We should stop pretending this is or ever can be reasonable full-time employment.
Driving for apps is something you do on the weekend to supplement your day job, or during school hours as a stay at home spouse or whatever.
However, the gig economy model is a choice. A choice that can be fixed by simply reclassifying these workers as employees. The gig economy is little more than a way to get around employee protections, and the sooner we face that obvious reality the better.
The amount of people using food delivery apps is some 2.31 billion worldwide. Are you suggesting that some 1/3 of the human population who would prefer to pay less for their food delivery all don't work for a living?
The actual problem that I never see addressed is that should EVERY job be a "living wage" job.
To me that answer is and always has been no. There will always be a need for temp workers.
There are millions of illegal immigrants, living 5 to a bedroom proping up the resturant industry. The back of house doesn't do very well at all, its only the wait staff that makes a fair wage for the effort.
You could double the price of a beer in NYC or Miami and people would still come.
What does living mean? When I belonged to a high demand religion that is known for "helping" its membership, financial assistance was dedicated to the preservation of life only. Not the preservation or growth of the quality of life. So if you had a medical life transition and a mortgage, they might pay for you to dump the mortgage and move to a tiny apartment while also receiving some food pantry items on a semi-regular frequency. Their goal was to keep you alive, not to give you a living. At the time, excess bills like cell phones, internet, cars, etc. were recommended to be removed and/or deducted from assistance given (in urban areas; rural areas cars were not really a focus, there was some autonomy in the people making the decisions). Only what was needed to remain alive.
I bring this up not because I necessarily agree with the approach, but rather to ask what we mean by "living" wage. The typical idea is that it allows people to afford food, shelter, and basic necessities (cue tangent discussion regarding American healthcare). Under this definition, are people willing to bunk up six to a room and expand WIC/SNAP? Because that is what a "living" wage can be -- not a great existence but not dying while working full time.
The usual excuse for this Spartan approach is that there aren't enough resources. For current program funding levels this is true. And in the US, we keep shooting ourselves in the foot for further resource growth -- regulations and policies are continually cherry picked, unprotected, and embattled to the point that the cost burden to maintain even the status quo is overwhelming, whether in implementation (NIMBYism) or in infrastructure (environmental impact studies taking years and decades) or in ideals (protecting water and air via the EPA).
Ideally we could organize, right? Unionize, make our collective voices heard. While a wonderful thing to enable, and there are many great outcomes when it happens, unions are subject to corruption as well -- I am not sure there is a legal framework that helps overcome that particularly pernicious principal/agent problem.
So, in this brief review, we arrive to your same conclusion, that we structurally probably can't support every job having a high enough wage to satisfy each to their wants. We can hope and want and organize for it, but until we have some significant structural changes in society and policy it seems unattainable to me :(
As an almost absurdist starting point that highlights this spectrum - several eons ago byproducts from bacteria poisoned the atmosphere and threatened life on earth until plants and eventually animals evolved, enabling homeostasis to occur.
And some people today live at the periphery of Chernobyl by choice, much like the animals in the exclusion zone that are thriving.
So it's reasonable to point to an implemented standard and consider it an ideal, perhaps even worth defending!
The reality is that for most people, these "gigs" are actually jobs. Qualifying them as "gigs" and saying that people shouldn't depend on them just allows you to feel better about not paying the true cost for the goods/services you are consuming.
If the only dashers/uberers were people who were truly only doing it for "gig work", the platforms would go under. Either that or enjoy your 50 dollar sandwich or 100 dollar uber.
I order doordash on weeknights on occasion. Who is delivering to me if the drivers are just people supplementing on the weekend or during the school day while their kids are away?
If you are working, then you should be treated with dignity.
> We should stop pretending this is or ever can be reasonable full-time employment.
Hypothetically, imagine a society that required welfare claimants to accept any job they were offered. If any would not work, neither should he eat.
Should such a society allow shitty/exploitative/dangerous jobs to exist, and force welfare claimants to work them?
Or should there only be an obligation to take a job if it provides a certain minimum level of safety, dignity and salary?
Ironically, that is one of the original "10 planks of communism" by Marx and Engels (i.e. "The liability of all to labour").
"It should not be considered okay for there to be jobs that cannot earn a decent wage ... since we ... see people working these jobs full time."
"...for most people, these "gigs" are actually jobs. Qualifying them as "gigs" and saying that people shouldn't depend on them just allows you to feel better about not paying the true cost for the goods/services you are consuming."
and "...the gig economy model ... can be fixed by simply reclassifying these workers as employees."
We can redefine the set of "we" all we want, but that doesn't change the fact that this is a not-uncommon viewpoint amongst more than just delivery drivers.
Unfortunately the truth of the matter is that the service provided by these jobs is simply not worth enough to support a living wage and the pool of competing candidates willing to do the job is high. The only way to have "our" cake and eat it too requires perpetually subsidizing this line of work with either public funds or funds from increasingly disgruntled investors.
I haven't ordered food from an app in years since the sub-par experience of waiting over an hour for some cold and congealing phad thai is simply not worth the premium when I can order directly from the restaurant, pick it up myself and achieve a better overall experience.
I was earning money to spend on new computer bits etc, not to pay rent for a family of 4. I valued the flexibility and the easy life.
The problem comes when people think this type of work is suitable for a full time career, not just a way to "top up" an income - either by working one or two nights a week, or doing it as a student, or doing it after retiring to keep the social aspect.
People don't think this work is a full time career, but they often enough don't have another choice. When you have barely (or none at all) language skills, or you're an immigrant whose certifications from their home country aren't recognized, or you're without legal immigration status, there aren't many ways left to make a living - it's either "tech gig work" (deliveries, taxis), construction/trades/restaurant helper or agriculture. The latter options are physically demanding, dangerous options or they don't exist around urban areas, and you often run into issues getting paid or dealing with dangerous/abusive employment - "gig work" options at least pay out reliably and carry less workplace abuse.
Want to fix gig work issues? Offer a decent social safety net so that no one is forced to accept this kind of work just to survive, and the market will (have to) improve on its own.
You're right it's a good way to get around immigration law, where someone with a right to work subcontracts the job to someone without and keeps 10/20/50%. That tends to be more the case with things like ubereats rather than traditional pizza-place-employing-driver -- you can't work in dominos without showing right to work, and you can't swap out the employee as people would notice, because you are Alice the driver who's kids have just left home and plays in the local cricket team, not "Driver 24601"
Given that we had no problem getting pizzas, currys etc in 2000 before ubereats I'm not sure I recognise the "without gig work we wouldn't get warm pizza" argument.
Then I reckon the solution isn't to add antagonism to the employment relationship they already have, but rather as a community rally around to provide resources to lower their search costs (Note: I assume when you say "don't have another choice" you really mean the finding and switching costs for new opportunities are too high)
No, I mean that the eligibility is not present.
Getting employment requires hurdles many people cannot pass: you need a registered address to get postal letters (which excludes many homeless), you need valid immigration credentials, you need skill certifications (school or academic degrees, vocational training, ...) for many employments (which foreigners sometimes have a hard time showing (refugees) or getting recognized legally), you need to speak the language, you need to be able to read and write...
For us tech people, a lot of these hurdles don't apply, but the lowest rungs of employment / society have a very difficult time which most of us don't have any experience.
I think my point still stands. Community funded programs that helps individuals find their next step, when funded appropriately, are often enormously successful. In the healthcare context, say you want to decrease the number of repeat folks to the ER without decreasing their access -- basically ounce of prevention vs. pound of cure approach. A representative example is person who regularly comes to the ER for insulin issues. In addition to cost pressure, there issues might also source from not have a working fridge or consistent electricity. It is thus cheaper for the social safety net to provide electricity and a basic fridge than to have the person return regularly to the ER for insulin.
Similar workflows and standard of care exist for almost every social ill -- if we have the civic sense to fund it -- to help people take the next step towards bettering their lives.
Or are we really debating whether there is some extremely small subset of people who can only get a job delivering pizzas(somehow) and they can't possibly get any other employment?
First of all, the horror, second of all, there used to be a thing known as "going outside", and before that there used to be a thing known as "cooking".
How far back do you want to go to find the optimal configuration of society? Or does it just coincidentally match the configuration that you personally grew up with?