'So immoral': gig economy workers forced to pay fee to receive their wages
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
This is really the crux of the issue: why do we pretend that gig workers don't deserve the same benefits and protections that proper employees do? Even referring to it as a "gig" makes it sound more like a hobby than a livelihood.
EDIT: yea sorry I meant to imply "wages and wage guarantees" as well but I just shoved it in with "benefits and protections"
I feel like some kind of gradient system would be ideal. Like if you work 10 hours a week you get 25% of the cash value of benefits. That way, a company wouldn't be incentivized to keep them right below the limit.
catastrophic insurance can be paid by the state.
I know the US has that health-care thing, is it just that or there are other ones that need a cut time somewhere?
Because some—in some cases, many—of them don’t. And in many cases, e.g. healthcare, it’s unclear why we’re still bundling something into employment that properly should be separate.
Extending employment protection to gig workers is a simple solution. But it probably leaves many of them worse off than they are now. (Also, most full-time employees are paid up to 14 days after post.)
This, one million times over.
I read an account describing how things came to be as they are.
Apparently, it all started during WW2.
The Government controlled wages, and so some wages were too high and some too low, and for those set too low, it became difficult to get staff.
To make employment more remunerative, employers began to add benefits on the side - such as health insurance - and these were not taxed, either.
The Government eventually noticed this was happening, and moved to tax such benefits, and discontent with this was so widespread the Government backed off.
So then we end up with health insurance as a non-taxable benefit tacked on to employment.
What is tax referencing?
Source?
This just doesn't make any sense—single payer would free up the union to fight for more. Literally just the sunk cost fallacy.
Do unions in single-payer countries typically have healthcare goodies?
Even in the modern day, they are one of the largest influential advocates for keeping this scheme: labor killed Obama’s cadillac tax which was designed to solve this problem.
Not that the cadillac tax was ever going to survive, the American people are not educated enough to understand why it is such an important policy.
That's almost 11 million people, which was around 12% of the civilian workforce, diverted to the military.
The wheels move slowly but once they grind nothing can stop it. The self employed are being reintegrated into the Borg collective.
Jason Snell, the former editor of Macworld went independent after getting laid off from MacWorld. He purposefully put together streams of income consisting of podcasting, writing articles for different magazines - including MacWorld, writing for his own blog and writing technical books.
He said out of those, because of the initial laws passed in California, it made it harder for him to be what in essence was a gig worker when writing for various websites.
The little time I did spend doing C2C contracting, I also had net 30 payment terms.
Yes I realize it’s different for the gig workers in the article. But the last thing we need is laws that affect all “gig workers” whether they make $10/hour or whether they are making $150/hour.
On that note, I did pay a third party company $10/hour for a short term contract that I had with a former CTO. It would have been too much work on both ends to get me approved to work directly for the company so I became a subcontractor for an established company to make every thing easier even though I found the initial contract.
Once you get paid the amounts that people are in the "gig economy" it becomes exploitative, people don't have enough to live or to get out of their situation easily.
I don’t get to “choose” how much I make. I just get to choose whether the amount of money I’m being offered per hour is worth my time.
Just like when I sub contract as a W2 contractor with a third party firm. I know how much I’m going to net. The higher my asking rate is the more I’m going to make and the more the contracting firm is going to make.
Oh, right. They don't.
The drivers can decide whether a given rate is worth it to them given other alternatives like anyone else that’s the entire purpose of surge pricing to convince more people to drive when there is more demand
Ridesharing seems like a relatively-efficient market. Nobody is singularly setting the rate.
We could switch to a two-sided market where every time you book a ride you enter a reserve and maximum price, and then drivers enter their reserve and minimum and the system matches for a fee. And then we can watch a competitor eat our lunch because literally nobody wants to do that.
I've worked on several projects were I was promised an FTE conversion after performing really well during a project. My manager said the company wanted to keep me around and convert me to an FTE spot. Within weeks of my project being released, they dangled the conversion out in front of me while reducing my hours to 20-25 a week. I fell for it for a few weeks and then decided they had no intention of converting me, it was just to keep me around for various other shit work their devs didn't want to do so I moved on - another perk of being a contractor/part-time/"gig" employee.
I met one lady who was from another city and came to town to spend time with her child and grand children. Her daughter was at work during the day and her grandkids were in school. She drove Uber during the day, during the week when she was bored and wanted a little extra money.
The esteem ad other associations of that usage are now given to untrained drivers, personal shoppers, and cashiers because it helps technology firms avoid traditional worker protections.
We should have just expanded medicare to cover everyone, but no, that'd give too much power to the workers.
Maybe the solution is to go piecemeal. We already have Medicaid for the poor--raise the limit on that. Expand Medicare to children and pregnant women. Et cetera.
> that'd give too much power to the workers
Medicare For All isn't popular [1]. There isn't a conspiracy, just people being cautious about a complicated and important topic.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/468401/majority-say-gov-ensure-...
The sheer earned disdain I've seen expressed for health insurance providers recently makes me hope this is some sort of 'Abe Moment' for the US where even conservatives can acknowledge the majority of Americans are sickened by what our healthcare system has become.
You're much better off boiling the frog by expanding the availability of medicare through various means until almost everyone has it as an option even if they're not using it.
"Americans' positive rating of the quality of healthcare in the U.S. is now at its lowest point in Gallup’s trend dating back to 2001," yet still, 71% rate the quality of their own healthcare excellent or good, with 65% saying the same about their coverage [1]. (I'm guessing the quarter to third minority that doesn't have a positive view of their own healthcare or coverage overlaps significantly with the one fifth who view Mangione very or somewhat positively [2].)
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/654044/view-healthcare-quality-...
[2] https://stratpolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/UHC-Pol...
In most EU states you pay taxes to provide medical care to employees. If an employee gets sick or otherwise unable to work, you are usually required to continue paying those taxes even if the employee does zero workhours.
The key part to help small businesses is to mitigate their risk of dispropotional cost. Does not matter if it's a tax or any other payable.
This is already true, at least in part. Not only do employers get to fully deduct the cost of almost all employee benefits from their taxable income, but in most cases (e.g. health insurance) they also do not have to pay their share of employer payroll taxes (Soc. Sec and Medicare tax).
Resorted to this after not ever getting paid too often.
It's normal for people working temporary jobs (such as factory or cleaning work) to be paid weekly.
They don't want to treat these workers as employees (so they can skip paying out benefits) but pay them like employees (at the end of the month; in fact even worse than that).
- want to get your ticket 'delivered' via email? Convenience Fee!
- want it mailed to you? Convenience Fee!
- want to pick it up at the box office? Convenience Fee!
When you consider all your available delivery options to be "convenient", it's just a fee.
edit: I'm aware you're supposed to get some kind of special business insurance but at the time I was not aware of that. Thankfully this insurance company who I had been with for almost 10 years honored my claim.
I am glad I'm able to drive on the side. Turn it on and go nice to have extra cash. I am aware of the instant pay (fee) but I also like that vs. waiting for ACH to clear day(s) later.
How did you prove it? What is their standard of evidence? My intuition says it would be difficult to prove a negative.
If the police report mentions an second individual in the car unrelated to you then they might start digging around for your name in Uber or Lyft, but most of the time that is probably just a standard question to screw over the unwary.
I do food deliveries primarily since my car isn't accepted as a passenger car
As an aside, delivery can be fun as far as exploring a city and meeting random people (mostly the food workers) but it's a way to get out. I am destroying my car though putting like 1000 miles a week on it or more.
I think once I'm out of debt I won't drive/donate plasma anymore and just use my spare time for other things provided a have a good paying job like I do now.
About the Health Insurance angle: The article is about YoungOnes - which claims to only operate in the UK and Netherlands. Both of which counties have national health systems. (And the article is so UK-centric that I see no mention at all of the Netherlands.)
When a service, often my local municipality, charges a fee to pay a fee.
VISA is arguably the biggest mafia organization in the world... 3% of all retain sales worldwide? Why?
With the proliferation of 3rd party "payment processors", and the accompanying crimes commited, The Fed has instituted a central bank hosted instant payment system:
https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about....
But almost no one uses it. Why is that? Do people really want their money locked up in stripe or paypal?
But I bank at a local credit union, and I've mentioned FedNow to about 5 different branch managers. So far, no one has even heard of it 8-/
They just cancelled a relationship with zelle (which I didn't like or use), and I've suggested that tehy replace it with FedNow, but no one even knows what i'm talking about.
p.s. Love your username mosburger! My favorite Japanese fast food chain! Especially for their offering of the YasaiBurger...
"Standard 30+ day delay" is pretty common for contractors of all sorts, and is part of the reason contracting rates should be so much higher than standard employment. But it's kinda shitty and usually due to laziness on the corp's part rather than any particular actuarial reason.
How is that a gig at this point? It's a temp agency. Temp agencies cannot do this in the UK right? A cursory low-effort google returns some laws. [0] I'm sure they have legions of lawyers ready to argue their unique and disruptive business model has never been seen on the british isles before but I have trouble seeing this as anything other than a temp agency.
It used to cost me maybe 25 cents for a cup of coffee. Now, its like $25 to get my Starbuck's double-decaffeinated half-caf with a twist delivered by Doordash.
Gotta gig, 'cause the Inflation is Real, boomer!
The company in the OP set up "a new payment system" without warning to their workers, and now people are getting paid 30 days later than previously agreed upon. If you think that the average person won't be impacted by not getting paid for a month, then yes, I stand by my statement.
They literally are. The deal was altered so that what used to be free now charges a fee.
> Enough demand that it can generate revenue, not enough revenue that it creates incentives for high-loyalty structure -–which is what you do when you care about your employees and want to keep them working for you.
If Uber loses one driver, there is a thousand that would gladly replace them and get paid same day, in cash, pre-tax at a higher hourly rate than they can get in the job market (Amazon warehouse, Fast Food, etc...), with a lot more control of their time.
How do you compete? The companies know and have no incentive to hire.
Meanwhile, if legislation is passed to force them to do it, they're likely to dramatically cut driver headcount to keep their already shitty P&L healthy and will cause 100s of thousands to lose their main income source and a 1000x increase in costs for consumers. (Bad outcome for all parties involved)
As it stands the economics of that business model are too messed up for a good path forward to exist.