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Comment by xwdv | Hacker News Reader

I wonder when we will start to feel guilt for supporting these businesses that run exclusively on the desperation of giggers.

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.

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Nobody's forcing anybody to deliver your teriyaki. You're paying a premium so you don't have to leave the house. Someone's freely choosing to earn some money to provide your premium service. They've decided that delivering your thing is better for them than not delivering your thing.

The overthinking involved in this stuff is bizarre.

“They’ve decided that picking the cotton is better than refusing to do so”.

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.

Comments like this are why I don't believe in democracy anymore.

Food delivery is not even in the same universe as chattel slavery, they're completely incomparable.

You can't just say this, you have to say why. It's going to be a hard case to explain how you can't compare two types of work.

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.

Nope, 300 years ago we had slavery and now we have gig work. I think that's the same universe ;)

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.

Yea, this is pretty much how I rationalize it. Shitty work but hey if someone’s willing to do it I won’t care. Everyone is different.

Yes absolutely do not think about the conditions under which someone would be willing to do it. What would have to change in your life for you to be willing to? Don't think about it!

I don’t understand.

I would have to lose 30 years of work experience, all of the skills I've learned, and my professional network.

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.

> I would have to lose 30 years of work experience, all of the skills I've learned, and my professional network.

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.

If everything is a response to incentives then by this logic you could also say a software engineer is coerced into their career because of pressure put on by the cost of their lifestyle. People doing shitty work might not have incentive to do anything else.

It seems very important to you to believe that the lowest paid, most precarious and vulnerable workers choose that freely and are thrilled with it.

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.

I could have chosen to be a low paid vulnerable worker and not been thrilled with it. The barrier to entry is so low, it seems difficult to believe some people wouldn’t freely choose it out of convenience. Not sure how you can believe 100% of those workers are coerced into that line of work.

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.

You seem risk-averse, and that’s OK. But you aren’t in any position to tell other people what level of risk or action to take to maintain or improve their lives.

People are free to choose and they take on the consequences of their choices, good or bad.

That's like when people discover a product is made with child labor they the boycott the product, the factory shuts down, and the children who used to have income are now forced to the street or into prostitution.

You are blaming gig work, but gig work helps them, at least somewhat.

Just as accurately, it's like when you stop patronizing child prostitutes, and the children now have to work as beggars. If you use this as an argument to continue patronizing child prostitutes, people will be angry at you.

That's a poor argument because prostitute and beggar have similar social levels.

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.

Americans still don't feel guilty for 400 years of slavery. It's going to take a while for us to come around on gig work.

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