Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
So for the first 3-4 months, I did some wine waiting as a gig(agency work, no fixed place or hours. Like with Uber, you provide your own gear - like uniforms, bottle openers etc.) at the finest, the most iconic places in London. I worked at the Shard, I worked at the Cafe Royal, I worked at Four Seasons in events where celebrities like Victoria Beckham or Prince Harry were guests. I did my jubilee at BAFTA's after party, I was the wine waiter for the award-winning team that made the Amy Winehouse documentary. That night I had a chance to meet with pretty much every single celebrity(900+ guests from the industry), I was a huge Breaking Bad fan and I had the chance to speak with Walter White.
How to get into this gig business without ever working in this industry? 1 day of training and boom, I'm a waiter at the fines restaurants in the world.
It was such an amazing experience but whoever imagines living like that forever should have poor judgement. I was there to make some money until I get a real job and open a bank account(really hard to do because of catch 22) and most people who worked with me were either new arrivals like me or Australians who came to the UK to experience Europe for a year or 2(They come just before or after college with 2 year work visa, work for few months and travel Europe).
The world is transforming, the employment contracts are not the driving force. They are a reaction to the new needs. I think it's alright, an equilibrium will be reached.
To expand on what mrtksn means: in the UK, it is difficult to get a bank account without proof of address. It is also difficult to rent a flat without a UK bank account. There are a few ways around this:
- Have a friend put you on their water bill and use this as proof of address. I suspect this is illegal.
- Join a flatshare without getting on the lease, pay for your portion of the rent with Transferwise or something, and have your flatmate put you on the water bill. I sure hope this is legal.
- Find a bank which is a bit lax about proof of address and is willing to accept things like proof of employment. Lloyds used to do this, but I've heard they no longer do.
Later I got a job as an UI developer in the City, but the first few months were hard.
The rental side has become more tricky. The Immigration Act 2015 made it a criminal offence to rent a property to someone who does not have the legal right to live in the UK, with a maximum penalty of 5 years imprisonment and an unlimited fine. Unless you have an EEA passport, it can be very difficult to find somewhere to live. Some landlords are even more cautious/discriminatory and won't rent to anyone who seems foreign. It's another embarrassing symptom of Theresa May's illiberal and inhumane "hostile environment".
You can mail your debit card to any address you choose, no verification required.
“When you sign up through the Monzo app, we’ll ask you to take a picture of that ID and a short video of yourself. That’s it! You’ll need a UK address where we can send your debit card, and then you’re good to go.”
[0] https://monzo.com/blog/2018/05/29/getting-bank-account-immig... [1] https://monzo.com/blog/2016/09/19/building-a-modern-bank-bac...
If you are registered to a university, Barclay's will have something to sell you.
Eventually the employer strongarmed the bank to open an account for me.
This also applies to anti-money-laundering stuff: it's better to affect loads of people really badly who are most certainly not money laundering as long as it does not affect the people who are money laundering at scale.
That said, there are people who don't really understand that people on social media paying you for access to your bank account are probably money laundering.
This is in a country where it is perfectly permitted to open several stores of the same chain of gambling establishments in the same street with fixed-odds betting machines and no questions of where the large sums of cash being handed over come from.
Apparently in the past people with questionable sources of income used to open fake accounts to move money and the banks were happy to do it until the regulators slammed them with fines.
Also, when you have a bank account you can get things like a phone contract with a direct debit payment. Apparently, some people made it a habit to leave the UK without paying their bills after they are done with their seasonal work.
I'm sure some people run much more elaborate scams.
A passport is enough to prove your identity isn't fake. But since it's not enough to give you a credit line, banks simply refuse the service. There are way too many people with no access to banks.
They did https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girobank https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_Office_Money
A passport is enough to prove your identity isn't fake
Theoretically, perhaps, but in practice anyone who needs to validate identity will ask for multiple forms of ID.
AFAIK, it doesn't work for Santander (both in the US,UK and Spain, based on a colleagues account) as they treat each country and separate.
I never knew it was so hard for new arrivals in the UK - here in Spain it was pretty easy, the hardest thing was getting the appointment for the ID card.
I lived in Germany for a bit too and there it was also easy.
I really think we need some ID system like the NIE or Anmeldung in the UK as I can't drive and always had to use my passport as ID which is a massive pain - it'd make stuff like this easier too.
I had to make my agency write the employment letter multiple times because the banks always found something wrong. Finally, it was a week before Christmas and I had to beg the HSBC employee to accept the letter and open my account because I was running out of cash on Christmas.
The the "finest, the most iconic places in London" hire cheap sweatshop, bring your own tools, amateur labor.
It might be a good chance for a newcomer to the business, but it also kills the business long term (just hire newcomers and pay them shit forever), and cheapens their whole experience to Las Vegas level for me.
Why places that charge $20 for a drink (or way more) are so greedy to not properly pay wait staff and keep qualified teams longterm, is beyond me...
We were also called "candidate" as if we are permanent job candidates. That was actually true for some people who actually persued jobs in the hospitality industry and when someone gets a permanent job the employer pays the agency a fee.
Or they can outsource the contract to a 3rd party, let that company deal with coming up with hired guns, liability, etc, and just hope it all works out. And if it doesn't, it's a lot easier to fire a contract company and find a new one, than to fire actual employees.
What most people seems to think is happening is that as information (and related technologies like communication) has become abundant it also became really important. And that people working in the "gig economy" is adapting to this reality.
I don't think that is how things work. When something becomes abundant it is the other things that become important. As information has become abundant things like housing, education, security, recognition and contacts is what lets you leverage the abundance of information to create opportunities.
People working in the "gig economy" isn't adapting to a new reality, they are victims of the people who are now favored because of their access to housing, education and security.
This is of course counter to what should be happening. Any nation who want to take advantage of the abundance of information should make those other things readily available instead of letting them be captured by rent-seekers.
Unless it keeps changing and never settles.
Last time wealth inequality peaked, the robber barons had strike breakers and whatnot. This time (with wealth inequality continuing to soar to historically unprecedented heights) they have the 'gig economy'.
Many Americans are stuck with dead-end low-wage low/no-benefit part-time jobs (plural) trying to make ends meet - the weak job market offers few alternatives, while the gig economy (ubiquitous temp workers) stands as an implicit threat against workers organizing.
The job market in the US is booming. It's the exact opposite of a weak job market.
The manufacturing unemployment rate is 2.x%.
GDP will grow by a trillion dollars in 2018, nearly equal to the entire size of Mexico's economy. The US economy will expand at a rate three times faster than the EU economy this year (this quarter will be seven times faster than the growth rate in Germany, and Japan's economy is shrinking again by contrast).
Nearly one million full-time jobs were gained in the month of May [1], with a large decline in part-time jobs. That's the largest full-time monthly job gain in 20 years.
The U6 unemployment rate is back down to a level that is historically considered very healthy.
Wages are rising at the fastest rate in a decade.
There are more job openings than there are people looking for jobs, the first time that has happened in decades.
By what means is this unacceptable? "I find myself working 40 hours a week to afford cable and a new iphone. I consider that unacceptable given the wealth I am surrounded by."
Those two statements are qualitively equivalent. Because you move to a nicer neighborhood, you shouldn't have to put up with things other people put up with? Huh?
And most of your things are made by people working comparable hours for much less money and a lower of standard of living. Yet you somehow find that "acceptable" even though you're still complicit in their exploitation.
I fail to see why geographic proximity makes things less acceptable. If we could ship the fruits of their labor from overseas, that would be ok?
One of many reasons people draw parallels between today and the Gilded Era or Roaring twenties.
Succinctly put. I'd say this was also a reason why, 9 years ago during the big crash, we saw "productivity" measures go up, and continue to rise even after the 'recovery', even with companies working with fewer people. They managed to get the same results out of fewer people (or... close enough results), and those people really couldn't say 'no' because... they'd rather have some job than none at all (or, again, they needed something vs nothing).
/s
What is a convincing argument that this line of thinking is wrong?
If I lay a trap, and you fall into it, and I offer to release you if you give me your bank details, are you free?
If it's a disaster and I charge $10000 for a bottle of clean water, are you free?
If a society requires you to work in order to live but only offers you poor options for work, are you free?
We generally talk as though, as long as there is no specific person intentionally coercing you, you're free to choose. But those particular elements don't actually make much difference to your freedom. It seems to me that being set up with only unfavorable options is different from being really free to choose.
It seems to me that invalidating the notion of freedom might not be what you set out to do. Instead, you're trying to make a point wherein people are only truly free if they have some options that are favorable. Do I interpret you correctly?
In that case, what's "favorable"? Who defines and judges such things? What standards are used? I know people who are capable and skilled and thus offered highly remunerative positions that they don't want to take because of who is hiring - is that favorable or unfavorable? Reasonable arguments for both spring readily to mind. Are we to use an individual's personal preferences only?
> If I put a gun to your head and say "Your wallet or your life," are you free?
No -- the subject is you and your gun, if you remove them the situation improves.
> If I lay a trap, and you fall into it, and I offer to release you if you give me your bank details, are you free?
No -- the subject is your trap, if you remove it the situation improves.
> If it's a disaster and I charge $10000 for a bottle of clean water, are you free?
Yes -- while there is a subject (you), removing it will not make situation any better at all.
> If a society requires you to work in order to live but only offers you poor options for work, are you free?
Depends?
In USSR, with exit visas and "social parasitism" laws, no. Agent is state, and removing will make a situation better -- yes, you would still be hungry, but at least they would not arrest you, and you could try your luck in another country.
In USA, mostly yes. There is nothing you can remove to get better options for work, or to allow living without work. There are some exceptions -- like anti-vagrnacy laws and job licensing -- but they do not affect most people.
I join in the argument that labor is coerced into participating in the free market in the US. The agent/subject that you're missing is the government and their enforcement of laws pertaining to property.
I would argue that labor is only as free as the social net for unemployed is strong. The coercion comes from the fact that your landlord can have the sheriff evict you (or your bank can foreclose and do the same) and the place where you help yourself to food without paying can have the police arrest you. Likewise if you try to oppose that physically, or, say, gain employment by selling illicit drugs, there's a system already in place to confine you to a jail or prison.
You're arguing that labor is only free so long as it can hold a gun to someone else's head (the evil 10%) and force them to support said labor via welfare by taking the fruits of the labor that the 10% produce. As though one has an inherent right to someone else's very life and property (if you did, you wouldn't need a gun to steal that property). Communism, because it has worked out so well over the last century.
It's a contradiction. You're actually saying some people get to be 'free' using coercion and overt threats of force, by enslaving other people to fulfill their needs via welfare transfers based on the taxation of other better off persons income.
The system of welfare transfers, much less actual Socialism, requires extreme force to be applied at all times to keep the system functioning, as such there can be no freedom at all - there's always a gun pointed at your head.
The whole prerequisite of welfare is to take excess resources to redistribute.
Now who decides what is excess? Definitely not the person who has it and is greedy. So or societies have decided that majority or representative of the majority decided this. Reasonably equitable system, but not exactly colouring or incorruptible.
I don't think free markets exist, I believe they are an idealized model. I think this is especially true for the labor market.
Likewise, I don't believe there are coersion-free societies. But that does not mean I'm willing to overlook some baseline level of coersion as not being coersion at all. Governments (regardless of economic policy) tend to assert a monopoly on the use of violence in an area, and that monopoly on violence means their policies are enforced through coersion.
But If you say that property laws are coercion, you cannot then say that social net for unemployment helps one be free. The coercion agents are still out there, waiting for you.
After all, you were not not free in USSR even if you had a job - freedom is about possibilities.
Who would say that someone using a gun to coerce you is free?
But more broadly… it depends whether someone is a dogmatic free-marketer fundamentalist or just someone who was swayed by the arguments from that dogma. For the fundamentalists, forget it.
For those actually open-minded, take the scientific argument. Start with confirming agreement that you're both pro-social instead of anti-social (you both actually want what maximizes overall flourishing and well-being and don't prioritize some other value or dogma). Then get them to acknowledge that the free-market argument is a model that needs to be backed by empirical evidence to be accepted as actually describing reality instead of being just an untested hypothesis.
If you can get them to thus at least accept that understanding the complex factors in play is daunting and we can't just take an elementary principle and blindly apply it to any situation conclusively… well, then you can have a discussion with them over the next couple years about behavioral economics, psychology, culture, power…
My general go-to is emphasizing that employer power comes largely from being organized. It's not like each interviewer completely makes their own decision about hiring anyone with no rules or restrictions from the company (unless the interviewer is a sole-proprietor themselves hiring one other employee or contractor). The power in the corporation comes specifically from the organized structure of the company. The individuals on the other side of a contract are divided. They use things like unions and government to have power in solidarity, and without that, they can never have comparable power in negotiations.
So, either we accept the impulse for workers to build organizations or use government for solidarity or we insist that companies shouldn't exist either and need to just be free-market masses of independent actors too or we drop the pretense that we're describing some sort of equal-enough, voluntary free-market negotiation.
Good luck!
You have a dogma yourself. that's ok, just be aware that you have one, and are espousing one.
> "Then get them to acknowledge that the free-market argument is a model that needs to be backed by empirical evidence to be accepted as actually describing reality instead of being just an untested hypothesis."
The free market is one of the most tested ideas out there.
> "They use things like unions and government to have power in solidarity, and without that, they can never have comparable power in negotiations."
law is really important for most forms of economic systems to work. I think the fact that social media and perception drivings things so much could have a positive outcome in this area. Companies should see the welfare of their employees as an important role in making the world 'better'.
I see a lot of tech companies saying they want to make the world a better place, yet for instance, they have abysmal 401k matching plans. melinials are not saving enough for retirement, and that bad behavior in tech is not helping the future crisis. I wish a tech company would decide to be a true leader on this
I completely deny this. I am anti-dogma and presume at this point that you are either just lumping me in with dogmatic people who say things that my points remind you of or that you are otherwise misinterpreting me.
What's my dogma? Are you just conflating "dogma" with things like "bias" and "perspective" because I certainly have those, I'm just one person and not omniscient.
> The free market is one of the most tested ideas out there.
The free-market as a MODEL is well-tested and understood. There are cases where reality fits the model pretty well, but they are isolated. The vast majority of reality is far enough from the free-market model that it's impossible to use reality as a test of "the free market" because most markets in reality aren't fully free.
I suspect you're equating "market" with "free market". All the complex parameters of pricing, supply-and-demand, basic market economics… that's all present in most markets, free or non-free. It's not like when there are regulations or power imbalances, cartels etc. etc. that all of market economics disappears. But there's so rarely any example of completely free market to even study, we can't accurately accept that it's well-tested.
We can't study free-markets in a lab the way we can study basic physics or cell biology or whatever.
Besides, the vast majority of economics as a field has been practiced in ways that are nowhere near the scientific rigor of many other fields.
> [your last two paragraphs]
I'm not sure I follow the relevance here. Are you assuming that you're talking to some dogmatic ideologue such that the plain things you state which seem sensible enough is a counter to anything I think or wrote?
Education, Infrastructure, Military, etc.
All socialistic enterprises funded by the general fund.
Free enterprise does not work without a socialistic framework to support it.
For a pure unregulated free market see Ethiopia.
Even Somalia, the market is affected greatly by the military context of what's going on. It's got less centralized control, but it's not an actual free market entirely. A true free market as a complete overall social system is probably just a fantasy idea.
Ethiopa is one of the places I most want to visit before I get too old.
If we want the nuclear power of capitalism without the boom, we need to engineer an appropriate containment vessel.
Its not ironic, the requirement is called rule of law, and its a foundational stone from the philosophers that brought that royalty and religion from the State. The recognition of private property has been recognized as a necessity from the get go in classical philosophy and economics.
> Odd as it may sound, full time jobs are essentially what cause involuntary unemployment because you are not market testing your position on a daily basis.
Sure, it might decrease labor flexibility which can increase unemployment, but how big an effect can that actually be? And what is the proposed solution to fix that if its an actual problem?
> The gig economy is an attempt to deskill...
The gig economy is not de-skilling workers, its consuming the labor of unskilled workers because the price-ratio works. Those very same companies pay 6 figure salaries to a lot of people, that provide utility to the company as well. Neither by design, or in theory, do companies increase their profits by reducing the skill of their labor, they do it by increasing their productivity.
I see a tenuous relationship with the reserve army concept of Marx trying to be used here, but I'm not buying it.
We're all trading time and willpower for money. If the gig economy has a poor ROI, people can end up in poverty traps - stuck working a couple shitty jobs because they need the money to survive, but the jobs consume so much time/will-power that they can't pursue alternatives.
This becomes a huge issue for Uber-style companies where workers buy their own tools (cars), in exchange for uncertain per-trip wages with no benefits. They're called "contractors", but realistically what can they do if Uber "fires" them? Work for Lyft? Same shit, different logo.
Uber's practices are outright deceptive - they compare very optimistic ridesharing wages to hourly employee wages, without considering their car ownership/fuel/taxes/maintenance/insurance costs. I did some napkin math a while back which suggested quite a few drivers are actually losing money in the long-run (primarily maintenance and lower auto resale value).
Your actual post is mostly reasonable arguments, but this premise is not realistic. This is stretching the word 'coerced' to the point where it doesn't mean anything. The fact that resources are limited and we need the average person to add about as much value as they consume is not coercion. It is a (very sad) fact. There is no element of force involved except maybe the enforcement of property rights, which is one of the most reasonable things we ask our governments to undertake.
> They're called "contractors", but realistically what can they do if Uber "fires" them? Work for Lyft? Same shit, different logo.
Are these people born with "only allowed to work as a car driver" stamped on their forehead? If the market rate driving cars is so terrible, they need to find a different industry. The difficulties of moving between industries are real, I'll acknowledge them and say maybe there is a role for the government to facilitate this aspect. However, as a practical point, I don't think governments generally do. When we as a society decide who is responsible for employees moving between industries, we basically have to choose between this being the employers problem, this being the individuals problem or this being someone else's problem. I'm very happy to contend that, even though it is not very fair, the person who has the most control is the individual and they are the only one who is ultimately responsible for themselves.
There are a lot of problems with companies like Uber. The car drivers are clearly employees in every way except technicalities, and the practice of making them bring their own tools is reprehensible. But it is by far better to try and solve that problem by encouraging the growth of better alternatives than by dropping the hammer of regulation. When they regulated the taxi industries, my memory is in a lot of major areas the actual taxi drivers didn't end up benefiting and random licensed taxi owners did. Depends on the country and city.
Did you see what I said about poverty traps? Once someone is stuck, it's very challenging to break out without outside help.
> The difficulties of moving between industries are real, I'll acknowledge them and say maybe there is a role for the government to facilitate this aspect. However, as a practical point, I don't think governments generally do. When we as a society decide who is responsible for employees moving between industries, we basically have to choose between this being the employers problem, this being the individuals problem or this being someone else's problem. I'm very happy to contend that, even though it is not very fair, the person who has the most control is the individual and they are the only one who is ultimately responsible for themselves.
Personally, I'd like to see free or heavily subsidized public adult education. There is no need to regulate unethical employment practices when laborers have the freedom to seek employment elsewhere - the market can sort it out. But we need freedom of horizontal movement first.
And yet even in the supposedly so competitive SV tech market, abusive practices like forcing employees to sign arbitration agreements, at-will employment (can be dismissed with zero notice or severance and for no or any reason not prohibited by law), "unlimited" vacation that is really meant to discourage you from taking it, and long workweeks with no overtime pay are common.
Who doesn't get to deal with any of the above? Union employees (for the most part).
We need to agree on where the poverty traps come from first to then reason if government is the solution.
I think this probably does happen, but I'd be interested to know how many people are stuck in debt because they bought a product using a financial product they didn't understand vs it just happened.
This thread has a bunch of stuff about these potentially mis-sold financial products: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14476381
Essentially firms only hire if they can make a profit, where has an individual has to get hired to eat and have a sense of long-term usefulness in society.
Plenty of people take that freedom as an axiomatic, inviolable good or right, but reasonable people can have different values.
Some people believe that those freedoms are necessarily a net win for the economy, but that's a pretty shallow argument too.
Maybe workers' rights are a race to the bottom, a tragedy of the commons -- perhaps some small amount of regulation would be good for business and for workers, by forcing companies to spend a small amount more to get a more sustainable workforce without giving up advantages to competitors.
Obviously these freedoms and protections exist on a continuum. We've mostly come down on the side of minimum wages, which is a compromise on those fundamental, absolute freedoms -- in a sense all "workers rights" are curtailments of "jobseekers rights".
Uber's market is a market, but it's certainly not a free market.
Anyone who actually thought people gave a shit about chatbots was either deluded, a chatbot API salesman, or a manager/owner trying to cut costs by downsizing their call/chat support center.
Anyone who actually thought the gig economy was helping anyone but business owners was either deluded or a shill.
That's quite a generalization you're making.
Just because business owners are benefiting by pushing wages as low as the market will bear and reaping profits/growth, doesn't mean consumers/drivers aren't benefiting from the arrangement as well.
Service providers are granted an additional at-will income opportunity.
Consumers are granted a high-value low-cost service.
Many will argue that the service providers are being tricked into the arrangement through hidden costs. However, a large sector of drivers actually rent their cars, which pretty much removes all hidden costs and proves to me that these gigs are a viable alternative to employment.
I am a Software Developer with a decent salary for where I live. I got offered a job a couple of years ago, where 3/4 of my wage was through an international company and the rest through a normal Spanish one. When I saw the amount going into my account every month, I thought I had hit the jackpot as it was way more than I expected.
A while later when I got converted to a full Spanish contract, and my manager advised me to make sure I wasn't getting screwed. It was only then that I realized I hadn't actually been getting the pension payments on the 3/4 of my international contract up until then. What looked like a good deal hadn't actually been one at all.
I would be surprised if people less educated than me would understand all the hidden costs.
I'm going to highly disagree with you, there. I had a friend who tried renting the car from one of those companies. Nothing could be further from the truth than what you posted. It was basically the old "company store".
People don't need to give a shit about chatbots. A large amount of people deal with them all the time. Every time you decide to use chat to get help from some site that provides s service for you, what do you think the odds are you're first connected to a human? By having chatbots do the initial contact and information gathering, you can streamline the actual process and seamlessly connect and hand off to a real support rep after the rote info gathering is done, and provide them with the account number, a generalized idea of what the problem is, etc. Some requests can probably be handled entirely by the bot (need to change your password? That's easy to script).
Chatbots are all around us, supplementing formal interactions.
It's more accurate to say business owners and consumers are benefiting at the expense of the employees.
Like, suppose someone is selling some good and they get paid on commission, as like, some proportion of the purchase cost. If the price of goods of that sort go down (maybe one of the materials needed to manufacture it became more abundant?), then they would receive less income, but also not have to pay as much for different similar goods, and whether they are overall better or worse off would depend on the details.
In this particular case the consumers who are benefiting are generally a different group than the employees who are losing out, so I don't see why you bothered to point this out.
Which parent would not agree with, as they are offering a straightforward Marxist reading.
Sometimes you just need a quick gig to make ends meet between jobs. Something you can pick up in a day or two and leave just as quickly.
Full-time, long-term? No, it's not a great idea. But it's a good safety net when things get tough.
A lot of Americans point to Canada as an example, but it's a pretty bad example. If healthcare was so great in Canada, then there wouldn't be private hospitals in the United States that cater only to Canadians who go to America for the healthcare they can't get in Canada, or can't get in a timely fashion.
In American towns where a lot of Canadians spend the winter, the radio stations are full of ads for these hospitals. (Palm Springs, for example.)
If you mean the UK, the news over there is constantly full of horror stories about its NHS.
Perhaps you can be more specific?
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/jia-tolentino/the-gig-econ...
I'm half expecting their business model is to tarnish the industry to badly that Uber et all pay them hush money to stop advertising.
Right?
Consumers were losers?
I feel like the drivers are not paid adequately though, esp. given the hidden expenses. I talk with them regularly and think many don't realize those costs.
I always tip as a result, and I think Uber/Lyft give me better drivers as a result, though I can't be sure.
I think that these kind of thoughts are simply not economics. If driving is bad money after all of that, eventually people will realize and it will all come crumbling down. But it cant be true if drivers keep working for years like this.
It is also a stance that you can take only because you think there is something the government should do about it. There a a lot of carrers that are not financially sensical by some interpretation. Should artsists be banned or licensed to limit the number? Should Actors? Should QA analysts? etc etc.
My point is that even if it is a bad deal for drivers, its their choice to make, and its not going to lead to a better outcome to make the choice for them.
Fantastic typo! (Or was it intentional?)
The business does hiring many times, so they reap the efficiencies of scale and get increasingly adept over time at hiding the risks they offload onto the contractors.
To balance the information asymmetry, the contractors would need to pool their efforts similarly, and improve their ability to discover the true compensation. In other words, collective bargaining, with specialists who understand the full terms of the contract including all that's hidden in the fine print.
<snark cantresist="true">All those government officials who pass laws crippling unions should stop treating business owners like idiots who need "protecting".</snark>
Increasing unionizion has many side effects on the wider economy, and it's not my purpose to flog them. Instead, I'm merely trying to illustrate that each individual contractor is at a significant disadvantage when negotiating.
If HFCS wasn’t healthy, why do people eat it?
Now, that isn't to say that it wouldn't be better if people consumed less HFCS. (But, isn't the ubiquity of HFCS partially due to corn subsidies? I think I heard that.)
So, uh, when people purchase foods with HFCF I think it makes sense that this aligns with their marginal preferences. Does this mean it is to thei benefit? Hmm.
So you’re saying customers use those services for literally no reason.
(See: The curious curious phenomena that humans put most of their personal information on the Internet where other people can see it.)
Would not go to extremes and say everybody is a shill, since there has been serious innovation but we should be transparent of what is the cost of all that innovation. Just be honest with oneself (e.g. I'm working with this new fancy decentralized database instead of just buzzwording your way to success by blockchaining everything, etc). We need to drop the ego and work on what we love.
I've seen a lot of the people that some cases of people that do it that are future minded and care about running the numbers just rent a car for the day. All of a sudden, you've abstracted away a lot of those variable costs to a third party. Unfortunately, I think the rental companies wised up after a while, and have wording in the contracts about ride-sharing now.
I imagine in a large enough metro area, someone could (or has) abstract the vehicle and maintenance portion of the larger taxi services to specialized rental service for people that work in ride-sharing. Rent a ride-share car for a day, or more likely by the hour, and they'll make sure it's clean and in good running condition and meets the requirements for ride sharing service X, Y or Z. Specialized ride-sharing insurance optional...
Actually, I imagine some of the existing taxi services in larger cities might have already shifted to this. Seems like a natural pivot, since they already have the majority of what's needed in place.
For any unionized category/shop there should be a grouping of unions (adding a new union to that group should require a simple majority among a voting quorum of all active employees) which could thus collectively bargain between a large business and/or group of businesses and the workers that make that possible.
I also like the idea that unions on strike (in this case, groups of them; they'd agree to go out on strike together and vote together for it) don't disrupt business, but rather nullify profits. Maybe they agree that during "strikes" all compensation gets divided by charity/etc. This goes for the workers AND the businesses; both of whom still have to pay normal costs.
-- edit --
I forgot one other critical feature. Just like employees might take an employee though any of the unions, so to can the employee switch unions (I assume seniority and compensation offers would be favorable to prompt such a switch.)
It would be nice if Governments properly recognized the value businesses provide with long term stable jobs, and aligned the incentive in a way that creates more stable and happy communities in the distant future.
Right now governments will give anything to Amazon to get them to move to town and bring all those jobs with them. But how much will we incentive McDonald's to keep jobs, and not to replace all their employees with perfect hamburger vending machines?
Nobody is forced to drive. Nobody is forced to work for less than they value their labor. Unionizing Uber means dramatically high prices, which means less demand. There isn’t a magic pot of money just waiting to be distributed. If comes from consumer pockets. If Uber gets more expensive, I’ll drive myself. So that guy that would have made $10, now makes zero because he thinks he deserves $20. So he is actually worse off now. Markets don’t work in a vacuum — there are substitutes and you can’t “fix” a problem without unintended consequences.
Let supply and demand work. Those that think they should earn more can quit and to sell their services to someone willing to pay their desired rates. If nobody will pay that desired rate, then it’s clear that the market doesn’t value that service that much.
Why is supply and demand so hard for people to understand? We oppose industrial monopolies, why would we advocate for labor monopolies via unions?
> "...he thinks he deserves $20."
Who said anything about deserving? You said as much that you'd drive yourself when it came to a $20 ride; you wouldn't drive yourself if it was $10. This more or less suggests the only reason Uber provides value to you is because it charges less than what you'd charge if you were providing it, because you think you deserve $20. In that instance it's not unfair to say that you get value out of Uber undercutting the competition.
> "Those that think they should earn more can quit..."
I suppose they just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps too? Not many of us can enjoy the privilege of quitting our jobs because we know we're worth more than we're getting. I have that privilege and I use it often, like many of us do in tech. For as long as we value low prices at all costs, there will always be someone who is forced into taking on this kind of job because they don't have the luxury of choice that we do. They can't quit because it's either the $10 you want to give them, so you can save $10 for yourself, or nothing.
It's been clear enough for a long time that those who enjoy the services from others won't really advocate for them, and neither will their employers, so unions and regulations are there to sort that out.
It's easy for someone with a sought after talent to say normal workers can just "quit and sell their services to someone willing to pay more", but that isn't an actual option for many many people.
You must not think so if you believe they shouldn't have the ability to join a union.
"Nobody is forced to drive"
This whole "nobody is forced to" meme loses any and all credibility once you think for 2 seconds and realize that people are forced to work or starve.
"Let supply and demand work."
We're not the ones stopping it from working; employers are.
My best situation was when I had a client that was acting as a project manager and would feed me lots of work when I needed it.
EDIT: A few repliers clarified that it's probably about the stable and reliable income, and not about the nature of the work that's done every day. I can agree with that!
It depends how broadly you define “same thing”. I think many if not most of us would happily focus on programming every day.
Learning a new set of APIs, version control strategies, team members, platform peculiarities, build systems, bug reporting and issue tracking software, groupware... fuck that. I could sort of do it when I was in my early 30s but not now.
You don't wake up one day and say: "geez, I'm going to stop being a lawyer and go drive for Uber to spend more time with my kids". It is much more likely that a person flipping burgers somewhere might try being an Uber driver and that an Uber driver somewhere else might get fed up and end up going back to one of the low-skill alternatives (flipping burgers, retail, etc) at roughly equal rates.
"You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics."
In reality, of course, a can of Budweiser is cheaper than ever (productivity is up) while the populace has become so rich that it's voluntarily spending extra money on what it perceives as higher-quality beer. But there is no conceptual place for this in "beer" productivity statistics.
Economics is such a tragedy, because on the one hand it's so elegant and satisfying, but on the other it seems sufficiently incomplete to be considered broken. Maybe it's the newtonian version of something.
Newtonian methods had known flaws before relativity replaced them and quantum mechanics expanded that. Current economic methods also have known flaws. We're just waiting for Einstein.
The general form of the idea is called Simpson's Paradox - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
The application to the beer example is that as high-cost beers displace low-cost beers from the market, the cost-per-beer-sold rises even as the price of low-cost beer and the price of high-cost beer are both falling.
The study of economics is as much a framework for asking questions as it is for answering them. National-level economic systems are inherently to complicated to do meaningful experiments on, so we don't get to use the tools we normally do to find our way. Economics isn't broken, but the view of economics as a sister to physics is.
The "other things" that people would spend on are just other vehicles for acquiring utility. If the customer enjoys the better coffee enough to justify the higher cost, then spending on that is exactly in line with "better for the economy".
I ask because it _feels_ like everything has changed since 1973 at least. So I'm curious where my intuition differs from reality.
Productivity as typically reported is a statistic called "Total Factor Productivity" (TFP).
Here's how it's calculated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_factor_productivity#Calc...
> What units do we use?
TFP is unitless.
In the end, a designer can make a product people get more use out of.
Constant productivity growth is a terrible argument that computers haven't contributed to productivity. No single innovation, however broadly defined, will produce constant growth. As one source of growth peters out, another one picks up.
That's not true; the first decade of the 2000s rivaled the post-war era in terms of TFP growth:
https://www.bls.gov/lpc/nfbbar.gif
Even Brynjolfsson's ultimate thesis was not that "computers don't induce growth in TFP", but rather that "computers and business practices need to converge in order for computers to have an effect on TFP".
Google and Facebook contribute zero economic value. That's a big problem for trade.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/10/2...
But this is also a red-herring, its at most an accounting issue, not a real economy issue.
https://qz.com/633080/the-rise-and-fall-of-american-producti...
There’s plenty of demand for healthcare services and infra, but no social will to force the political will to fund it
Everyone has an opinion about how the rest of the world isn’t doing what they think it should, given some high level abstract view
Few offer concrete ideas
I think you're underestimating how important that flexibility is to a large contingent of people. I have talked a lot of Uber/Lyft drivers and have heard a ton of stories about how valuable that flexibility is. It's huge for students who are in school, for people who already work another job but want supplemental income, people who are mostly retired (or never worked) but have some new expense come up (one lady I spoke to recently started driving for Uber just to help pay for her daughter's upcoming wedding), people who are pursuing careers in music or other artistic endeavors, entrepreneurs who need a way to pay the rent while getting their business bootstrapped, etc.
For a lot of people in those situations, the control over their time really is a crucial aspect of what makes Uber/Lyft desirable.
Granted, that's just one aspect of the gig economy, but it seems to be a big one.
Strongly disagree. Waiting tables or bartending at high-end restaurants could be considered gig work. Wedding photography is gig work. I have a friend who runs a stationary side business as a "gig". These jobs, if you are able to market yourself effectively and gain a good reputation and some solid contacts, can pay extremely well. I have a nice 9-5 with benefits and stability, but my friends in the above positions earn about the same I do and work close to half of my hours.
That obviously isn't the case for everyone who does these, but I don't think you can make the claim "the pay sux" for all gig work.
https://www.npr.org/2018/06/07/617863204/one-in-10-workers-a...
One note from that story was they missed 25M low-income workers.
Jennifer Curry, a senior director at Samaschool, a San Francisco training program for low-income contract workers, estimates the government left out 25 million to 30 million freelance or contract workers who do some part-time work.
Aren't those exactly the type of workers that the NY Times article is talking about? 25 million is about 16% of the total workforce.
So in reality the number of gig workers might have doubled to something around 20% (or higher)?
I'd include all the hot air tech like AI, Big Data, and self-driving cars in that (until proven otherwise)...
But distortions to the dream have come from all sides. Customers demand the low cost, high quality service that independent contracts inherently don't provide. Customers also fail to recognize that your driver is an independent contractor, but they treat them like any service industry employee. Rideshare companies actively decide to offload employment costs to drivers while treating them just like employees. Drivers too violate the spirit of this idea, many immediately turn it into a full-time gig without organizing larger efforts to improve it. The spirit is that these gigs augment income, not become a sole source of it.
But almost across the board, these are messaging problems, and we as a society are really good at fixing messaging, despite how it feels at time. We are living in a time of massive message correction, and millions of previously marginalized people benefit.
Is the gig economy ideal? No. Eminently fixable? Yes.
Uber started as a way to fill the downtime that professional drivers had between clients and jobs. They said, "Hey, there is a workforce with 50% of it s hours idle. I bet we can turn the into cash." It was a brilliant idea. Airbnb started with a similar proposition. It was a derivative of couch surfing—find some excess supply and monetize it. People are doing this for free, I bet we can do it better and make a few bucks. And then in morphed into the abomination we have today.
It wasn't until Lyft and the competitive market saw what was happening and people thought, "What if we just ignore safety regulations and licensing by declaring that we are in a new industry? There's money to be made there." That's what the gig economy ended up being. It wasn't intentional. It was a way to avoid COSTS by ignoring safety, training, benefits, licensing, insurance, zoning and minimum wage laws. And that's where 90% of the value comes from. If these companies had to play by the same rules as everyone else they wouldn't exist because there wouldn't be enough money to be made.
Yeah, black cars with chauffeur licenses only. I remember thinking "a cab to the airport would be cheaper, but I'll pay a bit more to pamper myself -- I've never been in a black car!" just before I ordered my first ever Uber in 2012.
UberX, with "normal people" picking you up in their personal cars, wasn't until April 2013.
It never even occurred to Uber that it would be possible to let random, uninsured people drivers others around for peanuts, or that people would be so desperate for cash that they'd even be willing to do that. It was purely a function of the financial collapse that made it possible.
I'm pretty sure more than zero people have wanted part-time work with more flexible schedules than were commonly available. (See patio11: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/993186705850052610)
When unlicensed, unisnured people started driving for Uber and Lyft it wasn't because they wanted part-time work with "flexibility". It was because it was right after 2009, the unemployment rate was 10%, and people were desperate.
Says who? If the jobs are moving to the gig economy, then what income is a person supposed to augment? I find this argument both false and harmful to understanding the situation at hand.
I agree that there are certain workers who benefit from the gig economy (those living in mom's basement, have a working partner, etc.). What I disagree about (and thus possess cynicism) is that the "majority" will benefit from the transition of many positions from traditional employment to contracting.
We need a new third category: dependent contractor. Once that exists, we can start a more meaningful debate on what freedoms vs stability guarantees are best for it, without trying to force people into one extreme or the other.
The spirit of pushing all responsibilities and costs off onto workers?
In short, I suspect gig work is much more mentally taxing than typical work, since it isn't reliable or rooted in routine. I think that's why gig work is estimated at roughly the same percentage of the population as entrepreneurs.
Edit: Aditionally usually those have been the best drivers
I have done gig work for over six years. At the moment, I am working more like a traditional entrepreneur, but I can do that in part because I have the security of gig work to fall back on if I can't drum up enough clients. If I could get the kind of job I want, I would take it.
That last statement is a relatively recent development. I have health issues and doing gig work made it possible for me to have some earned income under really challenging circumstances where that really should not have been possible. Being able to access earned income while I'll and homeless allowed me to work on improving my health, allowed me to make working in my health a priority in a way that regular employment would not have facilitated.
I think this is the real revolution that isn't being talked about. Having a serious career requires you to have your act together in many important ways. You need energy, mental focus, some idea of what you like doing and are good at, etc. Gig work gives people options for muddling through or supplementing your income during difficult transitions.
Some years ago, I read a comment that was an A-ha! moment for me. Instead of attributing recessions to mysterious forces somewhere out there in the ether, it attributed them to human nature. It suggested we get lazy and complacent during good times, then work hard to get back on track after things start coming apart at the seams.
I am sure there are also large scale forces impacting people, but I dropped out of college in part because I knew people with college degrees and student loans who were mooching off of relatives and delivering newspapers. I felt I could deliver newspapers without a degree and would be better off for not being saddled with debt. It was very clear to me at the age of 20 that the "promise" I was hearing that a degree was a guaranteed ticket to a serious career and the good life was a myth. There is more to career success than getting X credential.
Large scale trends are not just the result of public policy at the federal level or real world phenomenon like Peak Oil. They are also the cumulative result of many individuals making choices.
The gig economy provides some fluidity and flexibility for workers who are handicapped, have a health issue, are having trouble breaking into their chosen career etc. Yes, I am aware that if gig work is all that is available, this can be a serious problem. But, in the other hand, another observation someone made that was an epiphany for me is that layoffs are part of the price we pay for having stable corporate jobs for some. When there isn't enough work to go around, someone gets shafted because of it. There is no magic way to make that not happen.
I'm aware there are people being shafted here. I think in the US, they are being shafted much more by our lack of universal health coverage than by gigs lacking benefits per se.
Sort of rambly. I don't have a specific point per se. More like thinking out loud, I guess.
The bemoaning by corporate media is hardly surprising. They want people to stay in one place. It fits the meme they know
But to quite the late Anthony Bourdain, “Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.”
Do we really need to babysit this much permanent infra that are massive office buildings and shopping malls?
Surely we need spaces to work and trade physical goods, especially if we’re on the g
I think this is the next step of globalization
Look at the Cold War era. Of course it made sense to hunker down. Where were you going to go? Europe and Japan were bombed to hell. The USSR?
This is the last 60 years coming to an end
Time for new patterns around what work and life should look like