Gig-Economy Workers Are the Modern Proletariat
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In Discipline and Punish, Foucault talks about how in the early modern era, the actions of subordinate individuals (workers, students, soldiers, etc.) became increasingly regimented through more and more precise specifications of procedures as sequences of elementary actions. Then in the 19th and 20th centuries, we started to see "rationalist" economic efficiency projects like scientific management/Taylorism, which essentially tried to deskill factory workers by fragmenting their work based on time and motion studies.
The gig economy is the neoliberal revival of these scientific management principles, plastered over with the neoliberal ideals of marketization and entrepreneurialism. Just like before, it aims to improve efficiency by quantifying and compensating work at finer-grained scales than ever before.
It has the potential to drastically increase economic efficiency, but at the expense of financial security and the psychological wellbeing of entire generations.
Plus globalization and adding women to labor supply.
The idea is that these projects aim to make more and more kinds of manual work fungible and exchangeable by breaking them down into small enough subtasks. Each of these elementary tasks get commoditized into a market of near-perfect competition when they become deskilled this way. It's not automation, it's a hyper-division of labor, like a worldwide assembly line connected by ethernet and optical fiber.
It is specifically that it isn't automation that makes it a problem. If you were totally replaced by a machine, then at least you wouldn't have to work. But here, you aren't being replaced by machines -- you are part of the machine, like a component that's completely replaceable and interchangeable.
Two people needed to do 5 tasks now done by 1 person who can handle all 5 tasks. Full time secretaries for everyone are now down to 1 administrative assistant for the whole team or office. Taxi dispatchers not needed anymore.
That’s what technology enables people to do. Measure, target inefficiencies, and commoditize. But I don’t think it’s anything like a grand conspiracy, it’s pretty much the only way to move forward.
Problem is the humans aren’t so interested in distributing the fruits of the resulting efficiencies in an equitable manner.
But it's precisely this barrier that we've begun to cross that indicates there are some very old questions that we should be asking ourselves again.
I think you and I agree that at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is that this increased economic efficiency has the potential to improve everyone's wellbeing, not just concentrate wealth in the hands of a few.
“Non market” work seems like another word for labor you can’t afford. Rich people with drivers and butlers or whatever have had instacart forever.
Having a central dispatch to relay what you want to a driver, have them go pick it up and deliver, and then re route them to the next one all while handling incoming calls is probably too expensive to offset the convenience of an individual not driving to Target and picking it up. But with a computer and some programming, you don’t need any dispatch, and you don’t waste time communicating what you need, which drives down the cost of getting something delivered to you so that it’s now affordable. The machine is doing the work of people that would have had to coordinate and pass all that information between two parties. Not to mention the risk of not being paid (taken care of by the payment card networks).
Also, I’m not convinced these many of these “gig” companies are going to be around forever. Instacart might work in a few urban locales with a few rich young people with no families, but it’s far from proven that it’s valuable enough and cheap enough for most people.
“Work” is different than transaction costs. The amount of human labor needed hasn’t changed in any meaningful way compared to what was needed before, so it’s not the reduction of labor demand through automation that’s at issue. What’s changed is, as the OP explained, that technology now permits more fluid allocation of that labor so as to reduce transaction costs. This is a different phenomenon from automation eliminating the need for actual work.
> “Non market” work seems like another word for labor you can’t afford.
Non-market work is a well understood term in economics for work households perform themselves, such as child care, etc. Technology that allows moving non-market work into the market doesn’t decrease labor opportunities, it increases them. That’s the opposite of your thesis.
Again, two different phenomenon. A roomba is automation—it replaces the need for a human to vacuum and decreases the amount of human labor needed. An app that makes it easy to hire someone to clean dishes after a big party is not automation and doesn’t decrease the amount of human labor needed.
> Rich people with drivers and butlers or whatever have had instacart forever.
Yes, and the amount of human labor involved in that scenario was about the same as today. What changed was the transaction costs, enabling a shift from an employee relationship to a contractor relationship Read the Theory of the Firm. It addresses this issue directly.
The fact that someone would even be willing to accept "gig" work is because the better opportunities they might have had such as manufacturing, customer service, secretarial, travel agent, etc is automated or outsourced, and/or they need to supplement their income because it's not rising in real terms.
>The amount of human labor needed hasn’t changed in any meaningful way compared to what was needed before
I disagree with this statement because I think that is all that has changed. Before and after instacart or uber or whatever, the cost of gas, vehicles, maintenance did not change in any meaningful way. So why did people not have things delivered for them? Because the equivalent amount of human labor required to do what internet+app+GPS would have been too costly.
The nature of rich people and drivers and butlers hasn't changed, I'm sure those that can afford to have them full time prefer that than some random person on Instacart. And while transaction costs have changed, what has also changed is a demand for labor that needs to be permanently employed for 40+ years. So you have the perfect situation where labor has nowhere to turn but these apps, and these apps can reduce the cost of utilizing this temporary labor such that the upper middle class can afford to use it.
Folks in this discussion are missing the point. Just because it is no longer human labor, does not mean it is no longer work.
When apps connect customers with providers instead of people, that is automation.
He argues that (to quote Zizek), "in daily ideology, our servitude is presented to us as our freedom. He demonstrates how we are all treated as capitalists who invest in our lives. Indebtedness implies a functional discipline. It is today a new way of maintaining control over individuals, all whilst promoting the illusion of free choice. Even the fragility of our career path and chronic insecurity is presented to us a chance to reinvent ourselves every two or three years. And it works very well."
It's so much more cost-effective than slavery. Slaves have to be fed, clothed, and housed. Gig workers don't.
Not only that, gig workers have freedom and opportunity. Not much of it, but they can fantasize about escaping their trap. There's a whole ideological system telling them it's all their fault. Capitalism, Christianity, and Judaism all line up on this.
Rebellion is very difficult. The debt system doesn't oppress. It's merely indifferent to your suffering. It simply ignores you until you die.
This happens because the employer pays per job. For example, Bird and Lime waste workers time by letting them all chase after the same scooters to be charged so a worker might spend time going to pick-up a scooter only to be beat to it by another by a few moments. It seems highly suspect that this is the most efficient way to get this done unless your idea of efficiency only means lowest cost to the company.
Contrast it with a typical salaried job. In such a position, people basically get paid to take bathroom breaks, chat with coworkers, check social media, eat lunch, etc. and they might not even be in the office for the full 40 hours a week. They get to eat up even more resources by participating in benefits like health insurance, paid time off, and pensions. Isn't that such a waste of resources?
That salary work mostly pays a lot more than gig work tells you something about the economic impact of both. Gig work might be more efficient than hourly pay for the same work, but it isn't maximizing overall economic efficiency, it's a middle man capturing more of the value.
All productive labour is being broken down into pipelined work streams where any individual worker performs as simple and as well defined a task as you can give them, and performs that task all day every day. This increases the economic efficiency of the worker, at the expense of depriving their work life of any meaning and turning them into an unremarkable, disposable, exchangeable cog in a machine.
Pretty much every industry in the developed world follows this trend, including tech.
It almost feels like secure salaried positions were actually the abnormal deviation in history, a small island of stability caused by a temporary surge of social democratic politics in the post-Great Depression era.
Do you mean social democratic?
Here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/... (search for "In the progress of the division of labour")
Turns out there's also a wikipedia page outlining the history of this line of reasoning:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour#Henri-Louis...
I worked in an environment where the CIO would frequently refer to the tech staff as “the factory”. I often encouraged this CIO and others in the management team not to because it was demoralizing and not true - the work was highly skilled, highly dynamic and not repetitive.
Oh and if you treated tech work like a factory it looked like lots of management overhead, poor execution from low skilled workers, predictable timelines (long timelines), and last but not least higher cost.
We haven't discovered great ways of winning wars or building empire without being inefficient and treating people like pawns.
Our history books don't spend time making us think about the morale of the front line soldiers in Alexander/Genghis Khan/Napolean/Stalin's armies. Instead we have entire shelves of books devoted to the mindlessly ambitious guys at the top of the food chain.
We make Edison an icon and give Marconi a Nobel, but if you know your history, these guys ended up at the top of the food chain because they were ruthless. It hardly mattered what Oppenheimer/Einstein/Feynman thought about the nuclear bomb. Because they were the "factory".
Much like the "factory" of people at the pentagon/wall st/google/facebook etc.
We still haven't figured out a good way to keep "factories" running or expand/defend empires without propping up mindlessly ambitious people. The inequality rates suggest our faith in them is at an all time high.
Our current default method much like the cold war or a chimp troupe, is to keep mindlessly ambitious people at the top of the food chain constantly paranoid about each other. Ofcourse we can do better. But the agency isn't there yet. For example, Facebook could turn into a Wikipedia type entity by tomorrow if the "factory" of workers revolt.
I don’t disagree with your thoughts on charismatic leadership but the response seems misplaced or slightly off topic.
I think factory management and motive is slightly different than dictatorial/power leadership.
At least he was being honest in revealing management thinking. Worse would be a guy who said the company was like a big family, while planning which kids to lay-off next quarter.
A successful path forward for humanity in such a world might involve somehow getting most people to have ownership of the robots that produce what they need/want. A difficult proposition because, if one has the freedom to manage capital one also has the freedom to be conned out of that capital or take on too much risk. It also seems very unlikely at the moment as at least the US's educational system seems to be run by people that think thinking about capital and investing is not valuable or a worthy use of time. Wouldn't it be great if we were all capitalists with an income stream we controlled that could support a minimum lifestyle. If it was supported by mostly robots/machines and not other people, it could be a great outcome for everyone.
Regarding ridesharing, I disagree. App-based hailing is objectively more efficient and scalable (to lower population densities) than street hailing, and more efficient than privately-owned cars requiring massive, distributed investments in parking infrastructure.
At least until recently these services didn't even seem to help with the utilization problem where drivers would be sitting for periods w/o a fair. At least Lyft now will schedule a drive with their next rider while the current one is in the car.
Companies are attempting to monopolize the employees output, but only pay for the seconds the employee is producing for them
a possible reason why it is uneconomic to give gig economy workers salaries is because the necessary discount would put them below minimum wage.
I believe this is exactly what economosts mean when they talk about efficiency. It’s professional jargon. And yes it differs frim the common sense definition of efficiency.
But the employers aren't paying for that time.
I am pretty sure I found it on HN a few years ago.
it's not so much that we're reaching for some neoliberal efficiency (whatever that means) at the expense of humanity, but that such kinds of industrial regimentalism allows the managerial class to place themselves above and apart from the proletariat in the corporation.
regimentalism marginalizes workers such that managers dehumanize and treat workers indiscriminately. it allows managers to make rational yet ruthless decisions without considering worker impact. it sets them apart; it others the workers, and thereby gives managers all-important status over workers, even where otherwise undeserved.
at the same time, the proletariat worker self-disciplines themselves (as foucault likes to put it) around the ever-intricate rules and ever-tighter tolerances, so much so that they cannot pay attention to the man behind the curtain pulling the strings (and realizing that he is pitiful and small).
this is the most important aspect of regimentalism, and the most insidious. the proletariat gig-economy worker loses money, power, and esteem in the transaction, but they're too busy jumping through hoops to do anything about it.
There is another problem which I find more worrisome: we are expecting gig workers (and most other workers) to subject to hardcore competition for their jobs, wages and terms. The argument (also my argument above) is that it leads to efficient and honest outcomes because it involves little to no coercion.
But at the same time, governments are colluding with and bailing out the financial elites with every market crash. We did it with LTCM, in 2001, in 2008 and who knows when again. The bailout involves mass coercion of savers and an implicit punishment of those who were careful.
It may have profoundly changed the mentality of the wealthy. For the last 10 years, "if it gets bad enough, there will be a bail out" has become standard investment wisdom.
Socialism for those who own, free markets for those who don't. This contradiction is what'll ultimately do us in.
People are particularly bad at self evaluation.
Keep in mind, most people don't know what their IQ is. And most don't consider themselves to posses less intelligence as they don't know what more intelligence feels like.
See this video for relationship between job expectation and IQ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjs2gPa5sD0
People with a level of intelligence that is measurably above average can still have difficulty finding and retaining jobs. There is a large group of people who can be expected to take whatever jobs they can find, out of necessity, regardless of their skills and aptitudes.
For AMT US (roughly since they don't give out exact numbers): 8% - could not find other employment 10% -can only work from home 23% - prefer to work from home 1% - pay is better then other available jobs 43% - to complement pay from other jobs 4% - to ear money while going to school 3% - as a form of leisure 7% - enjoy it
For AMT india (roughly since they don't give out exact numbers): 4% - could not find other employment 12% -can only work from home 24% - prefer to work from home 8% - pay is better then other available jobs 25% - to complement pay from other jobs 5% - to ear money while going to school 2% - as a form of leisure 14% - enjoy it
[0] - http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcom...
What used to be a quite rare mode of employment that just a few chose, has become endemic, and seems like it's become near the default for the lowest paid fifth of our economy. That growth has been entirely in the last 15 years.
They do it because the choice has become that or unemployment. Unemployment that will probably sanction them for not accepting a zero hour contract, or a self-employed driving or labouring job.
Plenty of private companies receive public funding disguised as defense costs and the output of their research goes to private investors. The transistor, GPS, Arpanet, etc ...
> Socialism for those who own, free markets for those who don't.
I get the point but the sentence is an oxymoron.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/socialism
"any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods "
I understand what the parent is trying to say and I agree with it, but "socialism only for the rich" is literally not socialism.
Why do you keep finding people to go into prostitution?
hunger
Source: see other commenter's reply, he looked it up.
Entire economy should be setup this way so that no one is tied to a specific career outside of the limited number of professions like doctors etc...
Make employers (self-employed or not, doesn't matter) pay mandatory retirement, health-care, incapacity and unemployment contributions / insurances.
This is already a solved problem in many countries.
People, on the whole, would prefer to have more meaningful jobs rather than delivering burgers to office workers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjs2gPa5sD0
Personally I wouldn't mind cycling around all day and staying fit, but keeping software running pays a fair bit better.
Yes actually, that sounds like a great improvement.
So basically you are arguing with yourself in effect which again I don't understand why would you do...?
What? how? What about service workers (which constitute a major section of US workforce)? Do burger flippers at mcdonald's own their means of production? Cleaners? Waiters? Heck even truckers don't own their truck.
On the contrary, in the classical sense most gig-economy workers (at least those we associate with the gig economy) are not Proletariat - uber drivers own their car, AirBnB own their houses, Marketplaces (etsy, fiverr etc... which Amazon turk is nominally a part of) own the tools and knowledge to make whatever they sell.
Amazon Turkers are really not representative of the Gig Economy (a term that came much later then Amazon's Mechanical Turk) and at least for me I don't really think of them as part of the Gig Economy.
That was never seen as possible in the squalor of 18th Europe.
So it is not that weird that people get the two wrong.
Now the question is whether they must own all of the means of production to be considered bourgeois? I would say no, especially in today's world, where most production is a complicated multi-tiered process.
But even if you do think so, they are still much better off, Marxist-wise, from virtually every service worker, who own no means of production.
In any case, that doesn't mean that there is no exploitation or that the gig economy should not be regulated, but it really doesn't have anything to do with Proletariat.
A farmer on a market stall can price however he likes.
Only Uber (and other ride-haling apps I suppose) forces a price, all other marketplaces the price is set by the seller - AirBnB, Etsy, fiverr. In Amazon Turk the seller and buyer roles are reversed and Turkers only accept work that pay enough for them.
I would say it's more a product of the industry they are in - transportation is usually regulated to have a fixed price almost everywhere - then the nature of marketplaces in the gig-economy as a whole.
An individual driver withdrawing his car is a resignation, or declining to do a particular job, surely? Go back to pre employment legislation times and it was pretty common to require a worker to own the tools by buying them themselves and take them to work in the local factory. The factory and machinery was still the means of production.
Consider a nationalisation where a state buys the means of production. They would nationalise the company that owns the factory not the individual workers and their tools. If someone decided to nationalise AirBNB or Uber they'd take the company and platform, not a thousand cars or houses.
It is up to the driver to accept the fare.
firms like comcast, who may be the only ISP offering >25mbps in a particular area, are the ones who get to dictate a price.
This analogy doesn't hold in the Marxian framework. Gig companies adopt the "D-M-D" scheme, where they hire a worker to produce a service which the company will sell, earning part of the profits; the marketplace owner does not enter such a scheme, and its relationship with the farmer is not considered to extract surplus value.
>But even if you do think so, they are still much better off, Marxist-wise, from virtually every service worker, who own no means of production.
Indeed, people like the farmer - owning the means of production, and self-employed or with few employees - are a distinct class in the Marxian framework, namely the petite bourgeoisie.
"The means of production" in the gig economy is the marketplaces and apps. They parcel out the work to people to carry out using the tools they have at their disposal -- a car, a bike, a toolkit, whatever. It's established, much like a factory is, to break up the work into discrete steps to be carried out by people who are largely replaceable. In this case the app is just the replacement for the top-hatted capitalist factory owner.
AirBNB hosts are slightly different since they more closely resemble petit bourgeois smallholders and innkeepers rather than members of the proletariat.
In a similar way that if a blacksmith (or a farmer) made something and went to the market square to sell it, he isn't a Proletariat just because he doesn't own the market square (which by the way, some would require rent to use).
Most gig-economy workers operate in multiple platforms (at least when possible) - drivers are on both Lyft and Uber, AirBnB apartments are also rented directly or through other platforms.
It's not the fact that the sellers don't own the marketplace that leads to exploitation, it's the fact that the marketplace exploits it's monopoly to extort too much freedom away from the drivers. I visited Ukraine a few weeks ago and drivers in the dominant ride-hailing app (Uklon I think) can refuse a ride if the pay is too low - this opens kind of a bid system. While the experience was terrible as a user it does change the dynamics completely.
Middle class does exist, and it's existence is rather obvious. Trying to conflate middle class with low class or poverty makes no sense at all, because the plight of a low class worker has absolutely nothing in common to the problems and challenges faced by middle class workers.
It is also a lot easier to move from middle class to poverty, than it is to fall from the upper class.
Yes, it feels like there is a 'colossal difference', but it's not nearly as big as the difference between middle class and the ultra-wealthy.
But anyway, I am hoping to make this role of teaching and babysitting AI as fun and rewarding as possible. Like a fun video game, along with a sacred duty to take care of users and protect their privacy.
I will also ship some form of this to end users eventually, so that it can run entirely offline, or at least without our services.
I'm thinking that systems trained with interactive learning might create an entirely new category of job, operating AI. Sure, trained domains will require less babysitting over time, but that just frees up the labor force to expand to more domains.
You may not like their proposals, or believe that they'll fix the issues, but they don't seem to want to hand power back to the NUM to restart 70s power cuts and the three day week.
I'd even venture to suggest they are more connected to this century than the current Tory administration. Whether Labour deserve to govern, or whether they have right combination of plans, well there I'm far less certain.
I also wasnt talking about zero hour contracts at all???
I hope HN doesn't become yet another arena where you can't discuss broad categories of political theory without being savaged by Corbynites.
[0]:https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jul/07/corbyn-crit...
I have no interest in a long thread about how the policies make people on HN feel. But it seems worth pointing out that the ‘precariat’ are a primary issue for Her Maj’s shadow cabinet.
So the situation will probably get worse.