The only way this is a passing fad is if customer or employee risk aversion suddenly drastically increases. I don't see any compelling reason why it would.
The only way this is a passing fad is if customer or employee risk aversion suddenly drastically increases. I don't see any compelling reason why it would.
Workers are only willing to do this because, as you read in the article, the only other choice is to be unemployed. They are not choosing this voluntarily.
In so many ways, we are all subsidizing these companies.
"“They may be able to paint someone’s shed this week,” says Dr. Standing, a professor of developmental studies at the University of London. “But they don’t know what will happen next week.”
He views peer marketplaces as part of a larger global phenomenon, in which labor brokers encourage people to work on contingency without basic employment benefits or protections. The companies essentially channel one-off tasks to the fastest taker or lowest bidder, he says, pitting workers against one another in a kind of labor elimination match.
The flexible timetables of project work are a trade-off for regular employment income and benefits. Retailers, restaurant chains and other employers may require more rigid work schedules than piecemeal gigs, or, worse, keep their workers guessing from week to week about which hours they will work. But many of those employers also offer workers benefits like disability pay or commuter discounts.
Uber, Lyft and TaskRabbit, for instance, do not regard the workers who provide services to their users as employees. The companies say they are simply arenas, like eBays for gigs. They require their service providers to work as independent contractors and, as such, the workers don’t qualify for employee benefits like health insurance, payroll deductions for Social Security or unemployment benefits."
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/17/technology/in-the-sharing-...
Or perhaps that if the government services you describe (e.g., free money if you don't work) did not exist, workers would have a stronger bargaining position to request higher rates from homejoy?
Could you clarify your counterfactual?
As noted in the article I link and quote further down the thread, these companies utilize an often-desperate workforce that will take whatever they can get to work. These companies keep their workers as independent contractors without any benefits. Sometimes that is fine, especially if someone is working as a Taskrabbit during his/her weekend to make some extra money. But the reality is that many of these people are relying on these services for nearly all their income and then leaning heavily on government support to make up the difference (i.e. what keeps a roof over their head or food in their stomach).
I am not making a case for any wholesale policy change on the part of these new services. I am just stating that there is baggage here and that maybe it would be better if benefits were offered through these jobs to their workers/contractors so that the customer pays for the complete cost of the service and that business model, instead of taxpayers.
And I am no economist or expert in the matter ––– all I know is either from news articles or anecdotes. Maybe I'm wrong.
If the price of a persons labour is insufficient for their living needs the only option is to draw it from society (welfare/charity) or have them suffer. Trying to pass that on to the customers or the employers of labour directly will result in unemployment.
“THE COMPANY DOES NOT PROVIDE CLEANING SERVICES, AND THE COMPANY IS NOT A CLEANING SERVICE PROVIDER. . . . THE COMPANY OFFERS INFORMATION AND A METHOD TO OBTAIN SUCH THIRD PARTY CLEANING SERVICES, BUT DOES NOT AND DOES NOT INTEND TO PROVIDE CLEANING SERVICES OR ACT IN ANY WAY AS A CLEANING SERVICE PROVIDER, AND HAS NO RESPONSIBILITY OR LIABILITY FOR ANY CLEANING SERVICES PROVIDED TO YOU BY SUCH THIRD PARTIES.”
This is the kind of things that eventually lead to class action suits, but settling this via the courts takes years.
We have some major structural employment issues going on.
Homejoy is resolving those structural issues by making it easier for buyers and sellers to find each other.
That's a structural issue: just as aging pulls people out of the labor pool, the increased substitutability of capital for labor is pulling out working-age adults from the pool of workers who are realistically able to work. Homejoy etc. does help the people at the margins of this pool who wouldn't otherwise be affordable to employ (e.g. due to overhead costs), but it doesn't obviate the basic structural trends happening.