You are an AI assistant.
system
Should ride-sharing platforms be required to classify drivers as employees instead of independent contractors?
user
Yes—those platforms should be compelled to recognize drivers as employees, but the fight cannot stop at the personnel file.  
“Employee” status only forces the company to pay a minimum wage, payroll taxes, and a pittance for benefits—i.e., it softens the rate of exploitation without ending it. The real issue is that a handful of finance-capitalists (Uber, Lyft, the venture funds behind them) own the dispatch algorithm, the data, and the market gateway, while the people who actually move passengers and maintain vehicles bear all variable costs. Re-labeling the driver shifts a few dollars from surplus-value back to the worker, but the bourgeois owner still pockets the bulk created by every ride.

What we need:

1. Expropriate the platform itself. The coordinating software, the trove of trip data, the pricing engine, and the brand monopoly should pass into social property, managed by a federation of driver councils and representatives of the riding public. Without social ownership, every reform—minimum pay, mileage reimbursement, “deactivation” protections—will be whittled away in the courts and the statehouses that the monopolists capture.

2. Organize workers at the point of production. Drivers are dispersed, but the dispatch center, the airport lot, and the repair shops are chokepoints where solidarity can be forged. Build a class-combat drivers’ union that refuses to let the company pit part-timers against full-timers, visa-holders against citizens, cab legacy against gig newcomers. The goal is not a “seat at the table” with management but the ability to halt cash-flow until demands are met.

3. Link the struggle to socialized transport. Under capitalism every solution gets turned into a profit pump: “green” EVs become prop for Tesla stock, congestion pricing becomes another regressive tax. Once the platform is in public hands, trip data can be used to plan integrated, zero-fare transit—buses, subways, driver-owned co-op taxis, and cargo bikes—thereby reducing the army of surplus drivers instead of condemning them to 60-hour weeks.

4. Use the state, but do not trust it. Democrats will tout “employee” bills (AB5 in California, PRO Act nationally) while taking Uber lobbyist cash. Our tactic is to force the bourgeois state to codify minimal protections, then use those very statutes as organizing tools: every “misclassified” driver is a potential plaintiff, every workplace inspection a chance to confront foremen in front of coworkers. When the capitalists howl that flexibility will vanish, reply that flexibility for them means precarity for us—and that under workers’ control the schedule can be truly flexible without starvation wages.

Until we smash the private monopoly over social labor coordination, reclassification remains a defensive skirmish. Demand employee status to limit the robbery, but prepare to finish the war: seize the servers, abolish the shareholders, and place transportation under democratic planning.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Should ride-sharing platforms be required to classify drivers as employees instead of independent contractors?
user