[icebraining]

Well, in my country if you work without a contract and the companies fires you without cause, you can sue them in Labor court and the judges will do a test to see if you were de-facto employed: whether you had fixed working hours, a manager that told you specific tasks and evaluated you on them, were paid a fixed salary or a per-task or per-hour rate, and a few others.

In Uber's case, and AFAIK, the drivers don't have any of that. They just have to take a course, and then they can just take any job they want, when they want, without fixed hours or even fixed days per week.

To me, they sound more like freelancers than employees.

[loumf]

In the US, a court can also rule that you were de-facto employed. There was a famous case with Microsoft

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp#Vizcaino_v._Microsoft

This happens all of the time. Large US companies sometimes only hire contractors that have employee status with some other firm to protect themselves.

In the standard test to determine whether an person is an employee, they look at things like who supplies the equipment, who sets the hours, whether it possible for the contractor to have a loss -- most critically in the Uber case, you are more likely to be classified an employee if you do the work that is the purpose of the company.

What that means is that if I clean the offices, I can be a contractor because the purpose of the company might be to make and sell widgets. If I am on the factory floor making the widgets, then the labor dept. frowns on a contractor classification.

These are all just guidelines -- the labor dept or a judge will make the call, but US tax laws incent them to prefer employee status.

(IANAL, but I have served on an employment board, overseeing a US Labor dept regional office)