Growth in the ‘Gig Economy’ Fuels Work Force Anxieties | Hacker News Reader

Growth in the ‘Gig Economy’ Fuels Work Force Anxieties

nytimes.com

35 pointsFuturebot57 comments

A dwindling number of people can do all the work nowadays. And the productivity is not going to decline any time soon. Unions are not going to help unless they lobby for a 20hr working week, guaranteed basic income or something in that vein.

For the best people there's an unbounded amount of work. But if you're not the best too bad for you. A lot more fields are becoming winner takes all (acting, athletes etc. are all this way).

Whatever that is, it's a group struggle. It's not an individual struggle or a battle that can be fought individually.

Unions were a solution at one point in time, but I doubt their effectiveness in an information economy. What we have is simply a lack of jobs for a lot of people.

We have to move towards a basic income - you get paid even if you do nothing. That way at least there's a hard floor on living standards.

That might be a lot more palatable to people if it came with strings attached. Maybe if you're not allowed to marry and have children if you're on basic income? After a few generations, the problem should disappear then.

Basic income would be for everyone, even billionaires. You're free to go out and earn more on top of that or not.

But yeah, you definitely shouldn't get more basic income for having children or children would become some kind of perverse cash cows.

Why? People who do no work have a right to have children.

No, it is the mis-allocation of capital.

There are so many bridges, highways which need to be fixed. There is so much trash in cities which could be picked up from the streets. There are so many older people who need/will need care.

There is no money to pay for all this.

But there is money sloshing around, buying $50M apartments in New York City, etc.

Personal nit but can we stop calling Uber a "startup" already? When you're getting valued in billions and running around with hundreds of millions hiring whoever you want to hire. You're probably a corporation, not a startup.

Uber is still:

1) Growing very fast, and

2) Spending investors' money to acquire market share of both drivers and customers.

In China, the prices are so low, and the subsidies for drivers so high, that I wonder whether Uber has even reached unit profitability (i.e. positive gross margins). Plus, they're spending money on customer acquisition, and investing in infrastructure.

Do we already know that Uber has found a repeatable business model?

Along the same lines, can we also stop talking about how the Great Recession has ended? It hasn't ended for something like 99% of people.

Reminds of this more direct article about the "servitude bubble":

https://medium.com/bad-words/the-servitude-bubble-c9e998c437...

so unionize. corporations and capitalists are looking out for their own profit margins and bottom lines. it's time you guys start doing the same again. in university's management class that i took the prof basically said corporations that get unions usually deserve those unions. it seems like the economy needs it now. it's the only way that we're are going to survive a capitalist economy at perfect efficiency. where corporations and capitalists are taking out profits from employee's paychecks.

so unionize

Easier said than done. Most people don't realize they are getting screwed out of their wages. They just think they need to work harder/smarter to get ahead. They also think unions are socialist/communist etc.

Then there are corporations who will do anything in their power to stop people from unionizing.

I would rather make less money than have part of my paycheck forcibly removed and given to politician-types so they can defend other losers' jobs against competition because they have 'seniority'.

so you'd rather fuck yourself out of spite?

Absolutely. It's all relative anyways; doing better in absolute terms is less important than doing better relative to parasitic morons like those protected and enriched by unions.

my unions prof said he wanted the right to fire one moron per year and that would be enough to solve this problem. because usually there is only one or two problem employees.

I don't think that would fix it. If he doesn't fire anyone, it's not effective, and once he does the quota is filled and the rest are free to dilly dally the rest of the year.

Most people don't work that way. There are many places where firing people is near impossible, but 99% still do a solid job.

People work because they want their lives to mean something. Usually if you put people in a group with an objective regardless of a reward they will try to achieve the objective.

If you hold entry salaries and promotion opportunities down with unions you dissuade more qualified people from considering your career entirely.

Why become a high school CS teacher making half as much as the less-skilled older teachers around you when you can go into non-union industry and make triple? My high school CS teacher was a history major who didn't know anything about CS and barely stayed a couple lessons ahead of us in the textbook. It's not that he was lazy or didn't take his job seriously; he was the only person willing to do it at all! Which is a direct consequence of teachers unions.

What, you think a high school would pay the same that private industry would?

It doesn't have to pay as much as private industry, but the more it pays, the more likely some idealistic student is to consider teaching as a profession. At the very least they could hit the $75k happiness threshold.

Why? Who says you can't be fired next year for dilly-dally-ing this year?

I can't tell if you are being sarcastic.

I make multiple times more money than I can spend; I don't care about real wages or if fat cat capitalists happen to be grabbing a larger share of the pie.

I care that I can look around and feel like my earnings and chances of being laid off are consummate with my productivity and skill relative to those around me and not my age (whether it's true or not -- perception is what's important).

Without that work is just a pointless grind of showing up on time to collect a paycheck. If that's what your job is already, fine, but that's not what I studied CS for.

so you're saying you studied CS so that you can be better than people, not because it's a good & stimulating career. Remind me never to hire you.

> so you're saying you studied CS so that you can be better than people

That's pretty much why anyone does anything, don't be fooled into thinking otherwise. It's in our DNA.

I'm sad for your view of the world.

FYI, seniority isn't some form of union corruption or malice. It's a fundamental strategy employed to reduce workplace competition which is what gives unions the leverage they need against the employer.

Without seniority, you get three problems:

1. The employer can again directly influence employee decisions by promoting those that side with them instead of with the union. So then in case of a strike, he'd say beforehand that he'll only consider a promotion for those who don't participate in the strike.

2. Junior union members do not really have a guarantee that it is worth the effort to join the union if they might end up still in entry level positions after X years. Seniority will affect them negatively in the first few years but then they will be guaranteed the same promotions.

3. Senior members would probably cause lots of issues within the union if they didn't get promoted before the young guys even if it was fair to promote the more skillful young. After all they participated in the union for longer at a significant cost and it's only due to their participation that the skillful young enjoy the workplace benefits they have. This might tear apart the union.

Now if you look at this through the "I'm better than anyone else around me" sort of tinted glasses you'll never really get any of this and it's probably not for you. Unions are for people who want to minimize employment risk because they have lots of responsibilities and cannot afford to be highly motivated corporate career climbers.

This is a good overview of why these methods are used.

Unfortunately, a lot of people in engineering fields seem to assume that these particular tactics are the only way a union can be run. Usually, the reaction to the idea that engineers should really unionise is causes an immediately hostile reaction. A union is what you (the members) want it to be, and a union that only addressed certain topics[1] would probably stop some problems from happening at all. There's no reason to authorize a union to interfere with the more mundane problems unless you want those feature and design the union to have those powers.

The key thing to remember - which the usual knee-jerk anti-union rhetoric ignores - is that problems start to grow when too much power accumulates in any one place. Neither labor or capital can be allowed to grow to powerful, as it is the conflict between them that keeps each side restrained. A few decades ago we saw the problems of labor getting too powerful, and before that the problems of capital (business owners) having too much power was obvious. Like any control system, you have to design feedback[2] into the control mechanisms.

[1] Issues involving collusion like the recent wage-fixing agreement between Apple/Google/Intel/{...} or the "working recent grads to death" (13 hours/day, 7 days/week) that EA used to require.

[2] If only we had a sociological version of a PID controller.

I'm not sure if there's a specific meaning to "seniority" in US unions, but there aren't strict seniority rules regarding promotions or pay increases in places with high union participation.

Eg the highest rates (~70%) in EU are in Finland, Sweden and Denmark. In those countries there are some things you get along the years, and there are pay increases for everyone from collective bargaining but it doesn't generally stop you from overtaking older colleagues in career advancement.

See for example http://www.worker-participation.eu/National-Industrial-Relat...

> I would rather make less money than have part of my paycheck forcibly removed and given to politician-types so they can defend other losers' jobs against competition because they have 'seniority'.

That argument is the reason why real wages in the US haven't grown in the last 40 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_wage#/media/File:US_Real_...

'seniority' is also there so that the company can't just fire you when you start getting expensive.

I always love these discussions about "merit" when we have already seen that even tech companies don't give one iota of damn about labor anything beyond "cheap". See: H1-B visa.

How do you accidentally 'start getting expensive'? Why are they giving you raises in the first place if they don't think you're worth the money?

Edit: furthermore, why shouldn't you be fired if you're not performing to the level they expect at the price they're paying for you?

If unions really manage to drive up wages, why would any company want to hire anyone in a union? (Especially for gigs where you can hire anyone worldwide.)

Management usually don't WANT unions. But in many cases, they can't stop them from forming, so they have to deal with them.

Let the unions form all they want. As long as the boss doesn't negotiate with them, how do they have any power?

Or is there some legal protection that says you can't fire people who refuse to work (ie strike) if and only if they are in a union?

Of course, the boss would have to have a reputation / commitment to acting that way, so that people don't try.

you can not fire people in unions just for belonging to a union and yes there is legislation that says that if a union forms then you have to deal with the union.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_labor_law#Right_...

OK, then just don't negotiate at all (or only negotiate pro forma, if legally obliged), and fire anyway who goes on strike?

Make it clear that this will happen, and if your commitment is credible, you'll never see a strike.

Escalating the conflict is rarely a good idea. It's not like this hasn't been tried before; labor simply had to find more creative ways of taking Direct Action; the "strike" is only one of their options.

The "blue flu" is a traditional way get around that type of threat. A particularly effective tactic is "work to rule", which is a de facto strike specifically designed to get around threats from management; it's harder to justify firing someone for following all safety/regulatory requirements.

If an industry is being particularly problematic, this is where it pays to be on good diplomatic terms with other unions, because the "nuclear option" for a network of unions is the General Strike. If management has any sanity at all, they will choose to negotiate well before such tactics become necessary.

Strength in numbers is usually a winning strategy, and the most effective counter is to convince people that they shouldn't fight back.

The nuclear option for the business is to shut down. (And perhaps re-open in another country.)

Shutting down is mutually assured destruction. But like mad in the cold war, it might work to keep the demands at bay. Iff you can make your commitment stick, and people have nowhere else to go.

The threat of unionizing is often enough to secure the demands of workers in some cases. Basically, whether you're in one or not, unions are good for wage-workers (in the short term).

They don't get a choice usually, partly due to protections set in law and partly because there isn't enough labour competition for them to only pick non-unionized workers.

Also in countries with well established unions like Germany, the employers expect the union to be equally responsible for some [productivity guarantees in return. It's less of a one sided deal. I believe in the recent recession, many union workers there agreed to a lesser pay in return for the employer to retain the whole of them employed.

Doctors and lawyers provide a good example of how unions (though they don't refer to themselves as that) can be embedded into the legal framework. With these unions also having control over the number of newly qualified workers admitted each year, supply is also sufficiently curtailed.

Loads of law students and recent graduates are unemployed but legal costs are sky-high all the same. That's a very dysfunctional labor market there.

Unions managed to establish themselves in spite of people being straight up murdered for joining them, so it's not impossible.

Don't unions only work if hiring non-union people doesn't work well?

I don't think unions are going to cut it this time round. The problem is that there is too much labour competition in the first place.

It's probably more fruitful to look into the whole "I file taxes as a contractor and get no benefits but I am effectively an employee" thing. I remember people on here complaining about that for a long time so it's a big enough issue that affects people in many job sectors.

As much as I like that idea, there are two basic misconceptions about that.

First, the contractors are self-employed and therefor compete with each other. In a union, employees do not really compete with each other.

Second, because the contractors compete with each other, they are liable to competition laws. A "union" in this matter would be a cartel and thus illegal.

Although, a state could and should introduce regulations that strengthen the interests of small contractors.

Though contractor can not unionize workers of a certain industry can unionize.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_unionism

Workers can also unionize according to craft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craft_unionism

The point of the article was that in some cases the judges have ruled that the "contractors" should be employees. And then if that's the case then they should be able to form a union.

I however was making a general point and not a specific point. Corporations and employers obviously want to force everyone into a freelance sort of position with no job security. There are numerous benefits in it for them. Someone has to do something to fight this. Because they do hold all the cards in this case. And they don't really need employees.

Uber's long term strategy of automation, which is what this is about in the long run, will essentially destroy the industry. In the long run that's really what you are dealing with. This is just one shot in that battle.

Of course, people and businesses can form interest groups. But they are still liable to competition laws. Price fixing is not allowed. Such a interest group can agree on certain standards, but not pricing or anything that would stifle competition.

Yes, if Uber needs to employ their former contractors a because of misclassification rulings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misclassification_of_employees...) - I like the German word "Scheinselbstständigkeit" - they then can form a union.

I've taken a lot of uber rides and have never met a driver who was planning on doing it long term - it was a stop gap measure for them till they got a better job.

So what happens when those people who have uber ready cars get other jobs? Seems like a stiff barrier to entry for new drivers - having a nice car that is.

I think that the (sad) more likely prediction is that there is no other job. As productivity and automotation increases, demand will increase for limited qualification jobs (until they are gone)

> I've taken a lot of uber rides and have never met a driver who was planning on doing it long term

That was always the spin about why it was OK that McDonalds and Walmart were terrible places to work. Because it's just a starter job for kids.

Yeah, not so much.

The piece by Nick Hanauer and David Rolf, linked in the article, is great. Long read, but worth it.

http://www.democracyjournal.org/37/shared-security-shared-gr...

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