So he uses Uber Eats to pick up the slack. The app lets him go online and go offline any time he wants — no shifts, no scheduling ahead. He’s also completely free to reject as many orders as he wants until he gets ones that offer a bigger tip. Skip, on the other hand, penalizes his earnings if he falls below 80% moving average accept rate (over the last 10 orders).
If Uber were forced to employ all of their drivers full- or part-time, he would lose all of the flexibility he now enjoys. He’d have scheduled shifts and have to clock in and clock out at specific times on specific days. He’d likely also lose the ability to reject orders entirely.
I can tell you right now, he would hate that. So would many other gig workers, who take full advantage of the flexibility to be able to look after their families and otherwise live their lives. Compare that with the chaos that is the life of a retail worker stuck with an automated shift scheduling system and zero start/stop time consistency and zero flexibility.
You are completely failing to see my point--if gig company A had to employ your Dad as a part time or full time employee with guaranteed minimum wage or work hours and other benefits he wouldn't have to tetris together an insane set of gig work jobs to keep from being evicted or starved.
Your dad is forced to be an indentured servant for these companies that can't make money without exploiting people like him. And somehow you are immediately going to bat for these employers... pretty sick IMHO.
His dad can work at anytime, anywhere and doesn't have a boss to mandate when he clocks in. How is that being an indentured servant?
I find it so puzzling that some people can’t accept that there are gig workers who prefer the flexibility and many of them wouldn’t be able to work at all if they had to be treated as part/full time.
> Skip, on the other hand, penalizes his earnings if he falls below 80% moving average accept rate (over the last 10 orders).
Certainly your ability to reject jobs or even to select the time you want to work would be severely limited (but let’s ignore that..)
If they were employing him, penalizing him for declining work would be fine.
Any company which would have to directly employ him would certainly penalize him for not accepting work and would not allow him to start his shift whenever he wanted.
That other app he’s using seems to be somewhere in between gig and normal work (so you seem to get the worst from both worlds).
> If they were employing him, penalizing him for declining work would be fine.
Which seems like a huge downside?
It all comes down to trade offs in the end. Either we optimize for people to hold jobs that allow them to survive in society and earn enough to do things like pay rent and buy food. Or we optimize for job dabblers who don't really need the work but want some extra cash. I believe we should optimze for people to hold steady jobs that allow them stability and do important stuff like pay rent and buy food. We should optimize for survival of the worker and workers require steady employment.
Not everyone doing gig work is hustling as a second job to get ahead (though that should also be both legal and accepted, IMO).
Eg, ridesharing can be done ride-by-ride by people choosing to accept fares from a marketplace but stocking store shelves works better having people there on committed shifts and delivering packages is in between, where people sign up for shifts but are expected to complete the full shift.
Why can’t we fulfill the needs of both people who want reliable, shift-based employment and people who want variable gigs?
And you don't see an issue with that?
That's not exactly true if we consider the environment that allows companies to operate like this, insomuch as his dad will eventually starve or be homeless if he doesn't eventually clock in. Hence the indentured servitude. The "worker's choice" of "just do gigs for a different gig company" doesn't really work if all gig companies stand together at the other side of the homelessness cannon.
How are traditional full time jobs not even worse then? They require you to clock in at times chosen by the employer or you lose the job and income.
The term refers to situations such as "An employer pays for transit of one or more people on condition that work of the employer's choosing is performed until the cost of transit, and any accompanying expenses, are repaid to the employer." Generally, these include specified wages, but employers commonly arranged that expenses and wages combined guarantee that the workers will be unable to pay off the contract within any specified timeframe. This often resulted in lifelong service, and could at times extend to workers' heirs (whether debyst inheritance be legal or not, as such workers were often at severe disadvantage to risk challenging the employer on any matter). Effectively, indentured servitude was usually indistingushable from slavery.
To address your "will eventually starve if he doesn't _eventually_ clock in", this seems to be the default case for all forms of employment (even if you employ yourself, in the wilderness, entirely on your own). The exception being that some places have sufficient social or legal safeguards to prevent a "clocked out" person from meeting this fate.
The point is true gig work allows you the flexibility to fit it around whatever else you have going on, be that part time work, starting a startup, taking care of a family, etc. of course it’s downsides and probably needs some more rules to protect the workers. But banning eliminates the opportunity entirely.
It sucks to be a freelance writer and it’s easy to get screwed; should we ban that too?
That would encourage companies to offer full time positions. Current law (in the US) financially penalizes full time employers, which is why most part time workers end up working multiple part time jobs.
A full time job gives your employer the power to dictate your life schedule to you. Your boss wants you at your desk at 8am but you have to take your kid to school at 8:30? Too bad! You’re there at 8 or you’re fired.
It’s even worse in retail and food service, as I alluded to in my original post. These workers get their schedules a week ahead, with shifts all over the place. One day you’re opening at 6am. Next day you’re closing at 9pm. Good luck having any kind of life outside of work with a schedule like that!
All this does is eliminate more jobs.
In your hypothetical scenario, a company that hires 2 or 3 people part-time would need to do health insurance for each of them, benefits for each of them and the additional full-time equivalent paperwork for each of them...
In that scenario, the company would end up just hiring 1 person full-time for the hours, and have much less added overhead costs.
This would lead to higher unemployment, because now instead of 3 people being employed part-time, only 1 person is employed.
Where's the good in that? Maybe I'm just not seeing it from my perspective, if anyone else can chime in?
It results in eliminating part-time jobs, overloading full-time employees, and increasing unemployment.
That is irrelevant, because of how it's measured: 1 person working 40 hours/week and 9 people not working gives an unemployment of 90%, but 10 persons working 4 hours/week gives an unemployment of 0% -- yet both scenarios have the same amount of work. Of course using part-time jobs reduces the unemployment figures. It says nothing, however, about the availability of work.
Your only comment here is to try to pivot into other arguments that you are inventing. Not gonna work here.
This is absurdly patronizing to people making their own choices, and the freedom to seek employment or work as they see fit. As someone who, as an independent contractor in CA, was the victim of such patronizing sympathy that resulted in regulation which was deeply contrary to my own interests, please stop trying to "protect" people like me. Ironically, that regulation was targeted at Uber, who then received a specific carve out that left me screwed over as a small independent contractor.
- have unlimited VC money (35 billion in operational losses over 10 years)
- offload things like medical insurance, depreciation, equipment costs etc. onto people who work for them
- screw over restaurants
I can't see how it's a net benefit
If we had any kind of sense, as a society, this shit would have been banned years ago.
I don't think we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Certainly there's some legal regime where workers can continue to enjoy the kind of work time flexibility they have with gig work, while also being compensated and treated fairly.
Social unrest is bad for business. I'm not sure why companies keep turning the screws when profits are at record highs.
I think on the one hand maybe a lot of people are away on summer vacation so not ordering food as often. On the other hand, interest rates in Canada have shot through the roof, so maybe a lot of people are cutting back on ordering in and choosing to cook more to save money.
Unfortunately, interest rates also affect my dad, so he’s getting squeezed pretty hard. I can’t blame the gig companies for that though, that’s the Bank of Canada’s doing.
I know I have never ordered from either because I was immediately aghast at the massive markup over the regular price for the products...
It's not. Gig work is one of many options.
You can be a full-time employee. You can be a part-time employee. You can start your own business. You can work for local, state, or federal government in innumerable roles.
Or, if it suits you, you can be a gig worker.
Focus on specific cases of companies treating workers unfairly, as this legislation appears to do. There's no point railing against "the system" because there is no "system".
Prottip: they don't exist
Delivery drivers always got paid jack and made the majority of thier income from tips. It was always a bad industry and Uber etc just make it worse by taking an additional cut and causing businesses to outsource to fewer total workers across the industry than would be employed/were employed under the traditional model where any business that wanted to do delivery had to do so by directly employing someone.
That argument is essentially: Workers should suffer so those who already were of means can profit more.
You can't open a restaurant unless you're already doing well, with large amounts of capital etc.
Drivers are generally living oatcheck to paycheck with zero available capital.
You do see why I feel zero sympathy, right?
And that's ignoring you're actually arguing for drivers to do more work for the same or even less pay....
If the alternative is more degrading forms of labor, with businesses sneaking around full time protections by only giving people 30 hours of work, and paying an absurdly low minimum wage, that's hardly an indictment of the idea of strong labor protections - quite the opposite. Why did you bring up socialism? Are you saying capitalism can't provide good labor conditions and we need socialism to do so? Extremely based take.
There are some niches that have operated under the gig work model for almost 100 years, such a certain sectors of trucking where drivers own their own rigs and specifically choose to enter that line of work, as opposed to a salaried job where they don't have to worry about maintaining their own vehicle, precisely because they want the ability to simply switch their (very well-paid 6 figure minimun) job off like a light when they feel like it, for a couple of weeks or a couple of months or longer, and then switch it back on.
I personally know a guy who has performed with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra for almost 20 years doing exactly this. he's a trucker with his own rig and his own schedule on his own terms for 6 months out of the year, and tours with the orchestra for the other 6 months. This type of lifestyle would not be possible if there was no established gig system available for people who wished to have that flexibility.
You've been told multiple time people value flexibility and yet you keep fixating on an old work model that you want to apply to everyone. More options are better. Full time jobs didn't go away. This whole industry didn't exist other than getting paid per shift as a pizza delivery driver.
How many gig workers do you personally know? I know more than 20 and all of them prefer gig work to signing up for a full time delivery position at a restaurant.
Gig work is available to immigrants super fast as well. Go to any major city in Europe and see migrants and refugees making a living delivering food. Do you think they are dumb and choose the worst job they can get?
Talk to some people before you pontificate over what they should want for themselves. They can literally stop the app at any point so your problem isn't that gig work exists, but that other people value things you don't.
Frequently it's their only option, the only job the have access to, so in a way, you're right.
They're not dumb, just constrained.
One can stay here debating all along why people get to those situations in the first place, and that normal jobs shouldn't require extra work, or that immigrants should be able to find easy "normal" jobs etc, but the point stands for me that a world where I can pick from three options (full-time, part-time, gig) is better than a world where I can only pick from two.
That being said, I'm supportive of more regulation around gig-work to protect gig-workers, but that regulation needs to be specific to gig work and not just force it to disappear outright. A gig-worker shouldn't be able to be kicked out without explanation, there should be recourse for customer ratings, they should be covered by some kind of global insurance, etc, but these things will need to be tweaked to this new reality instead of us pretending like there aren't many many people around the world that prefer this work arrangement.
Ofc, this depends on the region (country, state, etc.), I'd love to see some estimates on how much prices would go up in a particular region, and how much the demand would potentially decrease - when classifying drivers as full / part time workers.
Will be keeping an eye on this Seattle experiment.
In California Uber and Lyft rammed through a proposition to enable them to continue their labor abuses. Anecdotally, the prices have gone through the roof and I've never had more trouble getting rides, so I don't believe that. It's a failed business model because Uber has to provide a return to investors and livery is basically a race to the bottom without some form of price controls.
A lot of complaints i see on HN are very first world and don’t see how much some of these companies actually help.
These companies are not set up as charities. If they happen to help people, that’s a side affect of the primary purpose - generate maximum revenue.
Regulation is required where a businesses incentives do not align with societies (mining is an easy example). As much as C level execs will argue, self regulation has never been an effective mechanism. So Uber is incentivised, naturally, to provide a safe experience for a rider, as to do otherwise would reduce revenue. They are not incentivised to provide their drivers any semblance of a “life worth living”, as it has no positive correlation to revenue. This isn’t out of malice, it’s just economics at work. If we, as a society, want a better standard of living for gig workers, then regulation, flawed as it is, is the only mechanism I know of that has some chance of working.
See Ohio for what happens to an unpopular ballot initiative.
I’d vote against the Ohio initiative and for the Uber one.
I hated taxi cartels. They had horrible customer service, high prices, and I’m a big dude who had to deal with them. I cannot imagine how toxic it was for gals.
Sounds good for customers?
this is going to be a rant, but i mean…
the reason uber and lyft (and countless other “disrupters”) disrupted anything is they pretended the externalities didn’t exist/ignored the very externalities the already existing industry had previously already sorted out and lived through.
and lo and behold, no one even halfway intelligent is shocked that all of these issues arose at scale.
i’ll repeat what i’ve said countless other times: anyone who thinks they have a “disruptive” idea yet hasn’t extensively studied why the already existing industry does things a certain way, is an absolute lightweight and no one should be investing in with them.
we have a major problem in some of our industries of people who have deluded themselves that the people who came before were somehow primitive or less enlightened.
we see this all over the place, from people who want entirely rebuild large software packages from the bottom up, from submarine tourism companies, to “house flippers”, to short-term rental apps, who because their egos refuse to let them explore the history of their project, they just end up in the exact same place. only they took a really long, wasteful, and stupid detour to get there.
if an industry is doing something you think is wrong, explore the history of why it is done this way. don’t pretend like that problem doesn’t exist and then call yourself a disrupter. this is a recipe to have everyone laugh and go “it’s not like you weren’t warned there was giant hole around the corner and then you drove right into it.”
and even worse, if they have explored the history of their project, know very well the problems coming, but try to externalize that to wider society, it’s outright malicious.
> leaving customers to rely on…the bus? Or just not traveling.
again, taxis have been around for pretty much ever.
> It's a failed business model because Uber has to provide a return to investors and livery is basically a race to the bottom without some form of price controls.
You can't have a race to the bottom without competitors still in the market.
If competitors like Uber leave the market, Lyft can raise prices.
In the long run, there will be a balance between competitors entering and exiting the market just around the point where the industry is barely viable as a business.
That's also how eg restaurants or cafes work in many big cities; and this explains why so most cafes fail, but why there are also always some cafes around.
Or simply stop using uber ?
What changes is the information asymmetry where Uber etc knows a lot more about the conditions of people working for them than the people taking these jobs do. As a general rule those with more information are simply in a vastly better negotiating position.
Or they could keep pissing off the people with the monopoly on violence, maybe that'll work long term?
That’s not something the average person off the street is going to ask. But many are going to be pissed learning they will reimburse you for paying someone to clean your car but not the time it takes you to do it yourself, nor the lost wages until it’s clean.
But taking the outside view, you don't need to know all the specifics. You can just check Uber's general reputation (or lack thereof perhaps) for fair dealings with drivers. That general reputation will reflect how they are dealing with those edge cases in general.
Just like in the 2010s you could be reasonable certain that a job at Google meant you got free food, even if you didn't know the exact specific rules about what food would be available when and where.
If people get a worse impression than reality they can release more information, but if the public has a better impression than reality then they have zero incentives to say anything.
Information asymmetry isn’t about people knowing nothing. If you’re offended a job at some salary you know roughly how much they are willing to pay but you don’t know the minimum you can negotiate for. Similarly, companies don’t know the minimum you’re willing to accept but they do know quite a bit about market rates.
Executive pay seems fairly independent of the issue at hand.
Counterpoint: if they could extract more profit from the market by increasing prices, why haven't they done so already?
Market determines viable price for service, not cost. If the cost of doing business can't find a balance at rates the market will pay at acceptable profit margin, the business simply doesn't exist. Many aspects of our lives suffer from this reality: renewable energy companies in many places survives only because they're propped up by government subsidy.
The answer to "why aren't the executives cutting pay" is obvious: it's up to the executives, and why on earth would they cut their own pay, when they could instead simply decrease worker conditions and cut cost of labor? Without a union, executives have literally all the power.
Executive pay + shareholder profits (through stock buybacks, dividends) are where all the massive margins go to right now. There's no more profit to extract from the market (unless the finance team is terrible at their jobs and have been leaving money on the table) so that's where the money to cover increased cost of labor needs to come from.
I'm not really upset at the idea of CEOs making less money, I don't get what the big deal is.
So market set the pay for services however executive pay is not affected by the market at all?
Uber pays its executives what it does because other comparable companies pay the same. If they cuts that people they’d want to hire will choose to work for other places and they will have to find someone who agrees to work for less (which might or might not be bad a thing)
And arguable, executive pay is perhaps a lot more elastic than ordinary workers' pay. Companies aren't shy about paying huge bonuses to their CEO one year, but cutting them to nothing the next. Ordinary workers have a much steadier pay check, even when working for Uber.
Similarly, most companies are also quite willing to hire and fire CEOs. Statistical distribution of CEO tenures is a well studied subject.
No. Uber still has to compete for workers with other companies looking for labour. Unions presence or absence doesn't change that dynamic.
> Counterpoint: if they could extract more profit from the market by increasing prices, why haven't they done so already?
Not sure that's a counterpoint to anything? Yes, I assume that they are setting their prices to maximize long term profits.
However, if regulation increases costs across the industry, supply curves will recede, and if demand curves stay roughly the same, prices will rise (because the point where the curves meet will be at a higher price point).
If the executives of Uber could just ignore shareholders, they wouldn't need to worry about profits at all.
How would you prove a decision was wrong without hindseight? How would you prove an executive shouldn't make X amount of money?
Imagine I'm the CEO of Nike, I make $100 million a year. The company is doing amazing. Is that because of decisions I made, marketing, good product, word of mouth, things that happened before I was CEO. Prove that I shouldn't get that money.
They don't get the money back they already spent, of course.
It's hard to see a victim here; no victim, no crime.
Alas, that doesn't mean that everyone will have a utopian job.
Uber argue that most gig workers are just doing it as a spur of the moment side hustle, and therefore the flexibility is necessary. But your anecdote is the opposite.
To me it sounds like drivers support Uber because of some dystopian Stockholm syndrome where it's their only hope in a failed system.
Showing up for work on Monday is no guarantee you will show up on Tuesday. Correspondingly employing you on Monday is no guarantee you will be employed on Tuesday.
I think it's a bit silly to expect any other state of affairs.
That amount of insecurity is to me just insane. I can't fathom living like that.
The moment you have multiple employers to choose from (ie an actual market for labor) then the insecurity is removed. Indeed, for the most part, if you can deliver value, you can find someone to pay you for it and your bills will get paid.
It's not your employer's job to mitigate the risks an employee took on by not saving money. Everyone should have 90 days of expenses saved up.
I think your views come from a point of privilege.
- they have no savings or access to credit
AND
- they get fired on short notice
AND
- they can't get another job
I'm not sure that making the employer fire them with a longer notice period, given that they can't get another job, means they won't be screwed. Therefore, I don't think there is any utility in so restricting the employer.
Not having savings is bad and dangerous. That's not caused by labor law.
Jobs should serve the people.