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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

I take issue with the word 'quietly'. The gig economy is pretty much designed to do an end-run around worker protections, starting off by denying the workers so much as an employment agreement.

The difference is all the more striking in countries that had above average worker protections in place. A large contributing factor here is that due to the internet's international nature it is very well possible that the enabler is in a jurisdiction that is entirely different from the one where the work is carried out.

Free-market fanatics see this all as a good thing but I'm really not happy with this rapid return to piece-work, which was outlawed in favor of hourly rates and minimum wages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_work

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In my own life, I've found the total cultural embrace of "full-time" employment to be a vector for voluminous abuse.

It's specifically because we draw income from one company that they have leverage to abuse us.

It saddens me how this (to me) plain fact is left out of the debate about gig workers and their protections.

I think employee protections are crucial, but I think the notion that gigs are abusive in and of themselves is a misattribution of blame.

> because we draw income from one company

This is a fair contrary point to raise. You can see its effect most clearly in the U.S. in the fear people have around health insurance, because it's so closely tied to their employer. (Which is also its own ball of problems, of course.)

If the US ever manages to separate the safety net (healthcare, basic living needs covered, retirement) from full time employment I can see the argument for a gig economy working. You may actually see "the market" compete for employees in a way that benefits them instead of how full time employment works today. Given the fact that corporations are far more effective at passing laws that benefit them vs. the American people, I'm not going to hold my breath.

This is a terrible way to look at it. If the labor pool is fractured into hundreds of millions of pieces, each acting in their own self-interest, how can you keep big businesses from exploiting them?

We'd just be back to the wild west of employment law pre-1880s, except without even the meager fallback of employment contracts, everyone would be at the mercy of the owners.

There is a very real scenario for many workers that comes down to this:

a) continue working this horrible job and survive

b) quit working this horrible job and (lose healthcare/don't pay bill xyz/starve/insert outcome here)

My argument is that if survival isn't tied to gainful employment, the nature of work and the market will shift.

With gig platforms you're free to get abused by many different companies. Yey!

Sure. But more importantly, you're free to work for many companies so that if one becomes abusive you can turn up your hours on another.

And if they are all abusive?

You might ask how that can be so - but one clear example, the market dictates these jobs do not provide benefits, that is their competitive advantage even. So how can a different company competitively provide non abusive practices?

I work for a good platform. It's name is Textbroker. The positive part is in the name: it's a broker. It provides a marketplace for writers to find work. It mediates the relationship between writers and clients.

I don't chase my pay. It takes me seconds to request my pay once a week.

I don't fight with difficult, unreasonable clients trying to screw me over. I let Textbroker handle them.

I have tried to promote their model as a good model. I have tried to suggest people should create businesses like it for other types of work.

So far, it seems like no one is listening to me.

I'm glad to see there may be some workable models, I hope the business is sustainable.

Do you know how much an app "taxi" driver or an app food delivery person actually gets paid? (Also, it's not up to the person doing that to determine how much to charge)

The real problem, if you look at it from first principles, is the lack of US government protections/services for all workers.

If our government provided healthcare, eduction, a real pension program, non-terrible unemployment programs, etc. (as it works in most other developed countries) it would not matter if you are a gig worker or full-time employee. There would be no way to exploit you and gain a competitive advantage by hiring you as a contract worker. Companies and workers would be free to arrange employment simply around money and time. Benefits would not matter, and thus, the employment market would become more efficient.

The fact that US companies are wholly responsible for the quality of life of their employees is totally hilarious in a modern world where you don't work for the same company for your entire career. You can go from a 1st-world standard of living to a 3rd-world one simply by changing employers in the US. It's absurd.

> If our government provided healthcare, eduction, a real pension program, non-terrible unemployment programs, etc. (as it works in most other developed countries) it would not matter if you are a gig worker or full-time employee.

The issue with most of these things is that governments, especially the US government, are generally worse at providing things than competitive businesses. For people who actually have health insurance, outcomes in the US system are better than in most other countries, the US higher education system is generally considered one of the best in the world, etc.

The key is not to nationalize services, it's to provide a baseline of support. Pay everyone a UBI. Then if you need healthcare, you have money, go buy healthcare. If you want to go to school, go to school. You don't actually need the government to operate the school, and you especially don't need it telling people what to spend the money on. (See also student loans and home loan interest subsidies and the effect on education and housing costs.)

UBI is cargo cult finance. It's a broken mental model that will kill the system.

Money doesn't have inherent exchange value per se. It's primary value is in reducing friction in trade. Injecting more money into a system without tying it to injecting more goods and services into the system is a known means to fuel inflation.

A UBI doesn't create money, it transfers it. It's a generic safety net that provides a floor for how low income can go, so that nobody involuntarily goes without food or medicine but you also don't need the government providing services itself or ordering people to spend the money in a particular way.

> Injecting more money into a system without tying it to injecting more goods and services into the system is a known means to fuel inflation.

Right now people are paying for things on credit. If you give them the money instead of requiring them to borrow it, the only difference is that they don't have to pay interest.

But it could cause inflation in specific assets if the stuff the net recipients buy is different than the stuff the net payers would have bought -- which would be amazing. We're currently having a huge problem with central banks not being able to hit their inflation targets even at historically low interest rates. If we had something that could bring inflation up to traditional levels it would be a boon, since it would allow nominal wages to rise which is badly needed since everyone is currently saddled with unprecedented levels of mortgage, student loan and credit card debt and anything that could devalue the debt would be a major benefit.

If you give them the money instead of requiring them to borrow it

You are probably talking about the government borrowing it instead of individuals. This tends to not end well.

The money has to come from somewhere. If it isn't tied to creating new goods and services, then either you are basically printing more or taxing someone for it. Wealth transfer schemes are inevitably unpopular and tend to not work well. Schemes to "soak the rich" tend to get push back from the rich, who generally are in a better than average position to resist being victimized by the system.

>Wealth transfer schemes are inevitably unpopular and tend to not work well.

Transfer payments are used as an economic stabilizer along with taxation. They also pool risk. You'll need to back up your assertion since most economists see some benefit to transfer payments, and most developed economies use them.

> You are probably talking about the government borrowing it instead of individuals. This tends to not end well.

It tends to end with inflation eroding the debt. Which is exactly what we want in this case, ideally over time rather than all at once, but still.

> The money has to come from somewhere.

Why can't it come from nowhere? That's where the debt it's replacing came from. Banks don't actually have the money they loan you. They're only required to keep a small fraction of it in reserve. The rest of the money is created from nothing.

We're fundamentally in a position that we have to print a lot of money and cause a nontrivial amount of inflation because we already did that throughout the housing crisis and the response to it, allowing the prices of housing, education, healthcare and stocks to enter serious bubble territory. As a result of that either the nominal prices of those things have to come down or nominal wages and the nominal prices of everything else have to go up to reach parity with them.

But lowering the nominal prices of those things can't save the people who already paid for them on credit and now hold significant debt as a result, which is nearly everybody. Moreover, reducing nominal major asset prices tends to cause much more economic damage than raising the nominal prices of some other assets, because it causes people to default on underwater mortgages, hoard cash rather than investing it because the currency then appreciates in value, etc.

So inflation is good right now and printing the money would be a completely reasonable thing to do in the short term.

What happens after that is you pay for it from taxes, the same as the subsidy for [more specific program] would otherwise. But that should be a lot easier afterwards because real wages (and therefore real tax revenues) should be significantly higher than they currently are relative to the cost of necessities like housing, education and healthcare. In other words, the real amount of UBI you would need would decline with the real cost of those necessities.

> Wealth transfer schemes are inevitably unpopular and tend to not work well.

Then why do we keep passing/expanding rather than repealing various redistributive welfare and assistance programs?

UBI as such doesn’t imply anything regarding the source of the money.

My favorite scheme, f.ex, would rely entirely on a geoistic LVT-style dividend. The idea there is basically to capture externalities as rent, so no debt, taxes or money printing involved.

> UBI is cargo cult finance. It's a broken mental model that will kill the system.

Such dismissiveness is unwarranted. There's a lot of intriguing research on the topic that indicates that it may be a cost-effective replacement for the byzantine social support systems of modern governments, with benefits for both recipients and taxpayers. It only seems like a broken model if you /start/ with an overly simplistic model of the current situation, e.g one that ignores both the existence and desirability of social support systems.

Unfortunately much of the research is frustratingly incomplete. Search e.g. for information on Mincome.

It also seems like a reasonable transition mechanism, from the market economies that have brought us increasing productivity, to a hoped-for post-scarcity future.

The US health care system is the least efficient of all the developed world, in terms of results vs expense. In many sectors, a competitive market gives the best results. In health care, that's just not the case. The free market isn't the be all, end all solution that free market advocates want people to think it is.

First, US health care is hardly a free market. Second, the free market certainly isn’t a be all, end all solution. Most advocates of free market economics would agree with you.

It’s just simply better than any of the other solutions man has dreamed up so far, that’s all.

Is the free market the best solution to have an army? Or a judiciary system? It's not. So, it's not better than any other solutions for all problems.

>Is the free market the best solution to have an army?

It definitely is. As in "I'm not going to pay for bombing other countries, thanks."

> The US health care system is the least efficient of all the developed world, in terms of results vs expense. In many sectors, a competitive market gives the best results. In health care, that's just not the case.

Interestingly, your example undermines your case, because the US system is also less cost efficient than systems that are more market-oriented than it is.

The US healthcare system is uniquely problematic. It's not a markets vs. socialism problem, it's a unique damage that arises from trying to do things at such a scale.

Everywhere else in the world it's things the size of individual US states doing healthcare regulation, e.g. a median US state like Oregon has a GDP larger than Portugal or Greece. In the US it happens at the level of the entire union, which screws things up something terrible because it's well past the point that economies of scale give diminishing returns but it grows the public and private bureaucracies so large that they have their own inertia and gravity.

If the only thing the US did was repeal all federal healthcare laws and hand the whole thing over to the individual states, it would probably cut costs significantly. And then California could have single payer and New Jersey could require employer-provided coverage and Wyoming could let the market handle it entirely and probably all of them would do better than the feds are currently doing.

I used to live on Poland and suffer from depressive disorders, my country has free universal healthcare but it didn't improve my depression and most docs felt as if they don't care and don't know what to do but since I've moved to states, bought private insecure and now undergoing treatment, my situation has vastly improved. People here seem to care more than they did back in home.

I don't like free healthcare because it often time can't even cover the minimum of what people need.

Many people who knew better went to Private Doctors even when we had free healthcare because they don't trust free healthcare and attitude of those healthcare provider. You end up wasting a lot of time in such system.

>The US health care system is the least efficient of all the developed world

On paper maybe. As a person who lived in Russia and lives in Germany I disagree completely. How do you measure efficiency? Healthcare workers are blatantly underpaid in many european countries, waiting queues are getting longer, and the next potential chancellor is literally suggesting conscription as a solution for medical personal shortages.

That may work with a system where the consumer has a choice. Basically clients don't and end up overpaying and getting the run around by private insurance.

Best is a balanced system with a mixture of private and public with public providing most of the infrastructure.

US life expectancy is lower than most northern European countries (plus Canada) or Northern Asian countries and costs are higher.

That said some EU countries like Switzerland have mostly private systems.

The only downside of government healthcare is generally taxes are added to unhealthy foods, tobacco and booze.

> The real problem, if you look at it from first principles, is the lack of US government protections/services for all workers.

This is so true. If traditional jobs (not gig economy jobs) were better, no one would ever accept a gig economy job. Traditional full-time jobs are required to give healthcare and other expensive benefits (that governments everywhere else provide), so those businesses have cut down on the number of full-time jobs.

The real comparison here is between big companies who refuse to offer full-time jobs and instead rely on limiting hours to keep most of their jobs as part-time. People who accept gig economy jobs do so because they can work more hours per week (not artificially held under 39 hours so their company can avoid paying benefits). Generally people are rational actors when it comes to accepting the best employment opportunity, so if we see lots of people accepting gig-economy jobs it means that their other alternatives are worse. That's not a defense of gig-economy jobs but instead points out that this is a problem for all workers and suggests moving to a system that the rest of the world uses to solve the same problem.

And likely because the full-time jobs pay terribly so they do gig stuff to supplement / make ends meet. And it’s something they can do flexibly around their full-time work schedule.

The reason that government supported healthcare is so difficult to sell in the us is that it drives down the cost of labor and the real constituency of politicians (campaign donors) prefer cheap labor.

You nailed it.

You nailed it. Overlapping boundaries, inconsistent definitions and application of community values encourages misuse.

If you're working on a gig platform, you're at the mercy of the platform itself. Since you aren't the paying customer, and the client is, platforms' incentives rarely inline with those of workers.

>It saddens me how this (to me) plain fact is left out of the debate about gig workers and their protections.

That's because it's no really a solution. If everybody is made into an "entrepreneur" or "freelancer" or "consultant", then those gigs get just as shitty as employee, but without the extra protections.

I think large parts of the gig economy don't even work as proper free markets. The free market is based around people comparing all options and choosing the best one for them. That works reasonably well for deciding to rent out on AirBnB, but calculating your effective hourly wage for driving Uber, factoring in fuel, wear and tear on the vehicle, variable demand, future uncertainty etc is really hard, especially in advance. And if it's hard that means some people will get it wrong. If enough people get it wrong in both directions the market price will drop below where it should be, because demand for labor will be satisfied by those who overestimated their effective salary. At that point you don't have a functioning free market, it's just companies benefiting from peoples lack of math and modeling skills.

There is another thing about free markets. They aren't run by one company. You have virtual monopolies in many situations such as Uber. Lyft barely factors in and two companies is not a market anyway.

If it was a proper free market then there would be lots of services like Uber that drivers could select from.

I still think that decentralized public platforms are the way to break the technopoly market strangleholds.

Free-market fanatics see this all as a good thing

I'm not a free-market fanatic. I'm just someone trying to survive under circumstances where the world makes that unnecessarily difficult.

Gig work has been an effective antidote to otherwise impossible problems.

I wish I had a better life. I don't. Your attitude and assumptions are part of the problem for people like me.

The economy you are championing is one that primarily works for cis het white males. Women, people of color and other minorities were typically marginalized.

The erosion of worker rights by reclassification is not a panacea to discrimination. Removing these protections just makes it objectively worse for every employee.

You clearly seem to disagree but you haven't explained why not having rights has been an antidote to deep-seated social issues. I see no causation.

The only reason you are in that position in the first place is because you have few rights in the society you live in.

If not for that your situation would be much better. The United States is singularly bad at protecting basic rights for people who are less than lucky in life, the gig economy makes this worse, not better because it now seems like there is a solution: let those at the bottom of the societal ladder fight over scraps in a race to the bottom.

Of course from your position scraps are better than nothing but there are much better options available too. But they all start with a society where 'winner takes all' is not the default.

Unfortunately the export of the gig economy to parts of the world where the social safety net is working just fine has the effect of slowly eroding that safety net because there is less of a perceived need for one.

The only reason you are in that position in the first place is because you have few rights in the society you live in.

No, that is not the only reason I am in this position by any stretch of the imagination whatsoever.

That strikes me as true but sort of beside the point jacquesm was making. If you disagree, though, I'd like to hear your reasoning (really).

He's awfully opinionated about my country and my life without really knowing either topic well. I've spoken with him before. He assumes free medical care would solve my problems. He assumes I have huge medical bills because I'm American.

It's not true. I've basically been a military dependent my entire life. I've always had free or nearly free medical care. It's part of why I'm alive at all.

There are a lot of other issues with his assertions that I wouldn't know where to begin to address and trying to address them at all looks to me like social suicide for various reasons.

So thank you for the sincere and respectful inquiry, but it isn't likely to go anywhere good to try to answer it in earnest in a substantial manner.

Fair enough :). Thanks for your answer.

> He's awfully opinionated about my country and my life without really knowing either topic well.

I've lived on the US/Canadian border for 7 years and know the United States quite well, probably I have more friends there than I do here in Europe.

As for your life, you've spent years on HN educating everybody here on it in minute detail so if you want to make the case that I don't know anything about it then I suggest you read back your own comments and associated blog posts. I know more about your life than I know about my sister's.

> He assumes I have huge medical bills because I'm American.

My comment had nothing to do with your medical bills or lack thereof, and - given your comments to date - I would rather assume that they are low.

So to me it looks like the assumptions are all on your end.

On another note it is rather rude to answer to a comment thread and then to berate an earnest reply in this way.

I don't think I'm the one being rude here. But you and I have a long history of miscommunication and this is probably not the way to hash it out.

I just didn't want to be silenced on the topic because it happened to be you saying it. I honestly didn't expect you to reply to me at all.

FWIW: you're one of my favorite commenters on HN and you're in the list of my comment-updates-telegram-bot. I also find there's an odd tension at times in DoreenMichele's comments when it comes to the 'free market'.

That said, I really wish you'd keep out of these kinds of spats, and/or have the wisdom to know what might trigger or exacerbate them. I could see this one coming a mile away the moment I saw 'jacquesm' replying to 'doreenmichele'. Even if she 'started it'.

And that said, my apologies for inserting myself in this conversation :). I wish you both the best, hope you can find common ground, and enjoy your contributions here a ton!

Wouldn't increasing the availability of work do more to increase worker protections than regulations increasing worker protections. As employers compete for workers, wouldn't that create a system of protection for workers. I mean lets face it - the only real power in any negotiation comes from the power to walk away from the bargaining table

Exactly, that is the whole point, that’s why it’s cheaper for the companies.

They don't get to get off scot-free simply because they are in a different jurisdiction.

If they offer their app in jurisdiction A - they are operating under the laws of jurisdiction A, end of story.

I remain hopeful we can fix this.

>Free-market fanatics see this all as a good thing but I'm really not happy with this rapid return to piece-work, which was outlawed in favor of hourly rates and minimum wages.

Funny thing is that US has minimum wage and til recently had mandatory union participation. Sweden has neither. Yet, Sweden has a much better working conditions and more free market.

It's quite funny to observe US people got used to crony capitalism blaming free market for bad working conditions.

Labourism is doing better under free market, you just can't into labourism, that's the problem. When Britain abolished mercantilism in favor of more laizes-faire policies in mid 19th century, the labourism flourished, and the working conditions (which were nearly stagnant in the previous 50 years) improved dramatically.

Regardless the regulations you would impose you wouldn't have good working conditions until you achieve basic consciousness. Labourism is not about regulations, it's about consciousness.

Otherwise there would be a few in power dictating to the many, and it doesn't matter if these in power would sit in the governments or in corporations.

> Free-market fanatics see this all as a good thing but I'm really not happy with this rapid return to piece-work, which was outlawed in favor of hourly rates and minimum wages.

Piece work is making a comeback because of the failure of the alternatives. Insisting that we should keep on with the same rigide system despite its obvious failing is the real fanaticism here. Doesn't mean piece work should be the norm, it just means both have their place and completely outlawing one or the other seem like a big mistake. None of these two are going away as they are both needed.

The fanaticism is in employers hunting for ways not to pay for any time not directly coupled to revenue. With gig work, this is tracked down to the millisecond.

Only employers who have very low skilled workers do so, for two reasons, one is that skilled workers have more power to negotiate better deals, the other reason is that these gig companies operate on thin margins, in fact most of them operate on loss so every dime that can be saved is worth it. They only survive because they are subsidized by billionaires investors. Eventually most of them will either go bankrupt or find a way out of their loss at which point they will be able to increase their workers salaries (as it is a good thing for productivity and attract more talents). There's a lot of animosity against "evil employers" or "lazy workers" but it usually is a bit more complex than these simple dichotomies.

most of them operate on loss so every dime that can be saved is worth it

This is the oddest definition of viability I've ever seen.

Piece work is clearly a failing system. At least as far as wanting our citizens to be able to do honest work for honest money.

Are you seriously comparing 19th century piece work with today's gig jobs? Are you aware that classic employment is not being deprecated? People will simply choose what they like. Why should you decide for them? I know many people who are significantly happier and richer this way; who are you to deny them this happiness? BTW, IMO it seems like corporations are much more likely and empowered to abuse their employees than a gig economy platform ever could. Every Uber driver that had issues just switched to another platform or got an employment (situation when they can't get an employment and Uber is the only option is out of this topic).

Often it's not a choice: lots of people are layed off, and then rehired as freelancers. This is quite common among healthcare and construction workers.

This is all for the benefit of the companies, not the employees. Lower wages, no need to pay other benefits like health-insurance or pensions, and ability to end contracts as companies see fit, especially when people get sick, become pregnant, or just old.

There are a lot of freelancers forced into this construction, not by choice.

Good point, that is not possible in my country though.

Yet. Don’t underestimate the lobbying efforts of industry.

One of my biggest pet peeves about the current labor market is how my healthcare and retirement planning is so tightly coupled to my employer. Can we create a system where you're beholden to your employer for these things but I'm not? I prefer the gig economy.

> Every Uber driver that had issues just switched to another platform

How many other platforms are there? How different are they?

> situation when they can't get an employment and Uber is the only option is out of this topic

There's no way that can be off-topic; you yourself said "People will simply choose what they like." If other options are foreclosed, what then?

> There's no way that can be off-topic; you yourself said "People will simply choose what they like." If other options are foreclosed, what then?

It is off topic because our democratic republics are saying in their constitutions that this public social responsibility is handled by them and therefore the corporations and people don't need to care, because of which you are forced to pay social security tax. Am I paying it for nothing?

BTW I live in a country that has stronger and person-based social system than the US. Other commenters have made points about insurance being tied to employment and I agree, in that case things are different.

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