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Comment by qbasic_forever | Hacker News Reader

Do you realize what you're saying? Gig company A only dribbles out 8 hours of work a week so your Dad is forced to also work for gig company B, but needs flexible hours to do so.

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.

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"Your dad is forced to be an indentured servant for these companies"

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?

He DOES have a boss that mandates when he needs to work--the apps penalize him if he isn't taking rides and eventually cut off his work entirely if he isn't taking them (which is the whole point of the original article and legislation in Seattle!).

That’s exactly how an app which treated him as a part-time worker would work. If you stopp accepting every ride that’s offered to you, you get fired. What else would you expect?

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.

Absolutely wrong. There are no penalties for not working. I've done that myself. Further to equate a "boss" to an app is quite a leap.

The commenter explicitly says to the contrary:

> Skip, on the other hand, penalizes his earnings if he falls below 80% moving average accept rate (over the last 10 orders).

The commenter also says nothing about being penalized for not taking shifts. If they sign up for a shift, they are expected to work that shift. It is a completely different model than Uber Eats, which he can sign into or out of at any given time, without penalty.

If so if uber was forced to employ all of their workers how else would to expect it to work than that?

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..)

They're not his employer so they shouldn't penalize him. If you're truly a gig worker, why are you being penalized for not accepting some job? How does that make sense?

If they were employing him, penalizing him for declining work would be fine.

Is Uber penalizing him? No.

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?

Ummm.... it could be a job with a flexible schedule. I don't understand why that's so hard to set up.

Because Skip has shifts and he is expected to deliver to a certain standard during that shift. The “should be an employee” people seem to want their cake (be classified as an employee) and eat it too (not get punished for not doing acceptable workloads as an employee). Smh

You're talking about a different app not Uber, which doesn't penalize per acceptance rates. Besides, I don't think you understand how these gig apps work. You can only accept or reject if you're clocked into a shift. His dad can clock in at anytime but he won't be penalized on Skip if he's not clocked in.

This discussion of work like something that people can whenever they want, however they like feels so off base to me. It's work. It's something that people have to do in order to survive and live. Yet for people who promote the flexibility of gig workers it gets talked about like a sport or some other fun activity of choice.

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.

There are plenty of people who can only work part-time yet may still need money. People in school, people with young kids, people with medical conditions that limit their activities (sometimes variably by day/time), etc.

Not everyone doing gig work is hustling as a second job to get ahead (though that should also be both legal and accepted, IMO).

Why don’t we optimize for both and allow the market to decide where each model is best suited to provide services?

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?

"It's something that people have to do in order to survive and live"

And you don't see an issue with that?

I love being exploited as long as I can set my own hours. I can quit at any time... just one last ride.

> His dad can work at anytime, anywhere and doesn't have a boss to mandate when he clocks in.

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.

> his dad will eventually starve or be homeless if he doesn't eventually clock in.

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.

This represents a poor understanding of "indentured servitude", or a deliberate broadening of its meaning to encompass other things.

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.

If you don't work, you don't eat.

I’m not GP, but I think you’re missing their point. They described the Canadian job as “gig” but it’s actually structured more like more traditional part time work. It sounds like you’d prefer to outlaw all part time work?

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?

Personally, I think part time jobs should have to come with the same benefits as full time, by law.

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.

My dad (and loads of other gig workers) don’t want full time Uber jobs. They like gig work because it gives their lives flexibility. The employer-employee relationship is about more than money & benefits, it’s about power.

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!

> "part time jobs should have to come with the same benefits as full time, by law."

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?

Do you know this is exactly how it works in most first world countries already? (except for the health insurance bit, because most first world countries have a public health system). Part-time workers get holiday pay, sick leave, and every entitlement of full-time workers, at a rate commensurate with their hours.

This has been tried.

It results in eliminating part-time jobs, overloading full-time employees, and increasing unemployment.

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.

It doesn't sound like Skip pays hourly though, so it's not very similar to part time work at all.

Nope, I said none of those things like banning part time work that you are saying.

Your only comment here is to try to pivot into other arguments that you are inventing. Not gonna work here.

It sucks to be seven years old and work in a textile factory, and they totally get screwed. So we chose to ban that. Slavery is another labor practice we've banned. Not sure what your point is about freelance writers.

Freelance writer are essentially gig workers and therefore slaves or underage factory workers according to you bizarrely nonsensical analogy

That's not what I wrote at all.

>Your dad is forced to be an indentured servant for these companies that can't make money without exploiting people like him.

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.

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 a job.

The only reason Uber exists to begin with is because they:

- 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

Uber is a terrible company, yes. Always has been.

That's true for basically all the "gig economy" apps, which are just enormous money sinks which fuck over (disrupt, according to their propaganda) whatever market they enter and then either collapse leaving a rotting corpse where a functional market used to exist or become monopolists and then proceed to level the market in order to milk it up as much as possible. And then they collapse anyway.

If we had any kind of sense, as a society, this shit would have been banned years ago.

The demand for food delivery still exists and plenty of other companies would fill the void, that's how the free market works. Right now these apps are exploiting workers so they can pocket more money for shareholders and paper over a failing business model.

Love how you talk about the "free market" here, but also insist that certain types of employment should be illegal. (As an aside: we don't have a free market. Such a thing doesn't actually exist in the real world.)

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.

However they would have no incentives to hire people who prefer highly flexible work hours and would force his dad to work fixed shifts which clearly not something many gig workers prefer (and I’m sure many of them would prefer higher grade pay for instance than whatever you’re proposing).

If the best the current system can offer is "either debase yourself like a peasant into multiple gig jobs that regularly screw you, or, be homeless, and sorry there's just nothing we can do about that" eventually people are going to start considering other systems.

Social unrest is bad for business. I'm not sure why companies keep turning the screws when profits are at record highs.

To be honest, I think Skip and Uber Eats are either struggling or in a seasonal down cycle right now. Very few orders coming in, and it’s not just my dad. He talks to the other drivers out there and they say the same thing.

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.

Both cost so much more than dieect order and pickup that it's getting close to cheaper to take a cab to get it direct from the shop, right?

I know I have never ordered from either because I was immediately aghast at the massive markup over the regular price for the products...

> If the best the current system can offer is "either debase yourself like a peasant into multiple gig jobs that regularly screw you, or, be homeless, and sorry there's just nothing we can do about that"

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".

Show me the full yime jobs as food delivery driver that would meet the demand for such jobs and I'll give you $100

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.

There's another side to that coin. If every restaurant that wants to offer delivery has to have their own driver, that means there are tons of drivers sitting around doing nothing while waiting for orders to come in. By outsourcing delivery to Uber, all restaurants in a city can be served by one pool of drivers, leveraging economies of scale. This opened the door to many more restaurants offering delivery because they didn't need to pay drivers to sit around.

And?

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....

Considering current labor shortages it wouldn’t be at all unreasonable to conclude that many gig workers do this because they actually prefer the flexibility these app provides to working fix shifts with almost no way to influence tour schedules yourself. All these champagne socialists seem to ignore that for some reason..

In some ways gig work can provide a level autonomy not normally available to the people taking gig work, sure, but it doesn't change the fact that gig workers are exploited, and that's bad.

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.

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