The Snaring Economy 1
In The Guardian, Frank Pasquale and Siva Vaidhyanathan see a precedent for Uber etc.
It’s not the precedent you would expect. Here’s a snippet (emphasis added):
The analogy is most obvious in the case of an American civil rights law itself. Uber has ignored advocates for the blind, and other disabled persons, when they claim Uber’s drivers discriminate against them. In response to a lawsuit by the National Federation of the Blind, Uber bluntly asserts that it’s merely a communication platform, not the type of employer meant to be covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act. Some judges and regulators accept that reasoning; others reject it. But the larger lesson is clear: Uber’s aggressive efforts to avoid or evade disability laws are nothing less than a form of corporate nullification, as menacing to the rule of law as defiance of civil rights laws in the days after courts ruled against racial segregation in the US.
Follow the link for the rest of the article.
July 28, 2015 at 11:00 pm
Uber doesn’t service lots of people. I live near two retirement homes and the people who live in them, you naturally expect them to need access to transportation. As a census worker I in 2010 I covered one of them. Not uniquely in southern California, they house a lot of old elderly Chinese people. Uber doesn’t serve them. Mostly, I suspect, because none of its gypsy drivers speak Mandarin or Cantonese or can even tell the difference. (Working for the census, we had a way of doing this four years ago, plus on-hand translators, plus imagination. I collaborated with one woman on her smartphone. She called her daughter, who acted as intermediary. There was no “app” to do that.) On the other hand, the places are served by shuttle services for the elderly, the Pasadena bus system, and licensed cab drivers.
Uber, innovative? They’ve made “innovation” a curse word, along with much of the rest of those who peddle the goods and philosophies of the Silicon Valley.