The gig economy of the 18th Century
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The protections we have in place e.g. 40 hours work week, time off (4+ weeks/year in developed countries), termination periods, redundancy pay etc enable a market place where individuals employees can compete fairly with one another. Without these restrictions we open up a fast race to the bottom, where only those who are willing to work multiple jobs (gigs), extreme working hours at minimal pay can compete (see freelance websites and other "gig" platforms for examples).
The gig economy allows some unique companies (e.g. Uber, Deliveroo) to operate right now when they are backed with massive VC funds and operate at a loss - but we can't all expect to have a personal driver + food on delivery every day, without either seeing massive technology efficiency gains (which aren't there yet, e.g. drone delivery, self driving cars etc.) or alternatively we deregulate and push some people into poverty (gig economy).
It is senseless to believe that it is worker regulations that isn't grinding workers. When someone wants to work more than what they 40 hour work week offers, he would go into contracting and work a lot more. Our society is filled with people choosing to work more, and no-one is richer by forcing those people to work less.
Not only that, the race to the bottom you mention would not dock pay as much as you think. In fact, it would increase riches. This is related to the classical problem of confounding money with value.
Lets say you work 40 hours a week and make 1 fork an hour, and get paid 1 dollar for it. A contractor shows up and he makes 1 fork an hour and works 60 hours a week. The new influx of 60 forks will drop the price of forks, and hence you will be paid less per fork you produce: but the entire system now has 100 forks. You will be paid less but you can buy more forks with the lesser pay. In a real world example, you would lose money, because your entire income is devoted to forks but not your expenditures: but this effect happens with almost anything that is produceds and requires labor. So basically advocating for the restrictions in name of pay, is advocating for higher nominal salaries for less goods.
I don't get how you can not. Workers fought and died[0] for the protections the United States enforces. Why do you think that is? Because they were tired of racing to the bottom!
And for the economic example, this:
>but this effect happens with almost anything that is produceds and requires labor
just isn't correct. For example, one of the other top comments in this thread is specifically about how gig labor probably won't work well for most software.
>So basically advocating for the restrictions in name of pay, is advocating for higher nominal salaries for less goods.
That's a pretty interesting assertion. I could just as easily say the opposite.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni...
People fought and died for to expand christianity in the world as well. How can you not believe in god?
There are many things about the era of unions and worker rights that to my personal level, require a scrutiny I dont have the understanding and knowledge to disentangle. The increase of wealth and people's welfare might as well have happened in spite of worker's rights movements. Also, the greatest terrible thing about that era was that the state was participant in the oppression ,by using violence against workers. (At least it was so in argentina). Thats a great case for unionization, but not for workers rights, since the oppressor is the one that puts the rules.
The United States has some of the most rudimentary worker laws in the developed world, yet many jobs (like soft dev) tout great benefits like paid leave, extra pto etc. What increases worker well-being is the creation of wealth, not the mandatory legal requirements for it.
> just isn't correct. For example, one of the other top comments in this thread is specifically about how gig labor probably won't work well for most software.
That's pretty much an opinion, and software is not everything out there.
> That's a pretty interesting assertion. I could just as easily say the opposite.
I dont see how it would be opposite. Lower worker times means lower production, which means lower goods and services to consume. No matter what you do with the currency, reducing production makes the whole poorer. There are some arguments around this topic like reasonable work-times increase productivity and spending and all that, and they are believable to a certain extent, but the basic mechanic has to be the before mentioned.
To be honest, I always perceive that issue as a problem of perception of distribution. In a system of 10 workers, where each has the same output, if one of them were willing to work 60 hours over 40, he would make relatively more than the other workers and that causes a perception of inequality humans are inherently against. The 40 hour worker now also thinks(correctly) that his wage would go up if he could force the 60 hour guy to work 40 hours. But he believes this is good for him, which it isn't, because even he would be relatively worse, he would be absolutely better.
In economics, what you dont see often has a more profound effect that what you can see.
If I recall correctly, the longest stretch I've done of 60+ hour weeks in a metal fabrication workshop is 12.
The longest stretch of 50+ hr weeks I've done is in my current job in a metal fabrication workshop is about 5 months.
I genuinely cannot understand your argument in favour of 60 hour weeks.
> I genuinely cannot understand your argument in favour of 60 hour weeks.
This phrase implies that you are comparing mandatory 40-hours to mandatory 60-hours, which is not the line of argumentation.
The line of questioning is that people should be forced to never work 60 hours. It is a proposal of restriction, with the argument that the lives of workers would be better if so. And I argue that is not true.
One of the greatest advancements in worker well being in the US was done by Ford pioneering well paid and well rested employees.
I live in a country that had a certain amount of economic prosperity and it has been under clear economic crippling since the last constitutional amendment that expanded workers rights. Coincidence or causality? It's very hard to say, but the fact that union leaders are richer than CEO's and company founders makes the whole thing suspicious.
Modern unions definitely sell a lot of kool-aid.
Although I don't think it is better to have richer CEO's is better than rich Union leaders, this is not true unless you live in Cuba.
They also enjoy special constitutional protections, that makes them almost as hard to arrest as a politician. Their kids are house representatives. They take pictures with the president and campaign with them.
They are part of the ruling class. The lower more ideologically "pure" unions constantly denounce how rich they are by selling out their own workers.
They manage the medical insurance fund for all employees in their unions, which is a billion dollar fund: several times it was found they cleared out the funds as well as replaced meds and all that (a few lesser union leaders got convicted of this).
Argentina is a special place, and one could argue that corruption is a problem at all institutions. But the unions are one more corrupt institution, that can easily start selling out their own, the same way a politican would or a business man could sell out his employees.
For me, calling for unions to solve economic problems is like bringing a bear to solve the bee problem.
A note on union leaders owning million dollar homes: http://www.ambito.com/793963-los-duenos-del-paro-y-de-grande...
This is the "most successfull" union leader of argentina phyisically removing the president of the largest private post office: http://www.perfil.com/politica/moyano-fue-a-oca-y-echo-por-l...
Turns out he owns a post office with thousands of employees. He owns a lot of things, being president of a soccer club and all. He was never anything else but a trucker and a trucker union leader.
A note on noteworthy union leaders salaries, ranging 10-15x the earnings of the workers they represent:
http://www.laizquierdadiario.com/A-vos-que-te-cuesta-llegar-...
Union leaders are not forced to publicly disclosed their tax filings, so you can only gauge what they own by what they do.
You can argue this is anecdotal evidence, but then again, theres no way to make it no anecdotal because its protected information.
Modern corporations sell a lot of anti-union kool aid as well. Unions are not there to be "good people" any more than a CEO is supposed to be a "good person." Unions are there to balance corporate power.
>Coincidence or causality?
It's impossible to say without knowledge of the country. (not that I want you to dox yourself.)
I'm pretty sure we can find plenty of examples of great economic prosperity without unions and labor laws.
It is of common occurrence for a political movement to claim its actions were responsible for effects already happening. But also, there is a confounding effect: unions were a reasonable response to the acts of state that used violence and coercion against employees. The FBI busting strikes, or the military shooting down workers protests. Unionization was vital to revert that. But that doesn't mean everything they said or did was the best for the workers.
The ability to unionize is a very different thing that the passing of a law that describes how labor should be. Making unions illegal is an act of oppression. Forcing workers to be part of the union is another act of oppression.
But the case in point is about the addition of a work law that involves the restriction of how much time an employers can bid of the employee. I am not yet convinced that it was unions that raised wages so it was possible to raise salaries that covered working 16 hours to 12. I think that was already happening, and the protests and unions of the time were at best accelerating that transition.
Now we finally have some protections against precarity that we didn't have before. But we could have saved ourselves a lot of hardship if the government had just guaranteed them to us. And we are privileged workers compared with most. Most people couldn't afford to take the risks we did or afford to put that much of their spare time into organising a union.
Your views and understanding of this issue are trash and clearly come from a place of never having to worry about your job or livelihood.
Nope, I've only been screwed by unions my entire life as a worker with mandatory unionization and a consumer with import restrictions and service outages.
> Now we finally have some protections against precarity that we didn't have before. But we could have saved ourselves a lot of hardship if the government had just guaranteed them to us.
That is true for any desire. If the government gave me anything for granted, then I wouldnt have to work for it at all. The question about the precarity of the market you were/are is completely out of my knowledge, but I could argue that what you needed was a way to make the company responsible for the accidents and the health problems that arise from that work, or have some sort of work insurance that would align the incentives of the employers and the employee(make safer work spaces to reduce insurance claims). That is a very reasonable thing to ask of the government.
> Your views and understanding of this issue are trash
Compelling.
The angle of your comment, to me, doesn't take into account basic incentive differences between contractors and employees.
Employees are provided with certain benefits, but those benefits are paid by the employees themselves, not by "the company" or "the state". PTO is paid by the employee, simply because any job in existence has a salary based on perceived value by the employer. There isn't really a fundamental difference to an employee (in general)between paying 110 a year with 1 month time of, or paying 10 monthly without pto and allowing 1 month of licensing.
There is a difference to the employee though: he perceives, falsely, that the time off he gets is "free time, paid by someone else" and so he is way more inclined to use it. Specially when there are rules like expiration on them.
A small business man that runs his own shop or contracting work, knows that the time he does work he doesn't get paid. Because the cause and effect are so close together, the contractor is way more unwilling to take time off, because he wants that money.
Contractors work more not because they don't have worker rights, but because they can more clearly see what the effect of not working is. Now figure a law that says that contractors shouldn't work more than 40 hours a week: what a disaster it would be for them and for society, that people that want to work are prohibited from doing so.
I agree that people should definitely not be prohibited from working more than 40 hours. But disastrous? Let's assume such a law was passed. People would visit friends and family, spend time with kids, get better sleep, have time to cook, exercise, read more books. How is that disastrous? What is disastrous is people never having time to enjoy the things I just mentioned. So I would support simple policy disincentives to people working outside the range of let's say 30-50.
Of course, laws that would try to do such things always end up failing because people are pretty ingenious.
People can make the choice every day to work less and enjoy more, but they dont not because they are forced to, but because they assess what they like the most. Every person has to do a trade off between work and leisure, and restrictions on work just messes with what people want.
The solution isn't regulation because that only addresses a symptom without addressing the root cause. The only solution is to remove the employee's dependence on their employer (eg. universal basic income).
I also have strong hopes for UBI to re-adjust many things in society, like giving stronger leverage to the poorer classes in the imbalance of power they have with employers. However, at my current understanding of economics, i cant see how restricting labor would have positive effects on the aggregate of workers.
There are subsidy/government controls in place for this - if you price control it or otherwise force production without a market benefit, you drive folks out of the industry. This is a bad thing with food staples because then you get starvation, so you need the market to exist so people can enjoy profits but you need a floor/baked in demand to ensure minimum level of production to meet your populations needs.
Now, for this market, we need to ask "Do we care that the supply of gig-sector services is volatile?" and the answer is muddled - people want their reliable Just-in-Time(JIT) services but not enough to advocate for price floors to ensure labor supply exists and stays stable(low turnover). In our minds, that's the job of the contracting companies to do and we don't really care about the labor impacts associated with it. I guess the question is "Are we ok burning this now and hoping we have it in the future?"
[1]https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/13/7542371/apple-google-inte...
Problem is that not all sectors of the economy are uniform. You may have dramatically increased the productivity and reduced the cost of forks. However, health care can't be done by fork makers. Higher education can't be taught by fork makers. The supply of these goods is fixed by skilled labor, who can now demand more money because their BATNA is going into the fork automation business rather than working for a competitor. End result is that the world is awash in forks, but the people who make forks can get plenty of forks but no health care or education.
Most of the problems with classical macroeconomic models can be traced back to the fact that we don't live in a 2-good model, and the economy comprises thousands of markets that all have different productivity stats and levels of competition. If all markets moved in unison, then yes, rising productivity would be an unambiguous benefit for everyone. Not all markets move in unison, and so when essential goods are in markets with low productivity, large portions of the population can find themselves unable to afford those essential goods.
In any case, the restriction of how much people should be able to work could affect workers positively or negatively, but its not the solution to the problem of productivity and distribution.
Contractors exist because they are disposable. Period. In many instances, contract workers are less efficient and cause work to be broken up in arbritary ways to make the RFPs make sense. You're literally spending 3-5x for the disposability.
As a professional in a field, you should hate contractors as they diminish your work and make you disposable.
This is correct, in the same way that you should despise any other professional from competing with your service.
https://henrikwarne.com/2017/01/22/software-development-and-...
It is interesting to note that, broadly speaking, the world is becoming de-institutionalised. Talk to any older academic, engineer, doctor, etc., and they'll tell you that less and less people are interested in settling into a job for the long-term - for maybe their entire careers. The gig economy is one end of the scale, but it's happening across the board, and it's having many detrimental side-effects (talk to any older academic, engineer, doctor, etc.). Many of the more successful software companies today foster an institutional environment - one with a strong identifying culture, making it a more difficult place to leave (e.g. Google).
A few years ago (before his death) he interviewed on econtalk where he complained about economics teaching "Coase theorem" with the exact opposite conclusions to the ones he intended. I was taught "coase theorem" so I went back and read his old papers.
His perspective is all about examining transaction costs. He starts with absurdities, that exist but shouldn't given standard economics. If free markets and incentives are so important to economies, why don't they exist in companies. Companies are centralized bureaucratic organizations. Incentives are highly distorted and the structure is non dynamic. No internal exposure to "market" results, no competition, no creative destruction.
Why don't contracts and dynamism yield an emergent company-like-thing where individuals contract with eachother? His answer is transaction costs, and the friction inherent in free market transactions.
A side effect of the theory is that there is a tremendous amount of potential wealth lost to inefficiency and transaction costs.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937....
http://home.cerge-ei.cz/ortmann/UpcesCourse/Coase%20-%20The%...
^Essentially, Coase argues that in the absence of transaction costs, abcd. He meant this as a way of highlighting the importance of transaction costs, with abcd being obviously false in reality. Economists tend to assume efficient markets in their theory, so many read that statement to be boilerplate economist caveats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market-Based_Management_Instit...
[NB I'm in the middle of reading "Dark Money" so don't take this as a positive recommendation.]
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-hate-koch-brothers-part-...
I agreed with the ability to not shackle workers with arbitrary social crimes but, in the end, fell flat.
It seemed like there is no stance too severe that will cause the Koch brothers to not work with you if you support less regulation and restrictions on trade and production.
I had hoped that the podcast would bring up the idea that maybe there is a higher cost being incurred by their activities and relate it to tragedy of the commons. I assume Koch would have dismissed it as speculation and that you can't pin their work to causing environmental damage.
Anyway, some times I wonder if economists shouldn't use nonsense made-up names, like physicists do. Coarse's "transaction costs" include way more than contract settling and money transfer taxes. The use of that meaningful term confuses the hell out of everybody, and we get people talking about simplifying contracts in contexts where the highest costs are around acquiring shared knowledge.
I realize that most activists and politicians see this as part of the "contractor problem." IE many worker rights and protections are built into the permanent employee structure. They see employers shifting work from this structure to less protected structures, like contracting.
I think this is a narrow view. Other employment structures have benefits too. The gig economy is not going to replace the majority of work. It's a segment, like day labour, casual shiftwork, etc.
There are features to the gig economy that benefit different people. For some people, the low barriers to entry, no gatekeeping, no committment features of these gigs are valuable.
There is no reason not to legislate worker protection laws to cover these jobs, as they are. Currently, most pro-labour voices talking about legislation seem to be trying to effectively ban it, and force more conventional labour structures instead. I think this is misguided.
TLDR - couldn't agree more. Lets find ways to provide worker protections for the next labor market not the last one.
To date, thats literally the way people are attracted into the gig labor force and is central to what it means to be gigging.
This is a really bad trend that gigging will even accelerate.
I don't think this need is being fulfilled by people quitting their jobs to become Lyft drivers, I think it's a primary income for a lot of people who are otherwise jobless.
As a secondary income, I'd agree the hours are important factor.
I'm being regretfully dismissive, but this issue is one of those ones where I think you need first hand experience. Being able to set your own hours takes many people from non-employable to employable.
How governments can be enthusiastically cheering on a return to pre-industrialisation labour practices is beyond me - unless they have a vested interest in doing so, or are doing their damnedest to mollify an increasingly agitated populace while toeing the line their donors and lobbyists demand. Trump & Brexit are both symptoms of the increasingly widespread anger and despair, and if nothing fundamental changes (UBI?), a descent into a totalitarian/terrorist (where the terrorist is anyone who opposes unfettered state power) dichotomy is inevitable.
You already see the rhetoric in the press - traitors, saboteurs, etc. - and the political and economical landscapes are inseparable, despite what many wishful thinkers believe.
This is only surprising if you think of the system as a happy place where everything is automatically optimal.
For me the reason is obvious if you accept the old (and now unfashionable) idea that there is an ongoing conflict between capital and labour for who keep the profits.
Government is the rope that those forces are pulling in order to get their goals and, it seems, one is pulling stronger than the other now.
I watched this interesting interview(1) where the interviewed (around 6 minutes) mention how the view of the system as an ideal system (as something apolitical) without conflict appeared.
This is a very insightful metaphor. I haven't seen it before. Thanks!
Yes, there are problems with it. I certainly wish I had more money and more stability. But the real root cause of my instability is my medical situation. Freelance work has been a far better answer for me than regular employment.
There are a lot of people who have many other things on their plate beyond just trying to make a living. From parents of small children to parents of special needs kids to people with a sick relative or people going to college, there are a great many reasons why one might need to arrange for life to revolve around some other priority and have earning income take a back seat to that. Our expectation of a serious career actually is very problematic for such people.
Historically, the family was the organizing them for most of the world. This is become less true. Families have a lot of flexibility that full time jobs typically lack. If the family is no longer going to be the primary way that people are taken care of, then work needs to become more flexible.
I don't think it has to be a race to the bottom. We can intentionally design gig work so that it is not. I think this is the key to not only maintaining the high quality of life we expect, but improving it.
Jokes aside, we should throw away the fundemental luxeries of western civilization for the future. We can compromise on them but not to the degree of going back a century or two.
- If people die of hunger or sickness in the short term there will be no long run
Also: Just-world fallacy.
If you remove the bullshit-coating, you're left naked with the sad reality.
And as human are not capable of living without shelters and in fear for their future, they become dependent on society to pick-up your failure to provide a proper environment to your employees. You've essentially subsidized your business by deporting the negative externalities of "living wage" and "humane work environment" to the tax-payers.
And those new-age capitalists then lecture us on personal responsibility.
Also I don't see why you would want taxpayers to subsidize giggers. That would lead to a overabundance of gigging compared to what the market equilibrium would be without subsidies.
I've never heard the term "new-age capitalist", but I sortof like the sound of that.
This is an incredibly strong statement. Back it up please.
Law making is anything but an efficient and optimal, noiseless process. There is quite a lot of legislation constructed simply because of the government responding to pressure groups (worker unions, crony businessmen.....) and legislating their narrow interests for everyone.
I wonder though if there is any research made on such "externalised legislational costs". I believe it would be an interesting subject!
Also a fun fact: a large part of the corpus of modern coomercial law arised "organically" from old fragmented europe using derivated roman law in its interactions.
P.s sorry for lot of these " "
"The eight-hour day movement or 40-hour week movement, also known as the short-time movement, was started by James Deb and had its origins in the Industrial Revolution in Britain, where industrial production in large factories transformed working life. The use of child labour was common. The working day could range from 10 to 16 hours for six days a week." in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day
A gentle introduction enough to solve basic ignorance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_rights#Labor_Background
You can also look up the fact (and wonder why) that the USA is one of the very few countries in the world that doesn't assure paid vacation time and, right up there with Papua New Guinea and Suriname, is one of the three countries where there's no assured right to parental leave.
It appears that societies at large have a "narrow interest" in not working (for breadcrumbs, mostly) from cradle to grave.
You stated very explicitly "Each and every employee law" which I contrasted with a very simple observation of the legislation process. It was my intention to stress that the law making process is anything but direct and is full of noise, corruption and, yes, interest groups with narrow interests. In many countries of the former eastern bloc in Europe, bloated public sector with the backing of public worker unions are efficiently blocking any reform incentive of the governement and the labour market.
Qouting a few examples is barking at the wrong tree since I never contrasted that employee law may arise from horrible working conditions. I only gently contrasted the "Each and every" part which is a very strong and, dare I say, ignorant statement.
That's only mudding the waters. Work is performed to the benefit of someone. Someone is giving orders / specs and gives money for it.
The point of the gig economy is to avoid naming it a employer / employee relationship, by dividing it until it isn't meaningful anymore.
But that's only to hide the concept and allow to profit from a new relationship where you don't have to provide benefits / baseline standard of working for the people effectively being employed (that you can reduce to "spending their time on your problem").
> Also I don't see why you would want taxpayers to subsidize giggers.
That's precisely the opposite of what I am saying. The gig economy fucking up the labor market will force any humane society to step up and provide for those lacking access to basic things in life: help to pay the rent in the months where work is scarce, food stamps, etc.. And that's not even going into the lack of stability, forbidding any access to long term investment (a car, a house), which in our time and age should be accessible to anyone.
You have employers benefitting from a new relationship where they do not need to provide it for their employees because the relationship has been destroyed. This forces others to pick-up their failures. I don't want to live in a society where people are starving, with or without a job but even moreso if they are active and working.
I am against the gig economy, because this is a way for employers to avoid taking their responsibilities, meaning that taxpayers are left to foot the bill. If not, we go a few centuries back with extreme poverty, shantytowns and slavery-in-all-but-name. I do not want that, and I do not want to pay to increase the profit of others.
> Someone with in-demand skills and a good reputation
The easiest possible situation is not sufficient to judge the proposition. You also have to examine the worst and see if that's at all acceptable, then try to move the cursor back up until you are able to see if on average the proposition is viable. But of course the most capable people will be able to survive.
Until they get knocked off their bicycle while delivering someone's lunch and can't work, meaning they can't pay rent or buy food (because you're an independent contractor who only gets paid while 'gigging'). Then it's pretty useful to have an employer who covers things like sick pay.
We pay taxes and those taxes cover sick leave.
What we call "gig economy" are p2p transactions in name only in our existing incarnations of them: most of these are oligopolistic markets dominated by only 2-3 major "platforms". They are not a free market with lots of choices the giggers choose from with low to no switching costs; if there was an equities-exchange-like platform that did the matching, with equities-exchange-like margins, and many such platforms, that would be closer to a free market, and even smaller margins under a utility-infrastructure model of the platform where the data is open formats while the platforms compete on service and process would be even more free. Their cut of the action to facilitate the p2p transaction is not a fraction of a percent to 1-2% like highly-contested free markets are (like retail groceries). After that big cut, their "contractors" are still saddled with most of the transactional costs of being a contractor like various forms of business insurance, health insurance, accounting, payroll compliance, regulatory compliance, etc.
Our entire asset valuation pyramids and the dominant economic paradigm are built upon an assumption fairly stable income streams at the bottom, not to speak of the meta-assumption of constant growth. Insurance and credit banking are the big areas, but these assumptions are interwoven at a very fine-grained level throughout our civilization. A majority or even plurality economy based upon gigs transitioning from our current model is necessarily going to go through a drastically lower asset valuation period, and with oligopolistic platform choices depressing negotiation power on the supplier/contractor side, that period could extend indefinitely. This isn't per se "bad", or "good", but advocating the gig economy should come with realistic and frank discussions of side effects management.
People respond to incentives. The core incentives in a gig economy are: you cannot predict when your next check will come, you cannot even predict how big it will be when it comes, nor can you feasibly control the terms under which it comes. The pullback in consumption and spending from current levels will reflect people's response to those incentives. People's lives will be patterned after long-time survivors of this type of economy; certain subset industries in movie and TV entertainment have been structured this way nearly since inception for most participants, for example. General rule of thumb is you live way below your means, and you spend at most 20-30% of your high water mark annual earnings over a 10 year running average. Income swings of 100% or more over 2-3 years are not uncommon.
Under a gig economy, you will wait until you hold 20-50% down payment before committing to a mortgage; many people's annual incomes are so wildly inconsistent they can't get a mortgage, period. Note that the US new mortgage originations market currently relies upon around 3.5-5.0% down payments; the traditional 20% is now rare, the average is 11% (in the <35 year old cohort, it is 8%). One estimate at requiring 20% down payment is a 30% reduction in mortgage originations [1].
I speak to all this from spending the vast majority of my adult life as an independent business entity in the US, by choice (most years I have one client ask if I would ever consider going perm at reasonable compensation levels). My position harbors no animosity towards the gig economy; indeed, I'm an active participant in it and biased towards it (for various reasons). But realistically, it is not for everyone, and not even for the majority or plurality; it is a sustainable enough model for only a very small part of what we are evolving our current system towards, unless we put severely eroding current asset valuations onto the table, whether for 10 years (my minimum estimate) or indefinitely.
The key factor to keep an eye upon IMHO is whether or not the proposed change represents a shift towards a more symmetric power dynamic between participants. Right now, corporate structures wield asymmetrically more power than individuals, and a gig economy does not change that in most contexts, and worsens it in many other contexts.
[1] https://blogs.stthomas.edu/realestate/2011/05/16/revitalizin...
* Healthcare costs. This is non-negotiable. On an unsustainable path, and will collapse soon. Read around at Karl Denninger's Market Ticker site. He makes the point more forcefully than some would be comfortable with, but we're in a pretty dire, advanced stage so strong words and stronger action are warranted. [1]
* Payment term games. Small vendors abound with stories of customers yanking their chains, playing legalistic games around hyper-specific terms of delivery, or flat-out spuriously denying payment, etc. Once you climb the value ladder this tends to diminish quickly (at sufficiently high levels of operation, you become a key troubleshooting component of their organization, and they take care not to piss you off), but very small operators (1-10 man shops) preyed upon by big customers is unfortunately all-too-common to hear about. I'd prefer to see a Brandeis quote-styled mitigation. He said, "Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman." Some kind of information exchange, similar to a central clearinghouse of blockchain-secured documents in a transaction: if either side raises a dispute, the documents become viewable by all, with classification by disputed values, timelines, delays, court documents, etc. Works protection both directions, customers and vendors.
* Liability externalization. I'm getting demands for unlimited or $100M data breach insurance coverage and indemnification for one week projects. This takes time to negotiate down to reasonable levels, usually involving scheduling calls with my broker to explain for the umpteenth time that, no, even if you are Sam-Fucking-Walton-Back-From-The-Dead, talking with Lloyd's of London, with Warren Buffett smiling beatifically in blessing upon the enterprise, you will not get such a policy, but it is the latest in an ongoing trend by big customers to externalize as much of the cost of liabilities as they possibly can pin on someone else. Fortunately, the insurance industry is sensibly refusing to even quote for such policies, but they could do a better job reaching out to legal and procurement departments to let them know they can't grab a number from IT about information security risk and then slap it into the insurance requirements clauses.
I could go on, but I think you get the gist, and I'm far off the beaten track of this thread so I'll let myself out now.
This line of thinking is beyond insane to me. We seem to agree that people who don't earn enough to pay for a defined minimum standard of living should be taken care of:
Why is it a _bad_ thing that society is the one bearing the cost, instead of an arbitrary purchaser of their labor? If this responsibility exists, how does it not exist for all of us? And since the government is the expression of our collective will, why is the government not the appropriate entity to handle it? The notion that this is "subsidizing" purchasers of their labor is Orwellian bullshit.
Because taxpayers are then paying for companies like Walmart to increase their profits. They are able to reduce their labor expanses because "someone" will pick up their slack.
The government should help you when you don't have a job, so that you can have time for education, your kids, or plain healthcare if needed. But if you are active and working, if you spend your day working for someone (either in an office in a 9 to 5, or as a "giggers" chasing the next one during your day), then you should be able to sustain yourself without additional help from the government.
Because then employers will expect the gov to step in. They will drive their wages lower, and all the competition will do the same. And when the government is picking up the rest of the bill for everyone in the market, where the fuck should taxes come from?
Finally
> instead of an arbitrary purchaser of their labor?
Labor has a cost. If you are unable to purchase it, then don't. But don't expect others to pay for the labor you would have liked to purchase. This is like saying that just because I'm the arbitrary purchaser of a tuna sandwich, I should get help to pay for it. This is beyond insane.
> The notion that this is "subsidizing" purchasers of their labor is Orwellian bullshit.
This is pretty ironic that you accuse me of using newspeak, while you expect the state to become the sole responsible party to support basic amenities for its citizen. Because the latter is pretty orwellian, and thus your accusation itself goes in line with the concept of newspeak. Anyway.
Things that were widespread hundreds of years ago include slavery, forced marriage, child labor... does this give credence to those practices?
So, was there any prior pattern of using highly skilled labor in any kind of flexible "gig" system?
http://web.archive.org/web/20080923195808/http://etext.lib.v...
He catalogued the work done by the poor in the early 19th century extensively, and I do mean EXTENSIVELY. He gathered details not only of the types of 'gigs' being performed, but the specific costs and potential profits involved. He was actually trying to estimate how much these London hustles were contributing to the broader economy at the scale of hundreds of thousands of people.
It's a little dull, racist, and sexist, but the subject matter is fastidiously catalogued.
Some examples:
Of Oyster Selling In The Streets:
http://web.archive.org/web/20021129180421/http://etext.lib.v...
Of Roasted Chestnuts And Almonds:
http://web.archive.org/web/20021129184309/http://etext.lib.v...
Of The Cries, Rounds, And Days Of Costermongers:
http://web.archive.org/web/20021129180440/http://etext.lib.v...
Of Coffee-Stall Keepers: (I learned about 'saloop' from this one)
http://web.archive.org/web/20021129180034/http://etext.lib.v...
And of course, Of Street Piemen:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030127022056/http://etext.lib.v...