Hacker News Reader

Comment by fabianhjr | Hacker News Reader

> 3) those people that _willingly_ took those jobs are being taken advantage of

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.

View on HN

>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.

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.

> This is not really the company's fault that the system is set up so people must work.

The problem is companies like this take advantage of this as a feature of the system, not a bug.

> Address that at the societal level.

And how’s that working? It’s needs to be addressed at multiple levels simultaneously for any progress to be made.

>We can start with building enough housing so people can afford rent making $3 per hour.

This is a ridiculous statement. Yes, there needs to be more housing, but resources aren’t infinite so there will always be a floor that steadily increases and systems based in reality must take that into account.

>And how’s that working?

Well currently you can make 1k rent per month or be homeless. We should be bridging that gap rather than making it more difficult to pay people money.

Corporations are not part of society?

> 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.

Housing is a good thing to work on.

But we've already started! One thing we already have toward this effort is labor laws. That's why we want to plug the gaps in those laws and enforce them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com