Hacker News Reader

Comment by ogre_codes | Hacker News Reader

There are 2 big problems with on-demand/ gig employment.

#1 Our current system of coupling healthcare and other life essential benefits with employment is broken. It makes it difficult for people to work small jobs or switch jobs. In order for gig jobs to be viable, people need to be able to get survive a broken foot without going bankrupt.

#2 Gig-style businesses tend to vastly underpay employees. The early claims that Uber drivers were averaging $15-20/ hour or more were completely fabricated. The reality is most gig jobs require people use their own vehicles and don't pay them for inevitable downtime which means they are vastly underpaid. Minimum wage for gig workers should include payment for expenses (including a reasonable $0.50+ / mile for travel) and downtime between gigs.

If those things are fixed, then suddenly gig work is amazing, but that's a pretty big ask.

View on HN

I'm not going to tackle #1 other than to say I do agree that health insurance shouldn't be provided by your employer.

But for #2, you seem to be asserting that there is some method by which it is possible to determine that a particular salary/wage is "fair" and that "fair" wage must be mandated for all people.

You've asserted that gig businesses are underpaying and yet lots of people continue to take those jobs. Are you asserting that all those people are incapable of determining what is best for them? Are you asserting that what works for a college student on the side or a retired person or someone who needs extreme flexibility in their hours is unimportant and that the only the particular compensation package that you declare to be "fair" is valid for everyone?

Not everyone puts the same value on different job criteria. Some people want flexibility, some people want safety, some people want benefits (see #1), some people want to work outside, some people just want to keep busy, etc. Declaring that there is a "fair" wage for any particular job presumes not only that jobs are identical but that people are identical also.

> But for #2, you seem to be asserting that there is some method by which it is possible to determine that a particular salary/wage is "fair" and that "fair" wage must be mandated for all people.

We have a nationally agreed minimum wage.

Expecting that the average person doing a gig job would be able to earn that minimum wage plus expenses is not unreasonable. Since gig type employers, this base wage would need to be 50% higher than minimum wage to account for other expenses paid by employers. (employment taxes being the biggie)

The national agreed minimum wage is $7.25/hour. Every Uber/Lyft driver earns well in excess of that.

Every Uber/Lyft driver earns well in excess of that.

No. For most, it's not even close. The only way to make that kind of money was to collect kickbacks from bringing tourists to strip clubs.

Plus, many states have a minimum wage much higher than $7.25/hour.

Source: Drove for Uber for eight months.

Sure, in some states like CA and NY, Uber drivers earn closer to $15/hour.

Anecdotal Source: I've driven Uber too.

Actual Source: https://www.ridester.com/how-much-do-uber-drivers-make/

Note that the $15/hr figure from the source includes tips, but does not count gas, insurance, nor vehicle wear and tear

It includes gas, maintenance, and insurance.

It can't properly do so because those costs vary tremendously by vehicle, location, etc.

Source? I've heard the opposite from some drivers.

Source: https://www.ridester.com/how-much-do-uber-drivers-make/

> Full-time UberX drivers can expect to earn nearly $590 per week after tips when working 40 hours in a week. Beyond the aforementioned factors — location, surge, and tips — weekly earnings can also be heavily impacted by the amount of trip requests you receive throughout a seven-day period.

> Uber drivers are known to make slightly less than Lyft drivers. We’ve found that a standard Lyft driver makes about $17.50 per hour, which is nearly $3 more than what Uber drivers make. Of course, your average Lyft wage (just like your average Uber wage) will vary based on location, how much you take advantage of promotions on Lyft, and how much you earn in tips.

> It’s a general rule of thumb for the rideshare industry to budget roughly 20 percent of the total ride fare amount for ride-related expenses. At that rate – hypothetically speaking, after factoring in pick-up, drop-off, and dead time – the UberX driver could estimate to make somewhere in the neighborhood of $15–$20 an hour if they were to get two similar rides each hour they drove.

[1] https://www.ridester.com/how-much-do-uber-drivers-make/

It doesn't look like this takes depreciation or gas into account, but the site is like 75% advertisements so I might have missed it.

From the article:

"These expenses include:

Insurance: This includes personal insurance and a rideshare or commercial insurance policy.

Car/lease payments: The amounts a driver pays to drive their vehicle. Drivers either own their own vehicles or lease one from Uber or a third-party provider.

Tolls, license, permit fees: Drivers pay for all of these fees. Passengers pay an added surcharge when drivers must incur toll fees.

Gas: Since drivers are considered independent contractors, they must pay for their own gas, and are not reimbursed.

Vehicle maintenance: Drivers are responsible for their own vehicle maintenance and upkeep. They will be reimbursed if a rider damages their vehicle, however."

Vehicle maintenance is not the same as depreciation.

I think it's debatable whether vehicle depreciation is a cost that needs to be included.

For the majority of Uber/Lyft drivers, the vehicle is a sunk cost — they would have bought a car Uber/Lyft or not. These drivers use these cars for personal use when they're not driving on gigs. There are even drivers that buy cars just so that they can drive for Uber, but if Uber/Lyft didn't exist, those folks would still need to buy a car to meet their own personal transportation needs.

Depreciation is going to inevitably happen to anyone that owns a car, whether or not they are a rideshare driver. It's like saying that you need to include the cost of a daily lunch in the equation.

> Depreciation is going to inevitably happen to anyone that owns a car, whether or not they are a rideshare driver.

Depreciation is partially a function of miles put on the car. Rideshare drivers put miles on their cars a lot faster than they would have otherwise.

Either way, sfkdjf9j3j is right. Your source doesn't account for vehicle depreciation.

Compare the bluebook value of a typical car that might be used for this kind of work at ten years old with 120k miles (12k/year) vs. ten years old with a million miles (100k/year). The difference will end up being like $2500, because after ten years the car will be worth hardly any more than that no matter how many miles it has on it, and it can't lose more than 100% of its value due to higher mileage.

~$2500 amortized over 880k additional miles is <0.003/mile, and even less in net present cost because you don't lose it until you sell the car.

Your typical rideshare car isn't nearly that old, though, and isn't going to make it to nearly a million miles either. You've cherrypicked every single variable to favor your case, and you did the calculation wrong besides (you need to use the starting value of the car, not the ending value). Do it again for a newer more valuable car, and a lot fewer miles put on it. You can easily see depreciation amounts in the thousands of dollars per year.

> Your typical rideshare car isn't nearly that old, though

Now, or when they stop using it?

The average car in the US is 11.8 years old.

> and isn't going to make it to nearly a million miles either

This is a completely plausible number of miles for a vehicle driven full time over the course of several years.

> and you did the calculation wrong besides (you need to use the starting value of the car, not the ending value).

No, you use the difference in value between the car with fewer miles vs. more miles at the point where it is replaced, i.e. the amount you lost at resale by having more miles on it.

The difference in value between the starting value and the ending value independent of miles is the loss due to age/time, which is a sunk cost since the car ages whether you drive it or not.

> Do it again for a newer more valuable car, and a lot fewer miles put on it. You can easily see depreciation amounts in the thousands of dollars per year.

Because then you're measuring the depreciation due to time (the sunk cost portion) rather than the depreciation due to additional miles, and the depreciation due to time is much higher during the first years of the vehicle's life.

It is also naturally much less efficient to do that in general. How many taxi companies are you familiar with that buy new vehicles, drive them for 10,000 miles/year for two years and then sell them? You can make anything cost a lot if you're willing to waste money.

You're not understanding that many people are buying nice NEW cars for the purpose of driving them for rideshare, because of the requirements of the platforms, and that these new cars are then depreciating heavily (up to tens of thousands of dollars' worth in a few years) because of the absurd number of miles being put on them that absolutely trashes their resale value.

The typical rideshare car here in NYC is purpose-specific (needs different plates), has an average new cost of at least $30k, and is pretty new. It's absolutely correct to count the full cost of the depreciation of this vehicle as a rideshare expense.

And the average stats for cars in general in the US are irrelevant; what matters is what's being used for rideshare. You can't use old clunkers for that.

> You're not understanding that many people are buying nice NEW cars for the purpose of driving them for rideshare

You don't buy a new car unless you have money to burn. Even if you need a "new" car, you buy a three or four year old car, which is still plenty new but lets the other guy take the lion's share of the depreciation. Half the difference is from having less time on the factory warranty which you would exceed on miles before that anyway.

Even with "newer" cars it's still not huge. A 2016 Camry with 60,000 miles is worth about $5000 more than a 2016 Camry with 500,000 miles, which is ~$.01/mile. But you don't sell a four year old car, you buy a four year old car.

> The typical rideshare car here in NYC is purpose-specific (needs different plates)

Who is to blame when cities pass rules that increase costs on drivers?

> It's absolutely correct to count the full cost of the depreciation of this vehicle as a rideshare expense.

It is absolutely incorrect when the owner is also using the vehicle as a personal vehicle, which they would need anyway, which makes the age-related component of the depreciation a sunk cost.

> And the average stats for cars in general in the US are irrelevant; what matters is what's being used for rideshare. You can't use old clunkers for that.

Which is why you stop using them for that when they're ten years old and not twenty or thirty. Notice also that this doesn't mean you're driving a ten year old car most of the time, it means you're driving a five or six year old car most of the time because when it's ten years old is when you stop driving it.

This is a ought/are problem. You're saying what rideshare drivers ought to be doing, and then in that most optimistic case doing your calculations based on that, but you instead need to taking a descriptivist look at the situation and doing the analysis on what people are actually doing, not what you think they should be doing. And, yes, lots of rideshare drivers are buying/leasing new vehicles to use for the platform, and they are suffering a lot from depreciation on it.

If drivers are doing something that they shouldn't be, and there's a fairly straightforward way for them to avoid negative consequences, then this is a matter that is out of scope of public policy.

Removing the negative consequences from making unwise financial decisions 1) is a moral hazard, and 2) punishes those that are using their resources more wisely.

0.003/mile is many times lower than the typical reimbursement for miles traveled. I once relocated for a job by driving my car across the country and IIRC the company reimbursed something like two dozen times as much as that (not including gas, hotel and food expenses.)

That's because the typical reimbursement for miles traveled isn't primarily for depreciation, it's for maintenance (and also typically fuel).

Corporations also like to estimate this number on the high side, or include amortized depreciation due to time rather than miles even if the vehicle purchase was a sunk cost, because business travel is often tax deductible and this allows the company to offer the employee additional tax-free compensation.

Fuel was reimbursed separately (I remember collecting all the receipts for that, food, and hotels) and I don't think maintenance would account for two orders of magnitude discrepancy. 0.003/mile is abysmally low.

If you have a vehicle which is ten years old, even with low miles it generally won't be worth very much, and you can't lose more than the remaining amount by putting additional miles on it. You can't even lose the entire remaining amount, because it will always have at least scrap metal value. This means that for a vehicle you hold for several years, the depreciation due to miles will be very low.

You could easily spend many times that amount on maintenance and repairs. One transmission rebuild could cost more than the total amount of depreciation due to miles over the entire life of the vehicle. Just oil changes add up to more than $10,000 over a million miles.

Maintenance is a significant expense per mile, even more if you're using "average" vehicles (as companies setting per-mile rates would) which can have significantly higher maintenance costs than the sort of vehicles people choose when they know they're going to be driving a lot of miles.

> Every Uber/Lyft driver earns well in excess of that.

If you don't account for travel time between gigs, expenses, or additional taxes, they might, but you can't Uber if you don't fill up your gas tank and change the oil in your car.

> Travel time between gigs

No gig in the world covers that.

> Expenses

On average, after vehicle expenses, Uber drivers make as low as $15/hour[1], and as high as $20/hour. And this is also assuming that one concedes the argument that gigs ought to reimburse expenses, which isn't true for most contract work.

https://www.ridester.com/how-much-do-uber-drivers-make

In most contract work, expenses incurred by the contractor to fulfill the contract are almost always included in the contractor's invoice.

That was somewhat my experience. It was always the case where travel and lodging were required. Say, for attending depositions. But I did buy my own machines, and pay for electricity to run them. And I didn't invoice for maintaining stuff.

So was that just my own naivete? And now that I think of it, buying better gear hurt me, in that it took less time to do stuff. But on the other hand, it allowed me to handle larger datasets, which made me more attractive.

Buying gear for use on multiple contracts is different from buying supplies to use executing a contract for a single customer. You can invoice the latter to the customer; you must depreciate or deduct the former on your tax return.

OTOH, some customers are willing to pay for contractors' gear even if it would be used on other customers, for example, if they require you to use upgraded equipment instead of the equipment you already own.

There is plenty of contracting work that both pays for travel and reimburses expenses, including all white-collar contracting and most blue-collar pay-for-hire. You're right that very little "gig" work does but that's the entire point; they push all these anicillary expenses onto someone else, either the individual or public/state systems.

I consulted for over a decade, and my clients always reimbursed for travel and lodging. And they picked up the bill, when we went out for dinner.

I’m sure that’s true, but they are not obligated to. That is what we are talking about here.

Sure, it's anecdotal. But what's so special about me, who was just another old hippie? Also, from what colleagues said and seemed to imply, it was the norm.

>there is some method by which it is possible to determine that a particular salary/wage is "fair" and that "fair" wage

there is one and that is relatively simple, it's what people negotiate under symmetric information. The behaviour of some full-time uber drivers is simply irrational and that is effectively being exploited by companies like Uber.

If one includes the cost of operating and maintaining the vehicle, not to mention the depreciation, the risk of losing work if it actually breaks down and so on you're not arriving at a salary that is even remotely sane or competitive.

And sure you can say fuck them, they know best QED and so on but it's simply not sustainable. Just look at who has to pick up the cost during the corona crisis now because these people are effectively broke if they can't drive, it's everyone else.

In the name of flexibility we are loading social responsibility of regular employers onto the public because drivers overestimate the benefits and underestimate the risks and companies like Uber want to line their pockets.

> The behaviour of some full-time uber drivers is simply irrational and that is effectively being exploited by companies like Uber.

Irrational to you.

> If one includes the cost of operating and maintaining the vehicle, not to mention the depreciation, the risk of losing work if it actually breaks down and so on you're not arriving at a salary that is even remotely sane or competitive.

There are a lot of reasons why people still make the economic decision to drive on ridesharing platforms, even considering all of this. 1) If the car is a sunk cost (I.e. they would have owned the car, Uber or not), then it isn't accurate to include its cost in the equation. 2) Some people will happily trade-off the slightly less competitive pay in return for not having a boss and not having to clock into a job.

> Just look at who has to pick up the cost during the corona crisis now because these people are effectively broke if they can't drive, it's everyone else.

This is literally true everywhere in the world. Coronavirus is a once-in-a-generation black swan event, and most governments' responses have been mass shut-downs of the economy and forced unemployment. The taxpayers foot the bill for most workers, employee or not. "Employment" status would not have changed that.

> In the name of flexibility we are loading social responsibility of regular employers onto the public because drivers overestimate the benefits and underestimate the risks and companies like Uber want to line their pockets.

This is how safety nets work. In many developed countries, health insurance is decoupled from employees and taxpayers foot the bill. Would you not consider this an abrogation of responsibility of Danish/Canadian employers to provide benefits for their workers?

It's actually not the same everywhere, and not even Taleb considers this a 'black swan' but a white swan, because people have been warning everyone about pandemics just about the last twenty years. And there's a black swan now every ten years anyway.

In parts of Europe the employment situation is significantly less bad, in particular in countries with proper corporatist structures. In Germany unemployment went up by 250k. The US has seen 10 million unemployment claims already, mind you per capita that's worse by a factor of ten.

And yes I would consider this an abrogation of responsibility by Danish and Canadian employers. It doesn't matter though because Denmark has a few million people in it and the government can basically jump in every time anyway.

The fact aside that the US lacks this sort of generosity for many reasons, what the gig economy has produced is a permanent precariat and tech companies without obligations. You have an army of semi-employed service workers who get wrecked by every crisis, be it a mortage crisis or a virus because there is no security in such a society.

You don't need to pray for a potiticized safety net if you have employers and companies that take care of their workers and invest into their long term human capital and don't lay them off during the crisis, that is you have organisational capacity, something the American labour market lacks completely. It's everyone for themselves as soon as the alarm bells go off.

> In parts of Europe the employment situation is significantly less bad, in particular in countries with proper corporatist structures. In Germany unemployment went up by 250k. The US has seen 10 million unemployment claims already, mind you per capita that's worse by a factor of ten.

The US saw 10 million unemployment claims because the official policy of all governments (Federal & State) was forced unemployment. The CARES stimulus includes a $600/week unemployment insurance _on top of_ the existing state UI. The state with the least generous UI is Mississippi, at $940/month — with the CARES stimulus clocks in at $3340/month. You can see the full break-down here [1]. In every state, the unemployment benefit is actually higher than the median wage. Businesses know this, and proactively lay off / furlough their employees so that they may collect this benefit (which extends to gig workers as well).

In European nations, the approach has been to offer stimulus packages to employers to keep their employees paid while they temporarily shut down.

The net effect is the same, people are getting money to be able to sustain themselves during a global social distance shutdown. In America, because half the stimulus is in the form of direct insurance payments to people, and unemployment is the means of receiving that, you will see high unemployment numbers. Not only is this expected, it is intended.

> You don't need to pray for a potiticized safety net if you have employers and companies that take care of their workers and invest into their long term human capital and don't lay them off during the crisis, that is you have organisational capacity, something the American labour market lacks completely. It's everyone for themselves as soon as the alarm bells go off.

This seems directly at odds with your point about Coronavirus. In a Coronavirus world, if governments are forcing enterprises to pause their business, the only way to make sure people don't starve is to have a politicized safety net. Either it is in the form of corporate subsidies to keep employees on payroll, or it's in the form of direct cash to people. Right now, the US is doing both[2].

[1] https://imgur.com/a/AifRmdD

[2] https://imgur.com/a/db2DC2s

>Are you asserting that all those people are incapable of determining what is best for them?

If you give somebody a choice between working a little bit and not having a job at all, most people will take the little bit of work they're offered. The "people continue to take these jobs" argument is only valid if there's an abundance of other jobs available, which there is not.

Whether or not a job is underpaid is not determined by whether or not somebody is willing to do it for that amount of money. If people aren't being paid a living wage, they're being underpaid, and their wages will have to be subsidized by social assistance programs if their basic needs are going to be met.

> If you give somebody a choice between working a little bit and not having a job at all, most people will take the little bit of work they're offered. The "people continue to take these jobs" argument is only valid if there's an abundance of other jobs available, which there is not.

Prior to the coronavirus, unemployment in the US was at historic lows. That is likely to return rather swiftly once there is no longer a pandemic suppressing economic activity, especially given the amount of stimulus being applied.

So there apparently are other jobs available in general, since most everybody has one (and only a very small percentage of those are working for Uber).

> Whether or not a job is underpaid is not determined by whether or not somebody is willing to do it for that amount of money. If people aren't being paid a living wage, they're being underpaid, and their wages will have to be subsidized by social assistance programs if their basic needs are going to be met.

They also have to be subsidized if they're unemployed, right?

That appears to be the major flaw in your argument. If there are other jobs available then they have other options and are choosing this for a reason (e.g. flexibility), but if there aren't then the alternative, if this work disappears because it can't justify higher compensation, is unemployment. Which is both worse for the worker and requires even more subsidy from the taxpayer. So either way it's better that more flexible but lower paying work be available.

Systemically there are always fewer jobs than people that want them as a matter of policy. Businesses hire only when there is profit to be had whereas people need a job every day to eat.

If you change the system so that there is always an alternative job available - and correct the power asymmetry so that individuals can say “no deal” too then wages will correct themselves.

And very likely most gig jobs would disappear as uneconomic.

> Systemically there are always fewer jobs than people that want them as a matter of policy.

This is far from the truth. In pretty much every bull market we end up with plenty of unfilled jobs. Even in many bear markets, there is no lack of unfilled jobs.

The problem is the mismatch between skills and desires of those that want a job and the skills and flexibility requirements of the jobs being offered.

A job may require skills not many people have. A job may require you to work in a place or at a time you don't want to work. But to claim that there is a lack of jobs is just wrong.

The problem here is that some jobs offer flexibility and only require a bit more than average human functioning pre-frontal pre-frontal cortex so you can handle doing something like move something from point A to point B. For a job like this, with the benefit of flexibility and the low skill requirements, it's totally reasonable to supply and demand to drive price down as you don't need to pay as much to find people capable and willing to do the job cheaply because it is an attractive job for them.

If you're willing to learn skills and willing to go to where the job is being offered and work when the job needs to be done, you'll find work that supports you.

> "Gig-style businesses tend to vastly underpay employees."

to your point, this is a function of information asymmetries in the labor market. based on a rough calculation from a couple years ago, a gig driver needs to make about $18/hour (including downtime between rides) to break even against a minimum wage job. between that and additional tax and benefits burden, it's no wonder most people forgo deeper consideration and focus on the gross income of gig work.

it's obvious that workers need to be given direct and upfront information about this. another remedy is to make it as easy to comply with labor, tax and other regulations as a w-2 job (where the employer does nearly all the work). you could also let workers set their prices, but riders hate having prices fluctuate a lot so maybe the platform needs to take on some of that risk.

lot's of things could be changed to make it a more even playing field between worker and platform.

> based on a rough calculation from a couple years ago, a gig driver needs to make about $18/hour (including downtime between rides) to break even against a minimum wage job.

Is this counting the similar uncompensated costs for ordinary wage labor? Most minimum wage workers can't afford to live in the city center even though that's where jobs are concentrated. If you live 60 miles from work, that's not just 120 miles a day of uncompensated driving expense, it's two hours of uncompensated time.

If you use .55/mile as the transportation cost with that long of a commute for a job that pays $7.25/hour for eight hours, that worker makes... uh, negative $8/day. Which I guess makes the two extra uncompensated hours they spend commuting a benefit because they get to amortize their losses over ten hours instead of eight and lose $.80/hour instead of $1/hour?

This might explain why a lot of people prefer making "less money" working for Uber.

> Gig-style businesses tend to vastly underpay employees.

Low-productivity services tend to vastly underpay employees. This is to be expected. The question is whether one can have "gig"-like work that's more worthwhile than driving around for services that can't even make a decent profit and are just spending money they get from their VC funders.

Not "underpaid" as in "not a living wage", but underpaid because once the cost of equipment is factored in, people can end up being paid less than minimum wage. It's a wage floor loophole that should be closed. Though to be fair, rideshare isn't the only guilty industry.

Or even lose money if they are reducing the value of an asset.

Specifically, running their car into the ground doing driving.

> Our current system of coupling healthcare and other life essential benefits with employment is broken.

Is it not possible to purchase your own healthcare independently of an employer? And opt-out of employer healthcare? Or are only employers allowed to insure you?

If it's a matter of scale could a buyer's union buy it bulk like an employer but not linked to your employment?

You can opt out of employer healthcare but it's not going to be in your interest to do so - they're not going to offer to give you cash in lieu.

> they're not going to offer to give you cash in lieu.

The ICHRA[1], which came into effect on January 2020 allows employers to do just that.

There's even a YC company that offers ICHRA functionality for employers[2].

[1] https://ichra.com/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22527102

Buying healthcare as an individual is very expensive, since you're not buying in bulk. Some larger unions do have healthcare for members, but it's more of a bargaining chip to keep workers paying dues.

> Buying healthcare as an individual is very expensive, since you're not buying in bulk

This is a common refrain, but it's actually not true. Individual plans operate as a giant "group" with other individuals, and the size of that group is often larger than most employer groups.

There are a host of reasons why healthcare is expensive in the US, and the "bulk purchasing" is not really one of them.

Source: I work in health insurance.

What we really need now to level is to make individual health insurance effectively a pre-income-tax item like it is when you get it via employment.

> What we really need now to level is to make individual health insurance effectively a pre-income-tax item like it is when you get it via employment.

The ICHRA[1], which came into effect on January 2020 is an interesting step in this direction. It allows employers to provide a pre-tax cash monthly allowance to buy health insurance on the individual market in lieu of the monthly premiums they would pay anyway as part of the employer mandate to provide group health insurance directly.

There's even a YC company that offers ICHRA functionality for employers[2].

[1] https://ichra.com/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22527102

Nonsense. It's cheaper to sell and administer one group policy that covers 10,000 individuals than do this for 10,000 individual policies.

Those 10,000 individual policies are paid for out of a shared pool of risk. The payer administers it the same way they administer a group plan. It is literally identical to a group of 10,000 individuals.

I work in health insurance.

Have you looked at the total cost of your insurance -- including what your employer pays? They have to report it to you as part of the ACA. Mine is $25000 a year for family coverage including employer subsidies. Luckily we pay less than $100/month though

Many unions used to administer and provide healthcare to members, before the Great Depression and WWII; but union-sourced healthcare is now heavily disadvantaged from a tax perspective. I say 'healthcare' because there were many non-insurance arrangements.

In some ways, having a union provide healthcare makes more sense than having the employer do it. In industries with many small firms, and fewer large unions (like construction), the union will probably have better bargaining power. Members of a given union also probably have more (means and needs) in common with each other than employees of a given company.

Huh. Back around 2000, I had ~affordable health insurance through SBWA, while consulting. As I recall, it cost ~$400 per month.

It is possible but prohibitively expensive. A "good" price for health insurance for an individual still has ~$1000 monthly premiums. This isn't far off what employers pay. A good plan can easily be $15k - $20k per year in premiums paid by an employer.

The ICHRA[1], which came into effect on January 2020 is an interesting step in the direction of decoupling health insurance from employment.

There's even a YC company that offers ICHRA functionality for employers[2].

[1] https://ichra.com/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22527102

I (single male, no dependents, early 50s, a "previously existing condition") am paying approx. $750/month for an ACA "Silver" plan (https://obamacarefacts.com/silver-plan/) from Blue Cross/Blue Shield (the only provider in my area).

Yes, it is possible to purchase your own healthcare independently. Prior to the ACA, however, things like preexisting conditions were not covered, which is how I know a Symbicort asthma inhaler costs about $700/ea.

> Is it not possible to purchase your own healthcare independently of an employer?

Have you priced outside insurance?

If you are making the wages Uber is paying drivers, it is not possible to purchase healthcare independent of your employer and pay rent.

If you are making the wages Uber is paying drivers, you will likely be eligible for ACA subsidies that reduce the monthly premium. If your income is low enough, the full premium price is subsidized.

> #2 Gig-style businesses tend to vastly underpay employees.

Yes and as said below, that's by design. Uber/Lyft for example would not survived if they priced their service to allow a fair pay for the gig worker after accounting for vehicle costs. This whole system is built on underpaying workers and making people believe that a ride could "really" be that cheap. It isn't. There is a reason why taxi rides were expensive before Uber became a thing.

> Yes and as said below, that's by design.

I realize this, which is why I suggest strongly that Uber not be allowed at the table if/ when any legislation around this matter.

> There are 2 big problems with on-demand/ gig employment

The only developed country where they are a problem is the USA.

Other countries have healthcare regardless of employment status, and minimum wages high enough to live a good life ($19.48 AUD/hr in Australia, for example).

They can, and have been fixed elsewhere.

> They can, and have been fixed elsewhere.

Yep. And I should have mentioned that.

That's US$12.12/hr to save anyone interested the time looking it up

It's more like US$13.50/hr if you take the exchange rate from a few months ago, before the COVID-19 crisis.

on #2, someone told me how much they made and I could not understand why anyone would do it - the additional wear and tear on your vehicle and depreciation did not seem to leave a net profit after the first month incentives/bonuses that all the gig employment places were using at that time (you have to be building enough of a profit margin to buy another vehicle at some point - just keeping your head above water seems like a waste of time driving instead of anything else to me personally but maybe I am speaking from a position of too much privilege).

It usually only makes sense if your car is a sunk cost — I.e. you own it for personal use, you would have owned the car anyway (Uber or not), and you decide to monetize it on the side.

>If those things are fixed, then suddenly gig work is amazing, but that's a pretty big ask.

There is no fixing these things. They are a feature, not a bug. The entire viability of these businesses exists within the margin created by stripping away any vestige of traditional employment stability, allowing desperate people to exchange their long term wellbeing for short term cash.

Eh, a significant portion of the first problem is solved by simply having single payer healthcare like most developed countries (except the States) has.

Or we could simply remove the tax break for employer based healthcare and let the market readjust.

And while we're add it, make health insurance premiums paid by individuals 100% deductable from their federal income tax.

I think this readjustment would tend towards extracting more money from fewer people who can pay and letting the rest go without care.

> remove the tax break for employer based healthcare

This is a big part of the problem, but I don't think it would fix everything by a long shot.

You do realize that in fact most developed countries actually have a healthcare system much like the US. Also most of the countries with a single payer health system have 3rd party health insurance that can be purchased. A true one payor only plan is the exception not the rule.

> You do realize that in fact most developed countries actually have a healthcare system much like the US.

You're gonna have to work a lot harder than you are here to make this point pass muster. It's pretty blatantly untrue.

Yes, supplemental insurance is often a thing that exists. It's generally nothing like the US system's insurance though.

I'm from Denmark, and the fact that certain parts of our healthcare system are not part of the single-payer system, and the fact that you can buy insurance for these things, really really does not make it a healthcare system much like the US'.

Universal healthcare doesn't necessarily have to be single-payer, lots of countries have multi-payer healthcare systems, like Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Singapore.

In the Netherlands and Switzerland, all health insurance is provided by regulated private payers.

> The entire viability of these businesses exists within the margin created by stripping away any vestige of traditional employment stability

That's a stretch. Even if Uber/Lyft were forced to employ their drivers, they would most likely just raise prices and cut marketing costs. Sure, they'd be much smaller businesses, but they'd very likely still live on.

Uber pays their drivers ~$7b a year. Employing them would cost an extra ~$2.1B/yr. Self driving cars are probably coming in 10 years, so even if they didn't increase prices or make any other changes in their operating model, they'd need to raise $21B to hold them over. That's not a small amount of money, but Uber's market cap is $54B.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com