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Comment by lugg | Hacker News Reader

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> Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon claimed that independent contracting amounts to “corporations trying to oppress workers.” He continued with, “When you hear about folks talking about the new economy, the gig economy, and the innovation economy, it’s fucking feudalism, all over again.”

I think if you take a look over the wiki page [1], he's probably talking about the similarity between classes. It's also in context about more than just the gig economy. And it's also in reference to what people are saying, the way they talk about it, and the way they are selling it to other people. Not talking about the gig economy itself as a concept.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism

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"Corporations oppressing workers", while being a very bad thing that I am very against, has almost nothing to do with feudalism, even by structural analogy.

As an example of something that would be apropos, Industrial Revolution working conditions and employer/employee dynamics would be far better analogies, although obviously imperfect themselves.

It's still got nothing to do with actual feudalism, except that it's also 'bad'. Except for those people who like working in the gig economy and for whom it works very well.

It's still got nothing to do with actual feudalism...

Yes it has. Feudalism was that exactly: all society, from bottom to top was based on individual asymetrical pacts between two parts, the vassal and the lord. This kind of relation existed between peasants and lords and between lesser and greater lords.

All employment contracts are asymmetrical. Almost all contracts are asymmetrical. The defining features that make feudalism different from any other master/servant or employer/employee relationship are completely different from the gig economy and the gig economy oppresses people in completely different ways.

For example a gig economy employee can withdraw their labour at any time; can choose how much or how little they work (sometimes within some very wide bounds); can often choose where they work; can change from one employer to another and back again freely; in some cases can choose to only work at certain times and locations that have better compensation.

Yes of course there are disadvantages and maybe those should be regulated, and maybe in some cases the relationship is abusive by employers, but the above doesn't sound anything remotely like feudalism to anyone who has even the most basic knowledge about feudalism.

Asymetrical is not an essential part of the definition, but the fact that it consists of individual pacts. That's different from modern labour in that employer-employee relation has certain rights for the employee recognized because it's a one to many, powerful to powerless... considered individually, while with these rights recognized there's collective bargaining and government-mandated clauses.

The feudalism term clearly seems to be introduced because of that, not because something's good or bad or whatever, but because it's atomizing labour relations.

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