A study finds that 58 percent of faculty at four prominent universities have received grants, fellowships, or other financial support from 14 tech firms. From a report: A paper published in July by researchers from the University of Rochester and China's Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business found that Google, DeepMind, Amazon, and Microsoft hired 52 tenure-track professors between 2004 and 2018. It concluded that this "brain drain" has coincided with a drop in the number of students starting AI companies. The growing reach and power of Big Tech prompted Abdalla to question how it influences his field in more subtle ways. Together with his brother, also a graduate student, Abdalla looked at how many AI researchers at Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, and the University of Toronto have received funding from Big Tech over their careers.

The Abdallas examined the CVs of 135 computer science faculty who work on AI at the four schools, looking for indications that the researcher had received funding from one or more tech companies. For 52 of those, they couldn't make a determination. Of the remaining 83 faculty, they found that 48, or 58 percent, had received funding such as a grant or a fellowship from one of 14 large technology companies: Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Intel, IBM, Huawei, Samsung, Uber, Alibaba, Element AI, or OpenAI. Among a smaller group of faculty that works on AI ethics, they also found that 58 percent of those had been funded by Big Tech. When any source of funding was included, including dual appointments, internships, and sabbaticals, 32 out of 33, or 97 percent, had financial ties to tech companies. "There are very few people that don't have some sort of connection to Big Tech," Abdalla says.

The Pulitzer prize-winning news nonprofit Propublica looks at Arise Virtual Solutions, part of the secretive world of work-at-home customer service companies that help large corporations shed costs at the expense of workers. And thanks to the pandemic, "business is booming." Arise lines up customer service agents who work from home. It then sells this network of agents to blue-chip corporations. Arise and most of its corporate clients consider preserving the secrecy of this arrangement to be vital... Arise's workers not only don't work for its clients, they also don't officially work for Arise. Like Uber drivers or TaskRabbit gofers, they are independent contractors. To get gigs, they first absorb substantial expense, paying for their own equipment and training, and then have fees deducted from every paycheck for the "use" of Arise's "platform."

Arise has faced, and lost, legal challenges alleging that its arrangements with agents violate federal labor law and cheat workers of what they are rightfully owed. One judge called the arrangement an "elaborate construct" created by Arise to get around labor law. Nevertheless Arise has been able to avoid altering its model in any significant way, aided in part by a 5-4 ruling from the Supreme Court...

With American roots going back to the 1990s, Arise's list of corporate clients, past and present, includes not only Airbnb, Comcast, Instacart and Disney, but also Amazon, Apple and AT&T. There's also Barnes & Noble, eBay, Intuit, Home Depot, Staples, Princess Cruises, Peloton, Signet Jewelers, Virgin Atlantic and Walgreens...

Many agents find that the pay, after the cost of training and fees to Arise, dips well below minimum wage.
Ironically, the historic Marxist song of the international workers movement began with the lyric, "Arise ye workers from your slumbers. Arise ye prisoners of want...."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: The Seattle City Council unanimously approved a minimum pay standard for Uber and Lyft drivers on Tuesday, the second city in the US to do so. Under the new regulation going in to effect in January, the ride-hailing services will be required to pay their drivers at least $16.39 an hour. The law, passed in a 9-to-0 vote, is modeled after one passed by New York in August 2018 that caps how many ride-hailing cars from services like Uber and Lyft can be on the street. Seattle's law will require drivers be paid at least 56 cents per minute and $1.33 per mile driven while transporting passengers. Lyft criticized the move, saying it would eliminate thousands of jobs. "The City's plan is deeply flawed and will actually destroy jobs for thousands of people -- as many as 4,000 drivers on Lyft alone -- and drive ride-share companies out of Seattle," Lyft said in a statement. "Uber may have to make changes in Seattle because of this new law, but the real harm here will not be to Uber," Uber said. "It is the drivers who cannot work and the community members unable to complete essential travel that stand to lose because of the ordinance."

After five years and an investment of around $2.5 billion, Uber's effort to build a self-driving car has produced this: a car that can't drive more than half a mile without encountering a problem [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: "The car doesn't drive well" and "struggles with simple routes and simple maneuvers," said a manager in the unit, in a 1,500-word email sent three weeks ago to Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, warning of the issues. The self-drivingâ"car unit "has simply failed to evolve and produce meaningful progress in so long that something has to be said before a disaster befalls us," said the manager in the email, which The Information has seen. The manager -- whose identity The Information confirmed -- reflects a common belief across Uber that the unit, known as the Advanced Technologies Group, is destined to lose the high-stakes race to its rivals, which have demonstrated a lot more headway, comparatively speaking.

The manager is one of a growing number of voices, both insiders and former employees, raising concerns about the unit's effectiveness and questioning Khosrowshahi's ability to hold anyone accountable for its failures. Thuan Pham, Uber's longtime chief technology officer, who quit earlier this year, is one of those critics. "Over the past two years I have periodically raised concerns with Dara on whether meaningful self-driving progress is being made at ATG and specifically urged him to ask specific questions in this area in order to assess this for himself," said Pham in an interview. "I just don't understand why, from all observable measures, the thing isn't making progress. How come there hasn't been accountability or transparency?"

After losing its license to operate in London last November, deputy chief magistrate of Transport for London (TfL), Tanweer Ikram, granted Uber an 18-month license after winning their court appeal. "Despite their historical failings, I find them, now, to be a fit and proper person to hold a London PHV [private hire vehicle] operator's license," he concluded. Engadget reports: Uber's new licence runs for 18 months. It has "a number of conditions," according to TfL, that will allow the regulator to "closely monitor Uber's adherence to the regulations and to swiftly take action if they fail to meet the required standards." Jamie Heywood, Uber's regional general manager for Northern and Eastern Europe, added: "This decision is a recognition of Uber's commitment to safety and we will continue to work constructively with TfL. There is nothing more important than the safety of the people who use the Uber app as we work together to keep London moving."

The UK's App Drivers and Couriers Union (ACDU) has "cautiously" welcomed the court's decision, but believes London mayor Sadiq Khan should take further action and limit the number of licensed drivers on the platform. "Such reductions, achieved through attrition, are necessary to ensure Uber can comfortably meet its compliance obligations including worker rights whilst giving TfL the breathing space necessary so that it can comfortably meet its responsibilities to ensure that Uber drivers and the traveling public are protected," the union said in a press release.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: SINCE COVID-19 MANY AMERICANS FELL BEHIND IN ALL ASPECTS," reads the website copy. The button below this statement is not for a GoFundMe, or a petition for calling for rent relief. Instead, it is the following call to action, from a company called Civvl: "Be hired as eviction crew." During a time of great economic and general hardship, Civvl aims to be, essentially, Uber, but for evicting people. Seizing on a pandemic-driven nosedive in employment and huge uptick in number-of-people-who-can't-pay-their-rent, Civvl aims to make it easy for landlords to hire process servers and eviction agents as gig workers.

Civvl aims to marry the gig economy with the devastation of a pandemic, complete with signature gig startup language like "be your own boss," and "flexible hours," and "looking for self-motivated individuals with positive attitudes:" "FASTEST GROWING MONEY MAKING GIG DUE TO COVID-19," its website says. "Literally thousands of process servers are needed in the coming months due courts being backed up in judgements that needs to be served to defendants." The company, at first glance, appears to be some kind of _Nathan For You-_esque prank: siccing precarious gig jobs onto vulnerable people. But Civvl is connected to a larger -- and real -- gig economy company called OnQall, which describes itself as an app that provides "on-demand task services to non-urban communities beyond main city areas." OnQall is the developer behind other, more believable TaskRabbit-esque apps, like LawnFixr, CleanQwik, and MoveQwik. Given the fact that Civvl is advertising all over the country and that OnQall, though not popular, does exist, it seems as though Civvl actually is an attempt to simplify the process of evicting people who cannot pay their rent during a pandemic.

The back-up safety driver behind the wheel of a self-driving Uber test vehicle that struck and killed a woman in Tempe, Arizona, in 2018 was charged with negligent homicide, prosecutors said. From a report: Rafael Vasquez, age 46, who is also known as Rafaela, pleaded not guilty on Tuesday after being charged in the death of Elaine Herzberg on Aug. 27, court records show. She was released pending trial set for February 2021. Herzberg died after she was struck while walking a bicycle across a street at night. The first recorded death involving a self-driving vehicle prompted significant safety concerns about the nascent autonomous vehicle industry. A Tempe police report said Vasquez was repeatedly looking down instead of keeping her eyes on the road. Prosecutors in March 2019 said Uber was not criminally liable in the crash.

Over time, as Silicon Valley companies had to change the way its employees work during the COVID-19 pandemic, "an undercurrent of resentment has bubbled up across the tech industry against those splitting time between work and family, and it's spilled out in public on employee message boards, company chat software and on social networks," reports CNET. From the report: At Facebook, the pushback has forced COO Sheryl Sandberg, a parent herself, to defend the company's policies. "I do believe parents have certain challenges," Sandberg said in an August meeting, according to a report in The New York Times. "But everyone has challenges, and those challenges are very, very real." Meanwhile, some employees at Apple, Facebook and Uber say they're barely making it all work. More than half of 1,000 people surveyed by Care.com said they felt like they'd let down their colleagues due to juggling children and work during the pandemic. Of the respondents to the survey, published in August, 52% said they hide their childcare issues because they worry colleagues won't understand. And 45% believe their career advancement has suffered because they're juggling work and kids at home.

As the pandemic spread, many tech companies expanded policies to help parents deal with the sudden responsibility of caring for children while also working full time. Some, like Google and Microsoft, extended paid time off. Companies like Apple, Facebook and Uber also emphasized willingness to allow for more-variable work schedules. [...] Other tech firms express the same sentiments to caregiver employees and to the press. But some employees say the companies haven't successfully woven those feelings into their hard-charging cultures, which, before the pandemic, often included the expectation that people would endure long commutes to the office so they could be at their desks, working into the evening.

It's led to surprising clashes within tech companies, where parent employees are learning that some managers and peers resent the benefits and flexibility parents are getting. Many parents are also reporting they need more time to finish tasks, in part because of the regular interruptions caused by children. A July survey of 1,726 active job seekers by the recruiting site ZipRecruiter found that mothers at home with school-age kids expect work hours to reduce by 9%, while fathers say they expect a drop of 5%. Taken together, these new working arrangements have led some nonparent employees to accuse the parents of being treated better by management while failing to pull their weight.

Uber has announced several new commitments, initiatives, and product expansions designed to address climate change. From a report: In a virtual press event this morning, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi cited the positive impact that the global lockdown has had on the environment, with "blue skies replacing smog above city skylines" and many cities using the pandemic to "rethink their infrastructure." However, with pollution rising again as normal routines resume, Khosrowshahi said that rather than "going back to business as usual," it's making moves to reduce its environmental impact. "COVID-19 didn't change the fact that climate change remains an existential threat and crisis that needs every person, every business in every nation to act," Khosrowshahi said. First up, Uber said that it intends to be an entirely zero-emission platform by 2040, with 100% of all rides booked through its app -- be that cars, public transit, or scooters -- taking place on zero-emission vehicles. Before that, though, the company is setting a goal of 2030 for all cars on its platform to transition to electric in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, as well as hitting net-zero emissions on the corporate side of its business during the same time frame.

"California is exempting about two-dozen more professions from a landmark labor law designed to treat more people like employees instead of contractors, under a bill that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed on Friday," reports the San Diego Union-Tribune: The amendments, which take effect immediately, end what lawmakers said were unworkable limits on services provided by freelance writers and still photographers, photojournalists, and freelance editors and newspaper cartoonists. It includes safeguards to make sure they are not replacing current employees. The new measure also exempts various artists and musicians, along with some involved in the insurance and real estate industries.
Vox Media had already cited the earlier version of California's AB-5 law as the reason it fired hundreds of freelance writers in December.

But the state's fight against gig-worker companies is still ongoing, reports CNN Wire: According to William B. Gould IV, a law professor at Stanford University, it "certainly makes a lot of sense for the Attorney General to put a lot of their marbles in the Uber basket. You're dealing with a company that has thumbed its nose at the rule of law for some time now and thinks there's no restriction that they can't evade," added Gould IV, a former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board. Jenny Montoya Tansey, policy director at the Public Rights Project, a public interest legal nonprofit that has been involved with enforcement efforts in California, said another factor is that "drivers have organized in numbers and are doing a really compelling job in getting their stories out, letting regulators, enforcers and policy makers understand some of the experiences that drivers go through."
And Tansey adds that the law's enforcers are also eyeing food delivery services: Prior to AB-5, San Diego City Attorney Mara Elliott filed a suit against Instacart, the on-demand grocery delivery startup valued at $14 billion, over worker classification; the case is on-going. More recently, in June, San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin filed a suit against DoorDash, the food delivery startup valued at $16 billion. "Food delivery is in demand now more than ever. Multi-billion dollar corporations that deliver food are profiting off this crisis while they exploit their drivers and deny them a living wage, unemployment insurance, sick leave and other basic workplace protections," said Assemblywoman Gonzalez of San Diego in a statement to CNN Business, adding praise to Elliott and Boudin's actions. "I hope other officials follow their lead. These companies need to be held to the same standards as any other law-abiding business in the state," Gonzalez added....

The threat to the combined on-demand business model is evident. Uber, Lyft, Instacart, DoorDash and Uber-owned Postmates have funneled more than $110 million into passing a referendum in November, known as Prop 22, that would exempt them from the law while providing drivers with some additional benefits.

Additionally, Uber and Lyft are facing lawsuits from California's Labor Commissioner's Office over allegedly committing wage theft by misclassifying their on-demand workers as independent contractors instead of employees.

Long-time Slashdot reader leathered shares an investigation from the Correspondent about blockchain -- and " what's so terribly revolutionary about it? What problem does it solve...? I can tell you upfront, it's a bizarre journey to nowhere. I've never seen so much incomprehensible jargon to describe so little... And I've never seen so many people searching so hard for a problem to go with their solution...." [Y]ou can't do much with bitcoin. But blockchain, on the other hand: it's the technology behind bitcoin, which makes it cool. Blockchain generalises the bitcoin pitch: let's not just get rid of banks, but also the land registry, voting machines, insurance companies, Facebook, Uber, Amazon, the Lung Foundation, the porn industry and government and businesses in general. They are superfluous, thanks to the blockchain. Power to the users...!

The only thing is that there's a huge gap between promise and reality. It seems that blockchain sounds best in a PowerPoint slide. Most blockchain projects don't make it past a press release, an inventory by Bloomberg showed... Out of over 86,000 blockchain projects that had been launched, 92% had been abandoned by the end of 2017, according to consultancy firm Deloitte. Why are they deciding to stop? Enlightened — and thus former — blockchain developer Mark van Cuijk explained: "You could also use a forklift to put a six-pack of beer on your kitchen counter. But it's just not very efficient...."

[I]nformation and communications technology is like the rest of the world — a big old mess. And that's something that we — outsiders, laypeople, non-tech geeks — simply refuse to accept. Councillors and managers think that problems — however large and fundamental they are — evaporate instantaneously thanks to technology they've heard about in a fancy PowerPoint presentation. How will it work? Who cares! Don't try to understand it, just reap the benefits!

This is the market for magic, and that market is big. Whether it's about blockchain, big data, cloud computing, AI or other buzzwords...

Maybe this is blockchain's greatest merit: it's an awareness campaign, albeit an expensive one. "Back-office management" isn't an item on the agenda in board meetings, but "blockchain" and "innovation" are... Yes, it took a few wild, unmet promises, but the result is that administrators are now interested in the boring subjects that help make the world run a bit more efficiently — nothing spectacular, just a bit better.

Federal prosecutors have charged Uber's former chief security officer with covering up a massive 2016 data breach by arranging a $100,000 payoff to the hackers responsible for the attack. The personal data of 57 million Uber passengers and drivers was stolen in the hack. NPR reports: Prosecutors are charging the former executive Joe Sullivan with obstructing justice and concealing a felony for the alleged cover-up. Sullivan "engaged in a scheme to withhold and conceal" the breach from regulators and failed to report it to law enforcement or the public, according to a complaint filed in federal court in California on Thursday.

"Sullivan is being charged with a corporate cover-up and Sullivan is being charged with the payment of hush money to conceal something that should have been revealed," David Anderson, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California, told NPR. Sullivan not only allegedly hid the breach from authorities, but also concealed it from many other Uber employees, including top management -- with one exception. According to the complaint, Uber's CEO at the time, Travis Kalanick, knew about the incident and about the steps Sullivan took to allegedly cover it up, including making the $100,000 payout under Uber's "bug bounty" program. Kalanick has not been charged and wouldn't comment for this story.

Like many tech companies, Uber pays so-called "white hat" hackers to test its systems for vulnerabilities. But the payment Uber made in this case was much larger than any bug bounty it had paid before, the complaint said, noting the company's program "had a nominal cap of $10,000." Uber required the hackers to sign nondisclosure agreements, also not standard practice for a bug bounty, the complaint alleged. Those agreements falsely said that the hackers did not take or store any data. "The problem is that this hush money payment was not a bug bounty," Anderson said. "We allege that this entire course of conduct reflects [Sullivan's] consciousness of guilt and desperation to conceal."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A California judge has granted Uber and Lyft an emergency reprieve from an order requiring them to treat their drivers as employees. The companies were facing a Thursday deadline to comply with the order. Earlier today, Lyft announced that it would be forced to shut down in the state at midnight tonight. Lyft said it was being forced to shut down its California operations by a 2019 California law, AB 5, that forces ride-hailing companies to treat their drivers as employees rather than independent contractors. Uber had warned that it was likely to do the same if the courts didn't delay enforcement of the law.

"This is not something we wanted to do, as we know millions of Californians depend on Lyft for daily, essential trips," Lyft wrote. However, the company said, the new law would "necessitate an overhaul of the entire business model -- it's not a switch that can be flipped overnight." The judge's emergency stay means that Lyft and Uber will be able to keep operating under their current model while they continue litigating whether the new law applies to them. Yesterday, in a podcast interview Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi rejected the notion his company is capable of employing all of its drivers in California.

"We can't go out and hire 50,000 people overnight," Khosrowshahi said on the Pivot School podcast hosted by Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. "Everything that we have built is based on this platform that... brings people who want transportation or delivery together. You can't flip that overnight."

In a podcast interview Wednesday, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi rejected the notion his company is capable of employing all of its drivers in California, as a state judge has ordered it to do so [and comply with AB5, the state law that makes it more difficult for companies to use independent contractors]. The Verge reports: "We can't go out and hire 50,000 people overnight," Khosrowshahi said on the Pivot School podcast hosted by Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. "Everything that we have built is based on this platform that... brings people who want transportation or delivery together. You can't flip that overnight." [T]he companies claim they would need to shut down operations in California completely in order to retool their businesses to comply with the law. Khosrowshahi said the shutdown likely wouldn't be permanent. "It'll take time but we're going to figure out a way to be in California," he said. "We want to be in California."

Khosrowshahi confirmed reports that Uber was looking into other models, like a franchise-style system in which the company would license its brand to fleet operators in California. "There's a black car service that we have that's based on fleets," he said. "And we are trying to figure out exactly what we do going forward." Regardless, Khosrowshahi said that Uber's response would be to limit the number of drivers allowed on its platform and to raise prices for customers after it eventually relaunches in the state. He predicted that upwards of 80 percent of those drivers who only log onto the app for 5-10 a week would no longer be able to earn on the platform. Trip prices in dense urban centers like San Francisco will go up around 20 percent, he said, while rates would be even higher in smaller, less dense cities.

Uber's critics note that there is nothing stopping Uber from continuing to provide drivers with the flexibility to set their own schedules under AB5. But the company rejects this notion, arguing that no company in California or elsewhere lets employees set their own hours. Uber has proposed a "third way" through the ballot measure it's supporting in California called Proposition 22. The measure would allow the company to sidestep AB5 and go on classifying drivers as independent contractors, while also providing some added benefits like a minimum wage and access to health insurance. Along with Lyft and DoorDash, it has committed to spend over $100 million, while union-backed driver groups only have around $866,000 to lobby against it.

Uber and Lyft, which are facing mounting pressure to classify their freelance drivers as full-time employees in California, are looking for another way. From a report: One option that both companies are seriously discussing is licensing their brands to operators of vehicle fleets in California, according to three people with knowledge of the plans. The change would resemble an independently operated franchise, allowing Uber and Lyft to keep an arms-length association with drivers so that the companies would not need to employ them and pay their benefits.

The idea would effectively be a return to the days of how groups of black cars were run. Lyft has presented the plan to its board of directors, one person said. Uber, which already works with fleet operators in Germany and Spain, is also familiar with the business model. The companies have not committed to the franchise-like plans, said the people with knowledge of the discussions, who asked to remain anonymous because the details are confidential. Uber and Lyft are waiting to see how California's legal situation around drivers, who have been treated as independent contractors, plays out first, they said.

"Self-driving cars are bullshit," writes Cory Doctorow: I'm a science fiction writer, so I quite enjoy thinking about self-driving cars. They make for really interesting analogies about data, liability, self-determination, information security and openness... But I'm a science fiction writer and that means I can tell the difference between "thought experiments" and "real things." Alas, the same cannot be said of corporate America.

For example, according to its own IPO filings, Uber can only be profitable if it invents fully autonomous vehicles and replaces every public transit ride in the world with them. Elon Musk — a man whose "green electric car company" is only profitable thanks to the carbon credits it sells to manufacturers of the dirtiest SUVs in America, without which those planet-killing SUVs would not exist — makes the same mistake. Musk wants to abolish public transit and replace it with EVs (he says that public transit makes you sit next to strangers who might be serial killers, which tells you a lot about his view of humanity).

Now, both Uber and Musk are both wrong as a matter of simple geometry. Multiply the space occupied by all those AVs by the journeys people in cities need to make by the additional distances of those journeys if we need road for all those cars, and you run out of space... these fairy tales require so much credulity to be taken seriously that they strain even the car-addled imaginations of American automotive culture, and also rely on the irrational exuberance inspired by imaginary self-driving cars to propagate and persist.

But that exuberance is sorely misplaced. Machine learning systems have brittle and unpredictable failure modes that can be triggered by accident or deliberately. The unconstrained problem of navigating busy cities with unquantifiable human activities is insoluble with ML.

Or, at least, it's insoluble if you care about whether cars kill even more people in even less predictable ways than they do now...
Doctorow adds that a key plot point in the third book in his "Little Brother" series (coming out in October) is "subverted, lethal autonomous vehicles." But Doctorow also shares a link to his short story "Car Wars," commissioned by Deakin University to explore the sociotechnological issues around autonomous vehicle.

It begins with a high school warning parents about students performing "dangerous modifications" to their car in violation of new federal laws -- three student vehicles were already confiscated for "operating with unlicensed firmware." (And "one of those cases has been referred to the police as the student involved was a repeat offender.")

But as the school launches its random vehicle firmware audits, a developer sends a desperate message to his followers on Twitter about something even more disturbing that's happening in real-time...

InfoQ reports on a new security group that launched last week: Supported by The Linux Foundation, the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) aims to create a cross-industry forum for a collaborative effort to improve open source software security. The list of initial members includes Google, Microsoft, GitHub, IBM, Red Hat, and more.

"As open source has become more pervasive, its security has become a key consideration for building and maintaining critical infrastructure that supports mission-critical systems throughout our society. It is more important than ever that we bring the industry together in a collaborative and focused effort to advance the state of open source security. The world's technology infrastructure depends on it."

Microsoft CTO for Azure Mark Russinovich explained clearly why open source security must be a community effort:

"Open-source software is inherently community-driven and as such, there is no central authority responsible for quality and maintenance. [...] Open-source software is also vulnerable to attacks against the very nature of the community, such as attackers becoming maintainers of projects and introducing malware. Given the complexity and communal nature of open source software, building better security must also be a community-driven process."
Also joining the group are Intel, IBM, Uber, and VMWare, according to Foundation's inaugural announcement, which promises its governance and decisions "will be transparent, and any specifications and projects developed will be vendor agnostic."

Lyft said it would shut down operations in California if forced to classify drivers as employees, the company's executives said in an earnings call with investors on Wednesday. Lyft joins Uber in threatening to pull out of one of its most important US markets over the question of drivers' employment status. From a report: At issue is the classification of ride-hailing drivers as independent contractors, which Uber and Lyft say most drivers prefer because of the flexibility and ability to set their own hours. But labor unions and elected officials contend this deprives them of traditional benefits like health insurance and workers' compensation. Earlier this week, Uber and Lyft were ordered by a California superior court judge to classify their drivers as employees. Both companies have said they would appeal the ruling, which was stayed for 10 days. But if their appeals fail, Lyft may join Uber in closing up shop in California, the company's president John Zimmer said. "If our efforts here are not successful it would force us to suspend operations in California," Zimmer said on a call announcing the second quarter earnings of 2020. "Fortunately, California voters can make their voices heard by voting yes on Prop 22 in November."

Uber would likely shut down temporarily for several months if a court does not overturn a recent ruling requiring it to classify its drivers as full-time employees, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in an interview. From a report: "If the court doesn't reconsider, then in California, it's hard to believe we'll be able to switch our model to full-time employment quickly," Khosrowshahi said. Uber and rival Lyft both have about a week left to appeal a preliminary injunction granted by a California judge on Monday that will prohibit the companies from continuing to classify their drivers as independent workers. Following the order will require Uber and Lyft to provide benefits and unemployment insurance for workers.

California's attorney general and three city attorneys brought the lawsuit against the companies under the state's new law, Assembly Bill 5, that aims to provide benefits to gig workers core to a company's business by classifying them as employees. In his decision granting the preliminary injunction, the judge rejected the notion that drivers should be considered outside the course of the companies' businesses, calling the logic "a classic example of circular reasoning."

A California judge ruled that Uber and Lyft must classify their drivers as employees in a stunning preliminary injunction issued Monday afternoon. The Verge reports: The injunction is stayed for 10 days, however, giving Uber and Lyft an opportunity to appeal the decision. Uber said it planned to file an immediate emergency appeal to block the ruling from going into effect. [...] Drivers' groups hailed the ruling as forward progress in their fight to upend Uber and Lyft. "Today's ruling affirms what California drivers have long known to be true: workers like me have rights and Uber and Lyft must respect those rights," Mike Robinson, a Lyft driver and member of the Mobile Workers Alliance, a group of Southern California drivers, said in a statement.

But Uber maintains this ruling will result in fewer jobs during a global pandemic that is putting strain on the state's economic conditions. "The vast majority of drivers want to work independently, and we've already made significant changes to our app to ensure that remains the case under California law," an Uber spokesperson said. "When over 3 million Californians are without a job, our elected leaders should be focused on creating work, not trying to shut down an entire industry during an economic depression." A Lyft spokesperson agreed. "Drivers do not want to be employees, full stop," the spokesperson said. "We'll immediately appeal this ruling and continue to fight for their independence. Ultimately, we believe this issue will be decided by California voters and that they will side with drivers." Earlier today in an op-ed via The New York Times, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said lawmakers should require gig economy companies to create benefits funds, which would "give workers cash that they can use for the benefits they want, like health insurance or paid time off."