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Comment by probably_wrong | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion, the problem is that gig companies eventually "suck the air" out of the market and leave no room for those "better" jobs to exist.

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.

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Uber has not been cheaper than a taxi for years now. Definitely not since the pandemic started.

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.

Agreed, I use Uber because it's easier, not because it's less expensive.

Even when I suspect it will be more expensive, I take it because I know it won't turn out that the credit card machine is inexplicably "broken" again.

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.

> In my opinion, the problem is that gig companies eventually "suck the air" out of the market and leave no room for those "better" jobs to exist.

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).

Lots of arguments lacking any sort of nuance in this one, but since I am short on one I will respond to just once:

> 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.

Ad hominem attack aside, I agree with much of what you say. But your argument hinges on a hypothetical that hasn't happened.

Forget about the libertarian wet dream, your bias is clear. What is the negative externality that you believe society is imminently facing and must be regulated? Do you believe Uber is on the verge of shutting down?

What ad hominem attack?

Uber is profiting off obfuscating the actual income its drivers make from those drivers. It's easy for us to fire up a spreadsheet app and see what a bad deal driving for Uber is, but a lot of people can't or don't do that, and they get screwed in the process. They don't even realize it until they look back and calculate why they're doing so badly financially

In theory, but the market is always more complex than this. A market is not a single company ever, except for Government.

> That's capitalism.

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.

We shouldn't help them when the chips are down. Let the investors hang themselves (without letting anyone starve*) so the next generation know how to plan accordingly.

I agree with you that this is capitalism, but I wouldn't take that as a positive. If anything, this is society (via the FTC) reigning in some of the worse aspects of capitalism.

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.

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