Things that were widespread hundreds of years ago include slavery, forced marriage, child labor... does this give credence to those practices?
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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 " "
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.
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.