The annoying/hard part about this debate is that the law is making a distinction, and everyday speech makes a distinction, and we use the same words in both cases, even though they have different meanings and implications.
It doesn't help that the legal distinction is hard to reason about since its goal is kind of nebulous. As best I can tell, it's balancing between "ensuring that businesses pay social insurance[1] obligations for anyone who they've made economically dependent on them" and "not making it burdensome to hire sporadic workers that 'feel' like legit independent contractors".
So yes, Uber can absolutely class drivers as employees (EmploymentLaw::Employee) and then say "oh just work whenever" (LaySpeech::Contractor).
[1] an umbrella term covering a lot of things; here, unemployment insurance and worker's compensation insurance.
Edit: Rewrote when I realized you were saying the opposite and I was disagreeing.
The annoying/hard part about this debate is that the law is making a distinction, and everyday speech makes a distinction, and we use the same words in both cases, even though they have different meanings and implications.
It doesn't help that the legal distinction is hard to reason about since its goal is kind of nebulous. As best I can tell, it's balancing between "ensuring that businesses pay social insurance[1] obligations for anyone who they've made economically dependent on them" and "not making it burdensome to hire sporadic workers that 'feel' like legit independent contractors".
So yes, Uber can absolutely class drivers as employees (EmploymentLaw::Employee) and then say "oh just work whenever" (LaySpeech::Contractor).
[1] an umbrella term covering a lot of things; here, unemployment insurance and worker's compensation insurance.
Edit: Rewrote when I realized you were saying the opposite and I was disagreeing.