California is cracking down on the gig economy

The primary reasons appear to be the giant tax subsidy for employer plans and the fact that insurers aggressively discriminate against people who don’t have employer plans.

Yes there is. Workers compensation insurance and other benefits have significant fixed costs per employee. If someone is treated as an employee, they'll be required to work a minimum number of hours to cover those costs.

What you're getting at is that there is a reason people buy insurance anyway -- the peace of mind that that won't happen to you, as I mentioned. Because a million dollars in claims money even if you have to multiply it by the only 2% probability of that happening is worth more to you than the $20,000 in guaranteed premiums you'll have to pay over your life, because if the claim actually happens you need the money more. The value of the same dollar is higher to you then, which you can predict from the beginning and account for.

But that value still has to be balanced against the losses to administration and fraud, and balanced against what you need the money for today. If losing $100/month to premiums causes you to starve now, it doesn't matter that there is a 2% chance that you starve in ten years from now. If the majority of insurance claims are fraudulent, the higher value of the money in case you have a legitimate claim may no longer exceed the losses from buying the insurance.

It's possible that buying insurance makes sense. It's possible that it doesn't. But people should be able to make that choice for themselves instead of having it imposed on them.

You value security and loyalty, because that's what your generation was raised with.

My generation has no delusions of job security. It does not and will not exist in our future. We value independence and freedom, and the opportunity to pursue our careers.

I've done contract work my entire life and wouldn't have it any other way. I do not want to be tied to a company. I earn much, much work working independently.

My insurance is my savings account. My insurance is my adaptability. My insurance is my skillset.

Your reply indicates that you think that has something to do with idealism, and it doesn't. We want to do work, get paid for it, and fuck off to the next thing.

You don't have to agree with it, just don't participate in it if you don't. But don't try to get in the way of other people doing what they want because you don't understand it.

In my opinion anyway the individual perspective is a moot point. Unless there's some serious shortage of access to information the main consideration should be the benefit to society as a whole and not just a single company. How much more stable will a business and its impact on commerce be if it does provide reduced-premium insurance is the more important question to ask.

You are in a discussion attached to an article about a piece of proposed legislation. It was a policy discussion from the start.

> To an _individual_ it is important for them to realize that they need to account for the risk involved in what they are doing.

That is true, but is it novel information that nobody is aware of? That seems to be the standard you want to apply.

> And absolutely no, you cannot get an individual workers compensation policy because it would cost more money than the income from the gig. Its absurd you would think that exists.

Disability insurance is typically 1-3% of your income because the payout in the event of a claim is proportional to your income. For the low income in most of these professions that comes to somewhere around $50/month. They may decide it isn't worth that much, but there is no basis to the idea that it would cost more than their overall compensation.

> Please do not go into online forums and just shoot idealism everywhere.

This feels like a double standard that in practice just means that you would prefer it if people with contrary opinions to yours would shut up.

The dominant unit cost by far is paying the drivers, which doesn't go down with scale. Then you get a bunch of other stuff like credit card processing fees and customer service that also doesn't scale much if any better with volume either.

The server cost is barely a unit cost at all. That's fixed cost. Though it still needs to be paid from something.

> You don't think employees notice when they are paid less? You don't think customers realize when they pay more? If you really want to make the claim that employees don't notice lower pay and customers don't notice higher prices, that's tantamount to admitting that the free market doesn't work.

They notice how much they're paying and being paid, but they lack the information to know how much they would be paying or being paid in the alternative. So they think they're getting "free" insurance when they're really getting insurance instead of a cost of living increase.

> Yes, obviously investors will pass the cost off to employees and customers, but if they pay an unjustifiably high insurance premium and try to pass that cost off, they open up a business opportunity for a competitor to pay employees better and/or charge customers less by buying cheaper insurance and passing off less of that cost.

You're assuming that the problem is caused by which insurance company the employer chooses and not that it is difficult to accurately detect insurance fraud without using invasive methods, so all the insurance companies charge rates that exceed the value of the insurance and the companies only buy it at that price because it's required by law.

> There are additionally some regulations in place that prevent employers from passing off too much of the cost to employees or customers (i.e. minimum wage or fixed taxi fares).

There are two options here. One is that the money comes from somewhere. The other is that it doesn't, the cost of the service now exceeds its value, and you lose your job.

> The advantage that a big company has is that when they shop around for insurance, they're much more likely to be able to get a good price than an individual because they're a large, valuable customer.

Insurance companies compete aggressively on price for all customers. Historically larger buyers had a slight advantage because they could get a discount to account for the lower per-customer acquisition cost of getting many customers at once, but now that insurance is a thing that you buy from a website after comparing prices on the internet, even that is becoming an increasingly negligible advantage.

Meanwhile if you buy it yourself you get to choose the policy that you want rather than whatever your employer stuck you with.

Big if true

In the Bay Area there's something called Casual Carpool; essentially it's just a series of locations you can go to around work-travel hours, and people who have cars and are willing to pick up people going to the same area will randomly show up and pick people up. No scheduling or prior arrangements aside from the locations. (And it's been around way longer than Uber/Lyft/etc.)

In London we used to have a good taxi system that was well run with trustworthy drivers in "Black cabs", but with the undercutting of Uber they are more likely to try underhand tactics.

Companies, including Walmart, don't set wages arbitrarily. Despite their size, they can't control the market for labor. They don't pay what they do because they are generous. There are frictions with hiring and onboarding people. They want their employees to be happy. And even if they were a significantly large employer, the market is not a closed system and things change

Regarding your welfare claim, it depends how you look at it. Walmart is offering these people the best employment opportunity they can get, otherwise they would work elsewhere. If they lost that opportunity which certainly some would with increased costs, they would likely be moved to more generous government benefits.

I think this statement is trivially true. The question becomes:

1) Are these people being underpaid, and would making them employees increase their pay?

2) Are there no better options available?

I am not convinced of either of these points. Uber's pay seems to be competitive [1]. We also have historically low unemployment. It is easier to get a job now than anytime in the past ten years[2], and much easier than the historical average. The fact that this is the case and people are still flocking to be gig workers should tell you that people want to be Uber drivers, they are not forced into it.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2016/11/28/fare-d...

[2] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate

Normally the going rate for a given job would be around where supply=demand. If there are too few potential employees, the jobs that can pay $20/hr will get the workers and the jobs that can only pay $10/hr will go under. If there too few jobs, the going rate will go down, and now jobs that can only afford to pay less will be viable.

The danger I see with trying to achieve social progress by mandating every job be a "good job" is that it is very easy this way to create a situation where supply != demand. If you simply mandate no jobs pay less than $20/hr, the businesses that are only viable at $10/hr will go under. But if supply=demand before, and a bunch of jobs disappear, now you have people that can't get a job at all. So you've created some winners, but only at the expense of the people who are least competitive in the job market. And to use Uber as a specific example, sure they can raise their prices, but fewer people will take Uber and the demand for drivers will still be reduced.

This is a simplification of course. Maybe even if the overall market can't afford to pay more, particular companies can, and unions could achieve better price discrimination for labor. Or raising the minimum wage a moderate amount may only have a minimal effect on demand. But I think the overall model of individual employees and employers with individual prices is pretty solid.

If you follow this model, the best way to achieve progress is probably not to ban low-paying jobs from existing. It would be to create a greater number of jobs (some of which are higher paying) and then the low-paying jobs will be forced to either raise their wages or cease to exist naturally. By doing it that way there won't be a job shortage. I think the government still has a major role to play in this, but it's a more complicated one than just mandating what the market price should be for a transaction to be allowed.

China is probably an example of this sort of development. Before the trade war, factories were already moving out of China (to Vietnam, etc) because the wages there have gone up so much. There are certainly many problems and it is certainly not a developed country yet. But the wage (and overall economic) growth over the past few decades has been almost unimaginable [1].

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/china/wages

You could say the same about every American living paycheck to paycheck. Are they all slaves?

The vast majority of people in the world work in order to feed themselves and their families. This does not make the work “involuntary”.

Choice is obviously not an absolute, because we don’t live in magical fairy land. Choice is the ability to decide how you will go about feeding yourself and your family.

Gig economy simply increases the available choices, and provides quite a few fairly pleasant options, judging by how many people choose to do Gig work versus any other possible minimum wage (or below) job.

There is real slavery in the world. To equate Gig jobs with slavery is pretty terribly insulting both to Gig workers and the people actually suffering true slavery or slave-like conditions.

That's not how things work at a low wage job. Beyond a threshold (around 30 hours) employers are hit with extra mandates (e.g. health insurance).

If that's the case with Uber drivers then they don't get benefits either. And on top of that, the company will probably have to cap drivers' hours in order to keep them from qualifying for benefits.

That's not true either. Being classed as an employee will mean that the drivers qualify for unemployment insurance, that Uber will pay half of some of the taxes typically levied on wages, oh and having W2 wages will qualify you for a tax-advantaged IRA (retirement account). There are some other perks as well depending on the locality. Being an employee versus contractor comes with a number of benefits that aren't health insurance.

Nonsense. If this were true part-time jobs wouldn't exist, but they do. There's no shortage of stories of people working at major retailers and being unable to get >29 hours / week because the employer doesn't want them crossing into full-time status (IRS defines this at 30 hours, many companies follow this for benefits purposes as well).

It's certainly possible that I'll end up paying down the road for the increase in wear and tear from when I was driving, but at least now I'm in a secure position where I could actually afford the repairs or to get a new car without worrying about paying the bills.

The examples given imply this classical meaning of "profession". As you've pointed out, engineering in this context means jobs you'd need a license for, like civil engineering.

Besides, harmonized or not, doesn't explain the economic weakness in Germany over the past decade compared to the US.

They kept it up into the 1950s, when Tom Watson died and control of the company passed to his son.

I like this note from the end of the Network World article, where they ask a Harvard Business School professor if there's anything similar going on in the contemporary tech world:

> "I don't think there is a Microsoft company song other than 'Get to the bank as fast as possible so you can deposit the check,' " Tedlow adds.

And regardless, this is exactly one data point. Hardly enough to draw any meaningful conclusions. And as I have said before, I am not inclined to trust the New York Times' coverage of large tech companies.

Slaves also had next to no protection. Slaves could be killed in gladiatorial fights, and were often used to work in the most unhealthy and unsafe jobs. Masters could rape their slaves at will, or prostitute their slaves. The only "protection" they had was the fact that it was in their masters' self-interest to keep them alive so that they could continue working.

I seriously cannot fathom as to how you can think that the gig economy is comparable to owning other human beings as property.

You make the unqualified assumption that these people had healthcare and benefits before driving for Uber. And regardless, unlike child labor these are adults that are making these decisions for themselves. They looked at their opportunities and decided that driving for Uber or Lyft was best. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that these individuals are more qualified to make their own life choices than people on the internet who know nothing about their lives.