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