teacher who moonlights as a driver for Uber is accused of sexually assaulting a female passenger.
Patrick Aiello, 39, faces charges of kidnapping and forcible rape, according to The Post and Courier. He has been removed as an Uber driver, and placed on paid leave from his job at Zucker Middle School in Charleston.
According to police, Aiello picked up the 23-year-old alleged female victim and a male companion from...

full article here.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...ef=mostpopular

[jk]

Re: Selflessness

Airbnb Horror Story Points to Need for Precautions


http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/15/yo...ecautions.html

interesting to note airbnb's hands-off stance as this event unfolded.

[don]

Re: Selflessness

interesting to note airbnb's hands-off stance as this event unfolded.

from the article:

But the central question here is for Airbnb: Just how much responsibility is it willing to assume for the safety of its customers? It refers to them as guests and promotes its security measures and hospitality. But its employees made a choice here that a hotel might not make in similar circumstances. Rather than sending someone to check on Mr. Lopez, Airbnb put the onus on his mother to make that happen.

Airbnb, Uber and their ilk have managed to get people to refer to them as pioneers of something called the sharing economy, a neat trick given that they are in the business of renting out rooms and charging for rides.

What they do share, however, is risk. As I’ve pointed out in previous columns, insurance companies aren’t always fond of everyday individuals running inns out of their apartments and driving people around for money. And an Airbnb listing may not mention the dog that will try to chew off your arm if you get too close, as I chronicled in April.

[don]

Re: Selflessness

Broward County update:

"Uber argues its current background checks and insurance for drivers are enough and the county's rules (criminal background checks and commercial insurance) would make hiring much harder."

Making "hiring much harder" is never explained.

[jk]

Re: Selflessness

Broward County update:

"Uber argues its current background checks and insurance for drivers are enough and the county's rules (criminal background checks and commercial insurance) would make hiring much harder."

Making "hiring much harder" is never explained.

i hope all they mean is that hiring is more expensive. otoh, perhaps they mean they were hiring people who can't pass those background checks.

[don]

Re: Selflessness

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The San Francisco district attorney announced Wednesday the expansion of a consumer-protection lawsuit aimed at Uber's claims about driver background checks.

District Attorney George Gascon said Wednesday that the growing ride-hailing company continues to unfairly claim it is rigorously checking the background of its drivers. Gascon said Uber can't make that claim unless it puts it drivers through the same fingerprinting process required of taxi drivers in California.

Gascon made his comments a day after his office filed an expanded lawsuit in San Francisco Superior Court accusing Uber of false advertising. The expanded lawsuit claims Uber failed to uncover the criminal records of 25 California drivers, including several registered sex offenders and a convicted murderer.

"This is really only scratching the surface," Gascon said at a news conference.
Uber Missed Criminal Records of Drivers, Prosecutors Assert

By CONOR DOUGHERTY


The district attorneys of San Francisco and Los Angeles have offered perhaps the most concrete evidence to date that people convicted of murder, sex offenses and various property crimes have driven for Uber, despite assurances from the company that it employs “industry-leading” screening.

“We are learning increasingly that a lot of the information that Uber has been presenting the consumer has been false and misleading,” said George Gascón, the district attorney in Uber’s hometown, San Francisco.

Some of the most pointed questioning has come from Mr. Gascón, who argues that Uber’s background checks are not as thorough as another service, called Live Scan, that is typically used by taxi companies.

He said in a news conference Wednesday that about 30,000 registered sex offenders in California did not appear in a public registry Uber uses in its background checks. The checks also go back only seven years.

“So, for example, if someone was convicted of kidnapping eight years ago, and they were just paroled last week — they just got out of prison — the Uber background check process will not identify the person as a convicted kidnapper,” Mr. Gascón said.

He said this was “troubling and misleading to Uber customers and to the public at large” because Uber says its process goes back as far as the law allows.One driver was convicted of second-degree murder in Los Angeles in 1982, and spent 26 years in prison before being paroled in 2008. He applied to be an Uber driver under a different name from those in his court records.

The complaint said Uber’s background check process could not identify the driver because it does not use biometric identifiers, like a fingerprint; because it cannot access criminal records that help to track aliases; and because the checks do not go back as far as the law allows. The complaint added that the Live Scan process would have identified the driver’s criminal past.

One driver was convicted of felony sexual exploitation of children in Wyoming in 2005, and another of “felony kidnapping for ransom with a firearm” in 1994. Other drivers were convicted of charges like robbery, assault with a firearm, identity theft and driving under the influence. Several were convicted of more minor charges, like welfare fraud.

“The main concern that we have here, and that we continue to have, is the fact that the consumer is not given the information, you know, the truthful information, in order to make an informed decision,” Mr. Gascón said.

The amended filing also asserts that Uber representatives continually changed their description of Uber’s screening.The company and its competitors use background check companies that can turn around requests in a day or two. And in states across the country, Uber — along with its rivals Lyft and Sidecar — have repeatedly fought proposals that would require them to match the checks required of traditional taxi drivers.

In California, for instance, Uber and other companies successfully lobbied to kill a law that would have required drivers to undergo a background check by the state’s Justice Department, as is required of taxi drivers.

The suit by the Los Angeles and San Francisco district attorneys includes other charges like operating at airports without permission.Uber, which recently celebrated its fifth anniversary, is already valued around $50 billion by investors. The company has raised a multibillion-dollar war chest to finance a global expansion and move into areas like food delivery.

[lektrode]

Re: Selflessness

this just in from me bruddah (the econ major)
kinda goes nicely with this one, as we were discussing the disintermediation of the american worker -
by the very same 'sharing economy' -
by one of The Key Players (that ex-wall-st-made-mob boss, bezos) from the santa fe reporter - since he/bezos likes to hang out there

and how he/amazon have built The Most Orwellian 'big brother' Corporate Machine goin ?

Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace

The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push
white-collar workers to get them to achieve its ever-expanding ambitions.
AUG. 15, 2015

kinda makes ole wallywhirled (WMT) sound downright charitable, dont it?

[don]

Ach, du Lieber!

Uber drivers are entitled to class action status in litigation over whether they are independent contractors or employees, a US judge said on Tuesday, in a ruling in a case that could have wide implications for the sharing economy.

Three drivers sued Uber in a federal court in San Francisco, contending that they are employees and entitled to reimbursement for expenses, including gas and vehicle maintenance. The drivers currently pay those costs themselves.

In the ruling, US district judge Edward Chen in San Francisco said drivers could sue as a group. Such a designation means the suit could cover more than 160,000 California drivers and could give plaintiffs more leverage to negotiate a settlement.

Representatives for Uber and the drivers could not immediately be reached for comment.

The results of Uber’s legal battle could reshape the sharing economy, as companies say the contractor model allows for flexibility that many see as important to their success. An ultimate finding that drivers are employees could raise Uber’s costs beyond the lawsuits’ scope and force it to pay Social Security, workers’ compensation, and unemployment insurance.

In June, a California labor commissioner ruled that an Uber driver was an employee, not a contractor. Uber has appealed that decision.

The case is Douglas O’Connor et al vs. Uber Technologies Inc, US district court, northern district of California, No. 13-3826.

Fingerprints, commercial insurance, chauffeur license. now social security, workman's comp . . . Oy vey, there goes the business plan, boychick.

[don]

More "Sharing" BS

Sharing? This is a straight business for profit. When I lend a neighbor a tool, that's sharing . . . . One wonders what's with the sharing buzz. Ideological cover? This being the very opposite of sharing. In reality it's the Monsanto business model - commodify the amassed collective knowledge - not in seeds but in teaching.

A Sharing Economy Where Teachers Win

By NATASHA SINGERSEPT. 5, 2015


What kind of tunes do you think Iago, the villain in William Shakespeare’s “Othello,” would listen to if he had an iPhone?

That is the kind of question that Laura Randazzo, an exuberant English teacher, often dreams up to challenge her students at Amador Valley High School in Pleasanton, Calif.

So, when Ms. Randazzo heard about TeachersPayTeachers.com, a virtual marketplace where educators can buy and sell lesson plans, she was curious to find out whether the materials she had created for her own students would appeal to other educators.

A couple of years ago, she started posting items, priced at around $1, on the site. Her “Whose Cell Phone Is This?” fictional character work sheet has now sold more than 4,000 copies.

“For a buck, a teacher has a really good tool that she can use with any work of literature,” Ms. Randazzo said in a phone interview last week. “Kids love it because it’s fun. But it’s also rigorous because they have to support their characterizations with evidence.”

She clearly has a knack for understanding the kinds of classroom aids that other teachers are looking for. One of her best-selling items is a full-year collection of high school grammar, vocabulary and literature exercises. It has generated sales on TeachersPayTeachers of about $100,000.
Speaking from her tiny home office, formerly a bedroom closet, Ms. Randazzo still sounded amazed at her success.

“What started out as a hobby has turned into a business,” she said.

Teachers often spend hours preparing classroom lesson plans to reinforce the material students are required to learn, and many share their best materials with colleagues. Founded in 2006, TeachersPayTeachers speeds up this lesson-plan prep work by monetizing exchanges between teachers and enabling them to make faster connections with farther-flung colleagues.

As some on the site develop sizable and devoted audiences, TeachersPayTeachers.com is fostering the growth of a hybrid profession: teacher-entrepreneur. The phenomenon has even spawned its own neologism: teacherpreneur.

To date, Teacher Synergy, the company behind the site, has paid about $175 million to its teacher-authors, says Adam Freed, the company’s chief executive. The site takes a 15 percent commission on most sales.

A former chief operating officer of Etsy and former director of international product management at Google, Mr. Freed is a veteran of data-driven growth companies. By selling tens of thousands of items, he says, 12 teachers on the site have become millionaires and nearly 300 teachers have earned more than $100,000. On any given day, the site has about 1.7 million lesson plans, quizzes, work sheets, classroom activities and other items available, typically for less than $5. Last month alone, Mr. Freed added, more than one million teachers in the United States downloaded material, including free and fee-based products, from the site.

“If you have a kid in school in America, they are interacting somewhere with TeachersPayTeachers’ content,” Mr. Freed said in an interview last week at the company’s headquarters in Manhattan.

Mr. Freed took the helm of Teacher Synergy in 2014. One of his first tasks was to bring the technology behind the homespun company up to date without introducing radical changes that might upset its following. That goal has become more urgent now that TES Global, a British company with its own teacher-to-teacher marketplace, has entered the American market.

Last week, for instance, TeachersPayTeachers introduced an iPhone app from which educators can buy materials. The app replaced an older version that allowed users to look up products but, oddly enough, not to purchase them.

“We were not a technology company until very recently. We were a teaching marketplace with a technology underlay,” Mr. Freed said. “Now we are trying to be both.”

The site’s popularity with teachers reflects the convergence of a number of trends in education and technology.

For one thing, school districts around the country have been introducing new learning objectives, called Common Core state standards, for different grade levels. That has sent tens of thousands of educators to TeachersPayTeachers looking for lessons to reinforce particular math and reading standards — like the requirement that sixth graders and older students be able to delineate and evaluate the argument in a given text.
“It’s a matter of understanding what the standards are and figuring out how to get the students to perform to those standards,” says Erin Cobb, a middle-school reading teacher in Lake Charles, La., whose Common Core-aligned teaching materials have had sales of more than $1 million on TeachersPayTeachers.

At a time when many politicians, technology executives and philanthropists are pushing novel digital tools for education, many teachers are also seeking old-school offline techniques that other teachers have perfected over the years in their classrooms. That has positioned TeachersPayTeachers as a kind of Etsy for education.

“A lot of the stuff you see in the digital world that is interactive, teachers are making them in analog form,” Mr. Freed said, noting that many teacher-to-teacher products are PDF or zip files meant to be downloaded and printed out.

As an example, he cited an “Interactive Reading Literature Notebook,” developed by Ms. Cobb. In her lesson plans, “interactive” does not refer to digital video or audio. It means students are asked to actively learn by, in part, cutting out and gluing assignments into their notebooks, taking deep notes in class and sometimes even drawing illustrations to demonstrate that they understood the reading.

“There’s a lot of creativity and innovation,” Mr. Freed said, “but it is tried and true in a lot of its methodology.”

For teachers, building a successful business on TeachersPayTeachers may also entail a lot of work.

To draw attention to the tools she developed for TeachersPayTeachers, for instance, Ms. Randazzo, the English teacher, started a teaching blog where she recounts her experiences or highlights resources she finds interesting. She also recently started a YouTube channel in response to requests from other teachers who asked her to demonstrate how to teach complicated concepts like irony.

She added that many teachers considered TeachersPayTeachers credible because they can find ideas from more experienced teachers who face the same classroom challenges they do.


“That is what ground-level teachers are able to do that textbook publishers can’t,” Ms. Randazzo said.

[jk]

Re: More "Sharing" BS

i think this teachers-to-teachers platform is significantly different than the other "sharing" businesses. for one thing, it doesn't offload any significant costs onto its sellers- no liability insurance, upkeep or maintenance is required. and teachers do lesson plans, and have done them for many years. if anything it allows the purchasing teachers to spend less time on developing what may turn out to be a mediocre lesson, and instead choose among lessons that appear interesting or even inspiring. the fees are de minimus. who loses?