Hacker News Reader

Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

It depends on the relationship, being an actual independent contractor is truly liberating. Choosing your own hours, working only on things you want to, setting your own salary based on how much you want to t work. There is real freedom in that as long as you get paid appropriately and actually get that freedom.

Companies wanting to save money on benefits while having 9-5 workers with no freedom of choice of when or how to work and no freedom to take other jobs? That's abuse of the system and illegal.

The difference is important.

View on HN

> Choosing your own hours, working only on things you want to, setting your own salary

you pretty much described the best case scenario here. On the contrary my dad was an independent contractor most of his life in construction (which was a also in a boom period making some people rich). For him this meant working 6-7 days / week (10-14 hrs), clipping coupons, and saving for a decade to buy a $70k house to avoid getting in debt. This while having sub-contractors working for him. He eventually did well (decades of hard work later) but I believe this situation is not so rosy for an average contractor unless you are at the top of your game in a very in demand industry

> It depends on the relationship

No, it depends on leverage. If you've got the most leverage, the relationship will be pleasant. If you don't, the relationship will be abusive. Just like everything else in capitalism. Supply/demand balance and friction matter far more than how "nice" your customer/employer is.

The distinction is crucially important: if relationship quality were an independent variable, everyone would be able to find decent relationships by hopping between jobs every now and again. Unfortunately, that's not how it works. The market determines what employers can and can't get away with, so someone stuck in a crummy relationship is likely to find a bunch of equally crummy relationships when they go job shopping.

> No, it depends on leverage. If you've got the most leverage, the relationship will be pleasant. If you don't, the relationship will be abusive. Just like everything else in capitalism.

Exactly. And it's not for nothing that "Workers of the world, unite!" is included in the Communist Manifesto, as uniting themselves against their employers was one of the few methods of gaining leverage for 19th-century workers.

If it counts I'm more of a Libertarian kind of guy, but even so I'm wondering for how long these growing power-unbalances will be ignored by both those "in power" (corporate employers, politicians, finance people) who just seem to crave for more and more, and also by us, the "normal people", who just carry on with our lives like things have never been better.

Because at the end of it all private property is merely a social construct, and once 100, 1000, 10000 people will find it strange that their combined earnings amount to what a "capitalist" or financier earns, then, just maybe, those people will decide to put that rich guy/girl in front of a wall and shoot him/her down. It happened before (see the Bolsheviks, for example), not sure why it couldn't happen again.

>not sure why it couldn't happen again.

Drones. And you better believe the powers that be will criminalize any movement that might level the playing field. The window of opportunity for change is closing.

There's a significant difference between the middle east and the USA in the number of disenfranchised chemists/EEs/mechEs/biologists/programmers per capita. The continued efficacy of technology developed "over there" is far from guaranteed if it is applied "over here."

I really, really hope it doesn't come to that. Horrible and messy would be the understatement of the century. Everybody loses, just some more than others. But my imagination has been drawn to this scenario more than once and I don't think the fight would be universally one-sided.

My hope is that we'll see some kind of market inversion when rent-seeking grows to a large enough part of the economy that the ever-falling inefficiency of distributed production becomes reasonable in comparison. Like communes, but without an anti-tech focus (progress in distributed production technology is what will turn them from bad ideas into good ideas, after all).

I just hope it happens before the violence starts in earnest.

Yes, but when this article talks about the growing number of contract workers, that growing number is people doing regular jobs and being labelled contractors. I'm working right now, but feel free to google about this growing problem of workers being illegally mislabeled as contractors.

> Choosing your own hours, working only on things you want to, setting your own salary based on how much you want to t work.

I've said this a few times before, but to pull this off takes a tremendous amount of work, effort and luck. Finding work and marketing yourself is another job in its own right that you have to do on top of existing client work. Furthermore, all of the risks that were once handled by the employer are now on the contractors shoulders. For most people, all this simply isn't realistic or sustainable.

> That's abuse of the system and illegal.

Everything is legal as long as you don't get caught, and it doesn't seem like anyone is interested in doing any catching.

I think part of the problem might be that workers don't know their rights.

But most seem to be w2 who don't get the benefits of being independent or employed.

Like most things in employment crappy poor employers spoil it for the rest.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com