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The Gig Economy represents the decline of the American Middle Class, as people who would have been able to find white-collar work or stable and well-paying blue

The Gig Economy represents the decline of the American Middle Class, as people who would have been able to find white-collar work or stable and well-paying blue-collar work 15-20 years ago now have to enter the service economy and perform low-level jobs, many of which require little or no specialized skills. For some reason we celebrate this trend as a society and laud its positives (e.g. being able to determine one's own work schedule), but in a decade or two the problems will become obvious and hard to ignore, as many gig workers find themselves too old to work but with no retirement savings, for example.

EliRivers 10y ago
e.g. being able to determine one's own work schedule This is, of course, something of a Hobson's choice. They can't work their own schedule; they have to work to the schedule of the temporary employer. The choice they have in this is to simply not work at time X, rather than move their work to time X.
- malandrew 10y ago
  Or they can learn some skills and work for a different employer or start their own business. The options are always going to be limited for those with the least skills that aren't learning new skills. It's 2017. Never before in the history of mankind has so much knowledge been accessible for so many at such a low cost (typically just the cost of a computer and internet access).
  - dagenleg 10y ago
    And who will hire a 40y.o. worker with no work experience and some internet-taught skills?
    - malandrew 10y ago
      More employers than would will hire a 40y.o. worker with no work experience and no skills.
    - jstanley 10y ago
      Nobody is suggesting people get hired with no experience and little skill. If you create value for people they'll give you money for it, it's as simple as that. If people aren't prepared to give you money for it, it's obviously not creating as much value as you think it is. That's nobody's fault but your own.
      - badsock 10y ago
        Ah, the good old Social Darwinism argument.
        newyankee 10y ago
        Survive or die, i am thriving because i am smart, dedicated, hardworking and you won't because likely you miss some of these things (backgrounds do not matter) /s
      - s73ver 10y ago
        So how does this person feed their family, then?
        jstanley 10y ago
        They won't be able to. How does a wild animal feed his family if he can't catch any food? He gets out-competed by more effective individuals. Given finite resources and unbounded population growth, population must grow to the point where there are not enough resources to support everybody, and then some people have to start dying.
        s73ver 10y ago
        Ok. We'll just make sure to move them all next to you while this happens.
        Can_Not 10y ago
        As much as you'd like to invoke social Darwinism, maybe they are secretly lazy or whatever, but there is one underlying issue. We are a modern civilized society. As a society, we have an obligation to prepare our children for the future. "Let them starve" means I'm going to be killed in front of my son behind a theatre by someone who's parents were allowed to starve. The solution isn't to buy a house in a gated community and pretend like problems go away.
  - derrickdirge 10y ago
    Just the cost of a computer and internet access. Which I pay for with money from...where, exactly?
    - malandrew 10y ago
      Cheap new laptops are in the sub-$200 range. Most educational content is text or simple videos, both of which can be consumed on a cheap laptop. The cheapest broadband plan from Xfinity in my area is $40/month. That being said, most people participating in the gig economy need access to the Internet to even participate, so most likely already have both a company and internet access. The people you should be worrying about are those that have no under-utilized assets to capitalize on such as a car or spare room.
      - John23832 10y ago
        >Cheap new laptops are in the sub-$200 range. Most educational content is text or simple videos, both of which can be consumed on a cheap laptop. The cheapest broadband plan from Xfinity in my area is $40/month. 200 bucks a lot for some people, and you have to pass a credit check to get xfinity access. > That being said, most people participating in the gig economy need access to the Internet to even participate, so most likely already have both a company and internet access. Cell service != general internet service. Try bootstrapping yourself into a tech job with only cell phone access. That may work in the third world where the standards are lower, but not in the West.
        cableshaft 10y ago
        I manage to do quite a bit during lunches with a $200 computer at places that don't have internet access. Sometimes I use my cell phone to look something up, but I can also just wait until later or check a downloaded pdf. You don't need to have constant internet access to be able to be productive on a computer. In fact, I'd argue that often not having internet can make you more productive, by not giving you any distractions. Well, if you know your entire domain well, at least. At work I'm constantly fighting frameworks or APIs or reaching edge cases or error messages I've never seen before that I've had to look up, so I'd be a lot less productive without internet. But I can program for quite some time in Python, vanilla C#, and to a lesser extent Swift without looking anything up. And back in the day I knew Actionscript so well I never needed the internet to be productive (I miss those days). Really, you need to be able to not have to context switch a whole lot. All-in-one platforms let you stay in one context; most modern web platforms force you to context switch all the damn time.
  - EliRivers 10y ago
    So what's going wrong? Why do we have so many people who, in times gone by would have been working semi-skilled or skilled blue-collar jobs, now scrabbling for unskilled work? Why aren't they all learning how to be chemical engineers by reading about it at their local library's internet PC? Clearly just having this knowledge available doesn't work.
    - devopsforlyfe 10y ago
      You would hire a self-taught chemical engineer? Nothing that can possibly go wrong with that.
    - cookiecaper 10y ago
      I don't ascribe the entire failure to this, but we've put significant barriers in the way of a self-motivated learner. Chief among these is the arbitrary requirement of many employers that a college degree, and particularly a degree specialized in the career field, is mandatory before any employment can occur. Not only does this incur significant financial cost, but it also incurs a completely untenable time cost for most people aged 25+, who need to provide both physically and emotionally for themselves and their families. While one could argue such credentials are important for life-or-death fields like engineering and medicine, the fact of the matter is that most college grads come out with a degree in a soft skill that doesn't really hold a strong relevance to the job they go on to fill in the workforce. In reality, a college education functions as little more than a class filter. If we want improve accessibility for the self-taught and make merit more meaningful, we should stop demanding arbitrary credentials for jobs that don't really need them.
  - intended 10y ago
    Right, and education results in MOOCs remain as abysmal as before. Time, opportunity, survival needs, many things curtail the ability of people to study.
  - jmcgough 10y ago
    This isn't a viable option for a 40 year old man with limited computer skills (and maybe not even a high school education) and is spending all their free time doing uber to feed and house a family. We can't simply dismiss people for "not working hard/smart enough" when the system is actively working against them to keep them in low-pay jobs
    - malandrew 10y ago
      Most full time TNC drivers I've spoken to only work 50-60 hours a week, which is about the same as what I work at my job. It leaves plenty of time to learn new skills. The truth is that most people regardless of education and job don't realize how they utilize the 168 hours per week that we all get to split between sleep, work, eating and leisure. When I used to teach, I had students give me the excuse all the time that they didn't have enough time to complete the assignment. I would ask others in the class how long they spent on average and then ask the students making the excuse to give me a rough breakdown of how they spent their last 168 hours. After account for sleep, other classes, other work, meals and liesure, they would routinely be unable to account for about ~40 hours. Most hours are squandered.
      - intended 10y ago
        Yes, that's normal life. You have to be very clear and ready to tell people that they have to give that up if they want to survive. Because in the end that's what people want. A normal life. Not everyone is passionate. Or driven, or interested in those things that can pay well. Which means that those hours must be stolen from a whole constellation of distractions (which get better at keeping you engaged) and interactions with other people. So people have to be made aware that they are going to be more unhappy not doing the work, than if they did do it. Most people aren't going to think like that.
        malandrew 10y ago
        Most people aren't going to think like that. But is the rest of society responsible for coddling those unwilling to contribute? For the record, I have no problem with society supporting those who cannot support themselves by providing those people with welfare. There is a difference between being unable and unwilling to contribute.
- mahyarm 10y ago
  Can you give an example? I'm trying to think of how that would apply to the typical Uber driver. Do you mean they would be working during surge time more because they get paid more?
  - EliRivers 10y ago
    An Uber driver sees a job come in. The customer wants to go from point A to point B. The customer want this to happen in the next ten minutes. The Uber driver has the choice of taking this job, or not. The Uber driver cannot decide to do the job in three hours time.
    - mahyarm 10y ago
      The customer can also choose to not give the job in 3 hours time and give it to someone else, app or not.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
pnathan 10y ago
Why does everything that might be flawed about the economy have to tie into the "American Middle Class". It seems almost this fabulist's position of Things Were Better Back Then, And Can't We Make America Great Again?
- subliminalbrad 10y ago
  Because it's one of the only politically acceptable ways of discussing capitalist exploitation.
- alejohausner 10y ago
  Things were better "back then". Wages for bottom 90% have not risen, in real terms, since the 1970s. Income for the top 10% has gone up a lot, by contrast. Union jobs raised wages for everyone: even though only a third of private-sector jobs were unionized, the threat of unionization pushed most employers to pay well. In the 1960s, one person could get a blue-collar job and keep a family going in a suburban house, with a car. This was all due to unions. We have been subjected to thirty years of propaganda about how unions kill jobs, how regulation is bad for jobs, how you should have "freedom to invest your money" (ie a 401-k rather than a company pension). This propaganda is now taken as gospel, and we don't realize it's just a ploy by those with inherited wealth to get a bigger share of the wealth. BTW, that's how we ended up with Trump. Yes, he's a narcissistic windbag, but people who voted for him had real grievances.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - pnathan 10y ago
    A major part of the 50s & 60s boom was the fact that most of the industrial nations had been turned into rubble in the 40s and the US hadn't. Once the 70s rolled around, the US manufacturers came to grips with serious competition. Some did better than others. Further, housing for GIs in the 40s and 50s was subsidized, thus changing the entire housing equation, and, further, women had not entered the workforce in large numbers, and, further, we require many more safety features on cars. These factors all are major portions of the story when comparing against your prototypical factory worker story, and mean that a simple narrative of Unions => Better Life doesn't work. Although unions do need to become much stronger in American life, they won't unspool us back to the prior era. and, tacking a paragraph on in my edit: probably want to talk to some black people about how great those years were. It's entirely plausible that some of the White American prosperity was due to heavily underpaying the Black Americans and treating them very poorly.
malandrew 10y ago
The gig economy would likely exist even if the middle class wasn't declining. In fact, there would likely be even greater demand for gig economy work if the middle class were thriving.
- WalterSear 10y ago
  This isn't about demand: this is about labour supply, and how the lack of opportunity makes gig economy business models possible.
  - malandrew 10y ago
    You're going to have to empirically demonstrate to me that these gig economy business models would not be possible. Their growth may have been aided by current levels of unemployment and underemployment, but to say they wouldn't exist is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. Even then I could see them growing as fast if there were a robust middle class with disposable income to spend on these services. The only thing that would change is the supply and demand curves. There would be more demand and less supply, making the only thing that would change would be the equilibrium price point where those two intersect.
    - hn_throwaway_99 10y ago
      I'll just comment on "The only thing that would change is the supply and demand curves." Just taking Uber, it seems they've been pretty adamant that their entire business model is predicated on having a large enough supply of drivers that (a) wait times should be no more than 5 mins and (b) prices are lower than cabs. For example, Uber flat out left Austin because they said that fingerprinting regulations would not allow them to have a large enough supply of drivers. Thus, I do agree with you that that the only thing that would change is the supply and demand curves, but many of these business models seem to depend on the very idea of there being a large enough supply to enable prices to be lower than alternatives.
      - 10y ago
fullshark 10y ago
We laud(ed) this largely because most are consumers and are enjoying a nice consumer surplus from the development. Also for some workers, it's been a nice way to turn spare time + depreciating capital into short term income. In a vacuum it looks like a clear win for all involved. The larger trend is where it looks worrisome, and that's basically what we're considering as some time has passed.
- 5thaccount 10y ago
  So without this trend, the world would have had more middle class and lower unemployment? My question more specifically is whether this trend is the cause or the effect? I'm not convinced in either direction BTW, I'm genuinely asking (the ether).
prostoalex 10y ago
> now have to enter the service economy and perform low-level jobs, many of which require little or no specialized skills have to implies there's a wealth of "white-collar work or stable and well-paying blue-collar work" out there but people are forced or coerced to act against their best interests. What's the alternative? Let's say the government decides to step in and make a structural change by changing the rules on W-2 employee vs 1099 contractor treatment. Will this lead to a resurrection of the American Middle Class?
- Apocryphon 10y ago
  The ideal solution would be to decouple the crucial benefits offered by W-2 jobs from those jobs. For instance, good health insurance- the government should offer a public option for that, instead. Given that medical debt is a crippling problem for many Americans, getting that resolved would go a long way towards recovering the Middle Class.
  - prostoalex 10y ago
    > good health insurance- the government should offer a public option for that, instead They do already offer the ACA exchanges as well as subsidies for low-income wage earners under ACA. ACA also mandates a maximum annual out-of-pocket cost of $6,600 per individual (and $13,200 for entire family). While still a substantial amount, it's a far cry from millions of dollars of medical bills that people were saddled with pre-ACA.
acchow 10y ago
> as people who would have been able to find white-collar work or stable and well-paying blue-collar work 15-20 years ago now have to enter the service economy and perform low-level jobs, many of which require little or no specialized skills. Anecdotally, I've met a number of Uber/Lyft drivers that told me driving allowed them to quit their past shitty job and choose a flexible schedule that worked well with raising their kids. Also, drivers that quit their jobs to pour energy into their family business with some extra cash from driving when needed.
- cheez 10y ago
  Next time ask how long they've been doing Uber. For the most part, I've only heard longer than 1 year a handful of times.
  - smsm42 10y ago
    Which completely destroys the top comment's point, if true - if one only does gig thing as... well, a temporary gig - there's no reason to worry about retirement with gig salary - nobody retires relying entirely on gig salary.
    - Can_Not 10y ago
      That's assuming that they left for a better job and that the replacement jobs were not also sequentially all gigs.
mahyarm 10y ago
The fact the gig economy job exists does not take away from the high paying job. If it didn't exist, these people would not be working or working at their local retail/restaurant store instead. The social problems of the low-income job lifer is not new.
smsm42 10y ago
Is there any evidence that people participating in gig economy are former blue-collar workers with 15-20 years of experience forced into it because they were unable to find any other jobs? My personal experience haven't been so - most "gig" services I've got were from people for which is was complementary income and which never intended to hold a full-time blue-collar job. Some of them could have 15-20 years of past blue collar experience only if they joined the ranks of workers straight out of kindergarten. But my perspective is necessarily narrow and accidental - so I wonder, are there any data on it? > perform low-level jobs, many of which require little or no specialized skills. These jobs need to be performed. So who should be performing them? > many gig workers find themselves too old to work but with no retirement savings, for example. You are assuming these people would always hold these jobs until they retire. Why? Most people that drive for Uber or do gigs on taskrabbit or fiverr do not see it as a lifetime career, as far as I know. Just as a teenager getting min wage in McDonalds does not plan to do the same until she's 65. So asking "how can you retire on McDonalds salary?" doesn't make a lot of sense.
- 5thaccount 10y ago
  > Is there any evidence that people participating in gig economy are former blue-collar workers with 15-20 years of experience forced into it because they were unable to find any other jobs? ... so I wonder, are there any data on it? JIC you missed it: http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/17/gig-work-online-selling-and-home-sharing/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/17/gig-work-online-sellin... http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/17/gig-work-online-selling-and-home-sharing/pi_2016-11-17_gig-workers_0-02/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/17/gig-work-online-sellin... shows that 18-29 year olds are most likely to be a part of the gig economy, as a percentage of an age range, and VERY few over 50 year olds participate (4%), so I'm not sure the data supports that specific view at all. On the data, IMHO (and it is just an opinion) where there is data, it is going to be incomplete because as a new phenomenon, there is nothing to compare it to historically, and the current situation will not be indicative of future performance. As an example, the demographics of internet usage have changed dramatically from 1995 to today, as now the vast majority of people on the web are not white, but instead live in Asia (the top 10 here http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users-by-country/ http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users-by-country/ includes only the US, UK and Germany, which are dwarfed by China and India). BTW: that NY Times article is a great example of using data really selectively, if not downright misleadingly. Examples: * "In New York City, an Uber drivers group affiliated with the machinists union said that more than one-fifth of its members earn less than $30,000 before expenses." OK, but is that BECAUSE of Uber, or the reason they drive for Uber? i.e. without Uber would they have more or less income? How many hours do they drive for Uber? Are they full or part time? And really, how is employing poor people anything but a positive thing? The mind boggles! * I absolutely LOVE how having a large number of minorities was presented as a negative. "Company employs 47% blacks and minorities" would seem to mean it is a really progressive company, however the NYTimes article takes this as evidence of how bad a company it is. I can only assume that is because them there my-norities are too stupid to see how they are being ripped off by these evil corporations, unlike the oh so clevery smart Whitey White-White-McWhite-Whites. I could have the tone wrong there, but man, it comes off to me as really patronising to these minorities. Last point and I'm done, from the Pew Data I love how it is a shock that people earning < $30K are more likely to take part in the gig economy than those making $75K. It is almost like people rationally choose to engage only when the marginal return from their time is best spent on the gig economy vs some other task ...

EliRivers 10y ago

e.g. being able to determine one's own work schedule This is, of course, something of a Hobson's choice. They can't work their own schedule; they have to work to the schedule of the temporary employer. The choice they have in this is to simply not work at time X, rather than move their work to time X.

malandrew 10y ago
Or they can learn some skills and work for a different employer or start their own business. The options are always going to be limited for those with the least skills that aren't learning new skills. It's 2017. Never before in the history of mankind has so much knowledge been accessible for so many at such a low cost (typically just the cost of a computer and internet access).
- dagenleg 10y ago
  And who will hire a 40y.o. worker with no work experience and some internet-taught skills?
  - malandrew 10y ago
    More employers than would will hire a 40y.o. worker with no work experience and no skills.
  - jstanley 10y ago
    Nobody is suggesting people get hired with no experience and little skill. If you create value for people they'll give you money for it, it's as simple as that. If people aren't prepared to give you money for it, it's obviously not creating as much value as you think it is. That's nobody's fault but your own.
    - badsock 10y ago
      Ah, the good old Social Darwinism argument.
      - newyankee 10y ago
        Survive or die, i am thriving because i am smart, dedicated, hardworking and you won't because likely you miss some of these things (backgrounds do not matter) /s
    - s73ver 10y ago
      So how does this person feed their family, then?
      - jstanley 10y ago
        They won't be able to. How does a wild animal feed his family if he can't catch any food? He gets out-competed by more effective individuals. Given finite resources and unbounded population growth, population must grow to the point where there are not enough resources to support everybody, and then some people have to start dying.
        s73ver 10y ago
        Ok. We'll just make sure to move them all next to you while this happens.
        Can_Not 10y ago
        As much as you'd like to invoke social Darwinism, maybe they are secretly lazy or whatever, but there is one underlying issue. We are a modern civilized society. As a society, we have an obligation to prepare our children for the future. "Let them starve" means I'm going to be killed in front of my son behind a theatre by someone who's parents were allowed to starve. The solution isn't to buy a house in a gated community and pretend like problems go away.
- derrickdirge 10y ago
  Just the cost of a computer and internet access. Which I pay for with money from...where, exactly?
  - malandrew 10y ago
    Cheap new laptops are in the sub-$200 range. Most educational content is text or simple videos, both of which can be consumed on a cheap laptop. The cheapest broadband plan from Xfinity in my area is $40/month. That being said, most people participating in the gig economy need access to the Internet to even participate, so most likely already have both a company and internet access. The people you should be worrying about are those that have no under-utilized assets to capitalize on such as a car or spare room.
    - John23832 10y ago
      >Cheap new laptops are in the sub-$200 range. Most educational content is text or simple videos, both of which can be consumed on a cheap laptop. The cheapest broadband plan from Xfinity in my area is $40/month. 200 bucks a lot for some people, and you have to pass a credit check to get xfinity access. > That being said, most people participating in the gig economy need access to the Internet to even participate, so most likely already have both a company and internet access. Cell service != general internet service. Try bootstrapping yourself into a tech job with only cell phone access. That may work in the third world where the standards are lower, but not in the West.
      - cableshaft 10y ago
        I manage to do quite a bit during lunches with a $200 computer at places that don't have internet access. Sometimes I use my cell phone to look something up, but I can also just wait until later or check a downloaded pdf. You don't need to have constant internet access to be able to be productive on a computer. In fact, I'd argue that often not having internet can make you more productive, by not giving you any distractions. Well, if you know your entire domain well, at least. At work I'm constantly fighting frameworks or APIs or reaching edge cases or error messages I've never seen before that I've had to look up, so I'd be a lot less productive without internet. But I can program for quite some time in Python, vanilla C#, and to a lesser extent Swift without looking anything up. And back in the day I knew Actionscript so well I never needed the internet to be productive (I miss those days). Really, you need to be able to not have to context switch a whole lot. All-in-one platforms let you stay in one context; most modern web platforms force you to context switch all the damn time.
- EliRivers 10y ago
  So what's going wrong? Why do we have so many people who, in times gone by would have been working semi-skilled or skilled blue-collar jobs, now scrabbling for unskilled work? Why aren't they all learning how to be chemical engineers by reading about it at their local library's internet PC? Clearly just having this knowledge available doesn't work.
  - devopsforlyfe 10y ago
    You would hire a self-taught chemical engineer? Nothing that can possibly go wrong with that.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    I don't ascribe the entire failure to this, but we've put significant barriers in the way of a self-motivated learner. Chief among these is the arbitrary requirement of many employers that a college degree, and particularly a degree specialized in the career field, is mandatory before any employment can occur. Not only does this incur significant financial cost, but it also incurs a completely untenable time cost for most people aged 25+, who need to provide both physically and emotionally for themselves and their families. While one could argue such credentials are important for life-or-death fields like engineering and medicine, the fact of the matter is that most college grads come out with a degree in a soft skill that doesn't really hold a strong relevance to the job they go on to fill in the workforce. In reality, a college education functions as little more than a class filter. If we want improve accessibility for the self-taught and make merit more meaningful, we should stop demanding arbitrary credentials for jobs that don't really need them.
- intended 10y ago
  Right, and education results in MOOCs remain as abysmal as before. Time, opportunity, survival needs, many things curtail the ability of people to study.
- jmcgough 10y ago
  This isn't a viable option for a 40 year old man with limited computer skills (and maybe not even a high school education) and is spending all their free time doing uber to feed and house a family. We can't simply dismiss people for "not working hard/smart enough" when the system is actively working against them to keep them in low-pay jobs
  - malandrew 10y ago
    Most full time TNC drivers I've spoken to only work 50-60 hours a week, which is about the same as what I work at my job. It leaves plenty of time to learn new skills. The truth is that most people regardless of education and job don't realize how they utilize the 168 hours per week that we all get to split between sleep, work, eating and leisure. When I used to teach, I had students give me the excuse all the time that they didn't have enough time to complete the assignment. I would ask others in the class how long they spent on average and then ask the students making the excuse to give me a rough breakdown of how they spent their last 168 hours. After account for sleep, other classes, other work, meals and liesure, they would routinely be unable to account for about ~40 hours. Most hours are squandered.
    - intended 10y ago
      Yes, that's normal life. You have to be very clear and ready to tell people that they have to give that up if they want to survive. Because in the end that's what people want. A normal life. Not everyone is passionate. Or driven, or interested in those things that can pay well. Which means that those hours must be stolen from a whole constellation of distractions (which get better at keeping you engaged) and interactions with other people. So people have to be made aware that they are going to be more unhappy not doing the work, than if they did do it. Most people aren't going to think like that.
      - malandrew 10y ago
        Most people aren't going to think like that. But is the rest of society responsible for coddling those unwilling to contribute? For the record, I have no problem with society supporting those who cannot support themselves by providing those people with welfare. There is a difference between being unable and unwilling to contribute.
mahyarm 10y ago
Can you give an example? I'm trying to think of how that would apply to the typical Uber driver. Do you mean they would be working during surge time more because they get paid more?
- EliRivers 10y ago
  An Uber driver sees a job come in. The customer wants to go from point A to point B. The customer want this to happen in the next ten minutes. The Uber driver has the choice of taking this job, or not. The Uber driver cannot decide to do the job in three hours time.
  - mahyarm 10y ago
    The customer can also choose to not give the job in 3 hours time and give it to someone else, app or not.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

pnathan 10y ago

Why does everything that might be flawed about the economy have to tie into the "American Middle Class". It seems almost this fabulist's position of Things Were Better Back Then, And Can't We Make America Great Again?

subliminalbrad 10y ago
Because it's one of the only politically acceptable ways of discussing capitalist exploitation.
alejohausner 10y ago
Things were better "back then". Wages for bottom 90% have not risen, in real terms, since the 1970s. Income for the top 10% has gone up a lot, by contrast. Union jobs raised wages for everyone: even though only a third of private-sector jobs were unionized, the threat of unionization pushed most employers to pay well. In the 1960s, one person could get a blue-collar job and keep a family going in a suburban house, with a car. This was all due to unions. We have been subjected to thirty years of propaganda about how unions kill jobs, how regulation is bad for jobs, how you should have "freedom to invest your money" (ie a 401-k rather than a company pension). This propaganda is now taken as gospel, and we don't realize it's just a ploy by those with inherited wealth to get a bigger share of the wealth. BTW, that's how we ended up with Trump. Yes, he's a narcissistic windbag, but people who voted for him had real grievances.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- pnathan 10y ago
  A major part of the 50s & 60s boom was the fact that most of the industrial nations had been turned into rubble in the 40s and the US hadn't. Once the 70s rolled around, the US manufacturers came to grips with serious competition. Some did better than others. Further, housing for GIs in the 40s and 50s was subsidized, thus changing the entire housing equation, and, further, women had not entered the workforce in large numbers, and, further, we require many more safety features on cars. These factors all are major portions of the story when comparing against your prototypical factory worker story, and mean that a simple narrative of Unions => Better Life doesn't work. Although unions do need to become much stronger in American life, they won't unspool us back to the prior era. and, tacking a paragraph on in my edit: probably want to talk to some black people about how great those years were. It's entirely plausible that some of the White American prosperity was due to heavily underpaying the Black Americans and treating them very poorly.

malandrew 10y ago

The gig economy would likely exist even if the middle class wasn't declining. In fact, there would likely be even greater demand for gig economy work if the middle class were thriving.

WalterSear 10y ago
This isn't about demand: this is about labour supply, and how the lack of opportunity makes gig economy business models possible.
- malandrew 10y ago
  You're going to have to empirically demonstrate to me that these gig economy business models would not be possible. Their growth may have been aided by current levels of unemployment and underemployment, but to say they wouldn't exist is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. Even then I could see them growing as fast if there were a robust middle class with disposable income to spend on these services. The only thing that would change is the supply and demand curves. There would be more demand and less supply, making the only thing that would change would be the equilibrium price point where those two intersect.
  - hn_throwaway_99 10y ago
    I'll just comment on "The only thing that would change is the supply and demand curves." Just taking Uber, it seems they've been pretty adamant that their entire business model is predicated on having a large enough supply of drivers that (a) wait times should be no more than 5 mins and (b) prices are lower than cabs. For example, Uber flat out left Austin because they said that fingerprinting regulations would not allow them to have a large enough supply of drivers. Thus, I do agree with you that that the only thing that would change is the supply and demand curves, but many of these business models seem to depend on the very idea of there being a large enough supply to enable prices to be lower than alternatives.
    - 10y ago

fullshark 10y ago

We laud(ed) this largely because most are consumers and are enjoying a nice consumer surplus from the development. Also for some workers, it's been a nice way to turn spare time + depreciating capital into short term income. In a vacuum it looks like a clear win for all involved. The larger trend is where it looks worrisome, and that's basically what we're considering as some time has passed.

5thaccount 10y ago
So without this trend, the world would have had more middle class and lower unemployment? My question more specifically is whether this trend is the cause or the effect? I'm not convinced in either direction BTW, I'm genuinely asking (the ether).

prostoalex 10y ago

> now have to enter the service economy and perform low-level jobs, many of which require little or no specialized skills have to implies there's a wealth of "white-collar work or stable and well-paying blue-collar work" out there but people are forced or coerced to act against their best interests. What's the alternative? Let's say the government decides to step in and make a structural change by changing the rules on W-2 employee vs 1099 contractor treatment. Will this lead to a resurrection of the American Middle Class?

Apocryphon 10y ago
The ideal solution would be to decouple the crucial benefits offered by W-2 jobs from those jobs. For instance, good health insurance- the government should offer a public option for that, instead. Given that medical debt is a crippling problem for many Americans, getting that resolved would go a long way towards recovering the Middle Class.
- prostoalex 10y ago
  > good health insurance- the government should offer a public option for that, instead They do already offer the ACA exchanges as well as subsidies for low-income wage earners under ACA. ACA also mandates a maximum annual out-of-pocket cost of $6,600 per individual (and $13,200 for entire family). While still a substantial amount, it's a far cry from millions of dollars of medical bills that people were saddled with pre-ACA.

acchow 10y ago

> as people who would have been able to find white-collar work or stable and well-paying blue-collar work 15-20 years ago now have to enter the service economy and perform low-level jobs, many of which require little or no specialized skills. Anecdotally, I've met a number of Uber/Lyft drivers that told me driving allowed them to quit their past shitty job and choose a flexible schedule that worked well with raising their kids. Also, drivers that quit their jobs to pour energy into their family business with some extra cash from driving when needed.

cheez 10y ago
Next time ask how long they've been doing Uber. For the most part, I've only heard longer than 1 year a handful of times.
- smsm42 10y ago
  Which completely destroys the top comment's point, if true - if one only does gig thing as... well, a temporary gig - there's no reason to worry about retirement with gig salary - nobody retires relying entirely on gig salary.
  - Can_Not 10y ago
    That's assuming that they left for a better job and that the replacement jobs were not also sequentially all gigs.

mahyarm 10y ago

The fact the gig economy job exists does not take away from the high paying job. If it didn't exist, these people would not be working or working at their local retail/restaurant store instead. The social problems of the low-income job lifer is not new.

smsm42 10y ago

Is there any evidence that people participating in gig economy are former blue-collar workers with 15-20 years of experience forced into it because they were unable to find any other jobs? My personal experience haven't been so - most "gig" services I've got were from people for which is was complementary income and which never intended to hold a full-time blue-collar job. Some of them could have 15-20 years of past blue collar experience only if they joined the ranks of workers straight out of kindergarten. But my perspective is necessarily narrow and accidental - so I wonder, are there any data on it? > perform low-level jobs, many of which require little or no specialized skills. These jobs need to be performed. So who should be performing them? > many gig workers find themselves too old to work but with no retirement savings, for example. You are assuming these people would always hold these jobs until they retire. Why? Most people that drive for Uber or do gigs on taskrabbit or fiverr do not see it as a lifetime career, as far as I know. Just as a teenager getting min wage in McDonalds does not plan to do the same until she's 65. So asking "how can you retire on McDonalds salary?" doesn't make a lot of sense.

5thaccount 10y ago
> Is there any evidence that people participating in gig economy are former blue-collar workers with 15-20 years of experience forced into it because they were unable to find any other jobs? ... so I wonder, are there any data on it? JIC you missed it: http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/17/gig-work-online-selling-and-home-sharing/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/17/gig-work-online-sellin... http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/17/gig-work-online-selling-and-home-sharing/pi_2016-11-17_gig-workers_0-02/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/17/gig-work-online-sellin... shows that 18-29 year olds are most likely to be a part of the gig economy, as a percentage of an age range, and VERY few over 50 year olds participate (4%), so I'm not sure the data supports that specific view at all. On the data, IMHO (and it is just an opinion) where there is data, it is going to be incomplete because as a new phenomenon, there is nothing to compare it to historically, and the current situation will not be indicative of future performance. As an example, the demographics of internet usage have changed dramatically from 1995 to today, as now the vast majority of people on the web are not white, but instead live in Asia (the top 10 here http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users-by-country/ http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users-by-country/ includes only the US, UK and Germany, which are dwarfed by China and India). BTW: that NY Times article is a great example of using data really selectively, if not downright misleadingly. Examples: * "In New York City, an Uber drivers group affiliated with the machinists union said that more than one-fifth of its members earn less than $30,000 before expenses." OK, but is that BECAUSE of Uber, or the reason they drive for Uber? i.e. without Uber would they have more or less income? How many hours do they drive for Uber? Are they full or part time? And really, how is employing poor people anything but a positive thing? The mind boggles! * I absolutely LOVE how having a large number of minorities was presented as a negative. "Company employs 47% blacks and minorities" would seem to mean it is a really progressive company, however the NYTimes article takes this as evidence of how bad a company it is. I can only assume that is because them there my-norities are too stupid to see how they are being ripped off by these evil corporations, unlike the oh so clevery smart Whitey White-White-McWhite-Whites. I could have the tone wrong there, but man, it comes off to me as really patronising to these minorities. Last point and I'm done, from the Pew Data I love how it is a shock that people earning < $30K are more likely to take part in the gig economy than those making $75K. It is almost like people rationally choose to engage only when the marginal return from their time is best spent on the gig economy vs some other task ...