Lyft drivers would make more as employees, estimates show

Critics claim that ridesharing companies stiff drivers by labeling them as contractors rather than full employees, but how much are they losing out on, really? Quite a bit, if you ask those drivers’ lawyers. In the wake of Lyft’s proposed lawsuit settlement over worker statuses, the attorneys have produced a court-ordered estimate showing that the average driver would have made an additional $835 in expense reimbursements over the past 4 years if treated as full-fledged staff. That may not sound like much, but most of the drivers covered in the lawsuit worked just 60 hours over those years -- that’s a lot of money for relatively little effort. Particularly busy drivers would have earned considerably more, according to the calculations.