Comment by troupo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by troupo | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> California’s attempt to regulate contractors was a disaster.

You have to decide whether you want the society to provide safety nets through healthcare, strong labor protections etc. or not.

> Again it’s society’s responsibility to provide for a safety net and to tax corporations to fund it.

Indeed. That's why governments and regulators eventually stepped in.

You can't in good conscience or good faith argue that Uber didn't offload anything onto society and people working for it just because "it's not the job of a company" etc. Uber literally engaged in multiple illegal and borderline illegal practices across the globe, including the US.

And yes, it's the literal job of a taxi company to make sure its drivers work a healthy amount of hours. In Uber's case it meant that it had to pay drivers enough money to cover the costs Uber offloaded onto them, and enough money left over so that they didn't have to drive 18-20 hours a day to make ends meet.

And yeah, not everyone can become Jason Snell

> You have to decide whether you want the society to provide safety nets through healthcare, strong labor protections etc. or not.

My argument is simply that the only “labor protections” the government should enforce on private enterprise is that a company can’t actively harm employees - OSHA protections, discrimination etc.

> And yes, it's the literal job of a taxi company to make sure its drivers work a healthy amount of hours. In Uber's case it meant that it had to pay drivers enough money to cover the costs Uber offloaded onto them, and enough money left over so that they didn't have to drive 18-20 hours a day to make ends meet.

It’s up to individuals to decide whether the tradeoffs are worth it. It’s not the responsibility of private industry to calculate what a “living wage” is for an individual. Uber never put a gun to anyone’s head to force them to drive for Uber. If anything the government should enforce how long someone can drive because it puts others in danger. But does the government stop people from working two jobs that might add up to 20 hours? What should happen when the driver drives for Uber, Lyft and DoorDash?

The illegal practices at least in New York were around taxi medallion monopoly where taxi drivers were getting in hundreds of thousands in debt to own them for the right to drive.

As far as not everyone being Jason Snell, there were other freelance writers and contractors like truck drivers who had to leave California to save their business

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/i-had-leave-california-save-...

It even affected 1099 (as opposed to W2) tech workers who were contractors.

If that is the world you want, then boy are you going to love living in Somalia. You could even move today!

Now you are going to come up with an intelligent counter argument to my saying that the government should enforce laws where the employer can’t actively harm employees, where the government should respect the fact that adults have agency to make their own choices and the United States should offer universal healthcare like every other industrialized first world and second world country equates to living in Somalia…

> Uber never put a gun to anyone’s head to force them to drive for Uber.

Oh no. Uber only spent 20 billion dollars on price dumping, driving competing companies out of business, and was the poster child for gig economy.

> If anything the government should enforce how long someone can drive because it puts others in danger.

Once again, the wages Uber was paying were below substinence if you were to drive just within the safe margin of hours. Oh, I forgot, it's ridiculously easy to become a writer and sustain living from a podcast. Those ~400 000 people could've easily found a different job.

---

However, the actual insane thing is this worldview that companies are not responsible for anything, and can do whatever they want; that people have to be punished for working because it's easy to not just switch jobs but to go and start supporting yourself with books and podcasts; and that there should be some magical government that provides some safety net, but still actively punishes people if they end up at a wrong job.

> Oh, I forgot, it's ridiculously easy to become a writer and sustain living from a podcast. Those ~400 000 people could've easily found a different job.

So the only choices anyone has in the US is to become a writer or an Uber driver? Does Uber have some type of monopoly on employment?

> However, the actual insane thing is this worldview that companies are not responsible for anything, and can do whatever they want;

I said that companies shouldn’t be able to do things that harm their employees - I never said that OSHA and safety standards shouldn’t exist. They also shouldn’t be able to do anything that hurts others. I even said that they should pay taxes to fund a safety net and to provide universal health care like every other civilized company.

> but to go and start supporting yourself with books and podcasts

No I said that the government shouldn’t get involved with creating an environment where adults can’t get into voluntarily contracts where they get to decide how much their labor is worth.

Even a cursory reading of whey I wrote would tell you I used Snell as an example of all of the contractors that wanted to do freelance who were harmed by a law meant to protect them but only created a nanny state that took away agency from adults who freely made a choice.

> and that there should be some magical government that provides some safety net

You mean the same type of safety net that every other industrialized company provides?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com