Interview with Deliveroo couriers appealing bargaining-rights decision
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
It's unsettling that now every business has a big moral obligation to make sure employees make the best choices for themselves.
I would expect that to be a fairly common sentiment/belief (though I might be wrong).
It comes down to the particular definition of 'unreasonably' that is being used, which different groups can and do disagree about.
It's the choice aspect I focus on. No one is forcing them, and it's borderline elitist of someone with a nice job to say "that's gross work and I think it should go away so things are less gross", along the lines of thinking families straddling the poverty line should simply "eat more quality food"
I'm not saying gig workers' circumstances are nearly as bad as those in the 19th century, I'm just illustrating the principle. The discussion then continues at 'what is an acceptable equilibrium'. Of which certain people, unsurprisingly, find that today's is not OK.
Note that I'm not saying here which side of the discussion I side on (that's a political question not worth rehashing here I think), just pointing out the (rather obvious) argument against total market freedom in this particular market (labor).
So, let's say you're an investor. You've got the choice of:
1) invest in a business with traditional happy lifer employees
2) invest in a business that treats its workforce like disposable contractors and may eventually become an Enemy of the People's Press, but offers higher potential returns, and may be able to eke out an existence in a niche that #1 could never serve.
3) invest in some less active financial instrument alchemy that employs zero local people and threatens no publicity waves
There is (maybe) an argument that #1 is preferable to #2, but it's at least complicated. However, I think it's general agreed that both #1 & #2 are preferable to #3.
If we're already talking Unions and unfair treatment of contractors 5 years into the existence of a type 1 here, one that no one knows could even exist under traditional employment circumstances, we may very well be driving funding into the reduced hassle of #3.
That's certainly what it would do to me, though granted my "fuck it" threshold is 5-10x lower than the average person's.
Society should work for the benefit of society, not just those in a position of power. We are seeing a change in how employment works, and we (i.e. society) need to work out how to handle this change. This article is part of the debate. You should not try to shut down the debate.
I just think before you fight for something, you should be certain that what you're after is worth winning.
I think it is generally agreed that #4 is preferable to #3. Because local jobs!111
I mean, seriously? That is your argument?
This is the thinking that leads to the shuttering of harsh garment factories in the developing world so the employees can go back to child sex work.
If you're white, you do.
It's easy to forget that today's industry is (still) built on slavery or near-slavery in the third world.
Deliveroo bikers have chosen Deliveroo over those, and there must be a reason for that, which the article fails to mention.
I'm also not taking sides, I just want to point out it's flat out wrong to say "if they're doing this in these conditions, it is probably because they don't have a choice".
That's a lot faster than I would predict. What are you basing that on?
Have you done this?
A former coworker had a similar story. He got into a fight with his wife because she was spending all day in facebook instead of finding a job, so out of frustration and spite he went out to pretty much the first pizza joint he could find and talked to the manager. 30 mins later she now had a job.
Heck, I have another cousin with schizophrenia who managed to land a security job (he didn't last unfortunately due to his condition worsening), but it goes to show finding a low pay job isn't some insurmountable task.
Another friend with a strong public school degree who floated around for months interviewing until she moved back with her parents, then finally got a job at the local library.
In your first example you mentioned a 'she'. From what I've been told from friends in the service industry, that's a plus (even somewhat if you're not considered attractive, but obviously much less so).
In your second example it didn't last, so it's quite possible a number of these "didn't last" experiences lead to doing deliveroo-style work.
Furthermore, I've been shocked by how terrible some people are at 1) considering alternatives to whatever choices they think they have, and 2) doing okay in an interview.
I get the impression lots of people are just not rational actors in these matters, and there are all sorts of hidden factors that can prevent someone from going for the 'better' jobs. I don't have strong opinions on what we should conclude from that, but I am at least inclined to think making the shittiest option as good as possible might be an all-round good thing to pursue.
Employers have a duty to their employees and to the society and community that grants them the right to the fiction of their existence, and that is being shirked.
Which is why Britain has the NHS.
To me, the entire point of a robust welfare state is that you don't need to regulate employment nearly as strictly, because then you aren't as reliant on employers for life necessities. And that's a net positive, because regulation is far less effective than entitlements.
Sure! But the NHS is effectively becoming "care for the old and everyone else can shift for themselves" in a lot of ways. And there are plenty of other ways that the social safety net in the UK (to say nothing of other places Deliveroo et al. operate, like the United States) is being sabotaged--council housing is shrinking, when it's not catching on fire, etc.
> And that's a net positive, because regulation is far less effective than entitlements.
Completely agreed. But political forces exist to trash them, so...welp.
Keep in mind that early industrialization was mainly subsistence farmers moving into cities to hugely improve their lives. Child labor was the norm, especially on farms, so children working in factories was an improvement. Do you think that accidents didn't happen to kids subsistence farming with their families or starving to death in central Europe?
I take it this was a general rhetorical question and not something you're specifically asking me - but either way, it's irrelevant. The fact is that 'we' (wherever I say 'we' here, I mean 'we as a society') didn't care enough about those children dying in the field or mud huts, but we did care when they started dying in factories (while that may not be 'rational' for a Less Wrong definition of 'rational', experiments on the trolley problem have shown in the past that there might be wide spread ethical intuitions that make this situation 'understandable' - but I digress).
I wasn't stating how things 'ought to be', just 'how things are'. 'How they ought to be' is in this case a trite discussion (at the level and within the means we have here). The OP however asked a facetious or naive question about 'how things are', one for which there is a simple, factual answer.
In that situation I doubt we would see many people taking on these jobs (including the parentheticals you mention) with these conditions.
Such is human nature. Always has been, always will be. We just do the best we can to balance between indulging it with socialism, and leveraging it with capitalism.
As technology enables expansion of the right-side tail for the relatively most wealthy, it seems like a reasonable utilitarian goal to say that we should adjust the left-side threshold more and more to the right, in a "optimize the well-being of the least well off" sense.
So I'd view this ever rightward moving threshold as a very good thing that represents exactly what we want in terms of progress.
If we ever got to a point where we said, welp "poor people" are now above the magic threshold (e.g. because the people on the left tail of the distribution mostly have hot showers, cell phones, and Netflix), so what more do they want? ... why are they complaining? ... this would be incredibly frightening. Essentially the wealthy would be deciding at which threshold upward human progress gets to stop, in favor of creating skewness in the distribution that concentrates more wealth into the right-side tail, as long as that left-side threshold stays above the "hot showers, cell phones, and Netflix" line.
No, that's not what that would mean. It means the producers of society get to determine at what point they wish to stop providing government mandated subsidies through either taxation or deficit spending to the non-producers or those who produce far less value.
There should be absolutely nothing wrong with people deciding that they do not wish to handover any more of their wealth. If your opinion is that the "system" is the culprit and these people are being squashed by bad laws, policies, etc., the proper recourse is not to legally rob others to help those people - the solution is to fix the bad laws and policies that may benefit the rich unfairly.
Underlying your claim appears to be some baseline assumption that the poor have some sort of legitimate claim on the productivity of other citizens. I strongly disagree with this assumption. I personally do not believe that anyone has a right to the fruits of my labor. The government, however, says otherwise and demands that I fork over non-trivial amounts of money to other people - individuals, to be clear, not public goods. I'm fine with the idea of taxation to provide for public goods like roads, military, etc.
The modern poor in developed nations (and especially the US) have a standard of living that exceeds what the average family experienced in most of the 20th century. This concept of poor is obviously relative and it is the Keeping Up With The Jones' mentality that drives this nonsense of ever-increasing handouts.
There was a great video I saw once by a guy who used to be homeless and on welfare. He said that when he was on welfare he was never grateful for anything he received because he was just mad others had more. He gave the analogy of imagining that your boss came over and said you did such a fantastic job you are getting 100k for a bonus. You're ecstatic and grateful. Then you find out that everyone else in your office got 200k bonuses. You immediately turn to anger and resentment, despite the fact that you are now 100k wealthier.
Helping thy neighbor is great. But legally mandating it is a terrible idea and has been terrible in practice.
How do we fix bad laws when the wealthy are paying good money for those bad laws?
>Every piece of the pie picked up by the 0.1 percent, in relative terms, had to come from the people below. But not everyone in the 99.9 percent gave up a slice. Only those in the bottom 90 percent did. At their peak, in the mid-1980s, people in this group held 35 percent of the nation’s wealth. Three decades later that had fallen 12 points—exactly as much as the wealth of the 0.1 percent rose.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-bir...
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/without-the-right-p...
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/amazon-...
Economics is not a zero-sum game.
The wealthy only account for a small percentage of the overall population. It is very easy to change the law if and only if people care enough to do so. But they don't. Because that involves work like protesting, writing to representatives, organizing community events, and maybe recalling mayors of congressional reps with votes of no confidence. They'd rather pretend to be outraged on Twitter, so that they don't have to actually do anything and instead watch Dance Moms or binge watch Netflix.
The fix is simple conceptually, but it is society's collective refusal to demand that laws be changed or for existing laws that are being broken to be enforced. If society really, truly wanted to fix the whole "paying good money for those bad laws" issue, it could do so relatively easily. But it's much easier for people to pretend it's not that big of a problem since things are relatively stable and people have what they need for the most part. Why rock the boat, right?
The problem isn't just the wealthy - it's all of us in our refusal to demand the law be enforced, as-written, without exceptions given based on wealth or size of the company/organization. Why was Wells Fargo, for example, allowed to just pay a fine for millions of fake accounts that were created which ripped people off? Those are clear cut felonies. If I opened a small, local bank and did that I'd be rotting in Federal prison right now, guaranteed. The only reason the employees that engaged in this and/or the Wells Fargo executives are not in jail is because society didn't demand the DoJ do it's damn job and indict them at the individual level. Hell, society at large didn't even withdraw their funds in bulk. Why would any retail customer hold deposits with an institution like that when this is a proven, admitted fraud, and was well-publicized? That's the real question. And it's the heart of the matter. And that's just one outrageous scam upon the people that comes to mind. There are many more.
I like the idea, but that's not how it works. We don't even have mandatory time off for voting, and not all states have mail-in ballots. People in the US work way too much for the average person to set aside time to understand complex issues. For those with an interest, sure, they'll set aside the time. But, the blue-collar worker from the Rust Belt can be easily tricked into thinking freeloaders, immigrants, and colored people are the reason they're poor, and that's a very basic, obvious issue. Combine that with the attack on the educational system (some Southern states have/are trying to remove Slavery from the Civil War portions of textbooks), and you have America - an ignorant, confused, disinterested public. The time spent on mindless activities (imo) indicates a level of tiredness. It's sad, and people should do better, but when we know they won't under these conditions, it's time to look at the conditions.
>I’ll let the researchers speak for themselves: “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”
>Main Street alone does not matter. Nor do interest groups that purport to support the general welfare. The data show that politicians cater to rich people and groups organized to advance their own narrow interests. Worse still, those interest groups tend to lobby for positions that are “negatively related to the preferences of average citizens.”
>Again, I quote: “In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.”
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/charles-wheelan/2014/04...
>The problem isn't just the wealthy - it's all of us in our refusal to demand the law be enforced, as-written, without exceptions given based on wealth or size of the company/organization. Why was Wells Fargo, for example, allowed to just pay a fine for millions of fake accounts that were created which ripped people off? Those are clear cut felonies.
I agree, but how many politicians do you think Wells Fargo owns? The average person doesn't matter to those politicians. The money and perks do. Also, again, people don't have the time/energy to hold these people accountable. Manipulation by the media also contributes to this - outrage fatigue, etc..
>And that's just one outrageous scam upon the people that comes to mind.
There are too many to keep track of. I appreciate the well-thought response. I think you're basically right in theory, but, in practice, I think you're expecting too much of the average person.
My comment was couched in terms of creature comforts that we have in most parts of the first world, but that's not necessarily the specific standard I'm advocating for, and the more general idea is just that people towards the left of the distribution should never be made to feel like they "shouldn't have" the comforts further to the right -- basically that we all should see progress as somewhat tied to both driving the mean to the right, and reducing the variance so that people at least in the far left tail are continuously brought closer to the far right tail.
There are other better ways to resolve the vicious psychological cycle you describe, but they're not material.
Do you think you can get a fair price if the other side knows you have to sell with a gun to your head?
I suspect most people would work for reasons you mentioned, but I also suspect that the price for undesirable unskilled labor would be much much much higher than it is today.
Which would incentivize automating this type of labor first. As it should be.
In any society there will always be people, who don't have the resources/skills to take another job. Either its geographically located elsewhere any you are tied to certain location (there might be plenty of reasons for this). Or the job is above your skill level, and you cannot afford an education. Or you are in a position where you just cannot survive some weeks of financial insecurity.
Thats why "workes rights" are important, its not just about you and me. Its mainly about people who don't have the means to say: "Fuck it I'm outta here!".
Basic income could be societal anchor, that creates the conditions for such an equilibrium.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/may/22/benefit-sanc...
> For those people interviewed for the study who did obtain work, the most common outcome was a series of short-term, insecure jobs, interspersed with periods of unemployment, rather than a shift into sustained, well-paid work.
Because nobody hires them on positions that have "minimum wage, paid holidays, pensions, protection from discrimination, and trade union rights" because these things cost money and the value they can deliver is below the cost of those things?
Or because flexible hours and flexible employment schedule is worth for them more than trade union rights?
He has been there several years and is one of the more skilled employees, and makes just under $18,000 per year. No retirement or profit sharing benefits. The work conditions are unsafe, with lax enforcement of safety policies for forklifts, stacks of containers, cleaning chemicals. Most employees are expected to perform the duties of the equivalent of 2-3 workers, including staying late without being paid overtime. The work can be physically grueling at times, even for my brother as inventory clerk, and much worse for some of the general factory floor workers.
The company has three salespeople who make The Office look like it was written by Norman Mailer. They interrupt people to go on diatribes about trite motivational anecdotes, talk about how you have to work hard to get places, and then sit in separate offices playing solitaire on their computers with the door open so that anyone can see them doing it. The company's absentee owner comes in every once in a while and holds catered lunches for the sales team, and literally excludes the ~10 other staff in the warehouse who actually do all of the work. Sales people make 5x-10x what the other staff make, and receive bonuses in the form of fully paid family vacations when they close big sales contracts, despite the fact that the rest of the staff often has to do tons of work to close the contracts, even including assisting the sales people with creating their PowerPoint slides, or pointing out statistical errors in charts and things.
My brother personally has saved them hundreds of thousands of dollars, possibly over a million, just in 2017, by catching quality control issues with batches of metal they received from an overseas supplier, which could have caused the company to lose one of their critical contracts. He also has had to fill in as a last-minute delivery driver for the company delivery van, working late into the night to drive all over a rural area delivering metal parts when the regular delivery driver was out sick.
My brother has 10 days of paid vacation and it's a dogfight every time he wants to use them. His last raise (of $0.25 per hour) was more than a year ago.
The company actively preys upon people with past criminal records, knowing that they are hard up for employment in a region where employment is already hard to find, and that once they are hired they will put up with any degree of degrading treatment. (My brother does not have a criminal record, but about 75% of the general warehouse staff do, and many did not finish high school and have a hard time even understanding the terms of their employment. The current staff are sometimes asked informally if they know any people with criminal records to recommend for open positions). This isn't a case of an employer helping the community by fairly considering ex-criminals for open roles. It's a situation where they tacitly target these people on the assumption they won't have to treat them fairly or respectfully, and can exploit them to a greater degree because they'll have fewer options to leave.
My brother does not have enough personal savings to move away, and likely would have to have a job lined up that paid relocation before he could even consider it, otherwise just moving to a new location would put him at the point of insolvency. Literally, the option of quitting is logically not an option, because it directly implies insolvency and, probably, a dangerously high risk of suicide. So, despite whatever superficial sense one might want to say he is "in a free labor market," it is just disingenuous junk nonsense. No matter how frugally he lives, his amount of salary is just so egregiously low that it could never be possibly to work his way into a better life situation. Not even decades of savings could do it for him, even if he was living at the absolute most extreme end of frugality (which he pretty much already is). He is just not paid a wage that can possibly sustain a viable savings rate, and there are no other jobs nearby, and moving is not economically feasible.
He doesn't have a college degree (dropped out of college due to severe diagnosed clinical depression and anxiety attacks -- still has student loans of course), but is highly intelligent, curious and resourceful. He is one of the few people who can make me laugh. He's a beautiful musician in his spare time, a wonderfully witty writer, and generous with his free time spent helping his friends and family and trying to do odd jobs for extra money when he can find opportunities (not often).
And there are many people in the US with even worse employment exploitation situations than my brother -- and vastly worse situations around the world. His story is already so bad we should be morally outraged by it, and it's not even among the worst stories you'll hear. I can't imagine what it's like to be in a similar situation to his, and then to add racial abuse, sexual harassment, or other forms of discrimination or marginalization on top of it.
It just blows my mind sometimes how ignorant we all can be of the genuine exploitation in our labor market. There's no sense in which it's a morally acceptable reflection of some market equilibrium. It's just: one side has inherited power and uses power to accrue and entrench more power; the other side is literally in serfdom. Even when people "earn" positions of power through economically productive output, it's on the backs of people in these situations, and through infinite other forms of mass exploitation, in the form of regulatory capture, backroom deals, outright fraud, and manipulation of publicly provided resources. The part attributable to any one person's work ethic or natural talent is so fleetingly small that it's just shocking how we still try to glorify it and hold it up as an example of why they "earned" power and wealth, and why those being exploited somehow are always to blame for it.
I'm more skeptical about not being in a free labor market. I know many people in London who get by on the minimum wage (~16K). I doubt the cost of living in a small-town factory in the Midwest is comparable to the cost of living in London.
It's a shitty situation, sure, but it sounds like a far cry from not being able to change jobs because a single day without any income would lead to insolvency.
I'm not saying those people have it easy on £16K, but e.g. consider the insane costs for treating depression that my brother faces, with few assistance options, which he has to balance out of such a low salary already. This kind of thing can also vary greatly state to state, with some states practicing much worse forms of social austerity than others -- and my brother happens to live in a particularly bad state for this.
Many of his coworkers, earning the same or slightly less, also are the sole providers for their family and have dependents they have to support out of this wage too. It's a situation where your car breaking down can be an unmitigated life emergency, and people avoid getting serious medical conditions treated because they can't even afford a copay or afford to fill a prescription.
So you might be surprised that the real cost of living after accounting for this kind of thing translates into a pretty dire situation for someone earning $18K in the US.
I know many people in London who get by on
the minimum wage (~16K).
For people who can sustain this situation, it does offer ways to have a higher quality of life even on a low salary. But a lot of people have families to raise and personal situations to manage that are fundamentally incompatible with it, requiring them to afford other living arrangements, creating a bigger stress factor upon on their budget.
The issue as I see it is with people relying on their employer, client, whatever you wish to call it.
Business is business. If you treat it as anything other, you will eventually encounter issues (especially at the lower end).
The union stuff should be seen in that framework. It's a negotiation.
I got on my bike, made ten quid an hour in some free time, got a bit of exercise, and that was that. It's obviously not a career.
It's kind of frustrating to see people hypothesise. Go and apply and do it and see what it's like, the barrier to entry is near zero.
Many jobs, no, most jobs are combinations of small individual parts of a whole action. And this shows that piecemeal work by dozens of different people not only works, but bypasses the whole level of employee/employer level controls.
Take a lawyer's job for example.. The research can be farmed off crowdsourced style. Nobody has to know what the case is about, only the search parameters given. All the gruntwork can be contracted can be cheaply contracted with little knowledge about the actual case. Then, a paralegal, again contracted out, can sign the appropriate NDA and do the paperwork for the filing. And finally, the actual lawyer just signs their name after a quick review. This is doable right now.
We also see this in medical establishments, where interns (aka: unlicensed people) can actually do surgery under a doctor's license. I could see mega-health orgs using maybe 4-5 doctors, and hire hyperspecialized interns to do the gruntwork. The doctors would primarily overview routine stuff and take over in catastrophes.
The only people who're safe right now are us automators. My labor = 1000 or 10000 physical laborers, as my tools (computers) give me leverage of a massive multiplier. A journeyman's tools maybe provide *5 labor speedup. And these contract delivery people are literally 1x. (It's shitty to compare, but that's what capitalism already does with $$$/yr)
The number of doctors that enter the field is limited not by the number of people who graduate with medical degrees, but by the number of residency positions available for training. Every year, we graduate more medical students than we have residency slots available, and that's not including foreign graduates who do their medical studies abroad but want to practice in the US. There is no artificial limit for residency slots; the limit is the amount of funding available.
Most of these are heavily subsidized by the government. Hospitals are free to create their own positions in addition, if they can fund them themselves. Very few do, because residency programs actually lose money on margin.
So this is basically Snow Crash.
> unlike, say, immigration law, there is weak enforcement of employment law.
For me in the US, this is the crux of the current wave of anti-immigrant sentiment. The problem isn't "immigrants stealing our jobs." It's shitty jobs that don't cover basic costs and have inhumane working conditions. But the people in power have done a great job of misdirecting people's attention to immigrants. Boy are they going to be disappointed when all the immigrants are gone and they still can't make a living.
EDIT: I know the topic of immigration can evoke strong emotions. I’m just pointing out that a decrease in labor pool ought to increase wages. Isn’t this just law of supply/demand?
It works this way if you consider a terrible work environment to be negative wage.
For jobs that hover around minimum wage because of low margins labor shortages mean better working conditions.
For example, if you toss a "must be able to piss clean" requirement on any job that doesn't require the employee to have the sunk cost of years of training and it adds about 50% to the effective hourly wage.
Another example would be university wages. Many departments can only afford work-study student workers. When you need work-study student workers with more than just a pulse you have to treat them better because most students would rather work for dining services and do an equally terrible job with free food.
The problem is that at a state/national level there's so much feedback delay, immigration is not evenly distributed, etc, etc that you can't extrapolate
I’m not advocating a position on immigration itself. Just stating one possible consequence of curtailing immigration.
A claim was made that constricting immigration will not lead to increased wages. I think this is contrary to how it normally works and thus the person making that claim ought to show why it's true. Let's turn it around, why don't you show the reverse of what you ask me?
I'm not an economist. I merely asked a question and sought input as to why labor prices wouldn't increase. I think you are reading too much into what I wrote. I'm strongly in favor of immigration. I'm a union member and I think labor laws are far too lax in the U.S. I think immigration would not be an issue if we had strong labor laws that were enforced. But we don't have those laws and thus people blame immigration for their woes.
But whatever one believes with regard to immigration it's extremist to think that there are no negative consequences of immigration and it's extremist to think there are no positive consequences of immigration.
From [1]:
For some subperiods and groups, the effects are positive or zero, but the most common result is that a 1 percentage point increase in the fraction of the population that is foreign-born reduces wages from 1.0–1.6 percent.
It's worth pointing out that the paper mentions that calculating the true impact is hard and controversial so who knows if the above is correct?
>Tom Deardorff has had to compete for workers. He's raised their pay by actually quite a lot. Back in 2006, working the celery field paid about $8.70 an hour. Now it pays more than $21 an hour. [...] Tom says his workers all are documented and that even doubling wages hasn't solved the labor problem.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2018/05/03/607996811/worker-shortage-hur...
If that causes celery prices to rise so high that no one wants to buy it, then maybe celery just isn't an economically viable crop.
1. https://metro.co.uk/2016/08/21/a-banker-a-worker-and-an-immi...
Both immigration (both legal and illegal) and employment regulation should be considered and evaluated accordingly. Dismissing one or the other won’t give us a good understanding of reality.
The people in power who use immigrants as a distraction have no intention of actually getting rid of the immigrants. They know they need them around for blaming.
I would guess a lot of these Couriers are quite happy with their existence. It enables them to earn some money on the side, while they try to become starving artists or whatever.
In any case, the cure for worker exploitation is not more rules. It is creating more jobs. Then workers with bad jobs can simply switch to a better job.