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I don't subscribe at all to the race to the bottom concept honestly. It is senseless to believe that it is worker regulations that isn't grinding workers. When

I don't subscribe at all to the race to the bottom concept honestly. It is senseless to believe that it is worker regulations that isn't grinding workers. When someone wants to work more than what they 40 hour work week offers, he would go into contracting and work a lot more. Our society is filled with people choosing to work more, and no-one is richer by forcing those people to work less. Not only that, the race to the bottom you mention would not dock pay as much as you think. In fact, it would increase riches. This is related to the classical problem of confounding money with value. Lets say you work 40 hours a week and make 1 fork an hour, and get paid 1 dollar for it. A contractor shows up and he makes 1 fork an hour and works 60 hours a week. The new influx of 60 forks will drop the price of forks, and hence you will be paid less per fork you produce: but the entire system now has 100 forks. You will be paid less but you can buy more forks with the lesser pay. In a real world example, you would lose money, because your entire income is devoted to forks but not your expenditures: but this effect happens with almost anything that is produceds and requires labor. So basically advocating for the restrictions in name of pay, is advocating for higher nominal salaries for less goods.

seppin 9y ago
You are conflating wanting to work more with having to. The gig economy provides both
frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
>I don't subscribe at all to the race to the bottom concept honestly. I don't get how you can not. Workers fought and died[0] for the protections the United States enforces. Why do you think that is? Because they were tired of racing to the bottom! And for the economic example, this: >but this effect happens with almost anything that is produceds and requires labor just isn't correct. For example, one of the other top comments in this thread is specifically about how gig labor probably won't work well for most software. >So basically advocating for the restrictions in name of pay, is advocating for higher nominal salaries for less goods. That's a pretty interesting assertion. I could just as easily say the opposite. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni...
- conanbatt 9y ago
  > I don't get how you can not. Workers fought and died[0] for the protections the United States enforces. Why do you think that is? Because they were tired of racing to the bottom! People fought and died for to expand christianity in the world as well. How can you not believe in god? There are many things about the era of unions and worker rights that to my personal level, require a scrutiny I dont have the understanding and knowledge to disentangle. The increase of wealth and people's welfare might as well have happened in spite of worker's rights movements. Also, the greatest terrible thing about that era was that the state was participant in the oppression ,by using violence against workers. (At least it was so in argentina). Thats a great case for unionization, but not for workers rights, since the oppressor is the one that puts the rules. The United States has some of the most rudimentary worker laws in the developed world, yet many jobs (like soft dev) tout great benefits like paid leave, extra pto etc. What increases worker well-being is the creation of wealth, not the mandatory legal requirements for it. > just isn't correct. For example, one of the other top comments in this thread is specifically about how gig labor probably won't work well for most software. That's pretty much an opinion, and software is not everything out there. > That's a pretty interesting assertion. I could just as easily say the opposite. I dont see how it would be opposite. Lower worker times means lower production, which means lower goods and services to consume. No matter what you do with the currency, reducing production makes the whole poorer. There are some arguments around this topic like reasonable work-times increase productivity and spending and all that, and they are believable to a certain extent, but the basic mechanic has to be the before mentioned. To be honest, I always perceive that issue as a problem of perception of distribution. In a system of 10 workers, where each has the same output, if one of them were willing to work 60 hours over 40, he would make relatively more than the other workers and that causes a perception of inequality humans are inherently against. The 40 hour worker now also thinks(correctly) that his wage would go up if he could force the 60 hour guy to work 40 hours. But he believes this is good for him, which it isn't, because even he would be relatively worse, he would be absolutely better. In economics, what you dont see often has a more profound effect that what you can see.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
    Just out of interest, how many consecutive 60 hour weeks have you worked? If I recall correctly, the longest stretch I've done of 60+ hour weeks in a metal fabrication workshop is 12. The longest stretch of 50+ hr weeks I've done is in my current job in a metal fabrication workshop is about 5 months. I genuinely cannot understand your argument in favour of 60 hour weeks.
and0 9y ago
This is naive. People get the best job they can get, which is rarely the one they want. I was always forced to work more than 40 hours and I hated it but never had a choice when I was younger. I had employers erode all sorts of my rights and I couldn't say a word, because I couldn't find any other work.
- conanbatt 9y ago
  What is naive is to believe the elimination of those jobs is going to provide you with a new and better one.
francisofascii 9y ago
The problem is the contractor, may not be working more because he wants to, but because he is not certain the work will be available in the future. Also, since the contractor is willing to work 60 hours, he is a little more attractive to employers. Also the town you live in has a finite housing supply. So even though you think you are making decent money, you are being outbid by all the 60 hours/week contractors who have more money than you. So you eventually give in and start working 60 hours to keep up.
- conanbatt 9y ago
  To keep up what. His own expectations? The angle of your comment, to me, doesn't take into account basic incentive differences between contractors and employees. Employees are provided with certain benefits, but those benefits are paid by the employees themselves, not by "the company" or "the state". PTO is paid by the employee, simply because any job in existence has a salary based on perceived value by the employer. There isn't really a fundamental difference to an employee (in general)between paying 110 a year with 1 month time of, or paying 10 monthly without pto and allowing 1 month of licensing. There is a difference to the employee though: he perceives, falsely, that the time off he gets is "free time, paid by someone else" and so he is way more inclined to use it. Specially when there are rules like expiration on them. A small business man that runs his own shop or contracting work, knows that the time he does work he doesn't get paid. Because the cause and effect are so close together, the contractor is way more unwilling to take time off, because he wants that money. Contractors work more not because they don't have worker rights, but because they can more clearly see what the effect of not working is. Now figure a law that says that contractors shouldn't work more than 40 hours a week: what a disaster it would be for them and for society, that people that want to work are prohibited from doing so.
  - francisofascii 9y ago
    > Now figure a law that says that contractors shouldn't work more than 40 hours a week: what a disaster it would be for them and for society I agree that people should definitely not be prohibited from working more than 40 hours. But disastrous? Let's assume such a law was passed. People would visit friends and family, spend time with kids, get better sleep, have time to cook, exercise, read more books. How is that disastrous? What is disastrous is people never having time to enjoy the things I just mentioned. So I would support simple policy disincentives to people working outside the range of let's say 30-50.
lostboys67 9y ago
If I go contracting (that's proper self employed contracting not disused employment) I would not be working more hours just be charging 3x my FTE wage.
- conanbatt 9y ago
  That is your prerogative. Of course contracting has to pay enough for the difficulty of finding clients and the sort, but in principle, you are not limited to how much time you want to work.
RealityNow 9y ago
It's simple. When you have an oversupply of job seekers competing for a limited slot of quality jobs, the employers have the upper hand in terms of bargaining, driving down wages and working conditions until they hit the minimum that people are willing to put up with. The solution isn't regulation because that only addresses a symptom without addressing the root cause. The only solution is to remove the employee's dependence on their employer (eg. universal basic income).
- conanbatt 9y ago
  I confess that I'm working my way up to Marx's capital, so I'm currently not convinced of the reserve army concept, and some of the modeling that says that economies tend to lower wages until people get the bare minimum. But even if I believed that to be true, restricting the amount of time they work will just keep pushing the salaries to survival level and it would do so faster. I also have strong hopes for UBI to re-adjust many things in society, like giving stronger leverage to the poorer classes in the imbalance of power they have with employers. However, at my current understanding of economics, i cant see how restricting labor would have positive effects on the aggregate of workers.
clutchdude 9y ago
Yes, it's a commodity market of forks at that point - a bushel of wheat, a hog carcass, etc. is more or less the same at some level, regardless of where it's grown...save for King Arthur flour, but that's another story. There are subsidy/government controls in place for this - if you price control it or otherwise force production without a market benefit, you drive folks out of the industry. This is a bad thing with food staples because then you get starvation, so you need the market to exist so people can enjoy profits but you need a floor/baked in demand to ensure minimum level of production to meet your populations needs. Now, for this market, we need to ask "Do we care that the supply of gig-sector services is volatile?" and the answer is muddled - people want their reliable Just-in-Time(JIT) services but not enough to advocate for price floors to ensure labor supply exists and stays stable(low turnover). In our minds, that's the job of the contracting companies to do and we don't really care about the labor impacts associated with it. I guess the question is "Are we ok burning this now and hoping we have it in the future?"
njarboe 9y ago
The people at the top competing companies seem to end up conspiring to suppress wages even when it is illegal and their companies ROI and profits are the highest of any other companies on earth.[1] Adobe, Intel, Google, and Apple were convicted (edit:actually, just paid money to prevent a trial) mainly on the fact that Jobs, Schmidt, and Otellini actually sent emails to each other discussing it that were revealed in discovery. I can imagine wink-wink agreements that would be far harder to successfully prosecute and thus never (edit: threatened to be) brought to trial. [1]https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/13/7542371/apple-google-intel-adobe-settlement-poaching-lawsuit https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/13/7542371/apple-google-inte...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- conanbatt 9y ago
  Are you suggesting that workers should get together and conspire in return?
  - njarboe 9y ago
    You mean like a union? Maybe not the best most ethical way to fight back but seemed to work at some level in the past.
  - notfromhere 9y ago
    That's what unions do, since companies have disproportionate power in negotiations
    - conanbatt 9y ago
      Im implying that two wrongs dont make a right.
nostrademons 9y ago
You get a good helping of Baumol's Cost Disease [1] this way, which actually seems to be what's afflicting the economy now. Problem is that not all sectors of the economy are uniform. You may have dramatically increased the productivity and reduced the cost of forks. However, health care can't be done by fork makers. Higher education can't be taught by fork makers. The supply of these goods is fixed by skilled labor, who can now demand more money because their BATNA is going into the fork automation business rather than working for a competitor. End result is that the world is awash in forks, but the people who make forks can get plenty of forks but no health care or education. Most of the problems with classical macroeconomic models can be traced back to the fact that we don't live in a 2-good model, and the economy comprises thousands of markets that all have different productivity stats and levels of competition. If all markets moved in unison, then yes, rising productivity would be an unambiguous benefit for everyone. Not all markets move in unison, and so when essential goods are in markets with low productivity, large portions of the population can find themselves unable to afford those essential goods. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
- conanbatt 9y ago
  Im not entirely sure this cost disease goes against classical economics. The value of a teacher increases as the children's expected economic value in the future increases in productivity. In any case, the restriction of how much people should be able to work could affect workers positively or negatively, but its not the solution to the problem of productivity and distribution.
Spooky23 9y ago
That's a weird way to look at it. Contractors exist because they are disposable. Period. In many instances, contract workers are less efficient and cause work to be broken up in arbritary ways to make the RFPs make sense. You're literally spending 3-5x for the disposability. As a professional in a field, you should hate contractors as they diminish your work and make you disposable.
- conanbatt 9y ago
  > As a professional in a field, you should hate contractors as they diminish your work and make you disposable. This is correct, in the same way that you should despise any other professional from competing with your service.

seppin 9y ago

You are conflating wanting to work more with having to. The gig economy provides both

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago

>I don't subscribe at all to the race to the bottom concept honestly. I don't get how you can not. Workers fought and died[0] for the protections the United States enforces. Why do you think that is? Because they were tired of racing to the bottom! And for the economic example, this: >but this effect happens with almost anything that is produceds and requires labor just isn't correct. For example, one of the other top comments in this thread is specifically about how gig labor probably won't work well for most software. >So basically advocating for the restrictions in name of pay, is advocating for higher nominal salaries for less goods. That's a pretty interesting assertion. I could just as easily say the opposite. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni...

conanbatt 9y ago
> I don't get how you can not. Workers fought and died[0] for the protections the United States enforces. Why do you think that is? Because they were tired of racing to the bottom! People fought and died for to expand christianity in the world as well. How can you not believe in god? There are many things about the era of unions and worker rights that to my personal level, require a scrutiny I dont have the understanding and knowledge to disentangle. The increase of wealth and people's welfare might as well have happened in spite of worker's rights movements. Also, the greatest terrible thing about that era was that the state was participant in the oppression ,by using violence against workers. (At least it was so in argentina). Thats a great case for unionization, but not for workers rights, since the oppressor is the one that puts the rules. The United States has some of the most rudimentary worker laws in the developed world, yet many jobs (like soft dev) tout great benefits like paid leave, extra pto etc. What increases worker well-being is the creation of wealth, not the mandatory legal requirements for it. > just isn't correct. For example, one of the other top comments in this thread is specifically about how gig labor probably won't work well for most software. That's pretty much an opinion, and software is not everything out there. > That's a pretty interesting assertion. I could just as easily say the opposite. I dont see how it would be opposite. Lower worker times means lower production, which means lower goods and services to consume. No matter what you do with the currency, reducing production makes the whole poorer. There are some arguments around this topic like reasonable work-times increase productivity and spending and all that, and they are believable to a certain extent, but the basic mechanic has to be the before mentioned. To be honest, I always perceive that issue as a problem of perception of distribution. In a system of 10 workers, where each has the same output, if one of them were willing to work 60 hours over 40, he would make relatively more than the other workers and that causes a perception of inequality humans are inherently against. The 40 hour worker now also thinks(correctly) that his wage would go up if he could force the 60 hour guy to work 40 hours. But he believes this is good for him, which it isn't, because even he would be relatively worse, he would be absolutely better. In economics, what you dont see often has a more profound effect that what you can see.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
  Just out of interest, how many consecutive 60 hour weeks have you worked? If I recall correctly, the longest stretch I've done of 60+ hour weeks in a metal fabrication workshop is 12. The longest stretch of 50+ hr weeks I've done is in my current job in a metal fabrication workshop is about 5 months. I genuinely cannot understand your argument in favour of 60 hour weeks.

and0 9y ago

This is naive. People get the best job they can get, which is rarely the one they want. I was always forced to work more than 40 hours and I hated it but never had a choice when I was younger. I had employers erode all sorts of my rights and I couldn't say a word, because I couldn't find any other work.

conanbatt 9y ago
What is naive is to believe the elimination of those jobs is going to provide you with a new and better one.

francisofascii 9y ago

The problem is the contractor, may not be working more because he wants to, but because he is not certain the work will be available in the future. Also, since the contractor is willing to work 60 hours, he is a little more attractive to employers. Also the town you live in has a finite housing supply. So even though you think you are making decent money, you are being outbid by all the 60 hours/week contractors who have more money than you. So you eventually give in and start working 60 hours to keep up.

conanbatt 9y ago
To keep up what. His own expectations? The angle of your comment, to me, doesn't take into account basic incentive differences between contractors and employees. Employees are provided with certain benefits, but those benefits are paid by the employees themselves, not by "the company" or "the state". PTO is paid by the employee, simply because any job in existence has a salary based on perceived value by the employer. There isn't really a fundamental difference to an employee (in general)between paying 110 a year with 1 month time of, or paying 10 monthly without pto and allowing 1 month of licensing. There is a difference to the employee though: he perceives, falsely, that the time off he gets is "free time, paid by someone else" and so he is way more inclined to use it. Specially when there are rules like expiration on them. A small business man that runs his own shop or contracting work, knows that the time he does work he doesn't get paid. Because the cause and effect are so close together, the contractor is way more unwilling to take time off, because he wants that money. Contractors work more not because they don't have worker rights, but because they can more clearly see what the effect of not working is. Now figure a law that says that contractors shouldn't work more than 40 hours a week: what a disaster it would be for them and for society, that people that want to work are prohibited from doing so.
- francisofascii 9y ago
  > Now figure a law that says that contractors shouldn't work more than 40 hours a week: what a disaster it would be for them and for society I agree that people should definitely not be prohibited from working more than 40 hours. But disastrous? Let's assume such a law was passed. People would visit friends and family, spend time with kids, get better sleep, have time to cook, exercise, read more books. How is that disastrous? What is disastrous is people never having time to enjoy the things I just mentioned. So I would support simple policy disincentives to people working outside the range of let's say 30-50.

lostboys67 9y ago

If I go contracting (that's proper self employed contracting not disused employment) I would not be working more hours just be charging 3x my FTE wage.

conanbatt 9y ago
That is your prerogative. Of course contracting has to pay enough for the difficulty of finding clients and the sort, but in principle, you are not limited to how much time you want to work.

RealityNow 9y ago

It's simple. When you have an oversupply of job seekers competing for a limited slot of quality jobs, the employers have the upper hand in terms of bargaining, driving down wages and working conditions until they hit the minimum that people are willing to put up with. The solution isn't regulation because that only addresses a symptom without addressing the root cause. The only solution is to remove the employee's dependence on their employer (eg. universal basic income).

conanbatt 9y ago
I confess that I'm working my way up to Marx's capital, so I'm currently not convinced of the reserve army concept, and some of the modeling that says that economies tend to lower wages until people get the bare minimum. But even if I believed that to be true, restricting the amount of time they work will just keep pushing the salaries to survival level and it would do so faster. I also have strong hopes for UBI to re-adjust many things in society, like giving stronger leverage to the poorer classes in the imbalance of power they have with employers. However, at my current understanding of economics, i cant see how restricting labor would have positive effects on the aggregate of workers.

clutchdude 9y ago

Yes, it's a commodity market of forks at that point - a bushel of wheat, a hog carcass, etc. is more or less the same at some level, regardless of where it's grown...save for King Arthur flour, but that's another story. There are subsidy/government controls in place for this - if you price control it or otherwise force production without a market benefit, you drive folks out of the industry. This is a bad thing with food staples because then you get starvation, so you need the market to exist so people can enjoy profits but you need a floor/baked in demand to ensure minimum level of production to meet your populations needs. Now, for this market, we need to ask "Do we care that the supply of gig-sector services is volatile?" and the answer is muddled - people want their reliable Just-in-Time(JIT) services but not enough to advocate for price floors to ensure labor supply exists and stays stable(low turnover). In our minds, that's the job of the contracting companies to do and we don't really care about the labor impacts associated with it. I guess the question is "Are we ok burning this now and hoping we have it in the future?"

njarboe 9y ago

The people at the top competing companies seem to end up conspiring to suppress wages even when it is illegal and their companies ROI and profits are the highest of any other companies on earth.[1] Adobe, Intel, Google, and Apple were convicted (edit:actually, just paid money to prevent a trial) mainly on the fact that Jobs, Schmidt, and Otellini actually sent emails to each other discussing it that were revealed in discovery. I can imagine wink-wink agreements that would be far harder to successfully prosecute and thus never (edit: threatened to be) brought to trial. [1]https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/13/7542371/apple-google-intel-adobe-settlement-poaching-lawsuit https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/13/7542371/apple-google-inte...

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
conanbatt 9y ago
Are you suggesting that workers should get together and conspire in return?
- njarboe 9y ago
  You mean like a union? Maybe not the best most ethical way to fight back but seemed to work at some level in the past.
- notfromhere 9y ago
  That's what unions do, since companies have disproportionate power in negotiations
  - conanbatt 9y ago
    Im implying that two wrongs dont make a right.

nostrademons 9y ago

You get a good helping of Baumol's Cost Disease [1] this way, which actually seems to be what's afflicting the economy now. Problem is that not all sectors of the economy are uniform. You may have dramatically increased the productivity and reduced the cost of forks. However, health care can't be done by fork makers. Higher education can't be taught by fork makers. The supply of these goods is fixed by skilled labor, who can now demand more money because their BATNA is going into the fork automation business rather than working for a competitor. End result is that the world is awash in forks, but the people who make forks can get plenty of forks but no health care or education. Most of the problems with classical macroeconomic models can be traced back to the fact that we don't live in a 2-good model, and the economy comprises thousands of markets that all have different productivity stats and levels of competition. If all markets moved in unison, then yes, rising productivity would be an unambiguous benefit for everyone. Not all markets move in unison, and so when essential goods are in markets with low productivity, large portions of the population can find themselves unable to afford those essential goods. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

conanbatt 9y ago
Im not entirely sure this cost disease goes against classical economics. The value of a teacher increases as the children's expected economic value in the future increases in productivity. In any case, the restriction of how much people should be able to work could affect workers positively or negatively, but its not the solution to the problem of productivity and distribution.

Spooky23 9y ago

That's a weird way to look at it. Contractors exist because they are disposable. Period. In many instances, contract workers are less efficient and cause work to be broken up in arbritary ways to make the RFPs make sense. You're literally spending 3-5x for the disposability. As a professional in a field, you should hate contractors as they diminish your work and make you disposable.

conanbatt 9y ago
> As a professional in a field, you should hate contractors as they diminish your work and make you disposable. This is correct, in the same way that you should despise any other professional from competing with your service.