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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

I like internet based delivery. Can we get a union based alternative so I don't feel bad about the person turning up to my door being an outsourced slave?

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In Denmark, our deliveries are currently not unionized, although there is a large debate around it. Denmark has no minimum wage either.

The people doing the deliveries for e.g. Wolt earn at minimum of 120 DKK an hour (~18,5 USD) on a scheduled shift and can often earn more, depending on how much they are willing to work. The last average I read is around 150DKK an hour (~23,30 USD) for delivery personel in that company.

The main issue with unionizing in Denmark is that it would require the companies to sign the delivery people to fixed-hour contracts (think nine-to-five), which doesn't work with the business model and isn't what most of the delivery people have expressed their wants about. Most of them enjoy the freedom and many in creative industries (e.g. musicians) use it as a way to supplement their income.

I think it is important to recognize what unionization actually means and whether or not that solves the problem, and before that; figure out what the actual problem really is.

Also foreigners who wants to study and get SU (State Study Support around 900 EUR/month, and yes, you basically get payed to study) use this to get what's called "equal status" which qualifies them for the SU and probably other benefits as well.

Thank you, great point.

(Also, I am thankful that you are descripting the SU correctly; one gets paid to be enrolled at a qualifying educational institution - paid to study, not paid to get an education, even though this is luckily what happens most of the time.)

> The main issue with unionizing in Denmark is that it would require the companies to sign the delivery people to fixed-hour contracts

That seems like a conflation of two entirely different things. Plenty of unions represent people who work intermittently or weird hours, like basically every union related to film production.

Possibly, but this is the situation we're faced with here in Denmark, as our cartel of unions have divided the market in such a way.

I agree that this is not necessarily what "unionization" means specificly, but this is the concrete case here, and thus my caveat as to the importance of the exact definition.

Sure, deliveries will cost $80 per hour with a 4 hour minimum. You can get deliveries between 9am-12pm and 1pm-5pm (mandatory lunch break).

> deliveries will cost $80 per hour with a 4 hour minimum

You don't pay per hour to get things delivered? Sure, if delivery workers unionized end customer costs would likely be a bit higher, but is that such a bad thing if it means the people working are not worked to the bone anymore?

It wouldn't be "a bit" higher, it would be out of the market. A completely analogous situation is how if we manufactured computers using something other than (effectively) slave labor, a macbook would cost $15,000.

These problems will go away in the same way similar problems have gone away in the past: with technology advancing to a point where no humans are required to be in the loop any longer.

Can I ask how you arrive at that $15k figure please?

It's not supposed to be an actual figure, but an increase of 0.5 to 1 orders of magnitude is realistic considering the price of similar products, like the Librem 5 USA.

Then again, if the Librem 5 were manufactured in the same volumes as a MacBook, that would probably save an order of magnitude in parts procurement, stocking, availability, and price negotiations, so in effect the costs would cancel out.

I think the 15000 number is way too high.

> a macbook would cost $15,000.

Devil's advocate: What's bad about that? Guess we would appreciate the value of the device way more if it would be that expensive. Also, by reducing the margin available to the company, it certainly wouldn't land at 15k. And yes, that would also mean that "shareholders" won't be able to make millions.

The downside would be that much fewer people would be able to afford it in the first place. Cheap personal computers are a very powerful force for good, this is a very unpalatable but reasonable compromise.

Taking the other side of the compromise is of course also reasonable, but pretending it's somehow a free lunch is not realistic.

I'd be in favor of that if it meant that companies and government would go back to taking mail and phone calls seriously.

Did cotton get more expensive after slavery was abolished? I feel like there might just be a small number of evil people extracting all the benefit and not passing those savings on to me.

By the Civil War era, there were suppliers of cotton in Africa and South-East Asia that were cheaper and more reliable than the Confederate states.

Hint: they didn't treat their workers much better than plantation owners treated slaves.

The point here isn't who is good and who is evil, I'm purposefully avoiding that. The point is that it's not possible to both have $1,000 laptops and decent wages for workers.

I find it very reasonable that one would say that no, it's not acceptable to treat workers like that, and if that means we can't have laptops, we'll do without.

I don't find it reasonable to claim you can have both.

As a middle class person, you can’t pay someone else a middle class living to fetch your groceries. Or clean your house, or drive you to the airport, or any of those things. You can only buy a service like this because the price that will get someone else to do it is small to you.

It’s a large scale trend. As an economy gets more productive, a would-be servant’s alternatives get better, and we wind up doing more of our own chores. Generally a healthy sign.

I think that's a bit extreme! But if their pay bothers you, tip them more.

Short answer is no. Long answer is majority of people discriminate a lot on price, so the only way is make governments mandates about quality of the service and how the people are treated - which comes with all the externalities and side effects of regulation.

+1 cheap services are cheap because labor is cheap in some way. Without cheap labor the cost has to be put on someone.

I am not so much worried about price in the case, but about barriers of entry - incumbents love regulation because it converts them into monopoly/oligopoly since they are able to extract economies of scale when complying (and of course lobby about favorable to them regulations).

Regulation of Uber class services means we will be stuck with Uber forever. Whether this is good or bad thing is left to the reader to decide.

With cheap labor, the cost also has to be put on someone, and labor is that someone.

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