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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

It's an exchange. The freedom of the gig economy vs. the loss of rights and benefits. If it's worth it for you take it, if not, don't.

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Sure. It's an exchange. It's an exchange designed to consign the poor into being ever poorer. But hey--you get your food delivered for two bucks and you never have to talk to a person. So that's great.

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.

It's neither accurate nor constructive to make it seem like there's an evil villain in these companies who's ACTIVELY designing/rigging the system to screw over the poor.

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.

There are villains in this. They're the people who exploit, who maximize profits on the backs of the poor instead of treating their employees like human beings and trying to not grind them into powder.

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.

If the legal standard finds they are employees the added cost is just more incentive to automate the jobs away completely. Soon enough all these terrible horrible jobs you speak of (which every driver I’ve spoken to is happy to have, usually having quit some other full-time employment to do gig work instead), soon enough all these jobs simply won’t exist at all.

You are incentivized to hurt people and steal their money if you reasonably think you can get away with it. That fact being true does not mean that actually hurting people for your benefit isn't evil. There are lots of actions that you are theoretically incentived to take, but it _is_ evil to do so.

Every time I read arguments like this (the threat of increased cost leading to more automation), I just further believe that some sort of guaranteed basic income is what we need to be moving toward. Ideally in the utopian future we automate "all" jobs away to the point where we have so few jobs compared to the number of people, and obviously people will still need to be able to tend to their basic needs and then some. Owning the automation just cannot mean you get all the profits from it.

Let's think about money for a minute. Money itself of course has no meaning. But we apply meaning to it. It essentially works as a proxy for the value we assign to labor and materials - both of which are finite in reality. So obviously you'd prefer drivers make more money, so they could live a better life. Well how much? I imagine you think a ballpark for a 'fair' wage would be somewhere around $15/ride. Now let's consider your person that relies on taxi type services for transportation. We'll say they go out and return to their house once a day. And every other day they also go in/out again for entertainment, essentials, and so on. For a 30 day month that's a total of 30 x 2 + (30/2) x 2 = 90 trips. And 90 x 15 = $1350. On a yearly basis that's 365.25 x 3 x 15 = $16,436.

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.

If wealth was evenly divided in the US, each household would have $760,000 [1]. Assuming a person spends $16,436 on taxi rides per year (instead of buying a new car every year), that would be 2% of their income, not 40%.

[2]https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/yellen20141...

Let's talk about terminology now. First is households. A household in the US is a bit more than 2.5 people. You can go ahead and bump up your costs to $41k a year on transport alone. The next is wealth. Let's hit on two points:

- 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.

Yes, it's unsustainable to be privately chauffeured around everywhere if you're not wealthy. Is this controversial? It's also ecologically and infrastructurally unsustainable so it's not something anyone actually wants.

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.

It's 'controversial' only in the sense that most people don't understand this. Many people seem to think that the only reason companies aren't giving great salaries to people, and 'letting' everybody earn a very good living doing most of anything, is greed. The person I was responding to went so far as to call these companies "villains." Or look at the other poster's response to this very topic. In reality, what people want is impossible, and but very few understand that. And I think the nature of this fact is often met with cognitive dissonance of some sort or another, which is sad. We are definitely becoming a nation that has an increasingly tenuous relationship with facts.

You're assuming that it's a choice people want to make. If you talk to a few gig economy workers it becomes pretty clear that many of them would much prefer a 9-5 job with decent pay and benefits, but are unable to find such jobs.

These apps wouldn’t exist in the first place without these caveats since they operate on thin margins. Sure, we could put them out of business and then how will that help people who can’t find a regular job? At least now they have options. Also we have a big problem with unskilled workforce nowadays - if you are unskilled by choice or (unfortunately) by circumstances this world is not going to be kind on you. That’s the sad truth.

The deal is, I have, I am not assuming. There are a lot of people I have met personally who seem honestly to want the situation.

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.

People are not choosing between full time work and the gig economy. They are choosing between unemployment and the gig economy.

So how exactly is the gig economy harming them? Would you rather see these people unemployed?

This is just false though.

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.

People leave this comment 1,000 times every day on HN; a million times of the internet. Left to their devices, people who push this line of thinking would put kids back in mines, chimneys and mills. Hey, it's an exchange, am I right?

Any “exchange” that’s premised on the “loss of rights” is just the Capital class leveraging their power to further exploit the poor.

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