Yes, you can be an employee of multiple ridesharing companies simultaneously

I have no opinion about whether California's Assembly Bill 5 is the right legislative remedy to ensure that Uber and Lyft drivers are properly classified as employees, rather than independent contractors.

But I do have a strong opinion about one particular objection that has been raised against their being treated as employees.

The objection goes like this:

A gig-economy driver can drive for both Uber and Lyft platforms at once. And it is not unusual for a driver to do so. But how can they be employees of both platforms simultaneously? Doesn't an employment relationship imply exclusivity? If they were classified as employees, wouldn't this be a form of double dipping?

This line of thinking tends to occur among people who have a single full-time, salaried job. For some reason, it's hard to fathom that yes, you can be an employee of multiple companies at once.

You can't necessarily be paid by more than one employer for the same unit of time worked — but that's not what's happening here.

If a driver who is an employee of both platforms accepts a Lyft ride, they are working as an employee for that one company, Lyft, for the duration of the ride. If the driver then accepts an Uber ride, they are working as an employee for that one company, Uber, for the duration of the ride. During the times when they are parked on the side of the road, waiting to accept their next ride from either app, they are not working as an employee for either company.

Keep in mind there's no minimum amount of time you have to work to be considered an employee. Even if you're clocking in for just 5 minutes, you're still a working employee for those 5 minutes and should get paid for those 5 minutes.

That's what's happening here, with these ride-sharing apps. It is a form of micro-employment, where you're not clocking in for a full shift with both companies. You're clocking in to perform a single ride, then clocking out. And you're doing this multiple times a day, constantly shuffling between part-time jobs according to demand.

The only difference between this type of employment relationship and traditional employment relationships is that at least in theory, the drivers can set their own working hours. But even in traditional part-time employment, available working hours are a dance between employee and employer. Employees will often say they're available on certain days between certain hours, and employers will then schedule them to work within those timeframes. But in any given scheduling period, an employee might raise a conflict, and the employee and employer might work together to agree on a schedule that is mutually satisfactory.

There is no substantial difference between how that scheduling works and how scheduling for Uber or Lyft works, except that in the latter case the haggling over work schedules between employee and employer happens in realtime, rather than two weeks in advance.

Outside of that consideration, the degree to which Uber and Lyft exert influence over drivers' working hours makes me wonder just how freely chosen they are. For instance, there are penalties, financial and otherwise, for invoking the supposed freedom to control one's working hours.

But even if Uber, Lyft, and the like are able to argue that drivers can freely chose their working hours, that's not the only criterion necessary for the drivers to be considered independent contractors. It is possible to be able to freely chose your own working hours yet still be classified properly as an employee, provided other factors point toward an employment relationship.

And in the case of Uber, Lyft, and other similar arrangements, the evidence points toward drivers having an employer-employee relationship. When a driver is engaged in a ride, they are doing barely anything independently. And while Uber and Lyft claim they're just an app that connects drivers and riders, the fact that drivers have no control over pricing, nor are they able to establish a subsequent business relationship with a rider outside of the app, makes it clear that these apps are not a marketplace. They are a workplace.