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 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.
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.
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?
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"