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> The gig economy is a very efficient way to allocate humans in a precarious environment. If you remove the bullshit-coating, you're left naked with the sad re

• em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
  Giggers don't really need employers or employees, since gigs can be performed in an ad-hoc p2p fashion. Also I don't see why you would want taxpayers to subsidize giggers. That would lead to a overabundance of gigging compared to what the market equilibrium would be without subsidies. I've never heard the term "new-age capitalist", but I sortof like the sound of that.
  • TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Each and every employee law that we enjoy now came as a direct response to some of the abuse that happened in the past. Before you decide to tear down all that our great-{n}-gradparents fought and bled for, please take a look at how the realities of work evolved since the industrial revolution. You'll find plenty of evidence that those nice "benefits" of gig economy break down in practice, resulting in lots of suffering.
    • vkreso 9y ago
      > Each and every employee law that we enjoy now came as a direct response to some of the abuse that happened in the past. This is an incredibly strong statement. Back it up please. Law making is anything but an efficient and optimal, noiseless process. There is quite a lot of legislation constructed simply because of the government responding to pressure groups (worker unions, crony businessmen.....) and legislating their narrow interests for everyone.
      • graphitezepp 9y ago
        I agree that saying ALL employee laws are begat from a direct response to abuse is too strong and probably not literal. Some majority sure, almost definitely, but it would be shocking if there are not any counter examples.
        • vkreso 9y ago
          Exactly! Legislation is an extremely noisy process. On a side note, I guess there is also some security against "retrospectively irrational" decision making in that noise as well.. I wonder though if there is any research made on such "externalised legislational costs". I believe it would be an interesting subject! Also a fun fact: a large part of the corpus of modern coomercial law arised "organically" from old fragmented europe using derivated roman law in its interactions. P.s sorry for lot of these " "
      • privateprofile 9y ago
        > This is an incredibly strong statement. Back it up please. "The eight-hour day movement or 40-hour week movement, also known as the short-time movement, was started by James Deb and had its origins in the Industrial Revolution in Britain, where industrial production in large factories transformed working life. The use of child labour was common. The working day could range from 10 to 16 hours for six days a week." in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day A gentle introduction enough to solve basic ignorance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_rights#Labor_Background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_rights#Labor_Background You can also look up the fact (and wonder why) that the USA is one of the very few countries in the world that doesn't assure paid vacation time and, right up there with Papua New Guinea and Suriname, is one of the three countries where there's no assured right to parental leave. It appears that societies at large have a "narrow interest" in not working (for breadcrumbs, mostly) from cradle to grave.
        • vkreso 9y ago
          I'm not from the USA as I see you've probably presumed, also labour markets and internal politics are vast and different form country to country. You stated very explicitly "Each and every employee law" which I contrasted with a very simple observation of the legislation process. It was my intention to stress that the law making process is anything but direct and is full of noise, corruption and, yes, interest groups with narrow interests. In many countries of the former eastern bloc in Europe, bloated public sector with the backing of public worker unions are efficiently blocking any reform incentive of the governement and the labour market. Qouting a few examples is barking at the wrong tree since I never contrasted that employee law may arise from horrible working conditions. I only gently contrasted the "Each and every" part which is a very strong and, dare I say, ignorant statement.
  • grive 9y ago
    > Giggers don't really need employers or employees, since gigs can be performed in an ad-hoc p2p fashion. That's only mudding the waters. Work is performed to the benefit of someone. Someone is giving orders / specs and gives money for it. The point of the gig economy is to avoid naming it a employer / employee relationship, by dividing it until it isn't meaningful anymore. But that's only to hide the concept and allow to profit from a new relationship where you don't have to provide benefits / baseline standard of working for the people effectively being employed (that you can reduce to "spending their time on your problem"). > Also I don't see why you would want taxpayers to subsidize giggers. That's precisely the opposite of what I am saying. The gig economy fucking up the labor market will force any humane society to step up and provide for those lacking access to basic things in life: help to pay the rent in the months where work is scarce, food stamps, etc.. And that's not even going into the lack of stability, forbidding any access to long term investment (a car, a house), which in our time and age should be accessible to anyone. You have employers benefitting from a new relationship where they do not need to provide it for their employees because the relationship has been destroyed. This forces others to pick-up their failures. I don't want to live in a society where people are starving, with or without a job but even moreso if they are active and working. I am against the gig economy, because this is a way for employers to avoid taking their responsibilities, meaning that taxpayers are left to foot the bill. If not, we go a few centuries back with extreme poverty, shantytowns and slavery-in-all-but-name. I do not want that, and I do not want to pay to increase the profit of others.
    • lostboys67 9y ago
      yep you still have a "master" and a "servant"
    • em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
      I don't understand what you are saying about employee/employer. In a gig economy, you can be your own boss. And without all those unnecessary layers of management, you could potentially keep more of the money for yourself than having a company take it. Someone with in-demand skills and a good reputation is going to have stable work both in a gig economy or as an employee, anyway.
  • cjrp 9y ago
    > Giggers don't really need employers or employees, since gigs can be performed in an ad-hoc p2p fashion. Until they get knocked off their bicycle while delivering someone's lunch and can't work, meaning they can't pay rent or buy food (because you're an independent contractor who only gets paid while 'gigging'). Then it's pretty useful to have an employer who covers things like sick pay.
    • walterstucco 9y ago
      That thing that pays for sick leave in Italy is called State. We pay taxes and those taxes cover sick leave.
  • yourapostasy 9y ago
    Aside from the other comments responding to you with relevant counter-points, a discussion over increasing a gig economy's footprint should account for Coase's Theorem (already mentioned by one other comment elsewhere in this thread, and I'm surprised more people aren't bringing it up) that points out the transactional costs of being your own contractor. The logistical tail that US contractors deal with gets non-trivial very quickly, especially as you climb up the value ladder. Entry is very easy and the logistical tail there is tolerable, but stay at that entry level and you never gain appreciable negotiating leverage. US healthcare is a huge elephant in the room, as Buffett recently pointed out earlier this year. What we call "gig economy" are p2p transactions in name only in our existing incarnations of them: most of these are oligopolistic markets dominated by only 2-3 major "platforms". They are not a free market with lots of choices the giggers choose from with low to no switching costs; if there was an equities-exchange-like platform that did the matching, with equities-exchange-like margins, and many such platforms, that would be closer to a free market, and even smaller margins under a utility-infrastructure model of the platform where the data is open formats while the platforms compete on service and process would be even more free. Their cut of the action to facilitate the p2p transaction is not a fraction of a percent to 1-2% like highly-contested free markets are (like retail groceries). After that big cut, their "contractors" are still saddled with most of the transactional costs of being a contractor like various forms of business insurance, health insurance, accounting, payroll compliance, regulatory compliance, etc. Our entire asset valuation pyramids and the dominant economic paradigm are built upon an assumption fairly stable income streams at the bottom, not to speak of the meta-assumption of constant growth. Insurance and credit banking are the big areas, but these assumptions are interwoven at a very fine-grained level throughout our civilization. A majority or even plurality economy based upon gigs transitioning from our current model is necessarily going to go through a drastically lower asset valuation period, and with oligopolistic platform choices depressing negotiation power on the supplier/contractor side, that period could extend indefinitely. This isn't per se "bad", or "good", but advocating the gig economy should come with realistic and frank discussions of side effects management. People respond to incentives. The core incentives in a gig economy are: you cannot predict when your next check will come, you cannot even predict how big it will be when it comes, nor can you feasibly control the terms under which it comes. The pullback in consumption and spending from current levels will reflect people's response to those incentives. People's lives will be patterned after long-time survivors of this type of economy; certain subset industries in movie and TV entertainment have been structured this way nearly since inception for most participants, for example. General rule of thumb is you live way below your means, and you spend at most 20-30% of your high water mark annual earnings over a 10 year running average. Income swings of 100% or more over 2-3 years are not uncommon. Under a gig economy, you will wait until you hold 20-50% down payment before committing to a mortgage; many people's annual incomes are so wildly inconsistent they can't get a mortgage, period. Note that the US new mortgage originations market currently relies upon around 3.5-5.0% down payments; the traditional 20% is now rare, the average is 11% (in the <35 year old cohort, it is 8%). One estimate at requiring 20% down payment is a 30% reduction in mortgage originations [1]. I speak to all this from spending the vast majority of my adult life as an independent business entity in the US, by choice (most years I have one client ask if I would ever consider going perm at reasonable compensation levels). My position harbors no animosity towards the gig economy; indeed, I'm an active participant in it and biased towards it (for various reasons). But realistically, it is not for everyone, and not even for the majority or plurality; it is a sustainable enough model for only a very small part of what we are evolving our current system towards, unless we put severely eroding current asset valuations onto the table, whether for 10 years (my minimum estimate) or indefinitely. The key factor to keep an eye upon IMHO is whether or not the proposed change represents a shift towards a more symmetric power dynamic between participants. Right now, corporate structures wield asymmetrically more power than individuals, and a gig economy does not change that in most contexts, and worsens it in many other contexts. [1] https://blogs.stthomas.edu/realestate/2011/05/16/revitalizing-the-private-mortgage-market/ https://blogs.stthomas.edu/realestate/2011/05/16/revitalizin...
• wutbrodo 9y ago
  > they become dependent on society to pick-up your failure to provide a proper environment to your employees. You've essentially subsidized your business by deporting the negative externalities of "living wage" and "humane work environment" to the tax-payers. This line of thinking is beyond insane to me. We seem to agree that people who don't earn enough to pay for a defined minimum standard of living should be taken care of: Why is it a _bad_ thing that society is the one bearing the cost, instead of an arbitrary purchaser of their labor? If this responsibility exists, how does it not exist for all of us? And since the government is the expression of our collective will, why is the government not the appropriate entity to handle it? The notion that this is "subsidizing" purchasers of their labor is Orwellian bullshit.
  • grive 9y ago
    > Why is it a _bad_ thing that society is the one bearing the cost, instead of an arbitrary purchaser of their labor? Because taxpayers are then paying for companies like Walmart to increase their profits. They are able to reduce their labor expanses because "someone" will pick up their slack. The government should help you when you don't have a job, so that you can have time for education, your kids, or plain healthcare if needed. But if you are active and working, if you spend your day working for someone (either in an office in a 9 to 5, or as a "giggers" chasing the next one during your day), then you should be able to sustain yourself without additional help from the government. Because then employers will expect the gov to step in. They will drive their wages lower, and all the competition will do the same. And when the government is picking up the rest of the bill for everyone in the market, where the fuck should taxes come from? Finally > instead of an arbitrary purchaser of their labor? Labor has a cost. If you are unable to purchase it, then don't. But don't expect others to pay for the labor you would have liked to purchase. This is like saying that just because I'm the arbitrary purchaser of a tuna sandwich, I should get help to pay for it. This is beyond insane. > The notion that this is "subsidizing" purchasers of their labor is Orwellian bullshit. This is pretty ironic that you accuse me of using newspeak, while you expect the state to become the sole responsible party to support basic amenities for its citizen. Because the latter is pretty orwellian, and thus your accusation itself goes in line with the concept of newspeak. Anyway.