FTC to crack down on companies taking advantage of gig workers
ftc.gov
ftc.gov
Most of us are old enough to have seen these companies spring into existence, so here are the steps:
1) 100% of people are employed or unemployed. Uber (for example) doesn't exist
2) uber starts existing, some previously unemployed people and some previously employed people start working for uber
3) those people that willingly took those jobs are being taken advantage of
What is the principal that justifies 3? People are not agents of free will, and any sub-utopic framework they have to participate in is immoral? Even if that's the case, I'd like to see the argument that those people who chose and choose to work at uber have worse outcomes than they otherwise would.
By your logic above, an indentured servitude would count as a "not being taken advantage of" and by implication, reasonable moral form of employment.
Each of the following questions in your final paragraph are similarly shallow.
> People are not agents of free will, and any sub-utopic framework they have to participate in is immoral?
This is a straw man argument to its core. No one is, or has suggested that all labor should be abolished unless it meets a utopian ideal.
> Even if that's the case
It is not the case
> I'd like to see the argument that those people who chose and choose to work at uber have worse outcomes than they otherwise would
Interestingly, this is the same argument that was used in favor of slavery.
I'm going to second the GP's request for a convincing argument, as I've also yet to see one.
Here in The Netherlands flexible labor and temporary rental contracts were introduced last decade, they were meant to increase the fluidity of both markets and take up a small amount of overall contracts, but have started to dominate both of them. Being on either basically erodes any certainty you could have had as a foundation to build your life on.
Gig work is even worse than flexible contracts. Not only can you be ditched at any moment, in many ways you are considered self-employed which strips you of so many protections normally afforded to you. And whereas self-employed software developers (read: freelancers) are in an extremely powerful economic position, the usual gig worker has almost zero leverage. ‘Nuff said.
I'll take a stab at a strong argument for gig workers being taken advantage of. I don't think it describes _every single_ gig worker, but I'm sure there are some for whom it's true.
There are individuals in precarious economic positions. They need income to survive, they are living one week to the next (meaning they pay rent weekly, and have no excess money at the end of the week). They need to provide for their families, maybe send money home to their families in another country because they are immigrants. Stuff like that. You can talk to them yourself, ride a cab in New York and ask the driver about his life, these stories are pretty common.
Let's say they have limited skills. But they have a body. They can move around, drive a car, or maybe just ride an e-Bike. They could maybe drive a cab, but driving a cab costs you a a flat fee per month to rent the medallion, no matter what you make. I believe you need some upfront capital to get started. So they sign up for Uber Eats / DoorDash / Grubhub / pick your delivery app.
The pay on DoorDash is very low, because consumers won't pay that much for food delivery. Out of that, the restaurant has to get paid, DoorDash has to get paid, and the gig worker has to get paid. Who has the least amount of bargaining power in this situation? The restaurant has other sources of income, so they can leave if they aren't happy with the cut. The platform obviously sets the terms, and there's a lot of people in precarious economic positions who need money. So the gig worker has the least amount of bargaining power. So he gets a pretty low pay. He lives in a one-room apartment with like, 8 other gig workers who all do delivery for Doordash, Grubhub, Uber Eats etc. (I'm not making this up, it's pretty common) and works 7 days a week. No time for learning some new skill, and since the wages are subsistence level, no ability to save and eventually move on to better work.
So essentially, they need money to survive, the money they get from delivery apps gives them that, but no more. They would certainly prefer to do something else, but have no other skills. So these apps run on the labor of people in precarious economic positions with no better options. Of course he has "free will", but I'm curios what economic alternatives you think are on offer that make that free will a meaningful, and not simply philosophical, concept.
Perhaps the phrase "taken advantage of" triggers some people. But it doesn't seem that controversial to me. The business works because there are people who need to work a job for very low pay. I don't think they love riding around picking up bags of food for $3-$5 each.
Here's a thread on the DoorDash Reddit, I found it by scrolling down the front page, it's not old.
https://www.reddit.com/r/doordash/comments/xeyvrg/the_soul_c...
Here's the top comment with 119 upvotes
> I couldn’t agree more. The only reason I’m doing doordash currently is out of desperation. Plus, it allows me some much needed flexibility which is crucial given some difficulties in my personal life.
I dunno what you consider that. But it's not like, an arrangement in which the worker seems to opting into this because they think it's a good deal out of their plethora of options. They do it because they are, in their words, desperate.
Edit: I'm not saying gig companies are evil or something, or even predatory. It's unclear to me if they have sound unit economics, but that doesn't make them evil. The business just doesn't work without low delivery wages.
They do though. Gig workers are almost always in a very economically precarious position which Uber takes advantage of in precisely the same way that employers of indentured servitude do.
If the US had full employment and decent unemployment benefits (like it used to) jobs like these wouldnt exist.
A request for explanation almost by definition cannot be a strawman. Just because you disagree with the context of that question does not justify such a shallow, emotional response.
It can when the request isn't really a request but an assertion taken to an absurd extreme that merely resembles a question. cf Tucker Carlson "just asking questions".
People can quit Uber/Lyft whenever. Indentured servitude cannot be quit.
There's a difference in "creating an opportunity for people" and "forcing them to work for you"
> this is the same argument that was used in favor of slavery.
Nope. There's a difference in creating a new choice for people and taking all choice away from them.
same thing really if you have no other option to earn rent and food.
And them using it as opportunity to pay low (after you include car deprecation/fuel/repairs might be even at/below minimal wage level) means you can't just do your 40 hours/week to support yourself.
> I'd like to see the argument that those people who chose and choose to work at uber have worse outcomes than they otherwise would
The reply:
> this is the same argument that was used in favor of slavery.
To which you replied
> Nope. There's a difference in creating a new choice for people and taking all choice away from them.
The commenter is not saying that gig work is the same as slavery here, they are saying that slave holders argued, often correctly, that slaves, as capital, enjoyed a higher standard of living than did wage workers, who could be worked to death and thrown away, and that this justified the institution.
This implies they have viable alternate choices (setting aside the obvious other option, unemployment or being houseless). It may be that Uber/Lyft are the only employers they have access to, or they may otherwise have a sufficient amount of bills / debt that they have no personal time / cash to explore employment alternatives adequately.
Conservative (and by and large its ally, libertarian) politics lean on this often obfuscated nuance to sell this idea that the poor always have the choice to simply leave exploitative employers. It is not so simple.
Wow, quite tone deaf for a response that doesn't actually address any single topical point, but just offers a very poor strawman.
Nobody is arguing that slavery is bad. People are asking how driving for Uber is remotely like slavery. And so far, nobody has answered.
Instead of mud slinging, how about being the change you want to see on HN.
Uber decided fuck Society's contract/norms for the business/employee relationship, we are going to abuse the definition of 'contractor'.
Once that observation is made, it becomes clear that the argument is actually: This class of people is unfit for better work, and without our poverty wages they would die. In my opinion that's very similar to the idea that the "negro" was inferior to the white man and therefore it was by his grace that the "negro" was allowed to exist.
"People get into these agreements on their own choice" some will say, but these are often people without other good choices.
The logical fallacy is that just because one option is better than the alternatives, it does not follow that the option in question is good. The villain from Saw may let you choose how you will be murdered, but your having chosen to be stabbed instead of drowned doesn't absolve the killer of their culpability in your death.
Interestingly, it's comments like yours that cause me to lose faith in the quality of conversation at Hacker News.
Basically Godwin'ing to "slavery" when the prior poster clearly talked about free will and choice is intellectual laziness.
That we went from "I have no job at all and am unemployable" to "it appears I can be exploited for my labor at a rate that doesn't allow me to escape poverty, but may allow me to at least not starve to death" is not defensible or desirable.
That you see it as acceptable or a reflection of a legitimate "choice" moreso reflects on your inexperience with or inability to adequately reason about the reality of sincere poverty, not reality.
That's really not very interesting, this same argument can be applied to many things that were good and many things that were bad.
Let's try and focus on the topic at hand vs arguing semantics
What are the lines a person may not cross for crossing is an indication that the person is lacking information or decision making competence and thus decision making power is taken from them?
Some might argue for one extreme or another, the rest of us see it at some point between total and no decision making power with the line drawn at different points in different contexts. Besides drawing the line, there is the matter of who can draw it. Why would one think that on the main the FTC is better at making the decision in this context than the person making the decision?
I get what you're saying but isn't it a little rash to discard all discussion on hacker news because of a splattering of naive shallow comments? I rather agree with your response, but I also understand how many people who have yet to consider the matter deeply, or maybe have never been poor, think of reality as "a group of rational equal individual actors".
I very much agree that the argument responded too here share a lot of similarity to arguments for slavery, although the veneer is certainly much more palatable, but we have to remember that even slavery was pretty popular, and hacker news will never be a progressive socialist platform.
Personally, I think accepting these types of discussions is a small price to pay for the informed and nuanced discussions i get to have and watch on hacker news.
Ok, go on. Please enumerate the similarities.
But, unfortunately, I think there are two major concepts that are also at play here, that cause me to disagree with your position, or perhaps should be better elaborated in order to explain mine.
The main two components of swaying public opinion during a public debate are:
First, who actually presents the more logical argument.
The second is that both viewpoints are given stature and respectability by the mere fact that both viewpoints are included in the debate and by the fact that the community has chosen to engage and listen to the debate. The fact that both the members of the debate and the audience itself are willing to listen to both sides of the discussion and take them both seriously is oftentimes the more major persuasive social force at play. This is because it means that audience members who perhaps do not pay as as much attention to the actual merits within the debate itself, will quickly deduce that by virtue of the fact that the debate is taken seriously, both viewpoints must therefore be serious and well respected. Additionally, the fact that both viewpoints are being debated at all implies that both viewpoints must be relatively similar in liklihood of accuracy and therefore it is reasonable to believe either side of the debate. After all we no longer hold debates on whether or not gravity exists, we only hold debates on things where either side could, potentially, be true.
This second point is why the concept of the Overton window exists. This second point is why you cannot correct neo-nazism by discussing neo-nazi ideas in a public forum, and the mere act of giving neo-nazism a public forum at all is a win for the neo-nazi, even if you then win the debate (in short: neo-nazism is such a rightfully hated ideology, that merely giving it the respect of a debate is a step up for the ideology, even if they then lose the debate). Etc
This leaves us with a question. Which is more important? Which concept is more responsible for persuading audience members? The first concept or the second? Surely, different discussions in different social situations would lean more heavily towards one or the other being more important.
I think if you and I were to a host public, yet small debate in front of a class of aspiring logicians at Oxford University, the merits of the logical argument would be more important than the setting itself. I would be willing to bet that such an audience, in such a not-very-high-profile setting would be more moved by logical argument than the social stature of the event. Conversely, I would posit that the reason Fox News invites liberals on their platform regularly, and then does not give them an adequate chance to prevent their viewpoints, is because it allows the network to put them against actually indefensible and unpopular extremely right wing viewpoints, and leave the uneducated audience, who did not receive a good explanation of either viewpoint, to leave the segment assuming that both viewpoints must be equally well respected and potentially correct.
The original post I responded to is factually incorrect. Their viewpoint boils down to the idea that a labor arrangement cannot be exploitative if that labor arrangement was entered into willingly by both parties, with no nuance for what constitutes "willingly" in our economic system. That is a patently false idea, and is only tangentially related to the situation of gig workers to which the author attempts to relate it.
So the question becomes, if I give a genuine rebuttal of that memetic idea, which would be more important? Would the Hacker News crowd be moved more by well reasoned argument that goes many paragraphs deep, involving historical examples and moral assessment? Or would the majority of internet readers skip over the debate after the first few sentences or posts, and assume that by virtue of the fact that the original post is the highest voted comment on the page, that it must be a reasonable viewpoint?
Considering the fact that at the time I posted, there were numerous attempts at logical refutation, all of which were ignored. And considering the fact that the vast majority of the responses I have received so grotesquely misunderstand my post as to think that I am calling gig workers slaves, as opposed to pointing out the logical fallacies of the post. I have to think that no, the second effect here is more potent to this particular online crowd than the first.
In that scenario, nuanced reasoned rebuttal of an extreme viewpoint is not reasonable. To give respect to an unrespectable viewpoint is not a virtue if your audience lacks the intellectual depth or curiosity to critically engage with the debate.
In that scenario, the best thing you can do is to put a large warning label on the unreasonable viewpoint that says: "Beware all audience members: the above viewpoint is not considered reasonable or moral by all members of this community." That is how you address the second social concept at play here.
People who then, afterward, want to discuss in deeper logic thereafter, are free to do so.
And that's why my response was intentionally brash, and why engaging with such an unrespectable and indefensible viewpoint, in public, at the top of the post, is an irresponsible thing to do, until it has been established first to a passive audience that this is not an equal debate between respected opinions. And even then, that is often not sufficient, but it is at least something I could do here.
Your comment reads like someone who read a few books on logic and argument and started using them whenever they have an argument without understanding it.
As inequality mostly driven by technology grows more and more people will be required to accept less and less fair employment so the gig economy is essentially betting on a worse tomorrow. I dont like that, i dont support it, and if the ceos of these companies are your neighbors like they are mine — you see how completely nihilistic they are about this. They know it, they don’t care. But they pretend a story that this is a better world for you, the naive tech worker.
Tons of people here are well monied professionals who struggle to put themselves into another person's shoes. They grew up privileged, got to go to school/college, and ended up on a good career path. They're people who will unironically say people should "pull themselves up by the bootstraps," and claim that we're in a meritocracy where hard work guarantees financial stability + success.
They have no idea what it's like for a person struggling to get by, and they've been sold a lifetime of "poor person = bad," or "poor person = lazy" propaganda.
There are lots of people here that struggle with basic empathy.
Most Uber drivers are happy because they can select their hours and the more they work the more money they make. It’s pretty simple. They aren’t poor, stupid uneducated masses that need saving by the likes of you. Your elitist views looking down on their ability to discern what is good for them is exactly why Trump disastrously won and we all suffered. And unfortunately why the Republicans will probably win again in 2024.
Just because someone sees that they have little choice, and then chooses exploitation over poverty, homelessness, or starvation, it doesn't mean that it's ok that we have jobs that exploit workers. It's the role of labor regulators to try to reduce the exploitative nature of these jobs. And if a job can't exist without exploiting workers, then it must be shut down. This isn't new or particularly controversial; it's been the goal of labor movements for centuries.
I mean this in general terms; I have heard both good and bad stories about what it's like to drive for Uber, so I'm not quite ready to raise up the pitchforks against them, but I do believe they are worthy of more scrutiny.
No it wouldn't. Indentured servitude requires someone to be indentured, which is immediately in conflict with OP's correct observation that no one is being forced to work. They directly hinged their question on the premise that the workers are free to make choices.
OP's question regarding the free choices of previously unemployed workers is valid. Questioning why 1099 employment isn't "moral" as you put it is also valid.
> > People are not agents of free will, and any sub-utopic framework they have to participate in is immoral?
> This is a straw man argument to its core. No one is, or has suggested that all labor should be abolished unless it meets a utopian ideal.
Actually your response is the straw man here, because you have introduced and attacked an absolute (all labor) where one did not previously exist.
You're projecting the errors you yourself are making onto OP.
You're thinking of slaves. Indentured servants chose to enter into binding contracts. No one forced them to sign away years of their life; they did so of their own volition. US case law would no longer recognize such contracts as valid.
Given that people need to work to live, replacing more/better jobs with fewer/worse jobs is absolutely a moral imposition on the working population.
Rationalizing this on the grounds that people are "free" to choose among the fewer/worse jobs is diabolical.
* Jobs are not sticky (eg, there are 0 switching costs once you are 'stuck' at an employer)
* Employers cannot change their character or terms (eg, it was a good place to work yesterday, now it has become a bad place to work)
* Employers cannot drag an entire industry or employment segment down (eg, race to the bottom)
* Employers cannot do anti-competitive/restrictive things (eg, you must drive this kind of car, you must work these hours, you cannot work for a competitor, you cannot negotiate on the terms of your pay structure)
I'm generally (and historically; eg, younger me) very sympathetic to the idea of freedom to contract for any terms.
However, it is not a zero-sum game. A previously-unemployed person does not become employed and then be magically better for life. That would assume they would have been unemployed forever had this business not come along, and it would also assume that this business cannot become worse to work for over time or limit one's prospects.
I used to be very opposed to the concept of wage floors, however what's changed my mind has been the impact of unemployment to drag down wages. As long as there is >0 unemployment, there can and will be a race to the bottom in terms of the wages and conditions of marginal employment. This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if the employment market was a fixed pie (again, zero sum game), but that's not the way the real world works.
That means if we want optimal outcomes, we need things like labor regulation and unions to balance the asymmetries.
It is very easy to get and quit a gig job.
None that I know of restrict you via noncompetes.
> it is not a zero-sum game
> does not become employed and then be magically better for life
> would have been unemployed forever had this business not come along
That's what makes it non zero sum. The marginal worker is better off, because this new marginal employer exists. Any down-the-line employer which isn't this one will be worse by definition.
> This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if the employment market was a fixed pie
Doesn't make sense. Either error in logic or I can't parse your final point.
This is why when one company manages to lower the bar just a bit further and find new loopholes to exploit to pay workers less, give them even worse working conditions and benefits, or give them even less power and autonomy, it sticks out more than it normally would in a healthy labor economy.
In this "minimum wage makes the government a union" metaphor, if you find a way to work for less than minimum wage, even if it's your only option, you're crossing the picket line and you're wrong. You're supposed to make a worse decision for yourself, so that everyone together avoids a race to the bottom.
So it is working as intended. But I don't like the intention, because it means, if the market can't price your labor above minimum wage, you just can't work. You have to find some other way to work for less than minimum wage, maybe working under the table, or getting qualified as disabled, or making YouTube videos.
Are we really asking poor people below that labor price floor to be on strike forever, to protect the jobs of other poor people who are barely above that price floor? It seems like a bad solution.
The alternatives are things like UBI or NIT or wage subsidies, which are not politically popular.
And maybe I'm committing the Golden Mean Fallacy, but I think if we had some combo of UBI and wage subsidies and then just let the market work itself out (and keep stuff like OSHA, of course), it would be better than setting price floors on labor.
Disclaimer: I became interested in UBI a few years ago after seeing SSC (Yeah, I know...) rail against basic jobs programs in this piece: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/16/basic-income-not-basic...
There is probably a line where the gains of increasing minimum wage even out and start to negatively impact some industries, but the data points to us being far below that line right now. We could easily pay lowest earners more and see only positive effects from it for everyone. And since that's the case, it seems less defensible that someone can work 40 hours a week and not even come close to providing the most basic necessities for themselves.
The issue is quality of life vs all wages, as reflected in buying power and the ability to have a good life. Rather than an inflationary focus on raising the minimum (a hidden tax on the non-ownership classes, as the land / property / business owners will just raise their rates to keep up); quality of life should be raised by raising Buying Power, not by raising the minimum.
Raising Buying Power is tough though, since it requires market regulation and leadership. It means the price of food, of services, and of housing must go down to make quality better. However we'd all be better off under such a model (owners and rent/profit seekers less so, but still better other than the profits).
The intent is that this is an empty group, except the people that actually are disabled.
Temporary unemployment will exist, of course, but the intent is that every moderately motivated, healthy, and non-disabled adult is qualified for many minimum-wage jobs and has a good shot at getting them when there are openings.
I see this claim repeated a lot but you didn't say where it comes from so it's a bit hard to discuss. In particular, you are making a claim about the productivity of low earners but I don't think this is something that is measured in the US? My understanding is the BLS computes industry-wide productivity measures, ie mean productivity (as opposed to say median productivity), and one would expect this distribution to be significantly right-tailed and the mean to be mostly influenced by the right tail.
I haven't seen any data that breaks down productivity growth by income, so if you have a source for your claim I'd love to update myself. When I search for "productivity growth by income" I see versions of your claim but again they are all about population _means_.
I haven't yet seen a source, whether it's a total average measure or bucketed, that doesn't at least show that productivity has always continued increasing year-over-year - not always at pace with GDP growth, but "productivity at an all-time high" still holds true. I think this tracks intuitively too, given that we continue to add infrastructure and technology to support production and services.
The key point is that lowest earner's share of income has consistently decreased at the same time. That discrepancy alone, and the fact that the discrepancy has been allowed to widen for many decades now, is what gets us to the situation we're in today.
How are people delivering food faster/cheaper than 30 years ago? There is more road traffic and cities are bigger (further to drive).
There is of course no threat of homelessness or starvation and those that were unemployed could have "chosen" to remain unemployed rather than taking those gig employment offers.
Also as per your example, clearly everyone that started working at Uber knew they had to take into account costs such as the replacement cost of their vehicle, higher maintenance cost due to a huge increase on average kilometers driven per month, higher insurance costs, cleaning and repair cost to seats due to higher usage, etc.
If people could choose to not work and not starve/lose their home I would somewhat agree most of those picking up employment as pauperized gig workers would do so willingly.
This is not really the company's fault that the system is set up so people must work. Address that at the societal level. We can start with building enough housing so people can afford rent making $3 per hour.
I have a bunch of keywords watchers for a site I am building (AI). They also hit some gig worker subreddits due to data labeling. There is so much demand for click work it is insane. The sad thing about it all is that, at least for remote work, US workers are competing against cheaper overseas labor.
I could hire some labelers, pay them per label a rate that comes to ~$10 per hour, and get completely undercut by someone who clones the business model but hires people from (e.g.) Brazil. It is a tough situation but the demand for work is there.
I'd be interested in any policies that create good jobs for American workers.
Separately - companies in the US take advantage of most employees. So I’d say any large employer could do with an FTC shakedown.
That said, it’s not any different than say Walmarts of the world - where most of their full time W-2 employees are in public assistance simply because of the pay.
Reality, in the capitalism anyhow, is - if you’re working for someone they’re not going to pay you more than what they can get out of you or the next sucker willing to work for less - the question is how much?! And what’s fair.
I'll try :).
A right, by definition, is a moral or legal entitlement to have or obtain something or to act in a certain way. (Legal) Rights cannot be taken away from you.
Make sure you understand that before the next step.
Now read -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_rights and make sure you spend ample time becoming acquainted with the kind of rights that are bestowed to workers in countries like the US.
Now make a judgment on whether you think some of these companies are infringing some of these rights. If you also have trouble with that, let me know and I'll help as well!
Governments may, at their discretion change the rules about how Uber might deal with its workers. California recently did this.
> Now make a judgment on whether you think some of these companies are infringing some of these rights
Maybe you could post your own analysis instead of having a sparse wikipedia page do the heavy lifting?
For legal: What law are they breaking by paying drivers as contractors?
For moral: Given that 1099 status is legal, why don't drivers have a right to be classified as such?
The law provides me the opportunity to work as a self employed contractor. I drive for Uber, Lyft, any whoever else. I end up making less than minimum wage. Who has violated my moral entitlement? Was it Uber? Did I violate my own rights? Why don't I have the right not to make minimum wage?
The history of the 1099 lends itself toward high-risk, high-reward employment. People who started their own businesses and accepted the risk of poor wages or failure in exchange for the chance to have a successful business.
The gig 1099 is a form of moderate-risk, low-reward employment. The risks are slightly lower because of piggybacking on a successful company, but the workers will never become independent of Uber, nor will they ever have a chance of "making it big". Their future is inexorably tangled with that of Uber/Lyft/whoever.
> Did I violate my own rights? Why don't I have the right not to make minimum wage?
The structure of our society mandates that people work. There are generally more people than jobs (as evidenced by a permanent unemployment rate). Allowing some classes of workers to work for below minimum wage can depress wages, because workers without other options will have to accept those below-minimum wages. Then there's a risk it spreads once normalized. Imagine big box stores and fast food switching to 1099's. A lot of those workers won't have the option to just work for someone else for minimum wage, because they lack the skills to switch to a new vertical. They either work for less than minimum wage, or they don't work.
The overarching idea is that it's better to take the right to work for less than minimum wage away to preserve a livable wage for people who won't have any other options.
If a right is a moral entitlement, then it's not bestowed upon you and it can't be taken from you.
If a right is a legal entitlement, then it certainly can!
They exploit the worker by underpaying them and treating them badly by the standards of the old levy, the taxi medallion. They exploit society by hollowing out the middle class.
We actually need a middle class for the benefit of the masses, and even the ultra-wealthy, though only a few of them seem aware of it, like Henry Ford paying his workers enough to buy his cars. H. Ford seemed to lack any goodness of heart--he just had the brains to recognize that no one could buy his cars if they didn't make enough money to buy them.
I think we should intervene in markets to sustain a middle class, which makes society better and richer on the whole. Unchecked free markets eventually seem to end up with a power-law winner-take-all type wealth distribution. Even the ultra-wealthy suffer compared to the ideal in societies with large wealth inequality. They don't live as long. They will have less things like the iphone, which the ultra-wealthy can't really even get a better core version of; they can, perhaps, buy one encased in gold. No middle class, no iphone and things like it.
Should interventions be limited to supporting a middle class?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Coast_Hotel_Co._v._Parris...
1099 is legal. It is explicitly legal to work as a self employed contractor and not make minimum wage. That is legally true.
Whether you link a case that was decided for political reasons does not affect this.
I suspect based on the original article that you may have the opportunity to read the legal analysis you ask for soon if the FTC determines any specific company violated labor law wrt gig work.
As a developer, you have to compete against everyone else in the world on the platform, regardless of your COL and previous salary expectations. The only power you have as a developer is to walk away from the platform and do something else for work (like drive Uber). Your work has been completely commoditized and you have few rights since you're a contractor. You're working for yourself and thus you're expected to be responsible for your own benefits. You willingly took a job and in that scenario, you wouldn't feel taken advantage of at all?
Uber completely destroyed the taxi industry, for better or worse. Contracting engagements are on the rise and it's not that farfetched to see a future where software developers are treated this way too. Why would any of us assume that we're immune from this commoditization, and if we can all agree that we wouldn't want to be subjected to it ourselves, why do we accept it for others?
1) Targeting a market with established taxi companies offering a legally regulated service requiring background checks, insurance, and driving/car safety standards. 2) Illegally setting up an unregulated competing taxi service which relies on the local police/elite being unable/unwilling(bribed) to enforce the existing taxi regulations in light of the size and effort uber puts into its racket. In the process it hires up anyone willing to do it, regardless of if their car is safe, they are actually a good driver or not, meet the insurance requirements of a taxi driver, and so on. 3) Pushing taxi drivers out of work because they can't compete with the obviously cheaper illegal competitor. 4) Hiring many of these now unemployed taxi drivers up as gig workers and paying them far less than they got before for doing a legal job.
This is their model and it is outright exploitative. It is literally just using money to wantonly break the law and rig a market. It is also pretty much what Airbnb and a lot of other silicon valley firms have been up to in recent years, since they obviously ran out of actual innovation to sell.
Licenses to drive taxicabs, called Taxi Medallions used to limit the number of taxicab drivers below demand. Buying the license to operate was a valid investment choice, for hundreds of thousands of dollars. This ensured secure work, wages and support admin for taxis. It wasn't perfect, it just was what it was.
Gig economy apps disrupted this process heavily by soaking up the demand for extra taxi cab services and providing a plug'n'play model for contractors to drive for their taxi service. This was a good deal in the beginning as wages were favourable and lower overheads gave individual drivers a chance to compete with taxicab co's. Medallion prices cratered, meaning a 600k+ medallion had to be bought out by the gov years later a one-sixth the price.
Prices and wages dropped on Apps. Apps never stopped signing up drivers, leading to a glut of taxi drivers that exceeded demand. App surge-pricing models meant the best times to drive were the most expensive for the customer and the highest-competition for the glut of drivers. Drivers could not guarantee consistent customers and therefore wages, or growth in wages so they had varying degrees of economic pressure. Some with car rental payments and personal expenses can not break even.
Apps do not enforce normal working conditions, so if someone cannot meet financial requirements with an 8hr shift, they are incentivized to hit 12hrs driving, for an average wage. When do you get a new job when you're trapped in a 12hr shift, dead end job with no growth or exit strategy? It's lose-lose. Or maybe lose-break even.
I work or I starve. If I don't work, and I don't starve - someone else must be working.
If someones sole and only option was to work for Uber: Is Uber the one at fault here?
If Uber didn't exist and person had zero options, would this be neutral, worse, or better compared to the former scenario?
It's not a fallacy because people have different moral standards about whether you should be employed at $7.25 or unemployed at $15.
Personally I consider it my absolute right to mow lawns at $5/day if I choose to do it. If you think I'm not making enough money, you can give me more! Don't force the people alreaday paying me to pay more.
The EITC gives more benefits than any minimum wage will and more than any 1099 law reform.
> If someones sole and only option was to work for Uber: Is Uber the one at fault here?
Nobody really cares who’s fault it is. Of course Uber is going to attempt to pay as little as they can for labor under existing laws.
> If Uber didn't exist and person had zero options, would this be neutral, worse, or better compared to the former scenario?
So, you mean if there was unfulfilled demand for transportation and a duopoly who abused labor didn’t exist?
> It's not a fallacy because people have different moral standards about whether you should be employed at $7.25 or unemployed at $15.
However, the real economy does actually exist and it is not possible to sustain any sort of lifestyle at $7.25 an hour. $15 is not even sustainable currently. So, to rephrase the question, should people working full-time be able to afford living in a house without government assistance, or should they be able to afford an apartment?
> Personally I consider it my absolute right to mow lawns at $5/day if I choose to do it.
I don’t think that grocery stores or landlords care about your beliefs. If you’re satisfied living in a tent by the interstate or outside and abandoned building, or at your parents house, or have a family or partner who can support you, that’s great. Otherwise, I suppose you can afford Steel Reserve, eat at a homeless shelter and sleep in a tent by the sidewalk at $5 an hour. However, such lifestyles incur significant expense to taxpayers.
> I work or I starve. If I don't work, and I don't starve - someone else must be working.
I have had jobs where I hardly worked at all, yet I received about 10 times minimum wage. Who is supporting the people in such positions?
> deception about pay and hours
> unfair contract terms
> anticompetitive wage fixing
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/amazon-ftc-pay-f...
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/11/25/bay-areas-doordash-to...
i guess you also would have had no problem when steve jobs and other SV companies colluded to wage fix? https://www.theregister.com/2015/09/03/apple_wagefixing_clos...
Looking at these issues in context, this industry seems no worse than any other.
Many pro-Uber arguments point out how rigged against everyday drivers the medallion system in some cities was. Precarious contract labor with all the power in the medallion owner's court.
In theory, "optional light second job or side work while a student" things sound great.
In practice, if you find that that's not the case for the majority of these workers, and that in many cases you've just enlarged an existing problem that was there, but largely ignored, in the case of taxi drivers and some other niches... then it's time to consider regulating this new system. (The taxi system also wasn't much in the news, but this newcomer was, well, news... so that's also gonna play a role.)
(You could also make full-time-employment less of a requirement for things like affordable health care - the market rates for individuals are still very different than what my employer pays for my coverage - but that's an even bigger political non-starter in the US...)
Morally, there are a few issues:
1) Workers are coerced into working because they need money to live. When it's between a life of despair and working for a shitty employer, workers will choose the latter. Laws are meant to prevent abuse in this situation.
2) The information disparity between the two parties means workers cannot make informed decisions, making them abuse their cars and insurance for less profit than expected.
3) The company can still abuse employees, for example by unfairly controlling rideshare rates, refusing to give them things they are supposed to get as employees (the nature of that relationship being defined by the state for the protection of the people).
If "take advantage of" is not well defined as you said, then it reminds me how intellectuals and young people loved Soviet Union in the 30s and 40s, and how European countries and Japan had so many communist parties and political assassinations after WWII. The word "taking advantage of" and "exploit" have such a great appealing to people's righteousness that even the US government can use them freely to gain support from a large number of people.
edit: read the actual announcement and added a paragraph accordingly.
In most European countries workers have protections which include paid sick leave, worker comp, social security payments, pension payments, maternity leave, etc. etc. All these are required by law to be provided partially or fully by the employers.
Uber does not pay any of those. They expect you to be self-employed and pay for all these things yourself yet dictate the price which makes it impossible to live. If you were truly self-employed you would not take the project at that price.
1) there are kids in the schoolyard.
2) all the kids are free to move around; they can talk to anybody else and do things to have fun.
3) a kid can decide to punch another kid; but the unwritten laws of the schoolyard prevent that, because the other kid might throw a punch back.
But now ...
4) a group of 5 kids decide to bully a kid that is standing alone.
How is this possible? Why don't the unwritten laws of the free schoolyard protect the kid?
Good thing there are teachers around to regulate the schoolyard!
I am not saying that this is necessarily the case of e.g. Uber drivers. I am just arguing in general around the argument structure of "the old options are still there, a new one was added, people have free will, therefore they cannot possibly be harmed by this".
Here are two example of how society doesn’t allow certain freely chosen compensations schemes. (A) suppose one could offer money for organ donation, we would see increase in donations. As a society we do not allow it because it is exploitative. (B) More extreme, suppose someone could offer money for the right to kill a volunteer, with enough money I’m sure there would be volunteers, but we don’t allow that because it is also exploitative.
The OPs (2) is less extreme than my (A) or (B), but I hope my examples show that (2) and (3) can be both true.
And if that is bad for the society, that must be addressed. Because, 'Oh, its just happened so' cannot fix things.
It only takes one common situation, right?
They go into debt on the vehicles they lease from the company or from an agent. They were given deliberately incomplete information about how much money they would make, so taking into account all the circumstances, they wind off worse than they would be at a standard, legal job. In other words, "by some process" of deception, they wind up below minimum wage.
Since they don’t, someone else is taking on those costs and risks. But who?
Of course, there are also people who have other jobs (firefighters, nurses, teachers, etc), students, between jobs and they love it. And regulations like this will hurt them.
I hope my argument make sense.
Is this really the case? Because every gig driver I rode with effectively worked for all locally available gigs at once.
Sometimes people want the world to be better than the bare minimum. And sometimes but clearly not in your case they feel sympathy and empathy.
Somehow people are confused how a voluntary action can be illegal if the circumstances that surround that action are not legal.
There are those who work, and then there is an idle class aristocracy of heirs who do not work, but who expropriate surplus labor time from those of us who do work.
It is not the job of the working class to make convincing arguments to the parasites who live off their labor, it is the historical mission of the working class to eliminate the parasitic class which does not work, and which lives off worker's expropriated surplus labor time surplus.
Contract work (1099) existed for a long time before Uber.
You get paid per service of moving people around, but might not be knowledgable enough to calculate deprecation and other stuff correctly.
More than that, any problem with the car is also on you, not on company car, so you'd have to budget for that too.
It's a way for company to shift the risk entirely to the lowest paid worker, including every risk involved with car itself.
It's even worse in say food delivery when the couriers are bidding for who can ship it the cheapest. You're essentially getting bidded out in race for bottom if there is enough competition, again going around minimum wage.
> 3) those people that willingly took those jobs are being taken advantage of
> What is the principal that justifies 3? People are not agents of free will, and any sub-utopic framework they have to participate in is immoral? Even if that's the case, I'd like to see the argument that those people who chose and choose to work at uber have worse outcomes than they otherwise would.
Because as society we decided letting capitalism exploit dumbasses willing to work for half-free is a bad thing. That's why we have minimum wages. That's why jobs like that should have unions. Because without body to represent them there always will be someone willing to do it for half free.
People who get super pissed at Uber without materialism just have a narrow perspective (Uber's still evil tho)
Some issues referenced in the link the FTC intends to address:
Misrepresentations about the nature of gig work:
While gig companies promote independence to potential workers,
in practice these firms may tightly prescribe and control their
workers’ tasks in ways that run counter to the promise of
independence and an alternative to traditional jobs.
Holding companies accountable for claims and conduct about costs and
benefits:
Gig companies must not be deceptive in their claims to prospective
gig workers about potential earnings, and they must be
transparent and truthful about costs borne by workers.
Concentrated markets: Markets populated by gig companies are
often concentrated, resulting in reduced choice for workers,
customers, and businesses. These companies may be more likely
to exert their market power in anticompetitive ways that
harm workers’ wages, job quality, and other aspects of gig work.
Combating unlawful practices and constraints imposed on workers:
Gig companies using artificial intelligence or other advanced
technologies to govern workers’ pay, performance, and work
assignments are still required to keep promises they make to
workers. Companies must also ensure that any restrictive contract
terms, including those limiting workers from seeking other jobs,
do not violate the FTC Act or other laws.
Policing unfair methods of competition that harm gig workers:
The FTC will investigate evidence of agreements between gig
companies to illegally fix wages, benefits, or fees for gig
workers that should be open to competition. The FTC will also
investigate exclusionary or predatory conduct that could cause
harm to customers or reduced compensation or poorer working
conditions for gig workers.Something that I think a lot of these discussions fail to account for (and was, incidentally, an underlying theme for California's Prop 22) is that gig companies artificially create a type of market that would otherwise cannibalize itself into a different type of market. If one were to follow the ideals of increasing payouts to [whatever arbitrary point is deemed acceptable], the logical conclusion is that either demand has to increase proportionally to create upward price pressure - and there's no reason to believe the market would simply increase demand just because one wishes for it - or service volume has to decrease (the service becomes less affordable, meaning less demand from price-sensitive customers, which in turn means less drivers on the road, longer wait times, etc).
But once we get into these terms, we run into the classic "I got mine" mentality. Then it's complaints that taxis aren't reliable, or smugness about how one doesn't even use these services in the first place. Well, which is it, does one supposedly "care" or is it really insofar as it doesn't become an inconvenience to themselves? Easier to just blame the companies for everything, right?
The one group that does truly care about the payouts is drivers themselves. From what I see in driver youtube channels, they can in fact become quite savvy about how much they can expect to take home, and come to their own data-based conclusions about whether new features or bonus structures are good or not. Common themes: two [gig companies] are better than one, long term is worse than short term, weekends are better than tuesdays.
And to tie back to supply and demand, gig worker supply base is highly elastic, aggressively more so than any other type of business. Uber's CEO even said inflation helps business because with rising cost of living, more people look to gig work to make a few extra bucks. So, in a way, sure, gig companies promote an environment where more workers can freely come in a take a piece of a pie (which is not infinite). The thing is everyone wants more of it and there's only so much to go around. Is setting up such a system akin to taking advantage of these people? In a way yes because it's playing to their desires to earn more in a world that is largely structured to think payouts should always go up over time, whereas the reality is that they're exposed to these raw supply-and-demand market forces more directly. But also no, because they wouldn't have that opportunity to make extra cash at all otherwise.
Sure they have free will and all that - but certain dark patterns definitely take advantage, and other omissions are an issue as well.
'The game theory' that keeps people driving and picking up more people and guiding them to hot spots for bonuses for example is not helping the driver be more healthy and alert and safe - it helps the company get coverage where they are lacking.
Quick payments could be advertised as bonus help - but if we are totally honest it helps attract and keep people who are trapped in addictions to keep doing things - so it may be a good thing but also in some cases a take advantage of people thing.
The 'money earned' thing is gamified in many ways.. from the emails saying 'make X dollars per week / month when you come back to drive with us' - to the lack of showing expenses.. many people are ignorant of what they make each week after expenses and have zero clue about tax burdens, and lack of investment in social security and other things they would glean from standard jobs.
Hey I am not hating on this - and it can be super great for the single parent who need super flexible work option temporarily for example- but it's a farce.
I frequently talked to drivers who were all shiny happy people showing they made "$1,000 this week' - but had no real understanding that they spent $400 on gas this past week compared to the 200 the week before, did not account for the car maintenance and no clue about the taxes owed.
At least in the market around here, I calculated the average money made to be about $6 per hour once considering taxes and gas.. and this is for a semi-dangerous job - no not talking about the passengers which are mostly okay - just driving around streets that many more hours is adding that much more danger of wrecks and such.
It would be trivial for these companies to add in expense reporting, scheduling for maintenance and taxes and bathroom breaks - but they don't - and we know why - it's the start-up- gig culture trying to maximize the valuation for wall street at the expense of those who are less educated about the sacrifices being made in the short term.
I have many more small data points to add - from pics of the tires some of these drivers are using to the lack of transparency about surges in more drivers coming - to uncompensated long drives to last minute cancelled rides - all sorts of things that are at the expense of those that can least afford it - and at this point these companies should know better about a lot of these things - but they are purposefully kicking those cans down the line to future issues in order to prop up the quarterlies for the short term benefit of those who do know better.
This could be a blog post with some pics and screenshots for better examples I guess. Oh, and the effects on the riders.. so many things to add - but the question was proof of taking advantage of gig workers.
Governments regulate indirectly like this all the time, there's nothing "weird" about it.
> In 1943 the War Labor Board, which had one year earlier introduced wage and price controls, ruled that contributions to insurance and pension funds did not count as wages. In a war economy with labor shortages, employer contributions for employee health benefits became a means of maneuvering around wage controls.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/28/about-half-of-californias-gi...
[2] The U.S. spent $8,233 on health per person in 2010. Norway, the Netherlands and Switzerland are the next highest spenders, but in the same year, they all spent at least $3,000 less per person. The average spending on health care among the other 33 developed OECD countries was $3,268 per person. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/health-costs-how-the-us-...
When you're already working the gig economy, I imagine $500 / mo is a lot more of your relative income than $100 or whatever for me.
Many people have to choose between paying for something that primarily only matters in case of a bad event (health insurance), versus paying for things that if they don't pay for them, bad things happen with certainty, fairly quickly - loss of power, going hungry, not having gas for the car that they require because our public transit systems have been systematically disassembled (again over the last half a century), astronomical interest/late fees on loans and a credit score drop that can mean credit gets even more expensive, or is automatically revoked, or impacts one's ability to find employment in a kafka-esque hell where having too bad a credit rating means a fair number of companies won't employ you.
When Wallyworld has staff who train employees in how to file for government benefits, maybe it's time to look at corporate tax share (in the 50's it used to be about 50%, now it's a few percent) and minimum wages.
It is like employment insurance. Self employed love to opt out, but come a major economic crisis, they demand they be allowed to participate.
Simultaneously, they need to reduce the regulatory burden on health insurance companies (but always accept pre-existing conditions). This way more health insurance startups can compete with the large legal entities that are health insurance companies.
With these two in place, no employer will ever control healthcare for employees, insurance companies will need to learn to live in thin margins and medical providers don't need to bear the administrative burden of insurance, this, reduce cost or pay more to the providers and nurses. In this way, insurance companies that cannot compete on price will fail and that is healthy capitalism.
Insurance companies exist to hedge risk - the federal government doesn't need to hedge, it can literally inflate the risk out of the market.
Pay my doctor's well, they deserve it. I don't even remember who I bought insurance from - don't care if they get paid.
The real answer is not to acknowledge employer sponsored health insurance at all, and to treat it (tax it) just like every other form of compensation. Its current treatment is a nearly 100 year old remnant of attacks against unions. If you stop the giveaway to employers, employee-provided health insurance would evaporate, and the government would be forced to take rational action on healthcare provision and costs.
Health insurance is as much of a scam as casino gambling, and should be regulated out of existence.
Because of this, an individual buyer of health insurance is going to have a hugely variable cost of insurance, based on their risk profile. Currently, this risk is spread out by grouping employees of a company together, spreading the cost. That is why larger companies get much cheaper rates.
Health insurance risk is so varied, and so often not something the individual can control, that the only fair and efficient way to insure everyone is to create a single, large, cohort... spread the risk to every citizen via universal coverage.
Would it be federal, or state-wide? How would it be funded? Would it be public "option", or would private pay be banned like in Canada? How would compensation rates be updated, and how often? Ask any hospital administrator what they think of Medicare/Medicaid rates, and they'll probably answer that they're set too low and that they lose money on Medicare/Medicaid patients.
The details on "universal healthcare" can range from heavily-regulated private insurance - Germany for example - to outright bans on private pay for items insured by the government (Canada). A lot of Americans seem to want some sort of federal system that provides insurance for everything, which seems like the best way to get the most expensive, least capable system imaginable. Imagine having yet another insanely expensive, totally underfunded entitlement program that politicians can continuously pad with new promises every 2-4 years when they need to get re-elected.
The Canadian experience (source: Canadian currently living in the US) is one you do not want to replicate, so be wary - Canadians have little confidence in their system at this point, even though it's quite expensive relative to European peers - and we have shockingly low numbers of imaging machines, hospital beds, urgent care clinics, etc. per capita, all well having administrative bloat that makes university administration look positively lean by comparison.
People love to fret about this politician or that politician, but the reality is that Canada got the incentives totally wrong because they sounded nice. No out-of-pocket expenses? No evil private medicine? No profit from healthcare!
As it turns out, central planning fails in healthcare just like it fails everywhere else. So "ensuring everyone has access to reasonably good healthcare" is an excellent goal, but "giving any level of government a monopoly on healthcare insurance" will be the death knell of the generally excellent healthcare Americans have access to if you have insurance.
Virtually every rich country except America manages to provide “free at point of use” healthcare because of government intervention. And of note, if you’re not happy with what the government provides in most of these countries, you can usually top up to gold-plated health care at a fraction of the cost in the US. Last I checked, the US also managed to do this just fine where it has to: the VHA spends about as much as the NHS does and also gets excellent outcomes.
Talking about “the Canadian experience” seems strange to me: don’t each of the provinces/territories do it differently? The Manitobans in my family seem very happy with the provision they get. Regardless, 75% of Canadians are “proud” of Canadian health provision[0].
Most rich countries (that aren’t America) also have essentially instant and free transfers between bank accounts … because either the government intervened or threatened to intervene.
0: https://biv.com/article/2020/08/covid-19-crisis-has-failed-e...
It's a bad system and since that article was published public sentiment has been worsening: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/first-reading-canadian-...
Most people who have glowing things to say about it have had minimal interactions with the system. The overall data shows predictable results when government intervention completely skews market incentives: the patient experience blows, administration is bloated to hell, it lacks capacity, and it bleeds healthcare professionals across the border where pay and working conditions are generally better.
The fact that anyone defends the system as it's currently designed is honestly baffling to me. If you took another essential industry - food - and applied similar incentives (any food paid for by government can't be purchased privately, government sets the rates, etc.) most people would correctly predict it would be disastrous.
It's just a lazy argument to say central planning fails in healthcare, because it generally works well in other countries.
The biggest complaint I hear about the Canadian system are wait times, but those affect the expensive US system, too. My wife needed back surgery and couldn't get it scheduled until 6 months out in the US, after jumping through health insurance hoops (useless procedures to check boxes) for 6 months prior to that.
Ended up in the ER told "don't move or you might not walk again" while she had to wait 2 days, writhing in pain (but not allowed to move!) until a surgeon performed her surgery 4 months earlier than scheduled.
And we paid 10s of thousands of dollars, which took years to pay off.
Outcomes aren't uniformly better, by the way. Canada routinely ranks near the bottom of the OECD and like one notch above America, but in America you can get the best healthcare in the world (Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, etc.)
Canada has no equivalent - the small Cleveland Clinic presence in Canada hasn't bothered trying to open a hospital because it would basically be impossible, unlike in the UK where private hospitals still exist.
The healthcare professionals in Canada are very well-trained, but there are too few of them and they're smothered in useless bureaucracy.
another day on the news, someone suffered a stroke and because the ambulance didn't come on time she is partially paralyzed.
another couple had a miscarriage with the mother dying because surgical tools were not sanitized properly.
some desperate and sick of waiting travel to US or abroad (Korea, Japan).
family doctor, nurse shortage is half the problem. canadian medical school breadth of teaching is generalist and do not go deep enough.
there are now calls for privatization. i wish people would stop fetishizing canadian public health care, its better than nothing but behind the rest.
-Private insurance is allowed to exist and compete with the public offering
-Everyone is entitled by law to the public health system for any kind of injury or health need.
-The hospitals used by the public health system are government-owned. They are run by government bureocrats and staffed with private employees (the doctors, nurses, janitorial staff, etc)
-The hospitals are managed by the respective jurisdictions in which they are, but they have to follow the basic model that the federal government imposes through the national health ministry.
The best hospital systems in the world, like Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic, are generally non-profits operating in a mixed system where they take private insurance, out-of-pocket payments, and medicare/medicaid. They have to remain competitive otherwise they won't attract customers from out-of-state or out-of-country. If you basically force patients on the public system to only use certain government-run hospitals, you're dooming them to an inferior experience than what you could get by perhaps enhancing access to public pay for some services.
Plenty of counties also provide market healthcare with private insurance without the American issues, e.g. Switzerland [1]. If we want to keep a market-based model, there are reforms that point the way forward.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Switzerland
If you can't make the VA model work in America, that's good evidence that a bigger model would suffer the same, but bigger problems.
If you do not like this structure then you should have worked to block Obamacare from becoming law, because that was a primary objective of the legislation: to decouple health care plans from large companies and employers, and make that insurance more accessible, on the free market, to more workers than ever before.
Editorial: This is why everyone calls it Obamacare. The Reps love the knock. The Dems are not wanting to remind anyone Affordable is in the name.
Note: I'm not knocking ACA per se. We should have health care. The issue is ACA is a fine example of: good idea, poor execution. And no one has the will to fix what is by most accounts not living up to its promise or need.
Did it? There was lots of talk at the time about how you get to keep your private plan. And the actual text of the ACA mandated that large employers offer health insurance, which was not the case before the ACA.
What provisions in the ACA made great efforts to decouple them? i.e., which provisions incentivized individuals to not be on employer plans, or employers not to offer them?
I'm not sure what you mean by "decoupled." I could buy private health insurance prior to the ACA and it was cheaper (at least for me it was). Also, I wouldn't call the marketplace "open." Right now health insurance is like the internet in that you can only purchase it from local providers and you can only realistically use it at "in network providers" without the cost becoming astronomical. The lack of competition is what is artificially keeping prices high. Case in point: my dental and vision insurance can be used in all 50 states with a huge number of providers and costs a fraction of what my health insurance costs.
agreed, but they won't. Most of the "gig" companies are exploitative parasites.
An employee of a company is in traditional terms, somebody who acts for the benefit and interests of a larger entity which engages in business to business or customer interaction, in return for earning a reasonable wage and defined employment terms set by the company.
An independent contractor is an individual entity, who by setting their own terms and prices, provides a service for other individual entities for the purpose of earning a reasonable income for themselves.
What Uber has done, is see all the protections afforded to employees of a company both traditionally and federally, and sidestep them because they call their drivers independent contractors. It is implied that the Driver is setting their own pricing and terms of employment. They may legally technically be doing so, but what they're really doing is agreeing to the same terms set by Uber and defined by Uber as every other driver, as if they were employees. This allows Uber to really do whatever they want to an "independent contractor" which has agreed to their terms of not setting their own rates, having no transparency, and being totally subject to Ubers conditional compensation agreements.
Honest question: why does anyone think these people are being taken advantage of? Why would you work a gig job if it weren’t a) desirable for whatever reason or b) if you had a better offer.
Where do we draw the line of interfering with an agreement between two competent, free parties?
In this particular case, the important thing to me is the focus on honesty about the nature of the job. If they tell you, while you're voluntarily entering an agreement, that you'll have a certain degree of flexibility, and in practice they try not to let you have that, you've been lured into the deal on false premises. Usually we call that fraud, and in any case it should be uncontroversial that it's immoral.
After reading the comments here I was prepared to be disappointed by the policy direction, but instead I'm only disappointed I didn't see any specific enforcement teeth mentioned. Demanding transparency and that companies treat their contractors as contractors is IMO the correct direction; it's certainly better than retroactively classifying as employees people who never wanted to be such, as we sometimes see.
But I do agree with you on everything else. I think that companies who want to hire contractors, should treat them as such, and not as employees for which they can reap the rewards of a contractor classification.
Of all forums, on HN I feel I ought to be able to make a precise logical statement, meaning no more or less than I said, and be understood correctly. I like to think that most readers did, and the commenters (you less so, I'll grant) trying to draw obviously stupid conclusions from my careful wording are the minority.
You can still do this, it's called three hots and a cot. The police will direct you how to sign up.
If there are people desperate enough to go to prison to eat and have shelter, we should probably find a solution for those people within society. That likely means there is some point between what we currently offer and what prison offers where those people would be better off. Without those (shitty) jobs, you have a binary choice between good job or the streets.
Honestly, I think a lot of this comes back to housing policy and healthcare. You can't build boarding houses anymore. Zoning laws basically make it so you can be homeless or pay $1k / month (metro city). There's a lot of room in the middle there. The healthcare system is so bloated and broken that I do not think we will bring costs down, so the only solution there is state funded then using state leverage.
Setting a floor for voluntary agreements sounds very humane, but it also means that anyone who can't reach that floor is open to abuse. The same goes for immigrant labor. We don't clamp down on it because doing so sounds racist, but it creates a system where people can be easily exploited.
Do we though? If UBI and universal healthcare were a thing, I would be OK green-lighting ALL voluntary agreements. What am I missing?
What are the working conditions that cause something to be literal slavery as opposed to contract labor?
Would individual contracts with a nation's armed forces count as slavery? Why or why not?
Let's take Uber as an example: if you wanted to open a rival company following the taxi laws that Uber ignores you'd have higher employee and maintenance costs. Eventually you'd go broke: your drivers may be happier, but yor clients are all taking Uber because it's cheaper. And once you go broke, your drivers have no choice but to work for Uber. It's a race to the bottom.
> Where do we draw the line of interfering with an agreement between two competent, free parties?
Typically, when the deal is too disproportionate and/or one-sided. Anti-usury laws and contracts void due to lack of consideration are two examples, but I'm sure there are others.
People take Uber now because it's about the same cost as a taxi, but the credit card machine is never broken, and they can be summoned on demand.
Want to really hurt Uber?
Tighten taxi regulations so that a taxi may not legally operate without the ability to accept its full published list of acceptable payment options. The operator can take it out of service until repairs are complete, or police impound it.
You call it sucking the air out of the market because you don't like it. It's not a better job, it's the same job, you just want it to pay more.
Yes, if you cannot provide a service as cheaply as your competitor, you go broke. That's capitalism. If Uber is the cheapest taxi provider, then yes they will dominate...but that's because consumers chose Uber over more expensive alternatives. If Uber can charge low prices because lots of people are willing to work for it, and consumers choose Uber because of its low prices...where is the problem? If Uber subsidizes rides and goes broke, they deserve that fate as well.
> And once you go broke, your drivers have no choice but to work for Uber.
Or they do something else. This is the natural balance of market forces. Driving an Uber is essentially unskilled labor. If the attractiveness of the job drops, people go and do something else. The labor pool shrinks, and Uber is then forced to raise wages to attract people back into their ranks. Your cut-and-dry extremes are just not how the real economy works.
> Typically, when the deal is too disproportionate and/or one-sided.
These contracts are not too one-sided. A gig worker can stop working at a moment's notice (which has historically been one of the perks).
Every "obligation" that Uber and friends avoid with its gig workers policy (health insurance, accident insurance, unemployment, retirement) falls on the shoulders of the taxpayer. The companies are privatizing the profits and socializing the costs (which is something that capitalists like to do) and society is arguing that this is not what they want. It's the same reasoning for forcing construction companies to pay for the safety equipment of their workers even if market forces would prefer the workers to pay for it themselves.
> If Uber can charge low prices because lots of people are willing to work for it, and consumers choose Uber because of its low prices...where is the problem? If Uber subsidizes rides and goes broke, they deserve that fate as well.
Except once Uber starves and destroys the taxi service in a city, and one day declare bankruptcy and close down their servers, that city is going to be left in a pinch with a void that can't immediately be filled, leaving society to foot the bill for their greedy destruction.
It seems like this argument and some others constantly suffer from the libertarian wet dream where any business, no matter how complex, can be spun up in an instance _if only there was no government to interfere_. That has never been true, and every business has externalities towards society that may need to be managed and prodded back in line from time to time with very necessary regulations.
Don’t worry too much about capitalist ideals, we should be willing to bend the rules as needed to promote a system where there is healthy competition and innovation.
If we can do un-capitalistic things like bail outs and PPP schemes to help businesses when their chips are down, we should be able to handicap them when things are in their favour, to help new businesses challenge them.
... isn't the lack of a better offer one of the components necessary to exploit a worker? You can only exploit a worker, without violence, if they are (financially) pressed against the wall and have no better options, right?
So given that these companies aren't making money, what if these changes drive them out of existence? If gig workers truly don't have a better offer, well now they have no offers. What do this people do then?
You want to say "better this job than the worse one then", right? I understand that. But if you view the working conditions of gig workers as exploitive, this can't justify their existence, IMO. Otherwise you get a race to the bottom and can justify any work condition with the exception of the absolute bottom of the barrel.
Whether or not you see the working conditions for gig workers as exploitive is up to you, of course.
1. Everybody says DoorDash doesn't pay their workers enough.
2. Everybody says DoorDash charges restaurants too much.
3. Everybody says DoorDash marks up the food too much.
4. Nobody is forced to use DoorDash, work for DoorDash, or sell on DoorDash.
5. DoorDash has never made a profit.
To answer your question, yes it’s probably a bit of a and a lot of b, but what does that change?
My open question again was not about whether to draw a line, like your mining example, but rather where we draw it.
I just happen to be of the opinion that gig workers, and miners working in dangerous conditions, happen to fall on opposite sides of that line.
Constantly. Endlessly. Daily.
We draw the line everywhere, all day, in every single aspect of lives. It’s the core concept of government, in fact it’s the basic premise of civilization.
Two parties can’t agree to enter into slavery. Or a Ponzi scheme. Or a restaurant meal where the cooks don’t disinfect the kitchen. Or a bank where there’s not enough reserves. Or an airplane that hasn’t been maintained. Or a verbal agreement to buy a house.
In all cases it’s because we’re not ok with the effect on society, like E. Coli outbreaks, plane crashes, bank failures, destitute old people, and lots of other stuff.
It’s not necessarily that the people themselves are being taken advantage of. Society is. The companies are externalizing costs and risks on everyone instead of absorbing them. We get to decide that’s not OK.
All of your examples are incredibly unlikely things for two informed parties to enter into. In fact, the reasons those laws exist is because of the information asymmetry. That seems reasonable to me.
But gig workers are not under the illusion that they are going to receive healthcare or other benefits. It's like if I took a job offer for $X and then demanded I was being exploited because I want $Y. I fully support gig workers in pushing for more, I absolutely do. These are natural market forces. Everyone should act in their own self interest...we know that Uber will.
I just think that in this instance, this qualifies as government overreach.
Considering the bought and paid for political legislatures with lobbying money and unusual whales funded by corporate interests, if you think this little blip by workers is “overreach” then you’d be flabbergasted by what corporate lobbyists get away with.
If the company is using some AI model to resolve disputes against statutory and contract requirements, same problem.
Same thing again with deceptive conduct and misrepresentation, if you take a dollar from one million people that you wouldn't have without deceiving people, this is a good area for regulator (like FCC) to handle. Class actions as an alternative seem to end up with a worse result.
Zero people would care about this if there wasn't a huge outcry from the gig workers themselves! This isn't just paternalism, it's the gig workers themselves driving these changes.
This isn't universal though. If you go to places where gig workers discuss these issues (say /r/UberDrivers) every post complaining about pay has people saying "if you don't like the fare, don't accept it!" and to be fair there are also lots who are not complaining about it.
In any event, I don't mean to defend uber. I don't favor their model. I would just say that it is NOT universal.
A single Uber driver can and often does do both.
Calfornia's AB5 was massively protested by gig workers. This sort of generalization is absolutely paternalism.
As to earnings, if I have a company and I earn $20k/yr on the side for myself I am not "transitioning that cost to the state" and I should not be prevented by law from operating my business. The same is true if I employ someone to do the work rather than doing it myself.
As to determining the cost of living: How would you propose this even be done? The cost of a student living at home is very different from a single person, and in turn is very different from a family with arbitrarily large numbers of dependents.
There is no such thing as a universal cost of living. Prohibiting part-time work only hurts people who could otherwise benefit from it -- like students who do not have availability to work full time hours.
Currently, it's the government's responsibility if you're unemployed. And, it's the corporations' responsibility if you're employed. As a result, you have corporations that are trying to skirt the responsibility by claiming that their workers are not actually employees.
But, why do we rely on corporations to provide basic income and healthcare to BEGIN with? Isn't it better if the government provides a social safety net to ANYONE (employed or unemployed)?
Healthcare maybe. But the income argument taken to the extreme: if no one works, society will cease to function. When you work for a corporation you are trading your effort for wages. It seems reasonable to pay a living wage to someone working 40 hours a week. They are contributing to society and shouldn't have to struggle.
I assume you don't actually mean to suggest EVERYONE would stop working. Rather, I assume you're suggesting that UBI, at a level of ~$1500 per month, would result in anyone making minimum wage to quit. Is there data that supports this? I would think that ~$1500 per month provides such a sub-standard quality of life that most of these people would continue working to supplement their income OR invest in learning to further their career. And, corporations, would be forced to increase pay, which would take some readjustment, but wouldn't be the end of the world.
> It seems reasonable to pay a living wage to someone working 40 hours a week.
I'm saying that, if you remove the need for a social safety net, this statement doesn't ring true. That is, if you're not providing value to an employer, it's not reasonable for them to pay you ANYTHING.
So if they do crack down on “taking advantage” then a new set companies will arise: Uber-driver subcontractors. Less than 50 employees so they do not have all these rules and they offer services to Uber.
Same like cooks, security guards, cleaning and other subcontractors which do not have any protection but Google, Facebook and others depends on them.
In short, regardless what FTC does it will not help the actual workers.
As per the Pew center research report from 2014, there are approximately 28M unauthorized immigrant workers in the United States. The availablity of these cheap workers pushes out the legal workers from fields like agriculture, hospitality, construction and leisure where illegal workers are more concentrated, as employers can discriminate against local legal workers since illegal workers are cheaper to hire and control.
This makes the legal workers go to the gig economy as provides an upper hand to the gig economy employers.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anthropology-in-practic...
Uber, Doordash, etc should be paying for the depreciation of every vehicle they use, as well as fuel usage.
If an argument is made as to what is the minimum standard that a person should expect to receive at any company is truly the question, then fine. That is a reasonable discussion. And likely one that no one honestly knows the exact answer to. What do we want to be as a society? How little do we want to help people who weren't "the lucky ones"?
It feels like they're trying to move the first rung of the ladder higher and higher. They would rather a young person take on mounds of debt, instead of say a low paid internship or apprenticeship. Current minimum wages ensure automation are going to win.
The only problem is that there's no evidence of this. Automation still costs more than people, and when machines get sick, you have to hire mechanics that charge by the hour to fix them. When automation is cheaper than people, it's a good thing that all of society profits from when things are automated as long as you don't allow the automators to permanently lock/monopoly away their innovations i.e. you allow competition to reduce prices.
All gigwork "tech" has succeeded in is manufacturing legal pretexts that allow companies not to pay for employee downtime. Bringing back piecework from the 19th century isn't automation, it's lobbying.
Yes. Abolish the minimum wage. Higher minimum wage forces more people out of the workforce entirely and skews the labor market in favor of large corporations vs small businesses. Amazon can absorb any minimum wage hike you can conceive, they don't want to and they will fight tooth and nail against it, but they can afford it. Your neighborhood pizza shop will go out of business (and be replaced by a Pizza Hut -- paying twice as much but employing 25% as many people and working them 400% as hard) if they have to pay their drivers 15 or 20 or 25 (or more) dollars an hour. Both of these effects, lower labor participation rate and consolidation of the employment market in fewer large corporations, are much worse for society overall.
I reject the "academic consensus" of people who are not a part of the real world.
It has been empirically proven that a higher minimum wage does hurt the lowest paid workers the most by forcing them out of the labor market and raising prices. Now as the other posted not so eloquently pointed out research, especially sociology (infamously in 2006 ~18% of social scientists considered themselves marxists), is a very left-leaning field and there is a lot of disingenuous research. The two most common bad studies I've seen say a very modest minimum wage hike doesn't cause layoffs, which is usually because everything is within the margin of error, or we see studies that say given enough time they see a benefit but this doesn't usually include inflation, forcing those workers to relocate, or a variety of other real world effects. But the fact raising the minimum wage hurts the lowest paid workers is just a fact
Spherical cows don’t work in physics, let alone economics. Minimum wages are suboptimal but starving is worse.
I think this is a good point of view, but, it's important to remember that what the business can pay differs from what it's willing to pay and that larger employers are more able to drive rates lower. Not all businesses are equal and we should favor the ones which bring the most benefit to the most people.
> Arguably a low paid apprenticeship is more beneficial than mounds of college debt.
100%. Remove "arguably" from your comment. Factor in the value of starting earlier and negative value of the debt you accumulate and very few professions truly benefit from a college education and most of the remaining ones only do so due to regulatory capture effects of requiring them and we would do well with reducing those in favor of far more trade-focused education (tl;dr more trade schools, less liberal arts colleges).
I'll explain.. if extremely expensive life-saving medicine did not improve things to the point those meds became cheap, then I won't expect "cheap labor" to bring me benefit, it'll only benefit the companies.
If you really care about automation and want to see it happen quickly, then stand by workers, their rights and support the increase of minimum wage... Nothing makes companies rush into innovating more than a way to save a buck.
these gigs aren't that flexible. Drivers can't set their own fair price and if you refuse too many rides as a Uber driver you're out, that's precisely why drivers should be deemed employees, not contractors.
People will always make what’s best for themselves within in their environment. If the FTC wants certain behaviors, they need to address it. If they fail to do that, it’s themselves they should blame.
consumers of the opportunity to labor?
It seems like normally we see the government agencies bending over backwards to prove that is not the case, that these are actually employees working for the company providing the marketplace software, so this specific word choice in this instance surprised me.
(FWIW, as commentary, I had to insist quite strenuously in my own case that I had NOT been an "employee" of Uber or Lyft, even though I had been providing rides in the evenings when I had nothing else to do when I was new to town and wanted to learn what was cool and meet people. When I got laid off from my tech job, my state government was insistent that Uber and Lyft had also been "employers" of mine for the purposes of determining eligibility for unemployment benefits, until I eventually showed them I had my own LLC, corporate insurance policy, etc., because yeah, I was doing it as a hobby, but I was damn sure going to be running my own business as a hobby, not being employed by Uber or Lyft as a hobby. It's difficult for me to understand why people want to be considered "employees." You're much more at the mercy of the company that way.)
That is the entirety of the argument around it.
If you get to be a small businessman due to your control over your own body, what is an employee again? Last I heard, employees also had control over their own bodies.
What is an employee?