>They certainly can offer flexible hours to full time employees - no where does it say "Americans shalt work from nine until five so sayeth we the founders".
I don't think you understand how a business like this works. For a customer serving business, they need to make sure they are staffed appropriately.
Would it make sense for a restaurant to offer all of their staffs "flexible hours"? Is it ok for the waiter to show up at 3am when he has trouble sleeping and just get paid doing nothing?
It's not about 9-5, but it's about when the customers show up.
I seriously doubt there's anything in labor law which would prevent Uber from allowing flexible (fractional) hours to their workers, so long as those hours pay at least minimum wage.
Uber isn't against this because it would make it impossible to run their business, they're against this because they're being forced to pay into things like unemployment which will make it more difficult for them to be profitable.
Yeah but drivers currently are free to choose their hours however they like. Surely allowing them to continue to do the thing they already do and the platform is designed to allow them to do isn't going to cause the same problems as a waiter not showing up during normal meal hours...
Sorry, I'm really confused, how is moving from contractors to employees supposed to make covering certain periods of the day harder for uber?
Normal businesses with normal benefits that hire for off-normal shifts generally pay higher for those shift slots or find an employee that values that shift higher than mid-day and employers absolutely can have an expectation of business hours and fire people for failing to meet that. They can also choose to allow their employees to work more flexible hours but this choice is entirely disconnected from contractor vs. FTE.
In the service industry in particular (as you noted above) showing up to work outside of core hours isn't likely to result in any productive work - maybe that waiter could run inventory or do some prep (and actually 3 AM isn't insanely early if you get a big breakfast rush) but that's entirely disconnected from uber saying: "Darn - we wanted to give them flexible hours, but now that they're employees I guess we can't let anyone work after 5PM" that's just BS PR from the company.
I don't think you understand how a business like this works. For a customer serving business, they need to make sure they are staffed appropriately.
Would it make sense for a restaurant to offer all of their staffs "flexible hours"? Is it ok for the waiter to show up at 3am when he has trouble sleeping and just get paid doing nothing?
It's not about 9-5, but it's about when the customers show up.