<story><title>Uber, Lyft drivers manipulate fares at DCA causing artificial price surges</title><url>https://wjla.com/news/local/uber-and-lyft-drivers-fares-at-reagan-national</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>leereeves</author><text>Under the theory that Uber&amp;#x2F;Lyft employees are contractors and allowed to set prices, wouldn&amp;#x27;t coordinating (&amp;quot;conspiring&amp;quot;) to do so en masse be considered price fixing?&lt;p&gt;Personally I think they should be considered employees, but a pro-management federal prosecutor could make some trouble for them.</text></item><item><author>radcon</author><text>This seems like it could also torpedo their Contractor vs. Employee argument.&lt;p&gt;Contractors get to set rates, employees don&amp;#x27;t. So you can&amp;#x27;t say they&amp;#x27;re contractors AND accuse them of committing fraud when they try to set their own rates.&lt;p&gt;Now if only someone would develop an app that does this for entire cities. The app could be their version of a union.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>radcon</author><text>On that note, does it make a difference that they&amp;#x27;re collectively &lt;i&gt;refusing work&lt;/i&gt; rather than collectively &lt;i&gt;setting prices&lt;/i&gt;? Uber and Lyft are still the ones actually setting the price.&lt;p&gt;In the end I don&amp;#x27;t think it will matter, Uber and Lyft could probably code around this pretty easily if it started to affect their bottom line. When they see 100+ drivers in the same place go offline within X seconds of each other, it&amp;#x27;s a pretty clear indication that there&amp;#x27;s coordinated action taking place. They probably have enough data from drivers&amp;#x27; phones to see that they&amp;#x27;re sitting still waiting to go back online.&lt;p&gt;I just hope they don&amp;#x27;t decide to make an example out of these drivers by banning them...</text></comment>
<story><title>Uber, Lyft drivers manipulate fares at DCA causing artificial price surges</title><url>https://wjla.com/news/local/uber-and-lyft-drivers-fares-at-reagan-national</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>leereeves</author><text>Under the theory that Uber&amp;#x2F;Lyft employees are contractors and allowed to set prices, wouldn&amp;#x27;t coordinating (&amp;quot;conspiring&amp;quot;) to do so en masse be considered price fixing?&lt;p&gt;Personally I think they should be considered employees, but a pro-management federal prosecutor could make some trouble for them.</text></item><item><author>radcon</author><text>This seems like it could also torpedo their Contractor vs. Employee argument.&lt;p&gt;Contractors get to set rates, employees don&amp;#x27;t. So you can&amp;#x27;t say they&amp;#x27;re contractors AND accuse them of committing fraud when they try to set their own rates.&lt;p&gt;Now if only someone would develop an app that does this for entire cities. The app could be their version of a union.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eropple</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s an interesting question. I&amp;#x27;m not a lawyer, but I&amp;#x27;d be interested in the answer. From a technical perspective it seems that they&amp;#x27;d need significantly more control over product liquidity &lt;i&gt;generally&lt;/i&gt;, rather than &lt;i&gt;locally&lt;/i&gt;, for it to apply; from a moral perspective it doesn&amp;#x27;t seem like a reasonable appellation at all and that the closest equivalent is labor organization--and it&amp;#x27;s worth noting that companies are not obligated to negotiate with labor organizations on behalf of contractors in the same way they are employees, but contractors &lt;i&gt;are&lt;/i&gt; allowed to organize. Contractor labor, such as SAG, IATSE, etc. do it regularly.&lt;p&gt;Practically, the impact of a hundred airport drivers deciding to &amp;quot;strike&amp;quot; is so small that a non-mendacious prosecutor probably wouldn&amp;#x27;t even look at it. But there&amp;#x27;s a lot of mendacity around Washington, so who knows.</text></comment>