When Government Clocks In For Uber

A Supreme Court win for drivers followed by a Cabinet sprint to “fix” the law, not the exploitation

You almost have to admire the efficiency. Most governments take years to hollow out worker protections. This lot looked at the Supreme Court’s Uber decision, glanced at the shredded pay equity laws still warm from the urgency shredder, rolled up their sleeves and said, “Right. What else can we break before morning tea?”

In one corner, four Uber drivers and the Supreme Court quietly confirmed what anyone with a pulse and a smartphone already knew - if a multinational platform controls your pay, your access to jobs, your rating and your ability to work, you are not a free, independent entrepreneur living your flexible dream. You are an employee in a cheap disguise, rented to management by the word “contractor” and a PDF of non-negotiable terms.

In the other corner, the Workplace Relations Minister looked at this overdue reality check and appears to have decided that the real problem was not exploitation, but the law’s irritating tendency to occasionally side with people who actually drive the cars.

So we now get a bill written like a love letter to Uber and any other company that likes the sound of “labour without responsibilities”. A legislative cuddle that effectively tells the courts, “Thank you for your service, but business certainty is crying and needs a bottle.”

It is a neat trick. The Supreme Court spells out that you cannot just slap “independent contractor” on someone who has no real bargaining power and no say in their conditions, then pretend the Employment Relations Act doesn’t exist. The Minister’s answer is to change the law so you can. “You can’t contract out of the Act?” says the Court. “Hold my Chardonnay,” says the Minister.

Remember, this is the same Minister who helped strip away pay equity protections under urgency, the parliamentary equivalent of shoplifting in a power cut. The pattern is not subtle. Whenever a court, or a group of workers, or basic human decency gets in the way of “flexibility”, the response is to quietly rewrite the rules until the inconvenient people disappear from the balance sheet.

“Flexibility” is the magic word here. It sounds so wholesome. Who doesn’t like being flexible? Pilates instructors love it. Employment lawyers, less so. In ministerial language, flexibility seems to mean - workers are flexible in their hours, their income, their rights and their ability to complain. Employers are flexible in absolutely nothing except how creatively they can describe control as “choice”.

Under this world view, an Uber driver is not stuck in a lopsided power imbalance. They are a “micro-entrepreneur”, apparently delighted to invest in a vehicle, fuel, maintenance, insurance, tax and dead time in between rides, in exchange for the spiritual reward of watching their per-kilometre rate slide downwards every time the platform sneezes.

If they don’t like it, they can simply “choose” another platform with equally non-negotiable terms, or “choose” not to work and enjoy the generous flexibility of having bugger-all income.

The courts called Uber’s language “window dressing” and “fiction”, a polite legal way of saying “this is nonsense and you know it”. The Minister’s response is not to tackle the fiction, but to legalise the fantasy. If the law says you have to look at the reality of the relationship, she seems determined to legislate reality out of the picture. Problem solved.

This is where the moral bankruptcy really shines through. At least Uber never pretended to be anything other than a ruthless profit machine. The Government, on the other hand, still likes to murmur about dignity of work and fair go and all that sentimental clutter when the microphones are on. Then it quietly designs policy for a world where “take it or leave it” is the default setting for anyone not already sitting at the Cabinet table.

Business certainty is the new golden calf. Everything is to be sacrificed to it. Court decisions? Optional. Pay equity progress? Inconvenient. The actual wording and purpose of the Employment Relations Act, which explicitly talks about addressing power imbalance? Charming, but let’s not let it get in the way of a good press release.

If you happen to be one of the workers on the receiving end, well, you are free. Free of minimum wage certainty. Free of sick leave. Free of holidays. Free of KiwiSaver contributions. Free, in fact, of all the cluttering nonsense that might help you stay afloat in a downturn or a diagnosis.

The really bleak joke is that the Supreme Court decision did not herald the collapse of the gig economy. It simply said that if a business model depends on pretending employees are not employees, then perhaps the model is the problem, not the law. That should have been the starting point for a grown-up conversation about fair work in a platform world. Instead, we are getting a legislative sledgehammer whose main purpose seems to be making sure that conversation never has to happen.

Because if workers in the gig economy can be recognised as employees, with rights, then awkward questions follow. About wage floors. About health and safety. About who bears the cost when algorithms replace rosters and “partner” really means “dependent supplicant who can be turned off at will”.

Much easier to call it “innovation” and “flexibility”, pat the market on the head and hope nobody notices the growing army of people whose livelihoods are wired to systems they do not control, under contracts they cannot negotiate, in a legal environment being carefully trimmed to keep them that way.

The blackest part of the humour is that all of this is happening in a country that once had a functioning apprenticeship system, national awards and a reasonably coherent idea that work should not require sacrificing your future stability at the altar of someone else’s share price. We dismantled that, were told individual bargaining would deliver a new era of empowerment, and ended up with workers signing digital contracts they barely understand, just to keep food on the table, while ministers congratulate themselves on restoring “clarity”.

This Government looks at a problem like power imbalance and seems to see not a social wrong to be corrected, but an efficiency glitch to be exploited. Courts that remember the purpose of employment law are treated like faulty software to be patched. Pay equity, once honoured in principle, is treated as a cost centre to be closed. The people actually doing the jobs become line items in someone else’s productivity briefing.

And so we arrive at the logical end point. A government that behaves like Uber with a parliamentary majority - constantly tweaking the terms, shifting the risk and reminding you that if you don’t like it, you are free to take your labour elsewhere, preferably somewhere with fewer rights and less internet access.

It is not governance. It is political surge pricing. When workers look vulnerable, the cost of their rights goes up, and the Government quietly switches them off to protect “certainty”.

The real punchline is that all of this is sold as modernisation. As if winding the clock back on pay equity, worker protections and court decisions is some kind of bold leap into the future, instead of what it actually is - a grubby little project to make sure the people with the least power keep carrying the heaviest load.

Somewhere, four Uber drivers read the Supreme Court decision and allowed themselves a moment of hope that the law still saw them. Somewhere else, a minister read the same decision and appears to have thought, “We’d better fix that.”

That, right there, is the joke and it is not funny at all.

If this struck a chord, you will find more hard truths, sharp edges and the occasional laugh at www.regenerationhq.co.nz/satire. We can do better and we should expect better, starting today.