Driving a taxi or delivering food is a pretty bad job, doing it as a self employed contractor is almost criminal. You have to cover all your own expenses and have no guarantee of work, with zero progression (ever heard of an Uber driving saving up and staring their own minicab business?). It’s a terrible economic decision.
The market does not correct for this as it is entirely controlled by a small group of companies.
So sure, nobody is forcing anyone to drive for Uber, but there are people who have to drive for Uber because they don't have any other opportunities in the short term.
It doesn't help that these jobs often have an attractive shine to them up front—fast, easy money! all you have to do is drive around!—but hide lots of costs—like massively increased wear and tear on your car—that there's no advertisement about, and no help in covering. If you have to keep driving to keep food on the table, it's also that much harder to take the time required to find a better job (though admittedly, that's not really qualitatively different from most low-end hourly-paid jobs, though it may be quantitatively, if your expenses end up wiping out enough of the income that you're effectively getting less than minimum wage).
Indeed. The minimum wage should be $20 an hour. If you can’t earn that much then you should be on the dole.
> The value of flexible work: Evidence from uber drivers
> Using data on hourly earnings for Uber drivers, we document the ways in which drivers utilize this real-time flexibility and we estimate the driver surplus generated by this flexibility. We estimate how drivers’ reservation wages vary from hour to hour, which allows us to examine the surplus and supply implications of both flexible and traditional work arrangements. Our results indicate that, while the Uber relationship may have other drawbacks, Uber drivers benefit significantly from real-time flexibility, earning more than twice the surplus they would in less flexible arrangements. If required to supply labor inflexibly at prevailing wages, they would also reduce the hours they supply by more than two-thirds.
This is a major debate in West at the moment, and in the UK it's synonymous with the term "zero-hour contracts": is it somehow OK to suppress unemployment figures by nominally employing more people but giving each one a smaller share of all the labour, and so, wages?
If the gig economy unsustainably employs people at cut-throat rates, then the statistics look good, and that spins the public opinion. Why would workers complain that they can't pay the bills if there are so many jobs out there? In fact, employment for peanuts is worse than no employment at all, because it is a lie perpetuated to try to avoid having to really deal with the issue of job poverty.
> What if...
Can you give an example of what you're talking about?
Fixed term contracts are allowable, because taking that thinking to the extreme would mean never being able to terminate a worker, even in cases where their employment becomes obsolete.
The issue revolves around "technically being employed" - having a contract which doesn't entail consistent or sufficient hours, and then not even having the choice to work enough to get by. This unfairly pumps employment figures for companies and the government, who can say that they have X workers, while denying an honest representation of how much people are actually able to work.
My original question was - is there an example of a job which could justify these kinds of fluctuations in working hours and subsequent income?
Painter, they can only work on days it's nice out. Kinda hard to paint when it's raining, and you can't get the day back.
By the same token many people of the “I’m middle class and I think this choice should be illegal.” persuasion genuinely think they’re making lower class people’s lives better by setting a minimum floor of some sort. They don’t think poor people can really make informed choices. It’s the same mindset as whorephobic feminists from Sweden or Iceland “protecting” women.