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Comment by IntelMiner | Hacker News Reader

The "job-centric" American economy feels...harrowing now

"While Grove supported helping technology startups, he also felt that America was wrong in thinking that those new companies would increase employment. "Startups are a wonderful thing," he wrote in a 2010 article for Bloomberg, "but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment."[40] Although many of those startups and entrepreneurs would achieve tremendous success and wealth, said Grove, he was more concerned with the overall negative effect on America: "What kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work and masses of unemployed?"

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You can debate the quality of the jobs, but just Uber has created millions of jobs. Amazon too.

Even Google which is very hesitant to enter businesses that require lots of labor employs hundreds of thousands of contractors.

How many jobs have Uber and Amazon destroyed? How well do the jobs pay? How much work do they demand for that pay? What's the net? Do they create any negative externalities?

You can't just look at revenues without looking at expenses.

How much do they rely on taxpayer funded social services for the survival of their workers.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-...

Welfare is a subsidy /against/ Uber. It means that Uber has to pay more, not less.

Um. Wrong? You'd be correct if a worker could only take either welfare or a job, but that's typically not the case.

I disagree. You'd be correct IMHO if the welfare stopped if the worker quit his Uber or Walmart gig.

If a poor person has two income sources, either source is less essential than if he had just one of the sources. The less essential the pay from the Uber gig, the less Uber can squeeze the worker.

...wow, this is a really great case against welfare work requirements! You're basically just subsidizing the companies that pay their workers the least.

Without the work requirement, you're actually helping people.

I agree.

The admin overhead for work requirements is also very much not worth it. It's basically just mandating extra paperwork and if you file it wrong you can't eat.

The reason we have it partly that welfare recipients literally don't like getting welfare without strings attached because they think it's embarrassing (or that the other people getting it don't deserve it), and part that states are hoping to save money by kicking people off for doing the paperwork wrong.

EITC is a way to do "work requirements" without the downsides.

If Uber’s pay was insufficient to survive without any additional income sources, workers would either die or move on to better paying jobs.

In this way welfare is actually subsidizing Uber employment. Assuming of course, that welfare is also insufficient to survive.

No. Giving people money (or food) increases their negotiating power, which lets them ask for better wages from whoever else is paying them. Uber is especially weak to negotiation because you can just drive less or switch to Lyft.

You're actually arguing that welfare is bad - if giving people welfare allowed Uber to lower their wages that means people would be better off without it.

> How many jobs have Uber and Amazon destroyed?

How many have Uber destroyed?

For Amazon the claim is more obvious - picking up the "killing local business" and "killing US suppliers" torches from Walmart before them - but I would be a bit suprised if there were any cities where there were fewer transportation drivers now than pre-Uber in the US. Taxis in the vast majority of the country were pretty few and far-between.

They are very different types of tech company; not as completely different as something like SaaS with no cost of physical goods at all, but Uber (while hardly an example of a good citizen company) is not really the sort of "some people in one city have jobs and nobody else does as a result" tech company as some others.

The 1920's had gig jobs too, it didn't work out well for them and we see parallels today.

If gig workers have jobs, why does Uber try so hard to classify them as "independent contractors" rather than employees?

The American dream, everyone working for themself.

the freedom to report to as many bosses as your sanity will allow.

because they choose when, where and at what price they will provide their service, unlike employees

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