Volatile pay for gig workers linked to health problems
apa.org
apa.org
I'm not saying there aren't abuses and I'm not saying it's not stressful. I'm just saying it's probably more complex than this survey suggests and that I would like to not see people throw the baby out with the bath water.
Some of our efforts to "fix" what we think is wrong with gig work punishes the very workers it is intended to help. Having too narrow a view of such issues is not a good place from which to try to improve things.
There are a lot of people out there for whom a regular job with a regular schedule are not a good fit for their life. The option to work when you can and not work when you can’t is a huge thing and we should be working on figuring out how to make that a more viable option rather than trying to tear it down because it can be abused. Especially when you consider that for many people in that position today all the security that supposedly comes with a regular job isn’t something they have because the only jobs they can take are minimum wage low skill jobs that usually come with no benefits anyway and will fire you the first time you call out. At least with the gig work, there’s no one calling you on the phone wanting to know where you are today and why you’re sick again.
Do people deny this? The motivation for this approach is that it is easier to write one law than totally revolutionize our entire economic system.
This complaint reminds me of the people who don't tip because they think the system is stupid. Sure, the ideal system would pay people a living wage and give them benefits from the start, but that system isn't here today and likely won't be here tomorrow. People need to live in the current system and they can't afford to wait. Refusing to try to help those people until we have the political will to change our entire economic system seems heartless to me.
Tipping isn't wealth redistribution. The server might be wealthier and make more money than me. Tips aren't income security or health care. I think it would be strange to call it "wealth" too. I'm not dropping enough money on the table to buy significant capital.
I tip because that's how the service is expected to be paid for. The system is set up so that the server bears the risk. It's unfair stiff the person with the least ability to change that system.
And the more you prop the old system up by tipping the less likely it will be that the new system will ever arrive.
Your way is to make the incumbent system just tolerable enough that it never changes.
Under the existing system, you can take a job at a retailer making $10/hour, or you can work in a restaurant for $2/hour plus tips, which comes out to $10/hour again. Flip a coin.
If some people stop tipping, the restaurant is now paying the equivalent of $9/hour after tips and the restaurant has to raise the base pay to $3/hour or the worker will quit and work for the retailer. If everyone stops tipping, the restaurant has to pay $10/hour.
Workers can respond to this at the individual level in proportion to how much it happens. But if no one ever stops tipping, where does the change come from? The restaurants? No. So you get the status quo indefinitely.
But it isn't a straight $9/hr. It is $10/hr some hours, $5/hr some hours, $3/hr some hours, etc. And as these studies suggest, that will literally kill people. We can't just say "here is the position we want to be and here is the quickest way to get there". We need to care about the people who are caught in the transition from one system to the next. Trying to enact this change through a grassroots effort of refusing to tip is the most painful way to accomplish this for the people who are currently stuck in that system.
>But if no one ever stops tipping, where does the change come from?
The same type of legislation that people here are complaining about. If you want to change the system for the altruistic reasons you suggest, put your effort into talking to your politicians. When the only work for change is withholding your money, it certainly seems like the motivation is selfishness covered with a thin facade of concern for the service workers.
It's basic arithmetic to add up how many total dollars you make in a week, divide it by the number of hours and compare it to what other jobs pay. Then threaten to quit unless your boss pays you as much as you could get elsewhere, or take the other job if they won't.
> And as these studies suggest, that will literally kill people.
Renegotiating base pay or changing jobs will literally kill people?
These studies are correlational. They equally suggest that people with preexisting health problems take more flexible jobs.
> The same type of legislation that people here are complaining about.
But that's the legislation that upholds the status quo.
> When the only work for change is withholding your money, it certainly seems like the motivation is selfishness covered with a thin facade of concern for the service workers.
Those are the things that work best, because the incentives are aligned. If your plan relies on people acting against their own interests, how often does that work?
The uncertainty is the problem. Sure, you can wait a few months and do some math to get what your average weekly pay would be. However not every week is an average week. Some weeks you might see 2x your average pay and some weeks you might see 1/2x your average pay. Have 3 of those below average weeks in a month and maybe you can't pay rent. That is what causes the stress. Stress kills people.
>But that's the legislation that upholds the status quo.
These people don't have benefits. New legislation gives them benefits. I doubt the people who now receive these benefits are worried about upholding the status quo.
>Those are the things that work best, because the incentives are aligned. If your plan relies on people acting against their own interests, how often does that work?
There are two incentives for abolishing tipping, help the service workers and make things easier for the consumer. An individual consumer refusing to tip is making things easier for themselves and saving money. However, while they claim to be motivated by helping service workers, they are in fact harming an individual service worker. I doubt that service worker thinks the incentives are aligned.
But that's the thing tipping creates regardless of this. You don't know if you're going to get 10% or 30%. Abolishing this is the goal.
Meanwhile a typical waitress has hundreds of customers per week. That's enough for a statistically valid sample without needing months to figure it out, and it's not likely to change dramatically overnight based on the actions of one individual customer.
> These people don't have benefits. New legislation gives them benefits.
New legislation eliminates some of their jobs, or requires them to work under different conditions because more restrictions are needed to justify paying benefits, or have their hours cut to below whatever threshold is needed to avoid paying them benefits even though they'd have chosen to work more etc.
And other jobs with those restrictions and inflexibility were already available if they wanted them.
> However, while they claim to be motivated by helping service workers, they are in fact harming an individual service worker. I doubt that service worker thinks the incentives are aligned.
The short-term interests of the customer are aligned with the long-term interests of the service worker and the customer is the one making the decision. That's a great alignment of incentives.
Yes, and a 0%-30% tip has more uncertainty than a 10%-30% tip.
Also you appear to be arguing as if I'm defending tipping as a practice. I'm not. I'm saying that an individual who refuses to tip despite it being an expected practice is being a bad member of society.
>Meanwhile a typical waitress has hundreds of customers per week. That's enough for a statistically valid sample without needing months to figure it out, and it's not likely to change dramatically overnight based on the actions of one individual customer.
You are arguing against your own point here. If a single customer is meaningless to the compensation of the service worker, that single customer is not making any meaningful dent in the system that goes way beyond that one individual service worker.
>New legislation eliminates some of their jobs, or requires them to work under different conditions because more restrictions are needed to justify paying benefits, or have their hours cut to below whatever threshold is needed to avoid paying them benefits even though they'd have chosen to work more etc.
This is true of any labor protections. Having a minimum wage eliminates jobs. Having safety regulations eliminates jobs. Sometimes eliminating jobs is in the best interest of society.
>The short-term interests of the customer are aligned with the long-term interests of the service worker and the customer is the one making the decision. That's a great alignment of incentives.
Try asking a service worker whether they would prefer a tip today or a hypothetical abolishment of tipping decades in the future. I don't think they are going to make the choice you are implying.
Which is why it should be done away with whatsoever.
> Also you appear to be arguing as if I'm defending tipping as a practice. I'm not. I'm saying that an individual who refuses to tip despite it being an expected practice is being a bad member of society.
A person who refuses to tip is attacking tipping as a practice and acting to end it. Calling them a bad member of society is by extension defending the alternative.
> You are arguing against your own point here. If a single customer is meaningless to the compensation of the service worker, that single customer is not making any meaningful dent in the system that goes way beyond that one individual service worker.
No, it's fully consistent. The point is that you can change your individual behavior without causing excessive harm to some hapless service worker in particular, because you're <1% of their customers.
What really changes things is what happens in the aggregate, but that works too. If almost everyone tips, that's the status quo. Whatever percentage of people stop, employers will have to make up the difference to retain staff. Some intermediate period where the service worker's pre-tip hourly wage is $4 instead of $2 is fine. When that percentage finally reaches 100%, tipping is abolished.
> This is true of any labor protections. Having a minimum wage eliminates jobs. Having safety regulations eliminates jobs. Sometimes eliminating jobs is in the best interest of society.
Minimum wage eliminates jobs and we shouldn't have one. Causing some people to be involuntarily unemployed so some others can make slightly more money is a poor trade off when better alternatives exist, like UBI.
[Good] safety regulations don't eliminate jobs, because the alternative is safety incidents resulting in legal settlements, which cost the employer more than complying with preventative measures. The preventative measures therefore destroy fewer jobs, and if they don't you've implemented them wrong.
Many "labor protections" are paternalistic and net harm workers.
> Try asking a service worker whether they would prefer a tip today or a hypothetical abolishment of tipping decades in the future. I don't think they are going to make the choice you are implying.
Ask anyone if they would prefer an immediate gain for themselves personally or a larger future gain for a class of people they belong to. You've now discovered collective action problems.
Lining up someone other third party's incentives with the better overall outcome is a great way to solve them.
So the argument that we must do this quick thing that continues to prop up a bad and failing system as opposed to doing something else that moves the needle on improving the system seems like false urgency.
You also don’t need to change the whole system, just one part of it. I find it hard to believe that in a state like California it was easier to get support for “all contract employees are now w2 employees, except for this long list of arbitrary exclusions” (which may or may not actually result in those employees getting benefits) than it would have been for “all people who earn at least 70% of their income from 1099 income are now eligible for MediCal and/or subsidized market place plans and unemployment insurance.” Heck if you really wanted to “stick it to” the gig jobs you could even add a new tax to cover this on any company that employs more than 50 (or some other number) or more 1099 employees in the state.
Instead we seem more focused on trying to make gig jobs work more like “real jobs” and that to me actively harms people who benefit from having gig jobs be available. And we know there’s demand for that sort of work, so why try and throw it out just because we’re too lazy to make real changes
I don't know where this assumption is coming from. I support this type of law because I think people deserve benefits.
>I find it hard to believe that in a state like California it was easier to get support for “all contract employees are now w2 employees, except for this long list of arbitrary exclusions” (which may or may not actually result in those employees getting benefits) than it would have been for “all people who earn at least 70% of their income from 1099 income are now eligible for MediCal and/or subsidized market place plans and unemployment insurance.” Heck if you really wanted to “stick it to” the gig jobs you could even add a new tax to cover this on any company that employs more than 50 (or some other number) or more 1099 employees in the state.
It would take someone who pays a lot more attention to California politics than me to fully explain this. All I can do is say that one was made a law and one wasn't. From this layman's perspective, it seems like the one that was made a law was easier to make a law. And for the record, I would support your proposed law too, because I think people deserve benefits.
How many places can you work with a completely flexible schedule, a handful, most of which is gig-work.
Now because of making all these employees w-2 they require their employees to put in 40 hours a week, and work on a specified schedule. These people now have to find other work or be unemployed.
Fundamentally you're benefiting full time drivers at expense of part-time drivers. I think this is a bad trade-off because people who can work 40 hours on a schedule have lots of other employment options where as part-time drivers who can't commit to a schedule in advance has far fewer options.
And what if that single parent has a 10-year-old, should we allow that parent to send the kid to work in a coal mine?
Your argument is effectively the same one used against all labor protections. You can't take the existence of people willing to do a job as evidence that those people are fine with the conditions of that job. It ignores that our system coerces people into work. So yes, any law which makes it more expensive to employ someone will cause some jobs to disappear. That alone isn't a reason to avoid labor laws.
>Now because of making all these employees w-2 they require their employees to put in 40 hours a week, and work on a specified schedule.
This is a choice by the company. It isn't a requirement of the regulation. I'm not sure why 100% of the blame goes to the regulation and not the company that is actively adopting antiworker practices in response to legislation preventing them from continuing their previous antiworker practices.
You’re assigning moral judgment on a purely numbers question. My health insurance costs my company ~20k per year over the cost of my salary. Which means at a bare minimum, just to pay for the coverage my employment must either generate 20k in additional revenue or free that 20k up from some other place. No amount of legislation will change this fact and if a job can’t generate that money then, it wont just magically be provided because “people deserve benefits” it just simply wont exist. This is why companies have scheduling and time commitment requirements, because there is overhead in each additional employee and you can’t make that overhead go away just because you make a law saying more overhead must be paid.
So your options are either you legislate jobs out of existence in some attempt to force third parties to pay for what people “deserve” or you skip the middle man and give people what they “deserve” and leave what people “earn” out of the equation.
In my mind if you truly believe people “deserve” these things, then trying to force someone else to provide it is a wastefully inefficient way of getting it to them. We don’t do this with anything else people “deserve”. People deserve to have food, we don’t mandate that employers buy their food for them. People deserve a place to live, we don’t mandate that employers buy them homes. People deserve clean water, we don’t mandate that employers distribute bottled water to their employees. If people deserve health care or unemployment insurance or social security or whatever then stop mandating other people do it. Provide it to the people and raise the taxes to cover it.
The motivation behind the minimum wage is so people can supposedly afford all those things that you highlighted as things people "deserve". The reason employees "deserve" to get benefits from their employer and not housing is because we as a society have decided that an employer's role is to provide things like health insurance and not housing. That decision is mostly arbitrary in hindsight, but it is the system in which we live. I would be happy if we decided to change that and disconnect health insurance from employment, but that is a harder fight than just mandating employers provide it. You are making perfect the enemy of the good in this situation. When the difference between the two is millions of people continuing to suffer for years if not decades, we should go for the quick good over the hypothetical long delayed perfection.
Yes it does. Minimum wage is a stupid policy for the problem it's trying to solve. We should do better, and the fact that we haven't done better isn't an excuse to keep making new stupid policies.
I argued this law is a bad one, and your defending it by arguing that we should have labor laws. I agree, I just think this law is a bad one.
> This is a choice by the company. It isn't a requirement of the regulation. I'm not sure why 100% of the blame goes to the regulation and not the company that is actively adopting antiworker practices in response to legislation preventing them from continuing their previous antiworker practices.
Should we instead blame the companies for being profit seeking? Should we enact laws not based on their consequences in the real world but instead based on the hypothetical world where all companies are run by mother Teresa?
And this law does not make all workers better off. It makes some better off and other worse off. It takes away 70+% of flexible schedule jobs to increase the # of w-2 benefit jobs by what ~3%.
Yes, because your argument is not specific to this law. For example:
>And this law does not make all workers better off. It makes some better off and other worse off.
I can't disagree with this. It is true. It is also true of the minimum wage. If you want to argue that these jobs are good for society, you need a stronger argument than people will work these jobs if they exist.
My argument is very simple.
This law helps some people a little. Individuals working gig jobs 40 hours a week who are willing and able to work on a schedule.
It also hurts other people a lot. Individuals who can't or don't want to work 40 hours a week on a schedule.
2. I'm for the decriminalization of sex work.
The problem is, job providers can also just stop providing the jobs that are no longer in their interest to provide when the extra burden of XYZ is added.
That's the trouble with a free society. If you make something more costly to do, people will do less of it.
(In all fairness I hear you can sometimes get away with this, e.g. some studies say minimum wage doesn't necessarily reduce available jobs, but it's very tricky. I think you will ultimately pay the piper some way or another.)
No they don't. That sounds like something you think people think.
If the comment doesn't apply to you personally, feel free to ignore it. But don't pretend you can speak for everyone.
A. Basically everyone has a nuanced understanding of the trade-offs involved in mandating businesses to do things.
B. A sizable proportion of people and politicians neglect, in their thinking, the unintended negative consequences of mandating businesses to do things.
I admit I may be speculating a bit, since people are not eager to volunteer what they neglect in their thinking, but I don't find it difficult to determine between these two options what is more likely.
I've met plenty of people who assume "legislation that requires X benefit" is a pure good. You can explain to them how this is false, and they usually feel a bit silly for missing the obvious here, but they absolutely had that belief.
I'm really not sure why you would possibly think this is some straw man argument.
Children are best served through in-home care because it's often the in-home situation that's most difficult, and the parents are most stressed. And no amount of taking the parent and child to a clinic is going to help that.
The level of absolute detachment from reality you see in academics is staggering. These gig jobs are used by millions to be able to make ends meet during difficult times. I know personally dozens of people who have done uber or door dash in between jobs, during hard times, taking a break for a 9-5 work week and they enjoyed the freedom and the ability to lease a nice car while also paying their rent.
You can see the same disconnect in politicians trying to force people into a full time employment contract in order to deliver food. There have always been delivery jobs at restaurants and people avoided them due to the lack of freedom.
This new hyper vigilant do-goodery by people who haven't experienced a solid minute of reality outside of academia, politics and big tech is already doing more harm than good and the righteousness is ratcheting up every year. This will not end well for anyone and these same "very smart" people will be completely bewildered when the "poor" people they are trying to do good by verbally and physically assault them for the very actions they supported at the cost of every one.
You keep talking about "reality", but the actual reality is that these gig jobs don't pay nearly enough to be able to cover these costs. After all is said and done, a lot of gig workers end up breaking even at best, and sometimes even losing money.
If you buy a $30,000+ car exclusively to drive for Uber and have it serviced at the dealership instead of doing it yourself, you're probably losing money. But if you have an existing used car that you already need for other reasons, most of the cost (tax, insurance, time-based depreciation) are sunk and the gig can be net profitable while giving flexible hours.
People have the right to make that choice for themselves. Anyone who doesn't want it can go take any of the less flexible jobs that would be their only alternative if you prohibited these.
Most of the costs aren't sunk though, because they increase when you start driving your car a lot more. For example, you need to upgrade your insurance to a commercial vehicle insurance, and in many jurisdictions also register your car as such. Failing to do so can result in denied claims, canceled insurance, fines and penalties.
It certainly isn't always worth it, but in the event that it isn't, you don't need a law to prohibit it because it's already not something people have the incentive to do.
And if they're doing it anyway, the assumption should not be that they're idiots who need to be prohibited from doing something they apparently choose to do of their own volition, it's that they maybe know something more about their own circumstances than far away bureaucrats do.
The disconnect is hn users writing 3 full paragraphs about gig workers without apparently reading beyond the headline of what they are ostensibly responding to.
"poor sleep quality, headaches, stomach issues and back pain."
That's the normal way data is collected for those things in routine healthcare. We will prescribe drugs based on those self reports.
Let's not get started about the US healthcare system and prescribing a drug for every possible condition. Lots of things can help those symptoms...not just drugs.
>Sayre conducted a final online survey with 252 higher-income employees in finance, marketing and sales who relied on commissions or bonuses for a smaller fraction of their income. The workers completed monthly surveys for three months, and pay volatility was less harmful to health when they were less reliant on commissions or bonuses.
Stress is bad for your health. Pay volatility causes stress.
This is not academics advocating for full time employment. This is academics advocating for less volatile forms of payment.
I'm a little surprised that a community that traditionally receives a percentage of our compensation in nebulous equity that can be worth either nothing or millions wouldn't understand that uncertainty over your compensation is frustratingly stressful.
Many countries have a better solution for this. It's called a social safety net.
Some days changing a room over took me 30 minutes. Some days it was six hours. Same amount of work. Sometimes I drove for 10 hours. Some days I couldn’t drive at all.
Did this for a year. Would have died if not for these companies.
This is one of the few things I didn't like about independent technical consulting. I preferred to focus 100% on client's problems, not worry about keeping the work funnel full, nor worry about uncomfortable financial fluctuations.
At the point I abruptly had to switch back from consulting to employee -- in pursuit of money steadily appearing in my bank account faster than I could spend it, while I thought only about work -- I didn't have time to study for Leetcode interviews of my preferred FAANGs, so I sought similar high-skilled work in early startups...
Early startups have related problems, with looming end of the runway, and not knowing whether you're going to get the next round (slam-dunks can disappear before they happen), especially during the last couple years. On top of the usual stress of doing something new/big/hard in a small team, where the success of the company and colleagues hinges on you executing successfully.
Recently, it's not only startups. The last few months, we're seeing large stable tech companies (even the rich-kids summer camp lifestyle ones) laying off tens of thousands of people, and countless other tech people wondering about their own employment security. This coming right after the Covid-time sellers-market for talent.
Our situations in tech aren't anywhere near the same as being a low-income gig worker with little safety net. But we do currently feel some insecurity that might be new/reminder to us, and it's now harder to imagine that life is a meritocracy -- put roughly, our past comfort is as much luck as effort/merit.
That realization is a silver lining, and if we come out the other side, we should remember it.
Edit: Wow you all really like your stress huh?
It says "volatile pay is stressful in a bad way" but makes no claim about stress as a whole?
Not about "stress in a bad way" as opposed to some "good stress".
If you are permant stressing about your job, your life your mortage and you boulder for the first time, you might eperience mortal fear, from falling. Which makes the other stressors less substantial, thus "deactivating" or back-queuing them. After the fear for your life, the stress bodily reflex does not return usually in full force.
You relax. One good "short" stress ended alot of bad stress. There is no good stressor that is permanent.
PS: Thanks to the prof at college teaching us about this. Stress is pure poison, inlcuding flooding your body with cortisols and supressing disease symptoms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortisol#Immune_response
Resulting in the ilusion, that stress keeps you healthy. Meanwhile disease eats you alive and re-appears once you are a wreck.
If you regularly experience stress episodes for months and years, you might as well be a living corpse.
Or we could mass give out calming substances like weed or alcohol, but now we get to were we actually categorize permanent stress correctly. Its a mass applied substance problem, used to extract value from people.
this is not true though. I have a close friend who comes from a very wealthy family, to the point where, if he wants to, he doesn't have to work another day in his life. it took him something like eight years to get a four-year degree. he's struggled a lot with motivation over the years, and I became increasingly empathetic toward his situation the more I talked to him about it. it's really hard to find motivation to do stuff, even stuff you tell yourself you want to do, if it takes effort, and if there's no proverbial "fire lit under your ass" to get you to actually do something ("if I don't get another job before the end of next month, I won't have enough money to pay rent", etc.).
I've done some of my best creative work while under immense stress. great things rarely, if ever, get created in zero-stress environments. this idea that stress is always objectively bad is a very first-world way of thinking.
Stress is objectively bad for your health. That's a different statement from "in certain cases I need to compromise my heath for a greater good."
I never said anything about a "greater good", but I don't disagree that stress is objectively bad for your health, to some degree. but it's a tradeoff you have to make if you want to succeed. before our modern first-world society of wealth and safety, this was obvious to everyone, but it seems as though we've forgotten it. nobody is "owed" or "has a fundamental right" (or whatever) to living a stress-free life. life is a struggle, a competition, a game where there are winners and losers, and you have to do what you can to "win." this is just the immutable nature of… well, nature itself.
> If you could do creative work while not under stress that would be better.
that would be nice, but that's just not how it works for 99.99% of people!
We, as a society in this country, seem to have internalized the idea that our success or failure is entirely the product of things solely within our complete control. So anyone who succeeds got there on their own merits (with no other outside influence) and anyone who fails is obviously responsible for the consequences that befell them (again, with no outside influence).
This view is completely wrong, in my opinion, but because it lets us do things like short cut having empathy--obviously that homeless person is a bum because they screwed up--and frame resource hoarding as just prudently looking out for one's self, changing this view will be extremely difficult.
I work in healthcare IT and this industry has done more to push me towards wanting a greater sense of collective good and supporting the commons than anything in my life, including going off to college. Day after day, I see patients (as in, I observe them, not that I am providing care for them) who got sick or had an accident or simply had a malformed gene pop up and say "now's my time to shine!" at the wrong time. They're walking towards a future that will take hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep them alive or bring them back to health. Few of us have the kind of insurance that will carry that entire burden and even fewer have sequestered that kind of money inside our 401k accounts.
Also my family does not do well with retirement. If someone would pay 70 year old me for 20 hours a week I’ll probably do it.
Curious what that means.
There are many "startups" that have only have enough revenue to cover 20 hours per week of labor [0]. Basically, you keep the lights on and ship 0-3 features per month. The pay can be as high as $130+/hr usd ($10k/mo).
You'd be on your own for health insurance, but I probably would do this for my retirement.
[0] - Like a 5 year old SaaS app that never grew beyond $20k/mo revenue and the owner doesn't want to work on it any more.
We agreed that half of each raise would go to savings. We still got a little more spending money from each bonus or raise, but our effective savings rate went up each year, which helped immeasurably, both with our nest egg and in reining in our standard of living.
The reason we got in debt in the first place was overspending any new income. Our debt was mostly proportional to our income (or at least until we started planning a wedding, then it was Intervention Time).
It wasn’t just the money as we found out. Once we had a nest egg we no longer felt trapped in our jobs. That’s it a powerful force for good in your life and I recommend it for anyone.
The reason contractors charge twice as much as hourly employees is sane. You have higher taxes, you have an expectation of dry spells so you need to annualize your income, you are putting away a nest egg for unexpected dry spells (and ethical conundrums). You’re also doubling down on a narrow discipline and you should rake it in while you can because it is probably not sustainable. I’ve alternated between FTE and subcontracting for most of my career. Paradoxically I’ve had more learning opportunities while contracting than working salary, but you need a break sometimes.
While it's true that volatile-pay work is extremely stressful, this seems like a cherry-picked study to be able to write a flashy headline to people rightly concerned over a hot-button issue. They could have just as easily just said that volatile pay causes anxiety and stress, which IMHO you don't need a study for, just like we don't need a study saying that eating less increases hunger symptoms.
Anxiety and stress itself is a well-known cause of all these above issues, and there are a multitude of other work-related stresses than just volatile pay.
All of this is related to hustle culture. Where instead of believing in the myth that corporations buy your labor from you, we have a new myth that we are all to some extent self-employed. That our greatest assets are our ability to push ourselves for economic gain. That our attention is for sale. That the solution to financial ruin is a side-hustle. We used to rely on the community of people around us to make ends meet and provide enrichment in our lives, but the new mythos doesn't make room for that. Friendships are monetizable. Attention is transactional. Hobbies are for improving oneself.
I don't fully know where this rant is going. I don't think everyone thinks these things. But there is something about individuality and money being more important than camaraderie and material wealth that I think motivates the prevailing viewpoint that gig work is anything other than an erosion of protections our great grandparents fought very hard for.
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever." - Orwell
The null hypothesis is "health problems, and difficulties associated with health problems, cause people to take jobs with more volatile pay". It is plausible that volatile pay causes stress which causes problems, but this doesn't provide any convincing evidence of it. In fact, this part is evidence against it: "Mindfulness [...] has been shown to buffer against stress in other aspects of work and life [...] but it did not help reduce the physical symptoms associated with volatile pay." (Of course, an individual's mindfulness could also influence what jobs they'll accept and keep.)
(Another mechanism comes to mind for the "performance bonuses" they mention. That could lead to some people staying up late to finish things, or otherwise deciding to stretch themselves physically for their job. But if you want to study that, you should ask about those behaviors specifically.)
I found this strange:
"Sayre conducted a final online survey with 252 higher-income employees in finance, marketing and sales who relied on commissions or bonuses for a smaller fraction of their income. The workers completed monthly surveys for three months, and pay volatility was less harmful to health when they were less reliant on commissions or bonuses."
Whats this getting at? Ending incentive pay? This rhetoric is tied to 'pay transparency'. Aka, everyone must be paid the same if they have the same title/job. A workers rights issues, but really an employers wet dream.
While variability may be stressful and I wouldn’t consider the lifestyle to be particularly healthy, many waiters consider it a feature associated with having flexible hours to do other things. If they want more hours, competent waiters can almost always pick up as many as they want and it has been a sellers market for waitstaff labor here for as long as I can remember.
Even illegal migrant workers made much more than minimum wage when I lived in rural flyover areas. A chronic labor shortage will do that.
I come close when I order food on rainy stormy nights, I sometimes think about the person sent to fetch me my meal; the risk they put themselves in and the meager pay they get for it. I tip, but just the average. I won’t tip extraordinarily because I use these services too frequently to make it practical.
Indeed, it seems for us to live luxurious lifestyles, an entire class of people must be held at the edge to fulfill our whims.
The overthinking involved in this stuff is bizarre.
Edit, because people share a characteristic with heavy metals: the point is that a “choice” made under economic duress is not made freely. Slavery is an extreme example used to make the point more obvious. The threat of violence used to compel people to work the fields is obviously worse than, but not necessarily qualitatively different from, the threat of abject poverty if one refuses to take low-paying insecure jobs.
I'm not even sure how you can explain what free market labor is without referring to slavery, or explain what slavery is without referring to free market labor i.e. I don't think it's possible not to compare them and rationally talk about either of them.
In all seriousness, refusing to compare two things because you think they're "just too different" is simply acting irrationally. Look at the objectives, pressures, and outputs of each system and you may see more similarities than you'd like.
I might have done it when I was younger and didn't have any of that, but that kind of work didn't really exist beyond pizza delivery. I worked at a video rental store, instead.
Crappy jobs are a motivation to improve.
One bad head injury could do all that and more. What are you going to improve then?
My point here is that given other choices, people don't freely choose precarious low wage work. It's safe to assume that people doing those jobs have pressures and constraints on them that limit their choices. This is why they're "willing" to do shitty work. You could be coerced into it too, given the right conditions. Understand the incentives, don't just justify it away as "freely chosen" because it isn't. To some extent that's true of all of us, but not to the same extent and the difference is meaningful.
I think if you could find some curiosity about why they make those choices it might take you to interesting places, but I can't make you.
Everything is a trade off. You could choose to be a software engineer, but it requires a big investment of your time and making critical life choices at the right moments. Much more difficult than simply running gigs.
People are free to choose and they take on the consequences of their choices, good or bad.
You are blaming gig work, but gig work helps them, at least somewhat.
A better argument is if you stop patronizing a child prostitute so instead the child dies. What's better?
Also bringing in prostitute, especially underage, brings in a ton of unrelated baggage that messes up your argument. There is no such baggage with gig work vs employment.
Basically you need a better argument.
Is there any single 1 example of a fortune 500 that does any due diligence in treating people like humans or are we all permanently disposable until the end of time.
You're very nearly making the argument that the eligibility requirements are too strict, not that the skills are rare. Why do all the CEOs come from the same handful of schools and have the same backgrounds? Is that the only way to acquire the skills?
> most people do not have the ambition, drive or resiliency to survive the stress induced in those positions
Ok I am willing to buy that stress tolerance and a certain understanding of ambition are the main skills here.
> I believe over time the problem will be less of an issue as general intelligence in the population rises
Are stress tolerance and ambition closely linked to intelligence? I haven't found that to be the case in my experiences but maybe someone has looked into it idk. Seems relevant though.
> due to more open access to knowledge.
Does mere access to knowledge directly increase intelligence? Very exciting implications if so.
> some people have significant advantages, either environmental or genetic, and not all people are equal.
Not all people are the same but they are all equal in some important senses nearly universally recognized at this point. Like their need for access to certain material conditions, their innate dignity and rights.
> would you as a nation like to capitalize on your talent and give incentive to those few advantaged to rise to their level of competence?
The Talented Tenth but for white people? Ok gotta admit you caught me by surprise with this one lol. I feel like it didn't work out that well the first time around but who knows.
> Or would you rather treat everyone as equal, let talent go to waste, and become stagnant?
I don't think these things are connected at all. If you're going to draw a link between them then do so, but putting them together in a sentence doesn't establish that.
> The rising tide lifts all boats, and that can be shown by the fact we’ve nearly eliminated poverty in the last 100 years, which is not celebrated enough.
It might lift all boats but it also floods the shore. Food is cheap (well, was!) but healthcare is unattainable. Is it really eliminating poverty if we just let the impoverished die? I mean technically yes but that sort of "elimination" has a, literally, atrocious history when used as the basis of public policy.
Anyway I don't think poverty is as eliminated as you think it is! If people's potential is limited by their circumstances, which I agree that it is, then our need is to change their circumstances not exploit the differential as some sort of piezo-economic motor.
I don’t think this is the case. Sure, for most of the largest companies that is true, but that’s not a representative sample size.
> Does mere access to knowledge directly increase intelligence? Very exciting implications if so.
Yes, at the population level over generational time periods. I wasn’t able to find the sources here, but I’ll keep looking and edit my comment when I do.
> (Or would you rather treat everyone as equal, let talent go to waste, and become stagnant?) I don't think these things are connected at all. If you're going to draw a link between them then do so, but putting them together in a sentence doesn't establish that.
You’re right, it doesn’t, and I think this issue is too complex and nuanced to actually reach any objective argument. I’ll gladly retract my statement under the guise that there are too many definitions of stagnation, and there are also many different factors that can affect whether and how people are motivated to work hard and contribute to society. So it's difficult to make a definitive statement about whether treating everyone equally will always lead to stagnation and I was wrong in doing so.
I want to say I appreciate and agree with most of your insights. I do truly believe that the current social-economic structure does provide many unfair advantages to those at the top, that’s an unfortunate side-effect that we have great people working on. I also appreciate you calling out some of my points that I definitely articulated incorrectly (I wrote the comment in passing between meetings).