In the present regulatory environment, sure; one could argue that that environment is using employers as a vehicle for general social services in a way which is undesirable and reduces employment, economic output, and well being especially for the poor.
Moving the basic protections to public benefit schemes with appropriate tax support might be a better option. E.g., UBI instead of minimum wage, universal (single-payer or mandatory and subsidized default minimum coverage) healthcare instead of employer-mandated insurance, etc.
In almost any likely regulatory environment we are likely to see in the next decade, and definitely in absolutely any regulatory environment that the the-poors-are-revolting HN zeitgeist has any influence on forming.
I realize I am not telling you anything that you, specifically, don't know. (And I don't think you are the type to approve of those environments.) But having that out there provides important caveats for your "might be"'s. The problem exists and the problem is real and bad people are using it to hurt people and while I know you know the difference, underlining that "might be" might be doesn't erase what is.
But, it also brings an expansion in available jobs, and much greater flexibility in deciding when to work.
For a LOT of people, those are worthwhile tradeoffs.
> of some smartphone app having been created.
Piecework (which is basically what this is), long long long predates the smartphone.
"Flexibility" is what it's called when PR flacks, from their actual-full-time jobs (but, ha ha, not for long, the bell tolls for thee too), have to hide the hatchet job they do to the poor. It's not some "but fairings!" situation--it's a systemic attack on people.
It's an indisputable fact that these gig economy jobs provide more flexibility in the form of being able to choose your hours of work.
Is this flexibility a critical motivation to accepting work? For some people, yes. For others, no.
Is unemployment a critical motivation to accepting this type of work? For some people, yes. For others, no.
You want to paint this as black and white when the reality is only SOME of the workforce is faced with unemployment as the only alternative.
My question to you is: Do you know what fraction of gig workers would actually otherwise be unemployed?
If I had to guess, it's a small minority.
Unemployment is historically low right now. Yet, tons of people are still choosing gig work.
So there is something about it that people value. You can't just say there are no other jobs, because that's just not true.
This may very well be the more common case but it's not responsible to generalize either way. If you have evidence to support your claim please share.
Maybe I'm being too anecdotal, but I can only think of a couple of rides (out of dozens) where I would have called a cab had Lyft not been available.
Trying to get a cab ride from my house to a random place 15 miles away was a nightmare. Bad dispatch, no-show drivers, etc. Never really bothered after a few bad experiences, just designated a driver instead.
Uber did not invent this practice. They took it from the existing industry.
The existing industry was actually WORSE in that you would have taxi medallion owners who would charge people rent for the luxury of using their taxi medallion!
So please, do not blame Uber for the existing taxi cab contractor business practices.
(You can certainly argue that now having all these extra cars on the road is a bad thing, but that's a separate issue.)
If america had universal health care like the rest of the developed world, would anyone really care about this stuff that much?
There are others as well, which stems from the fact that for the most part the law considers contractors to be entities negotiating on equal footing with their customers (i.e. those who would otherwise be considered employers), whereas employees are required to have certain protections.
The "gig economy" is designed to break employment. It's designed to turn people who already are living hand-to-mouth or worse into always-available scutworkers for the upper class and the (smaller than one would expect) middle class that serves them in ways the participants in that "gig economy" cannot. But you can choose to not do it! And when, obviously and inexorably, that becomes the game in town available to vast swaths of the working poor, what then? There aren't even any workhouses anymore. Scrooge can't even offer that whatabout.
Most people may not have much of a choice about feeding themselves (ourselves) or their (our) kids into the thresher, but the people who do can have the minimal decency not to oh-but-it's-fine about it. And that includes most people on HN.
The reality is that these companies are just being driven by profits. And, one way to maximize profits is to minimize costs by offering fewer benefits to workers.
This outcome has a lot more to do with capitalism as a whole than the gig economy.
If you are a proponent for worker's rights and mandated benefits then by all means argue for that. But, please don't make it seem like there's some evil person on the other side that you're seeking justice against. That doesn't exist.
Maybe capitalism has problems and it's not just the "gig economy"? This is creeping towards an epiphany--maybe choosing to participate in capitalism at a high level rather than mitigate its excesses makes you complicit? Maybe you own what you do and when what you do hurts people, you own that harm and that hurt?
Yes, this does characterize many HN-sanctioned heroes. Too bad. Maybe they should instead be decent.
Nobody forced these companies to exist. If you can't do business without bloodying the poor who are your "human resources," maybe you shouldn't do business.
Well that's a lot of money. Of course I expect you'd probably say that that's because the 'bourgeois' are holding back the 'proletariat.' Okay. Let's go full on social system economics. Let's just pretend the entire GDP in the US is spread completely evenly between each and every person. And that's quite unreasonable as our GDP would decrease dramatically under such a system, but for arguments sake I'll give you that. Okay, that's easy. That's the GDP/capita or $52k. The total value of all annual goods and services in the US produced works out to $52k/person/year. But we can't forget about taxes now. To sustain our social utopia we'd need quite a high tax rate. But again, I'm going to let you have that and we'll just maintain current taxes. So we're each taking home about $42k. I'm also going to pretend that state and other taxes don't exist.
Now look at your $15/ride. If somebody was going to depend on that, they'd end up spending nearly 40% of their entire income just getting around even with a perfectly fair share of all income generated nationwide! And I gave you several unreasonably optimistic assumptions that makes that number a real lowball. The point here is that even in what I assume is your idealized system, this would not be a sustainable industry. It's very easy to see things through the lens of a victim complex because of the apparent inequality of our society. But these optics are in large part caused by inconceivably large population numbers. Imagine you earned just $1 from each person on this Earth. You'd be the 65th richest person in the world! Far from a 1%er, you'd be a 0.000000001%er. Earn $12 and you'd be the single richest person alive. Even if we just consider the USA. Imagine you took every penny Bill Gates, currently the richest person in the world, is worth and equally distributed it to each and every person in the US. That'd be a total of $275. Maybe you would say well do that to them all! By the time you're down to the 100 richest person you're only getting $17/person, and again that's for the US population only.
Most people in places where wages are livable walk, bike, ride a bus or train or drive themselves around. For the infirm there are subsidized transportation services.
[2]https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/yellen20141...
- Wealth is not renewable, which is why income is vastly more important. If you have $100 of wealth and you only spend 10% of it a year. You're completely broke a decade. 'Only' spending 5% of your total wealth on transport per year is a path to very rapid ruin.
- There's nowhere near the amount of 'real' wealth as there is 'paper' wealth, which is the number you're indirectly citing. Most wealth is tied up in the form of various investments, stocks, and so on. When you liquidate these assets, it results in a decline in their value. If you were to liquidate large amounts of market assets into spendable money, simultaneously, you would find the total wealth in the US to be a very small fraction of the numbers stated.
Many of them are people seeking a little extra money, a way to fund a new car, something to hold them over between jobs, a way to pick their own schedule... I have had a lot of conversations with a lot of workers in the gig economy and never have heard "I wish this was my full time job". Maybe that is the random set of people I've interacted with, maybe there is a bias for what people want to talk about.
What is absolutely clear though, is that a sizable amount of people participating in the gig economy are doing so because they want to take advantage of how it works, not despite how it works.
Many of them had other jobs, many of them clearly wouldn't want a full time job doing the gig.
The guy who was the creator of a local web design business driving me around on a weekend afternoon wasn't choosing between unemployment and the gig economy, he was supplementing his income while worked on his dream.
The programmer giving me a ride to SFO from the peninsula wasn't choosing against unemployment, we had worked at the same company in similar positions, we had a great time talking about how things were going. He was just making money as he commuted home.
The Afghani translator who immigrated after the war was a student making money over the weekend on his own schedule. Neither of us understood football at all.
A lot of the things I pay for "gig economy" employees to do are things I think would be awful as full time jobs, it would make me sad to support a business that put people in the position where that was their life. When it's optional, people using those bits of work to fill in the gaps or add a bit of extra on top of whatever else they were doing with their life, I am a lot happier to support those workers and those businesses.
Not so say that the businesses are doing everything perfect, but I think it's obvious that the 'lead generation' role (companies like uber, lyft, etc) are going to become more of commodities to the benefits of the workers using them.
Really the only problem here, and the only reason why there are lawsuits, is that these workers aren't being paid enough. I really doubt any of these people care whether they're classified as employees or contractors; they just want to feel like they're making enough money to support themselves (plus take care of self-employment taxes and healthcare costs) without feeling like to do so they need to work themselves to the bone. If these jobs provided a decent standard of living, I don't think these issues would exist at all.
Someone is hungry and now they have food delivered. Someone doesn't have a job and now they have a delivery job. It's a win-win situation in a short-term micro scale and people are just responding to short-term incentives. It may have a bad effect in the long term but hungry/unemployed people don't have time to think about that and middleman-apps are making good profit exploiting that.
They have been working as contractors, for companies, for decades.
Maybe you think the law should be changed, but situations like this have been established and determined for a very long time.