Hacker News Reader

Comment by countryqt30 | Hacker News Reader

Again, nobody forces you to do this so what's the point?

I think you're demonstrating a point of view that's tragically common here on HN - you're assuming that people are never desperate, and that they always have an alternative to choose instead. Many people are in the position where they only have one option and have to pick that to earn a living. That's not strictly being forced to work a job that sucks, but the reality is they don't have a choice if the alternative is starving or losing their home.

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.

> I think you're demonstrating a point of view that's tragically common here on HN - you're assuming that people are never desperate, and that they always have an alternative to choose instead.

Indeed. The minimum wage should be $20 an hour. If you can’t earn that much then you should be on the dole.

If you remove the opportunity to earn some money with gig work, you are forcing them into their next best alternative, which is starving or losing their home. I don’t see how that makes people better off.

The "gig work" jobs crowd out other, better-paying and/or better-benefited jobs because the companies brokering them (Uber, Lyft, etc) are able to operate without turning a profit.

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).

What were these people doing before they started driving for Uber? Presumably they decided that being a driver was a better use of their time and that's why they made the switch.

Do you really think people doing gig economy jobs have alternatives? It's not a "lifestyle choice", it's literally looking around and saying what can I do that will pay my bills, today. And if these are the only options available this is what you "choose".

Right, but without the gig economy jobs they'd have less possibilities for income.

Without the gig economy jobs they could get welfare. But they don't qualify for welfare because gig economy jobs are available.

Which would also mean the need for real jobs is honestly represented.

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.

I don't understand what you're getting at. So offering someone employment (do this for money) should only be allowed if it's at a consistent frequency (full time) and at a guaranteed non-variable amount? What if the job they're being hired to do does not have consistent demand? Or the service provided has competition, or varying costs, which requires price changes?

Yes. Workers should not be at the mercy of an unreliable paycheck.

> What if...

Can you give an example of what you're talking about?

Think about the demand for tax preparers each year. Higher demand Jan-Apr. Lower demand the rest of the year. Should companies be forced to hire tax preparers full time year round or should they be free to contract for only when they are needed?

That example isn't comparable to the kind of contracts that were originally being discussed. A contract with fixed hours on the scale of months doesn't have the same degree of stress as one with hours varying from day to day, week to week.

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?

There are so many, as a simple example, think basically any contractor that does work on houses.

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.

People do in fact have options. They look at them and they choose. Lots of people choose to work in the gig economy for reasons you obviously don’t value. Working Uber beats working many other jobs, as should be obvious by the fact people continue doing it. People aren’t idiots. You can fool some of them some of the time. You can’t fool many people about their own lives and experiences for long.

> 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.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w23296.pdf

What were the drivers doing before Uber existed? Were all of them unemployed and unable to find any other means of employment?

It’s like zoning. Some people honestly believe that no one is both willing, able and perfectly happy to live in a small, cramped apartment or without a kitchen, or in a group house. Other people understand perfectly well that making all those lifestyle choices illegal through zoning increases the value of their property by making it impossible to be poor and live in that area. If you make living in an area while poor impossible only the middle class and wealthy will live there and you’ll have lower crime and the schools will have good results because they’re full of the children of people who’ve made it.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com