There should be a way to codify law that requires companies to provide compensation for the trouble. Companies far too commonly assume guilty until proven innocent. It puts all the responsibility on the consumer because they want to avoid liabilities.
Yeah the law should be gig work is illegal and the OP should have been classified as a part time or full time worker who would have been paid for the entire time on the clock during the work day, including the time wasted while the company toiled to resolve a customer dispute.
My dad drives for Uber Eats as well as Skip the Dishes (a Canadian gig work food delivery app). He gets paid more per hour on Skip but the app will not allow him to work as much as he wants, it forces him to sign up for 3-4 hour shifts a week ahead of time. Sometimes Skip will only give him 1-2 shifts in a week (8 hours total work), which is simply not enough money to get by.
So he uses Uber Eats to pick up the slack. The app lets him go online and go offline any time he wants — no shifts, no scheduling ahead. He’s also completely free to reject as many orders as he wants until he gets ones that offer a bigger tip. Skip, on the other hand, penalizes his earnings if he falls below 80% moving average accept rate (over the last 10 orders).
If Uber were forced to employ all of their drivers full- or part-time, he would lose all of the flexibility he now enjoys. He’d have scheduled shifts and have to clock in and clock out at specific times on specific days. He’d likely also lose the ability to reject orders entirely.
I can tell you right now, he would hate that. So would many other gig workers, who take full advantage of the flexibility to be able to look after their families and otherwise live their lives. Compare that with the chaos that is the life of a retail worker stuck with an automated shift scheduling system and zero start/stop time consistency and zero flexibility.
Do you realize what you're saying? Gig company A only dribbles out 8 hours of work a week so your Dad is forced to also work for gig company B, but needs flexible hours to do so.
You are completely failing to see my point--if gig company A had to employ your Dad as a part time or full time employee with guaranteed minimum wage or work hours and other benefits he wouldn't have to tetris together an insane set of gig work jobs to keep from being evicted or starved.
Your dad is forced to be an indentured servant for these companies that can't make money without exploiting people like him. And somehow you are immediately going to bat for these employers... pretty sick IMHO.
He DOES have a boss that mandates when he needs to work--the apps penalize him if he isn't taking rides and eventually cut off his work entirely if he isn't taking them (which is the whole point of the original article and legislation in Seattle!).
That’s exactly how an app which treated him as a part-time worker would work. If you stopp accepting every ride that’s offered to you, you get fired. What else would you expect?
I find it so puzzling that some people can’t accept that there are gig workers who prefer the flexibility and many of them wouldn’t be able to work at all if they had to be treated as part/full time.
The commenter also says nothing about being penalized for not taking shifts. If they sign up for a shift, they are expected to work that shift. It is a completely different model than Uber Eats, which he can sign into or out of at any given time, without penalty.
They're not his employer so they shouldn't penalize him. If you're truly a gig worker, why are you being penalized for not accepting some job? How does that make sense?
If they were employing him, penalizing him for declining work would be fine.
Any company which would have to directly employ him would certainly penalize him for not accepting work and would not allow him to start his shift whenever he wanted.
That other app he’s using seems to be somewhere in between gig and normal work (so you seem to get the worst from both worlds).
> If they were employing him, penalizing him for declining work would be fine.
Because Skip has shifts and he is expected to deliver to a certain standard during that shift. The “should be an employee” people seem to want their cake (be classified as an employee) and eat it too (not get punished for not doing acceptable workloads as an employee). Smh
You're talking about a different app not Uber, which doesn't penalize per acceptance rates. Besides, I don't think you understand how these gig apps work. You can only accept or reject if you're clocked into a shift. His dad can clock in at anytime but he won't be penalized on Skip if he's not clocked in.
This discussion of work like something that people can whenever they want, however they like feels so off base to me. It's work. It's something that people have to do in order to survive and live. Yet for people who promote the flexibility of gig workers it gets talked about like a sport or some other fun activity of choice.
It all comes down to trade offs in the end. Either we optimize for people to hold jobs that allow them to survive in society and earn enough to do things like pay rent and buy food. Or we optimize for job dabblers who don't really need the work but want some extra cash. I believe we should optimze for people to hold steady jobs that allow them stability and do important stuff like pay rent and buy food. We should optimize for survival of the worker and workers require steady employment.
There are plenty of people who can only work part-time yet may still need money. People in school, people with young kids, people with medical conditions that limit their activities (sometimes variably by day/time), etc.
Not everyone doing gig work is hustling as a second job to get ahead (though that should also be both legal and accepted, IMO).
Why don’t we optimize for both and allow the market to decide where each model is best suited to provide services?
Eg, ridesharing can be done ride-by-ride by people choosing to accept fares from a marketplace but stocking store shelves works better having people there on committed shifts and delivering packages is in between, where people sign up for shifts but are expected to complete the full shift.
Why can’t we fulfill the needs of both people who want reliable, shift-based employment and people who want variable gigs?
> His dad can work at anytime, anywhere and doesn't have a boss to mandate when he clocks in.
That's not exactly true if we consider the environment that allows companies to operate like this, insomuch as his dad will eventually starve or be homeless if he doesn't eventually clock in. Hence the indentured servitude. The "worker's choice" of "just do gigs for a different gig company" doesn't really work if all gig companies stand together at the other side of the homelessness cannon.
This represents a poor understanding of "indentured servitude", or a deliberate broadening of its meaning to encompass other things.
The term refers to situations such as "An employer pays for transit of one or more people on condition that work of the employer's choosing is performed until the cost of transit, and any accompanying expenses, are repaid to the employer." Generally, these include specified wages, but employers commonly arranged that expenses and wages combined guarantee that the workers will be unable to pay off the contract within any specified timeframe. This often resulted in lifelong service, and could at times extend to workers' heirs (whether debyst inheritance be legal or not, as such workers were often at severe disadvantage to risk challenging the employer on any matter). Effectively, indentured servitude was usually indistingushable from slavery.
To address your "will eventually starve if he doesn't _eventually_ clock in", this seems to be the default case for all forms of employment (even if you employ yourself, in the wilderness, entirely on your own). The exception being that some places have sufficient social or legal safeguards to prevent a "clocked out" person from meeting this fate.
I’m not GP, but I think you’re missing their point. They described the Canadian job as “gig” but it’s actually structured more like more traditional part time work. It sounds like you’d prefer to outlaw all part time work?
The point is true gig work allows you the flexibility to fit it around whatever else you have going on, be that part time work, starting a startup, taking care of a family, etc. of course it’s downsides and probably needs some more rules to protect the workers. But banning eliminates the opportunity entirely.
It sucks to be a freelance writer and it’s easy to get screwed; should we ban that too?
Personally, I think part time jobs should have to come with the same benefits as full time, by law.
That would encourage companies to offer full time positions. Current law (in the US) financially penalizes full time employers, which is why most part time workers end up working multiple part time jobs.
My dad (and loads of other gig workers) don’t want full time Uber jobs. They like gig work because it gives their lives flexibility. The employer-employee relationship is about more than money & benefits, it’s about power.
A full time job gives your employer the power to dictate your life schedule to you. Your boss wants you at your desk at 8am but you have to take your kid to school at 8:30? Too bad! You’re there at 8 or you’re fired.
It’s even worse in retail and food service, as I alluded to in my original post. These workers get their schedules a week ahead, with shifts all over the place. One day you’re opening at 6am. Next day you’re closing at 9pm. Good luck having any kind of life outside of work with a schedule like that!
> "part time jobs should have to come with the same benefits as full time, by law."
All this does is eliminate more jobs.
In your hypothetical scenario, a company that hires 2 or 3 people part-time would need to do health insurance for each of them, benefits for each of them and the additional full-time equivalent paperwork for each of them...
In that scenario, the company would end up just hiring 1 person full-time for the hours, and have much less added overhead costs.
This would lead to higher unemployment, because now instead of 3 people being employed part-time, only 1 person is employed.
Where's the good in that? Maybe I'm just not seeing it from my perspective, if anyone else can chime in?
Do you know this is exactly how it works in most first world countries already? (except for the health insurance bit, because most first world countries have a public health system). Part-time workers get holiday pay, sick leave, and every entitlement of full-time workers, at a rate commensurate with their hours.
That is irrelevant, because of how it's measured: 1 person working 40 hours/week and 9 people not working gives an unemployment of 90%, but 10 persons working 4 hours/week gives an unemployment of 0% -- yet both scenarios have the same amount of work. Of course using part-time jobs reduces the unemployment figures. It says nothing, however, about the availability of work.
It sucks to be seven years old and work in a textile factory, and they totally get screwed. So we chose to ban that. Slavery is another labor practice we've banned. Not sure what your point is about freelance writers.
>Your dad is forced to be an indentured servant for these companies that can't make money without exploiting people like him.
This is absurdly patronizing to people making their own choices, and the freedom to seek employment or work as they see fit. As someone who, as an independent contractor in CA, was the victim of such patronizing sympathy that resulted in regulation which was deeply contrary to my own interests, please stop trying to "protect" people like me. Ironically, that regulation was targeted at Uber, who then received a specific carve out that left me screwed over as a small independent contractor.
If gig company A had to employ your Dad as a part time or full time employee with guaranteed minimum wage or work hours and other benefits he wouldn't have a job.
That's true for basically all the "gig economy" apps, which are just enormous money sinks which fuck over (disrupt, according to their propaganda) whatever market they enter and then either collapse leaving a rotting corpse where a functional market used to exist or become monopolists and then proceed to level the market in order to milk it up as much as possible. And then they collapse anyway.
If we had any kind of sense, as a society, this shit would have been banned years ago.
The demand for food delivery still exists and plenty of other companies would fill the void, that's how the free market works. Right now these apps are exploiting workers so they can pocket more money for shareholders and paper over a failing business model.
Love how you talk about the "free market" here, but also insist that certain types of employment should be illegal. (As an aside: we don't have a free market. Such a thing doesn't actually exist in the real world.)
I don't think we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Certainly there's some legal regime where workers can continue to enjoy the kind of work time flexibility they have with gig work, while also being compensated and treated fairly.
However they would have no incentives to hire people who prefer highly flexible work hours and would force his dad to work fixed shifts which clearly not something many gig workers prefer (and I’m sure many of them would prefer higher grade pay for instance than whatever you’re proposing).
If the best the current system can offer is "either debase yourself like a peasant into multiple gig jobs that regularly screw you, or, be homeless, and sorry there's just nothing we can do about that" eventually people are going to start considering other systems.
Social unrest is bad for business. I'm not sure why companies keep turning the screws when profits are at record highs.
To be honest, I think Skip and Uber Eats are either struggling or in a seasonal down cycle right now. Very few orders coming in, and it’s not just my dad. He talks to the other drivers out there and they say the same thing.
I think on the one hand maybe a lot of people are away on summer vacation so not ordering food as often. On the other hand, interest rates in Canada have shot through the roof, so maybe a lot of people are cutting back on ordering in and choosing to cook more to save money.
Unfortunately, interest rates also affect my dad, so he’s getting squeezed pretty hard. I can’t blame the gig companies for that though, that’s the Bank of Canada’s doing.
> If the best the current system can offer is "either debase yourself like a peasant into multiple gig jobs that regularly screw you, or, be homeless, and sorry there's just nothing we can do about that"
It's not. Gig work is one of many options.
You can be a full-time employee. You can be a part-time employee. You can start your own business. You can work for local, state, or federal government in innumerable roles.
Or, if it suits you, you can be a gig worker.
Focus on specific cases of companies treating workers unfairly, as this legislation appears to do. There's no point railing against "the system" because there is no "system".
Show me the full yime jobs as food delivery driver that would meet the demand for such jobs and I'll give you $100
Prottip: they don't exist
Delivery drivers always got paid jack and made the majority of thier income from tips. It was always a bad industry and Uber etc just make it worse by taking an additional cut and causing businesses to outsource to fewer total workers across the industry than would be employed/were employed under the traditional model where any business that wanted to do delivery had to do so by directly employing someone.
There's another side to that coin. If every restaurant that wants to offer delivery has to have their own driver, that means there are tons of drivers sitting around doing nothing while waiting for orders to come in. By outsourcing delivery to Uber, all restaurants in a city can be served by one pool of drivers, leveraging economies of scale. This opened the door to many more restaurants offering delivery because they didn't need to pay drivers to sit around.
Considering current labor shortages it wouldn’t be at all unreasonable to conclude that many gig workers do this because they actually prefer the flexibility these app provides to working fix shifts with almost no way to influence tour schedules yourself. All these champagne socialists seem to ignore that for some reason..
In some ways gig work can provide a level autonomy not normally available to the people taking gig work, sure, but it doesn't change the fact that gig workers are exploited, and that's bad.
If the alternative is more degrading forms of labor, with businesses sneaking around full time protections by only giving people 30 hours of work, and paying an absurdly low minimum wage, that's hardly an indictment of the idea of strong labor protections - quite the opposite. Why did you bring up socialism? Are you saying capitalism can't provide good labor conditions and we need socialism to do so? Extremely based take.
When what you want is full-time work with benefits, and all of the fixed schedule commitment and expectation of "you will always show up at a given time for a specified duration" stability that comes with that, then gig work seems like a major step down and even a cynical plot by corporations to deprive you of something you think you should rightfully have. But when what you want is gig work and all of the flexibility that comes with that, and there are many people who want this and have wanted it for years - even decades before the so-called gig economy became a buzzword- then gig work is perfect and irreplaceable.
There are some niches that have operated under the gig work model for almost 100 years, such a certain sectors of trucking where drivers own their own rigs and specifically choose to enter that line of work, as opposed to a salaried job where they don't have to worry about maintaining their own vehicle, precisely because they want the ability to simply switch their (very well-paid 6 figure minimun) job off like a light when they feel like it, for a couple of weeks or a couple of months or longer, and then switch it back on.
I personally know a guy who has performed with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra for almost 20 years doing exactly this. he's a trucker with his own rig and his own schedule on his own terms for 6 months out of the year, and tours with the orchestra for the other 6 months. This type of lifestyle would not be possible if there was no established gig system available for people who wished to have that flexibility.
Temp agencies have existed since forever. You call them, I’d like to work, you get a shift or a week of shifts or whatever. No commitment beyond that. Denying people part time work status has no benefits, part time workers already had opportunities to be super flexible
More likely, as a college student the OP wouldn’t have been able to get a shift scheduled because Uber would prioritize drivers who can work full time.
And Uber would have a terrible time finding employees in a university area where most of the local population and workforce is beholden to a part time class schedule. It would leave them open for a competitor who values and works with part time workers to swoop in and eat Uber's lunch.
If you're so sure about how to create a better business that all the employees would prefer why don't you do it instead of speaking about things you clearly don't know about?
You've been told multiple time people value flexibility and yet you keep fixating on an old work model that you want to apply to everyone. More options are better. Full time jobs didn't go away. This whole industry didn't exist other than getting paid per shift as a pizza delivery driver.
How many gig workers do you personally know? I know more than 20 and all of them prefer gig work to signing up for a full time delivery position at a restaurant.
Gig work is available to immigrants super fast as well. Go to any major city in Europe and see migrants and refugees making a living delivering food. Do you think they are dumb and choose the worst job they can get?
Talk to some people before you pontificate over what they should want for themselves. They can literally stop the app at any point so your problem isn't that gig work exists, but that other people value things you don't.
> Gig work is available to immigrants super fast as well. Go to any major city in Europe and see migrants and refugees making a living delivering food. Do you think they are dumb and choose the worst job they can get?
Frequently it's their only option, the only job the have access to, so in a way, you're right.
What's the alternative, getting rid of the only jobs that are flexible enough for people that have constraints? Not everyone can work part time or full time, that's the point being made all over the thread. The freshly-arrived immigrant is just one example. There's other examples in the thread, and I know people that do it around their kids' schedule to supplement their income, that use it as a side-job so they have funds to start their business or fund a hobby, etc.
One can stay here debating all along why people get to those situations in the first place, and that normal jobs shouldn't require extra work, or that immigrants should be able to find easy "normal" jobs etc, but the point stands for me that a world where I can pick from three options (full-time, part-time, gig) is better than a world where I can only pick from two.
That being said, I'm supportive of more regulation around gig-work to protect gig-workers, but that regulation needs to be specific to gig work and not just force it to disappear outright. A gig-worker shouldn't be able to be kicked out without explanation, there should be recourse for customer ratings, they should be covered by some kind of global insurance, etc, but these things will need to be tweaked to this new reality instead of us pretending like there aren't many many people around the world that prefer this work arrangement.
Or, we discover that we can't really have on-demand food delivery without a level of human suffering we find unacceptable, and it goes away. Uber dies. So what?
I definitely see the argument to classify workers as a more "permanent" status and guarantee all the benefits that come with that. But that would likely increase prices, decrease demand and cause some drivers to lose jobs.
Ofc, this depends on the region (country, state, etc.), I'd love to see some estimates on how much prices would go up in a particular region, and how much the demand would potentially decrease - when classifying drivers as full / part time workers.
Will be keeping an eye on this Seattle experiment.
> But that would likely increase prices, decrease demand and cause some drivers to lose jobs.
In California Uber and Lyft rammed through a proposition to enable them to continue their labor abuses. Anecdotally, the prices have gone through the roof and I've never had more trouble getting rides, so I don't believe that. It's a failed business model because Uber has to provide a return to investors and livery is basically a race to the bottom without some form of price controls.
Ballot initiatives are not rammed through. Consumers want Uber/Lyft. Taxi cartels were so God awful to deal with even crappy tech alternatives are better.
Maybe people had different experiences with taxi's but I've taken uber 30x more often than I've taken cabs, and still have had 10x as many bad experiences with taxi drivers. From not turning on the meter, to being rude to my wife, to purposefully taking roundabout routes in order to inflate cost, to being told a taxi would show up at 1am, only to have it show up at 8 am.
plus in places like South America uber is the far safer option. I know my wife and her friends hated taking taxis as they were much more likely to be sexually harassed or deal with some strange person. Uber isn’t perfect but it has significantly reduced this since the people who do it get kicked off the app.
A lot of complaints i see on HN are very first world and don’t see how much some of these companies actually help.
> A lot of complaints i see on HN are very first world and don’t see how much some of these companies actually help.
These companies are not set up as charities. If they happen to help people, that’s a side affect of the primary purpose - generate maximum revenue.
Regulation is required where a businesses incentives do not align with societies (mining is an easy example). As much as C level execs will argue, self regulation has never been an effective mechanism. So Uber is incentivised, naturally, to provide a safe experience for a rider, as to do otherwise would reduce revenue. They are not incentivised to provide their drivers any semblance of a “life worth living”, as it has no positive correlation to revenue. This isn’t out of malice, it’s just economics at work. If we, as a society, want a better standard of living for gig workers, then regulation, flawed as it is, is the only mechanism I know of that has some chance of working.
See Ohio for what happens to an unpopular ballot initiative.
I’d vote against the Ohio initiative and for the Uber one.
I hated taxi cartels. They had horrible customer service, high prices, and I’m a big dude who had to deal with them. I cannot imagine how toxic it was for gals.
> It's a failed business model because Uber has to provide a return to investors and livery is basically a race to the bottom without some form of price controls.
or taxis, i mean, they’ve been around since the horse and buggy days and probably even way before that, i don’t know enough about the history, but i’m guessing taxi style travel services were even around during the silk road era. uber didn’t invent travel for hire.
this is going to be a rant, but i mean…
the reason uber and lyft (and countless other “disrupters”) disrupted anything is they pretended the externalities didn’t exist/ignored the very externalities the already existing industry had previously already sorted out and lived through.
and lo and behold, no one even halfway intelligent is shocked that all of these issues arose at scale.
i’ll repeat what i’ve said countless other times: anyone who thinks they have a “disruptive” idea yet hasn’t extensively studied why the already existing industry does things a certain way, is an absolute lightweight and no one should be investing in with them.
we have a major problem in some of our industries of people who have deluded themselves that the people who came before were somehow primitive or less enlightened.
we see this all over the place, from people who want entirely rebuild large software packages from the bottom up, from submarine tourism companies, to “house flippers”, to short-term rental apps, who because their egos refuse to let them explore the history of their project, they just end up in the exact same place. only they took a really long, wasteful, and stupid detour to get there.
if an industry is doing something you think is wrong, explore the history of why it is done this way. don’t pretend like that problem doesn’t exist and then call yourself a disrupter. this is a recipe to have everyone laugh and go “it’s not like you weren’t warned there was giant hole around the corner and then you drove right into it.”
and even worse, if they have explored the history of their project, know very well the problems coming, but try to externalize that to wider society, it’s outright malicious.
> leaving customers to rely on…the bus? Or just not traveling.
again, taxis have been around for pretty much ever.
> It's a failed business model because Uber has to provide a return to investors and livery is basically a race to the bottom without some form of price controls.
You can't have a race to the bottom without competitors still in the market.
If competitors like Uber leave the market, Lyft can raise prices.
In the long run, there will be a balance between competitors entering and exiting the market just around the point where the industry is barely viable as a business.
That's also how eg restaurants or cafes work in many big cities; and this explains why so most cafes fail, but why there are also always some cafes around.
The underlying economics don’t change if workers are paid per gig or per hour, so the customer is unlikely to notice anything.
What changes is the information asymmetry where Uber etc knows a lot more about the conditions of people working for them than the people taking these jobs do. As a general rule those with more information are simply in a vastly better negotiating position.
This is not correct. The costs of employing drivers would increase. The driver supply would go down and the price of an Uber ride would therefore increase. This is basic econ.
If uber wants to kill their margins even more by reducing supply and driving up costs, that's their own mistake to make. They instead could keep the service cost that works at the price it's at right now by reducing executive compensation and finding other ways to increase efficiency.
Or they could keep pissing off the people with the monopoly on violence, maybe that'll work long term?
Company’s can reduce pay down to minimum wage, the only way it would force them to pay more is if on average people where making less than minimum wage on average.
You could have made the information asymmetry arguments perhaps a few years ago. But these days Uber's practices are fairly well known, so no one has to go in blind.
It’s all about edge cases, ie what specifically happens when a customer throws up in your car.
That’s not something the average person off the street is going to ask. But many are going to be pissed learning they will reimburse you for paying someone to clean your car but not the time it takes you to do it yourself, nor the lost wages until it’s clean.
If you take the inside view and look inside Uber, you might find that they handle each specific edge case according to specific rules.
But taking the outside view, you don't need to know all the specifics. You can just check Uber's general reputation (or lack thereof perhaps) for fair dealings with drivers. That general reputation will reflect how they are dealing with those edge cases in general.
Just like in the 2010s you could be reasonable certain that a job at Google meant you got free food, even if you didn't know the exact specific rules about what food would be available when and where.
Reputation is something companies manage, which introduces bias.
If people get a worse impression than reality they can release more information, but if the public has a better impression than reality then they have zero incentives to say anything.
Information asymmetry isn’t about people knowing nothing. If you’re offended a job at some salary you know roughly how much they are willing to pay but you don’t know the minimum you can negotiate for. Similarly, companies don’t know the minimum you’re willing to accept but they do know quite a bit about market rates.
If they could just decrease executive pay, why aren't they doing that already? In a sense, executive pay comes straight out of shareholders' pockets, so they would clearly have an incentive to decrease it, if they could.
Executive pay seems fairly independent of the issue at hand.
> If they could just decrease executive pay, why aren't they doing that already?
Counterpoint: if they could extract more profit from the market by increasing prices, why haven't they done so already?
Market determines viable price for service, not cost. If the cost of doing business can't find a balance at rates the market will pay at acceptable profit margin, the business simply doesn't exist. Many aspects of our lives suffer from this reality: renewable energy companies in many places survives only because they're propped up by government subsidy.
The answer to "why aren't the executives cutting pay" is obvious: it's up to the executives, and why on earth would they cut their own pay, when they could instead simply decrease worker conditions and cut cost of labor? Without a union, executives have literally all the power.
Executive pay + shareholder profits (through stock buybacks, dividends) are where all the massive margins go to right now. There's no more profit to extract from the market (unless the finance team is terrible at their jobs and have been leaving money on the table) so that's where the money to cover increased cost of labor needs to come from.
I'm not really upset at the idea of CEOs making less money, I don't get what the big deal is.
So market set the pay for services however executive pay is not affected by the market at all?
Uber pays its executives what it does because other comparable companies pay the same. If they cuts that people they’d want to hire will choose to work for other places and they will have to find someone who agrees to work for less (which might or might not be bad a thing)
And arguable, executive pay is perhaps a lot more elastic than ordinary workers' pay. Companies aren't shy about paying huge bonuses to their CEO one year, but cutting them to nothing the next. Ordinary workers have a much steadier pay check, even when working for Uber.
Similarly, most companies are also quite willing to hire and fire CEOs. Statistical distribution of CEO tenures is a well studied subject.
> The answer to "why aren't the executives cutting pay" is obvious: it's up to the executives, and why on earth would they cut their own pay, when they could instead simply decrease worker conditions and cut cost of labor? Without a union, executives have literally all the power.
No. Uber still has to compete for workers with other companies looking for labour. Unions presence or absence doesn't change that dynamic.
> Counterpoint: if they could extract more profit from the market by increasing prices, why haven't they done so already?
Not sure that's a counterpoint to anything? Yes, I assume that they are setting their prices to maximize long term profits.
However, if regulation increases costs across the industry, supply curves will recede, and if demand curves stay roughly the same, prices will rise (because the point where the curves meet will be at a higher price point).
They do work for shareholders but since shareholders aren't equally divided, i.e. one person or company may own a larger portion, and it's difficult to sue over this, executive can ignore the shareholders to an extent.
How would you prove a decision was wrong without hindseight? How would you prove an executive shouldn't make X amount of money?
Imagine I'm the CEO of Nike, I make $100 million a year. The company is doing amazing. Is that because of decisions I made, marketing, good product, word of mouth, things that happened before I was CEO. Prove that I shouldn't get that money.
> We can have higher employment and cheaper prices than we have now if we literally reinstate slavery.
Agreed. And companies would do it too if they didn't also need us to buy their products.
It's basically what has happened to manufacturing. Offshore factories are making products at literal slave wages and they get to sell to Americans for higher prices.
The wages are slave wages to the first world economies, but not to the developing world.
China for example has seen a massive decrease in the percentage of the population living below the poverty line as they’ve become the largest manufacturer.
At the end of the day these people are choosing to leave their farms to work in these factories because it enriches them. I’m not saying they’re great jobs, especially to us, but it’s not slavery.
> This is a common misconception.
> The wages are slave wages to the first world economies, but not to the developing world.
I know of this rationalization, but I don't agree it makes things ok.
Look at the Foxconn debacle where employees were committing suicide and strikes for better conditions were met with violence. It doesn't matter if their wages are technically slightly higher than the prevailing local wages. If you look at their quality of life, it's deplorable. Health care? Clean water? Safe homes? Paid sick leave? Work-life balance? Disability protection? Retirement plans? Do workers in China not deserve those things?
Why aren't first world business paying first world wages no matter where their workers are? They know they extract profits at the cost of human dignity for their workers. They know that offshoring jobs allows them to ignore American labor laws. It's not ethical. But as long as it happens somewhere else we can pretend it's not our problem.
No, there are certain upsides to gig work (mostly being able to set your own hours on the fly). What gig workers need is just better labor protections and benefits.
Perhaps the state shouldn't be in the business of telling consenting adults what services they can buy or sell to each other provided they're not harming others.
It's hard to see a victim here; no victim, no crime.
Am I missing the sarcasm? If your brother in law is relying on Uber, then employment protections would mean he doesn't lose his sole income unfairly and without notice.
Uber argue that most gig workers are just doing it as a spur of the moment side hustle, and therefore the flexibility is necessary. But your anecdote is the opposite.
We accept it because philosophically and logically it makes perfect sense that either party to a transaction should be able to revoke consent at any time for any (or no) reason, absent an explicit contract to the contrary.
Showing up for work on Monday is no guarantee you will show up on Tuesday. Correspondingly employing you on Monday is no guarantee you will be employed on Tuesday.
I think it's a bit silly to expect any other state of affairs.
The scenario you describe is only possible if there is only one employer.
The moment you have multiple employers to choose from (ie an actual market for labor) then the insecurity is removed. Indeed, for the most part, if you can deliver value, you can find someone to pay you for it and your bills will get paid.
It's not a matter of my view. The people you describe are only screwed if:
- they have no savings or access to credit
AND
- they get fired on short notice
AND
- they can't get another job
I'm not sure that making the employer fire them with a longer notice period, given that they can't get another job, means they won't be screwed. Therefore, I don't think there is any utility in so restricting the employer.
Not having savings is bad and dangerous. That's not caused by labor law.
What kind of jobs can you find on a single day's notice? Abusive gig work only.
Where I live the notice period is three months. I don't think you can imagine how nice it is to not have to worry about being fired on the spot, and when it happens you know you will have time to sort it out.
...or both could be presumed innocent until at least both sides of the story are heard. Uber is not obligated to take action immediately upon receiving a customer complaint.
One of the few advantages of middleman is to provide both sides of transactions with some level or protection. The store down the street may resell the same products from AliExpress but provides more protection than the fly by night resellers on Amazon.
I would trust Amazon slightly more than Aliexpress and both significantly more than the store down the street to make right any issues with goods bought there.
Amazon is very quick to refund, Aliexpress is slightly slower and more effort, a local shop is up to how they feel with only the vague threat of a chargeback.
It does not work that way. Innocence is applicable when punishment is applied. The driver was the one that was punished, therefore the rider was an accuser, whose innocence is irrelevant.
Yes, and assumed the driver was guilty. The two way road is that the middle-man has to assume innocence from BOTH parties until otherwise proven. Period.
The unemployment rate is extremely low these days, yes they do have other options in most places. Many choose to work for uber because they prefer the flexibility to having to work shifts with very limited options to alter your schedule.
