They're free to work for whoever they want. No one is forcing anyone to drive for Uber, they're doing it voluntarily. Why forcibly stop consensual behaviour?
Freedom of choice comes in degrees, with no sharp divide between free and not free.
The freedom of an individual to negotiate with employers exists in a context of wild inequality in negotiating position, information asymmetry, and coordination problems among workers that lead to a race to the bottom (absent collective bargaining or government intervention).
I don't know enough about Uber and their workers to comment on that in particular, but I don't think that "they could have not signed on, so it's OK" is necessarily a strong position from which to oppose collective intervention, governmental or otherwise, without qualification of the degree to which participants in an agreement were free to make their decisions, and what the consequences of thier decisions will be on the choices available to others. Since we're talking about low-wage workers and a giant company, my guess is that closer examination of those considerations won't aid an anti-intervention or pro-market (for common definitions of pro-market) argument.
It doesn't seem an issue of workers negotiating with the individual business. You're redefining "freedom of choice" to mean freedom to negotiate with a company. It's clear that the parent meant freedom to choose when/where they work. If there were better alternatives, people would chose that over Uber.
The fact that they aren't choosing other things shows that they're making an informed decision that they believe is best for them given their alternatives. We're free to wonder about if things could be even better for the people who made the choice to work for Uber, which is where some kind of negotiation between workers and Uber would come in, but that seems to miss the point completely. If there were better alternatives provided by any other company, most of the workers would go there.
> You're redefining "freedom of choice" to mean freedom to negotiate with a company. It's clear that the parent meant freedom to choose when/where they work.
Can't it be both? Really, I don't see how the two can be considered separately. The individual negotiation occurs in the context of the broader field of choices and consequences available, and of the relative power of the participants (which may, perhaps most relevantly, be considered as their ability to cope with any harm that results from saying "no" to a given offer).
> The fact that they aren't choosing other things shows that they're making an informed decision that they believe is best for them given their alternatives.
I don't agree that the fact of a choice having been made gives us any insight in to the degree to which it was "informed" but otherwise, sure.
My point is: that someone said "yes" and that it was within their power to say "no", is a pretty poor metric for freedom per se, and a bit more than that is going to be needed to demonstrate that (say) government intervention
would necessarily be inappropriate or harmful.
The problem is it is harmful to others. There is always someone who is willing to work for less or worse conditions which collectively affects everyone.
Really? It appears that's not the case, and "competition" means those with leverage (both with capital and technology) are able to capture an ever increasing amount of wealth compared to the rest of the working class.
Funny how "competition" is great as long as you're on the "winning" side.
I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. I apologize for poor phrasing in the previous comment. Let me see if I can more clearly explain with an example.
Imagine the question is, "Is purchasing food with money perfectly fine?".
Most people would agree that trading money for food is fine so long as it's consensual and both parties agree (i.e. assuming there is no coercion).
If one party used violence, or threats of violence, to get the other party to make the trade, that would be coercion. Most people would agree that this type of "trade" is not okay.
Employers shifting externalities onto employees is something that labor law has been created to mitigate for decades.
The fact that Uber has found a loophole (which is being closed quickly) does not make it "okay, because it's consensual".
Also, I have issues with semantically null statements that could have been written by a Markov Chainer that's seeded with text from the Mises Institute, but that's a more personal problem.
The freedom of an individual to negotiate with employers exists in a context of wild inequality in negotiating position, information asymmetry, and coordination problems among workers that lead to a race to the bottom (absent collective bargaining or government intervention).
I don't know enough about Uber and their workers to comment on that in particular, but I don't think that "they could have not signed on, so it's OK" is necessarily a strong position from which to oppose collective intervention, governmental or otherwise, without qualification of the degree to which participants in an agreement were free to make their decisions, and what the consequences of thier decisions will be on the choices available to others. Since we're talking about low-wage workers and a giant company, my guess is that closer examination of those considerations won't aid an anti-intervention or pro-market (for common definitions of pro-market) argument.