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Interview with Deliveroo couriers appealing bargaining-rights decision

93 points by raaxe 8y ago

kop316 8y ago
Serious question: If the conditions are just that bad, why even bother to work for them? There seems to be some sort of equilibrium to me where if it gets bad enough, no one will simply want to do this job, and choose to take some other low paying job (e.g. retail, fast food, etc.).
- menacingly 8y ago
  Agreed. I can swallow these "the company owes us something" arguments for businesses so large they make up the entire employment for a city, but not cases like this. It's unsettling that now every business has a big moral obligation to make sure employees make the best choices for themselves.
  - shabble 8y ago
    Alternatively, every business (or rather, the people who operate and control that business) have a moral obligation not to unreasonably exploit their employees. I would expect that to be a fairly common sentiment/belief (though I might be wrong). It comes down to the particular definition of 'unreasonably' that is being used, which different groups can and do disagree about.
    - menacingly 8y ago
      That's fair. For instance, company stores in mining towns were clearly designed to trap employees into a lifetime of debt with almost no personal choice in the matter. It's the choice aspect I focus on. No one is forcing them, and it's borderline elitist of someone with a nice job to say "that's gross work and I think it should go away so things are less gross", along the lines of thinking families straddling the poverty line should simply "eat more quality food"
- roel_v 8y ago
  That's true to a certain extent, but experience (19th century beginning-of-industrialization) has taught us that the floor (i.e., the equilibrium) is bad enough that we don't want that sort of circumstances. In other words, it turns out that people want to work to eat so badly that they'll put up with working 14-hour days and letting their 10 year old children work in factories that literally kill 10's of them per year. I'm not saying gig workers' circumstances are nearly as bad as those in the 19th century, I'm just illustrating the principle. The discussion then continues at 'what is an acceptable equilibrium'. Of which certain people, unsurprisingly, find that today's is not OK. Note that I'm not saying here which side of the discussion I side on (that's a political question not worth rehashing here I think), just pointing out the (rather obvious) argument against total market freedom in this particular market (labor).
  - kop316 8y ago
    That's understandable, your principle makes sense with that. An acceptable equilibrium and how much of it is regulated is a very political thing.
  - menacingly 8y ago
    This is a reasonable position and well-stated, but my concern is the implication that you will be vilified if you start a business that can't maintain a full time workforce with benefits. So, let's say you're an investor. You've got the choice of: 1) invest in a business with traditional happy lifer employees 2) invest in a business that treats its workforce like disposable contractors and may eventually become an Enemy of the People's Press, but offers higher potential returns, and may be able to eke out an existence in a niche that #1 could never serve. 3) invest in some less active financial instrument alchemy that employs zero local people and threatens no publicity waves There is (maybe) an argument that #1 is preferable to #2, but it's at least complicated. However, I think it's general agreed that both #1 & #2 are preferable to #3. If we're already talking Unions and unfair treatment of contractors 5 years into the existence of a type 1 here, one that no one knows could even exist under traditional employment circumstances, we may very well be driving funding into the reduced hassle of #3. That's certainly what it would do to me, though granted my "fuck it" threshold is 5-10x lower than the average person's.
- trevyn 8y ago
  Consider: It’s in both the workers’ and reporter’s best interest to make it sound worse than it is. Many would go so far as hyperbole, or straight up deceit.
  - menacingly 8y ago
    Furthermore, it doesn't stop. Once the press decides an arrangement is unfair on behalf of these adults, the articles will continue.
- dbuder 8y ago
  Lack of options, obviously.
- Certhas 8y ago
  If we had a universal income, and people would be free to sell or not sell their labor, we could talk about a meaningful equilibrium based on individuals preferences and choice. In that situation I doubt we would see many people taking on these jobs (including the parentheticals you mention) with these conditions.
  - darkerside 8y ago
    I posit that, in that case, a new "normal" baseline would be established by social consensus (perhaps, owning a home, smart phone, access to media, high quality medical care, and organic food) that is above what is afforded by the UBI. Falling below that threshold would then be deemed just as unacceptable as the poverty line today. And people won't solve it by taking on these undesirable jobs, they'll rail against an unfair system instead, just like we do today when things are already better than they've ever been. Such is human nature. Always has been, always will be. We just do the best we can to balance between indulging it with socialism, and leveraging it with capitalism.
    - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
      If we imagine that "life goodness" can be measured by a single real number, and we model it with a normal distribution with a mean somewhere on the positive axis, then one way to say what you describe is that we create a threshold somewhere along the left-hand tail of that distribution, and we declare anything below the threshold as morally unacceptable, in need of social constraints that prevent the permissibility of outcomes falling further to the left than our threshold. As technology enables expansion of the right-side tail for the relatively most wealthy, it seems like a reasonable utilitarian goal to say that we should adjust the left-side threshold more and more to the right, in a "optimize the well-being of the least well off" sense. So I'd view this ever rightward moving threshold as a very good thing that represents exactly what we want in terms of progress. If we ever got to a point where we said, welp "poor people" are now above the magic threshold (e.g. because the people on the left tail of the distribution mostly have hot showers, cell phones, and Netflix), so what more do they want? ... why are they complaining? ... this would be incredibly frightening. Essentially the wealthy would be deciding at which threshold upward human progress gets to stop, in favor of creating skewness in the distribution that concentrates more wealth into the right-side tail, as long as that left-side threshold stays above the "hot showers, cell phones, and Netflix" line.
- pfortuny 8y ago
  Read Dickens to get an idea of what human beings can “accept” to make a “living” for their families.
  - jeffreyrogers 8y ago
    The world is quite different now than in Dickens's time. Even in less progressive countries like the US.
  - conductr 8y ago
    I think optionality is a key difference. In Dickens' day, every job was a factory job and they all sucked. I'm pretty sure Deliveroo riders have other min wage options if they disagree with how Deliveroo wants to run it's business. Not to say that I fully agree with Deliveroo's choices if they are represented correctly, but I do agree with their ability to make those choices
    - pitaj 8y ago
      Yet more and more people kept moving into cities because the factory jobs that "all sucked" were better than subsistence farming.
- kome 8y ago
  > why even bother to work for them? Do you really need an answer? Sorry if I seem too aggressive, but I am quite frustrated by your (fake? real?) cluelessness.
  - miketery 8y ago
    People come from all sorts of backgrounds and don't have the same perspective as others. OP is asking a genuine question as they think they might lack a certain perspective (e.g. they are in a location with low wealth inequality, high class mobility, and no gig economy jobs to reference). Try and communicate to them what your perspective is instead of dismissing someone who is open to learning something new and hearing from others.
    - kome 8y ago
      From what kind of background do you need to come to understand that 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense [1] and most of the people in this world need to work all kinds of unpleasant jobs in order to survive? Is he living in an ivory tower isolated from the rest of humanity? But I guess, good for him, he may have leaned something really new: a sizable number of people have a hard time, even in first world countries. [1] http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/22/pf/emergency-expenses-household-finances/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/22/pf/emergency-expenses-househ...
      - bb101 8y ago
        In many parts of the western world, things aren't nearly as bad for the average worker as they are in the US. Remember that Hacker News is a global forum, so don't take for granted others' knowledge of the US or developing nations.
        kome 8y ago
        I never lived in the US...
      - jstanley 8y ago
- maze-le 8y ago
  The 'equilibrium' might be a nice theoretical model, but realistically, it fails, since not all people are in the same circumstances. In any society there will always be people, who don't have the resources/skills to take another job. Either its geographically located elsewhere any you are tied to certain location (there might be plenty of reasons for this). Or the job is above your skill level, and you cannot afford an education. Or you are in a position where you just cannot survive some weeks of financial insecurity. Thats why "workes rights" are important, its not just about you and me. Its mainly about people who don't have the means to say: "Fuck it I'm outta here!". Basic income could be societal anchor, that creates the conditions for such an equilibrium.
- isoprophlex 8y ago
  A slippery slope-style argument, as described at the end of the article (the rise of zero hour contracts): some workers will accept even the worst possible conditions, and this will shift the entire economy towards seeing this as acceptable.
- davidhyde 8y ago
  I think that this is a failing of the author of the article itself. Did they interview a couple of random deliveroo contractors and to build up some statistics or did they simply interview the union representative and a handful cherry picked others and conclude that this was the consensus of all deliveroo contractors.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- DanBC 8y ago
  The UK system of benefit conditionality forces people into these shitty jobs. The don't have a choice. They need to take the work or lose their benefit. There's an assumption from the Department for Work and Pensions that any work offered in the UK is legal. That's a reasonable assumption, but they could do with being a bit more proactive at protecting workers at the scummier end of the market. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/may/22/benefit-sanctions-found-to-be-ineffective-and-damaging https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/may/22/benefit-sanc... > For those people interviewed for the study who did obtain work, the most common outcome was a series of short-term, insecure jobs, interspersed with periods of unemployment, rather than a shift into sustained, well-paid work.
- smsm42 8y ago
  > If the conditions are just that bad, why even bother to work for them? Because nobody hires them on positions that have "minimum wage, paid holidays, pensions, protection from discrimination, and trade union rights" because these things cost money and the value they can deliver is below the cost of those things? Or because flexible hours and flexible employment schedule is worth for them more than trade union rights?
jesdjkeujjuju 8y ago
Good that it is absolutely not an one-sided article, favoring the viewpoint of the union exclusively. Garnered with some anecdotes of somebody having had an accident on the job once, or people sometimes not having assignments, to make it all seem oh so horrible. I would guess a lot of these Couriers are quite happy with their existence. It enables them to earn some money on the side, while they try to become starving artists or whatever. In any case, the cure for worker exploitation is not more rules. It is creating more jobs. Then workers with bad jobs can simply switch to a better job.
- justherefortart 8y ago
  Lmfao, simply switch to a better job. Simple solution for a simple mind.
- throwaway426079 8y ago
  It is clearly marked as being opinion, rather than news reporting.
justherefortart 8y ago
Too bad the governments of the world seem more interested in protecting the corporations than the general population.
- msiyer 8y ago
  Government is a corporation. Corporations are the government.
crankylinuxuser 8y ago
On a different reading and assessment: Many jobs, no, most jobs are combinations of small individual parts of a whole action. And this shows that piecemeal work by dozens of different people not only works, but bypasses the whole level of employee/employer level controls. Take a lawyer's job for example.. The research can be farmed off crowdsourced style. Nobody has to know what the case is about, only the search parameters given. All the gruntwork can be contracted can be cheaply contracted with little knowledge about the actual case. Then, a paralegal, again contracted out, can sign the appropriate NDA and do the paperwork for the filing. And finally, the actual lawyer just signs their name after a quick review. This is doable right now. We also see this in medical establishments, where interns (aka: unlicensed people) can actually do surgery under a doctor's license. I could see mega-health orgs using maybe 4-5 doctors, and hire hyperspecialized interns to do the gruntwork. The doctors would primarily overview routine stuff and take over in catastrophes. The only people who're safe right now are us automators. My labor = 1000 or 10000 physical laborers, as my tools (computers) give me leverage of a massive multiplier. A journeyman's tools maybe provide *5 labor speedup. And these contract delivery people are literally 1x. (It's shitty to compare, but that's what capitalism already does with $$$/yr)
- amelius 8y ago
  Except lawyers and doctors are highly protective of their employment and status. There's often a numerus clausus in universities, limiting the number of doctors that enter the field. And there's the FDA which controls medical practices, and since they consist of medically trained people, they are probably also highly protective of the status quo.
  - chimeracoder 8y ago
    > There's often a numerus clausus in universities, limiting the number of doctors that enter the field. The number of doctors that enter the field is limited not by the number of people who graduate with medical degrees, but by the number of residency positions available for training. Every year, we graduate more medical students than we have residency slots available, and that's not including foreign graduates who do their medical studies abroad but want to practice in the US. There is no artificial limit for residency slots; the limit is the amount of funding available. Most of these are heavily subsidized by the government. Hospitals are free to create their own positions in addition, if they can fund them themselves. Very few do, because residency programs actually lose money on margin.
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
My brother works as an inventory clerk in a small-town factory in the midwest that makes small batches of custom metal parts sold to other factories. He has been there several years and is one of the more skilled employees, and makes just under $18,000 per year. No retirement or profit sharing benefits. The work conditions are unsafe, with lax enforcement of safety policies for forklifts, stacks of containers, cleaning chemicals. Most employees are expected to perform the duties of the equivalent of 2-3 workers, including staying late without being paid overtime. The work can be physically grueling at times, even for my brother as inventory clerk, and much worse for some of the general factory floor workers. The company has three salespeople who make The Office look like it was written by Norman Mailer. They interrupt people to go on diatribes about trite motivational anecdotes, talk about how you have to work hard to get places, and then sit in separate offices playing solitaire on their computers with the door open so that anyone can see them doing it. The company's absentee owner comes in every once in a while and holds catered lunches for the sales team, and literally excludes the ~10 other staff in the warehouse who actually do all of the work. Sales people make 5x-10x what the other staff make, and receive bonuses in the form of fully paid family vacations when they close big sales contracts, despite the fact that the rest of the staff often has to do tons of work to close the contracts, even including assisting the sales people with creating their PowerPoint slides, or pointing out statistical errors in charts and things. My brother personally has saved them hundreds of thousands of dollars, possibly over a million, just in 2017, by catching quality control issues with batches of metal they received from an overseas supplier, which could have caused the company to lose one of their critical contracts. He also has had to fill in as a last-minute delivery driver for the company delivery van, working late into the night to drive all over a rural area delivering metal parts when the regular delivery driver was out sick. My brother has 10 days of paid vacation and it's a dogfight every time he wants to use them. His last raise (of $0.25 per hour) was more than a year ago. The company actively preys upon people with past criminal records, knowing that they are hard up for employment in a region where employment is already hard to find, and that once they are hired they will put up with any degree of degrading treatment. (My brother does not have a criminal record, but about 75% of the general warehouse staff do, and many did not finish high school and have a hard time even understanding the terms of their employment. The current staff are sometimes asked informally if they know any people with criminal records to recommend for open positions). This isn't a case of an employer helping the community by fairly considering ex-criminals for open roles. It's a situation where they tacitly target these people on the assumption they won't have to treat them fairly or respectfully, and can exploit them to a greater degree because they'll have fewer options to leave. My brother does not have enough personal savings to move away, and likely would have to have a job lined up that paid relocation before he could even consider it, otherwise just moving to a new location would put him at the point of insolvency. Literally, the option of quitting is logically not an option, because it directly implies insolvency and, probably, a dangerously high risk of suicide. So, despite whatever superficial sense one might want to say he is "in a free labor market," it is just disingenuous junk nonsense. No matter how frugally he lives, his amount of salary is just so egregiously low that it could never be possibly to work his way into a better life situation. Not even decades of savings could do it for him, even if he was living at the absolute most extreme end of frugality (which he pretty much already is). He is just not paid a wage that can possibly sustain a viable savings rate, and there are no other jobs nearby, and moving is not economically feasible. He doesn't have a college degree (dropped out of college due to severe diagnosed clinical depression and anxiety attacks -- still has student loans of course), but is highly intelligent, curious and resourceful. He is one of the few people who can make me laugh. He's a beautiful musician in his spare time, a wonderfully witty writer, and generous with his free time spent helping his friends and family and trying to do odd jobs for extra money when he can find opportunities (not often). And there are many people in the US with even worse employment exploitation situations than my brother -- and vastly worse situations around the world. His story is already so bad we should be morally outraged by it, and it's not even among the worst stories you'll hear. I can't imagine what it's like to be in a similar situation to his, and then to add racial abuse, sexual harassment, or other forms of discrimination or marginalization on top of it. It just blows my mind sometimes how ignorant we all can be of the genuine exploitation in our labor market. There's no sense in which it's a morally acceptable reflection of some market equilibrium. It's just: one side has inherited power and uses power to accrue and entrench more power; the other side is literally in serfdom. Even when people "earn" positions of power through economically productive output, it's on the backs of people in these situations, and through infinite other forms of mass exploitation, in the form of regulatory capture, backroom deals, outright fraud, and manipulation of publicly provided resources. The part attributable to any one person's work ethic or natural talent is so fleetingly small that it's just shocking how we still try to glorify it and hold it up as an example of why they "earned" power and wealth, and why those being exploited somehow are always to blame for it.
raisethrowdrop 8y ago
I have worked as a Deliveroo courier in London for a good while. I had no problems with it. The issue as I see it is with people relying on their employer, client, whatever you wish to call it. Business is business. If you treat it as anything other, you will eventually encounter issues (especially at the lower end). The union stuff should be seen in that framework. It's a negotiation. I got on my bike, made ten quid an hour in some free time, got a bit of exercise, and that was that. It's obviously not a career. It's kind of frustrating to see people hypothesise. Go and apply and do it and see what it's like, the barrier to entry is near zero.
moe98ntuin34 8y ago
To me, the real takeaway is this: > unlike, say, immigration law, there is weak enforcement of employment law. For me in the US, this is the crux of the current wave of anti-immigrant sentiment. The problem isn't "immigrants stealing our jobs." It's shitty jobs that don't cover basic costs and have inhumane working conditions. But the people in power have done a great job of misdirecting people's attention to immigrants. Boy are they going to be disappointed when all the immigrants are gone and they still can't make a living.
- sykh 8y ago
  Shouldn’t the decrease in available labor as a result of decreased immigration lead to wage increases? Particularly for jobs that aren’t going to be shipped overseas (construction, manual labor..). EDIT: I know the topic of immigration can evoke strong emotions. I’m just pointing out that a decrease in labor pool ought to increase wages. Isn’t this just law of supply/demand?
  - rhizome 8y ago
    Get ready for $12 lettuce.
    - sykh 8y ago
      That may be a result of decreased immigration. I’m only pointing out that if illegal immigration were wiped out then wages would increase.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    >Shouldn’t the decrease in available labor as a result of decreased immigration lead to wage increases? It works this way if you consider a terrible work environment to be negative wage. For jobs that hover around minimum wage because of low margins labor shortages mean better working conditions. For example, if you toss a "must be able to piss clean" requirement on any job that doesn't require the employee to have the sunk cost of years of training and it adds about 50% to the effective hourly wage. Another example would be university wages. Many departments can only afford work-study student workers. When you need work-study student workers with more than just a pulse you have to treat them better because most students would rather work for dining services and do an equally terrible job with free food. The problem is that at a state/national level there's so much feedback delay, immigration is not evenly distributed, etc, etc that you can't extrapolate
andrewingram 8y ago
One thing to note, whilst article claims that nobody would utilise the substitution clause, this is false. It's unusual, but it does happen. I work for a business with Deliveroo couriers as customers, and it's occasionally asked by some of them whether we support substitute drivers.
kyle-rb 8y ago
>Such a system encourages riders to travel at dangerous speeds: once, 25-year-old Mohaan came off his motorbike and badly injured his knee cap, but continued to his destination for fear that terminating the job would get him the sack. So this is basically Snow Crash.

93 points by raaxe 8y ago

Serious question: If the conditions are just that bad, why even bother to work for them? There seems to be some sort of equilibrium to me where if it gets bad enough, no one will simply want to do this job, and choose to take some other low paying job (e.g. retail, fast food, etc.).

menacingly 8y ago
Agreed. I can swallow these "the company owes us something" arguments for businesses so large they make up the entire employment for a city, but not cases like this. It's unsettling that now every business has a big moral obligation to make sure employees make the best choices for themselves.
- shabble 8y ago
  Alternatively, every business (or rather, the people who operate and control that business) have a moral obligation not to unreasonably exploit their employees. I would expect that to be a fairly common sentiment/belief (though I might be wrong). It comes down to the particular definition of 'unreasonably' that is being used, which different groups can and do disagree about.
  - menacingly 8y ago
    That's fair. For instance, company stores in mining towns were clearly designed to trap employees into a lifetime of debt with almost no personal choice in the matter. It's the choice aspect I focus on. No one is forcing them, and it's borderline elitist of someone with a nice job to say "that's gross work and I think it should go away so things are less gross", along the lines of thinking families straddling the poverty line should simply "eat more quality food"
roel_v 8y ago
That's true to a certain extent, but experience (19th century beginning-of-industrialization) has taught us that the floor (i.e., the equilibrium) is bad enough that we don't want that sort of circumstances. In other words, it turns out that people want to work to eat so badly that they'll put up with working 14-hour days and letting their 10 year old children work in factories that literally kill 10's of them per year. I'm not saying gig workers' circumstances are nearly as bad as those in the 19th century, I'm just illustrating the principle. The discussion then continues at 'what is an acceptable equilibrium'. Of which certain people, unsurprisingly, find that today's is not OK. Note that I'm not saying here which side of the discussion I side on (that's a political question not worth rehashing here I think), just pointing out the (rather obvious) argument against total market freedom in this particular market (labor).
- kop316 8y ago
  That's understandable, your principle makes sense with that. An acceptable equilibrium and how much of it is regulated is a very political thing.
- menacingly 8y ago
  This is a reasonable position and well-stated, but my concern is the implication that you will be vilified if you start a business that can't maintain a full time workforce with benefits. So, let's say you're an investor. You've got the choice of: 1) invest in a business with traditional happy lifer employees 2) invest in a business that treats its workforce like disposable contractors and may eventually become an Enemy of the People's Press, but offers higher potential returns, and may be able to eke out an existence in a niche that #1 could never serve. 3) invest in some less active financial instrument alchemy that employs zero local people and threatens no publicity waves There is (maybe) an argument that #1 is preferable to #2, but it's at least complicated. However, I think it's general agreed that both #1 & #2 are preferable to #3. If we're already talking Unions and unfair treatment of contractors 5 years into the existence of a type 1 here, one that no one knows could even exist under traditional employment circumstances, we may very well be driving funding into the reduced hassle of #3. That's certainly what it would do to me, though granted my "fuck it" threshold is 5-10x lower than the average person's.
trevyn 8y ago
Consider: It’s in both the workers’ and reporter’s best interest to make it sound worse than it is. Many would go so far as hyperbole, or straight up deceit.
- menacingly 8y ago
  Furthermore, it doesn't stop. Once the press decides an arrangement is unfair on behalf of these adults, the articles will continue.
dbuder 8y ago
Lack of options, obviously.
Certhas 8y ago
If we had a universal income, and people would be free to sell or not sell their labor, we could talk about a meaningful equilibrium based on individuals preferences and choice. In that situation I doubt we would see many people taking on these jobs (including the parentheticals you mention) with these conditions.
- darkerside 8y ago
  I posit that, in that case, a new "normal" baseline would be established by social consensus (perhaps, owning a home, smart phone, access to media, high quality medical care, and organic food) that is above what is afforded by the UBI. Falling below that threshold would then be deemed just as unacceptable as the poverty line today. And people won't solve it by taking on these undesirable jobs, they'll rail against an unfair system instead, just like we do today when things are already better than they've ever been. Such is human nature. Always has been, always will be. We just do the best we can to balance between indulging it with socialism, and leveraging it with capitalism.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    If we imagine that "life goodness" can be measured by a single real number, and we model it with a normal distribution with a mean somewhere on the positive axis, then one way to say what you describe is that we create a threshold somewhere along the left-hand tail of that distribution, and we declare anything below the threshold as morally unacceptable, in need of social constraints that prevent the permissibility of outcomes falling further to the left than our threshold. As technology enables expansion of the right-side tail for the relatively most wealthy, it seems like a reasonable utilitarian goal to say that we should adjust the left-side threshold more and more to the right, in a "optimize the well-being of the least well off" sense. So I'd view this ever rightward moving threshold as a very good thing that represents exactly what we want in terms of progress. If we ever got to a point where we said, welp "poor people" are now above the magic threshold (e.g. because the people on the left tail of the distribution mostly have hot showers, cell phones, and Netflix), so what more do they want? ... why are they complaining? ... this would be incredibly frightening. Essentially the wealthy would be deciding at which threshold upward human progress gets to stop, in favor of creating skewness in the distribution that concentrates more wealth into the right-side tail, as long as that left-side threshold stays above the "hot showers, cell phones, and Netflix" line.
pfortuny 8y ago
Read Dickens to get an idea of what human beings can “accept” to make a “living” for their families.
- jeffreyrogers 8y ago
  The world is quite different now than in Dickens's time. Even in less progressive countries like the US.
- conductr 8y ago
  I think optionality is a key difference. In Dickens' day, every job was a factory job and they all sucked. I'm pretty sure Deliveroo riders have other min wage options if they disagree with how Deliveroo wants to run it's business. Not to say that I fully agree with Deliveroo's choices if they are represented correctly, but I do agree with their ability to make those choices
  - pitaj 8y ago
    Yet more and more people kept moving into cities because the factory jobs that "all sucked" were better than subsistence farming.
kome 8y ago
> why even bother to work for them? Do you really need an answer? Sorry if I seem too aggressive, but I am quite frustrated by your (fake? real?) cluelessness.
- miketery 8y ago
  People come from all sorts of backgrounds and don't have the same perspective as others. OP is asking a genuine question as they think they might lack a certain perspective (e.g. they are in a location with low wealth inequality, high class mobility, and no gig economy jobs to reference). Try and communicate to them what your perspective is instead of dismissing someone who is open to learning something new and hearing from others.
  - kome 8y ago
    From what kind of background do you need to come to understand that 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense [1] and most of the people in this world need to work all kinds of unpleasant jobs in order to survive? Is he living in an ivory tower isolated from the rest of humanity? But I guess, good for him, he may have leaned something really new: a sizable number of people have a hard time, even in first world countries. [1] http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/22/pf/emergency-expenses-household-finances/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/22/pf/emergency-expenses-househ...
    - bb101 8y ago
      In many parts of the western world, things aren't nearly as bad for the average worker as they are in the US. Remember that Hacker News is a global forum, so don't take for granted others' knowledge of the US or developing nations.
      - kome 8y ago
        I never lived in the US...
    - jstanley 8y ago
maze-le 8y ago
The 'equilibrium' might be a nice theoretical model, but realistically, it fails, since not all people are in the same circumstances. In any society there will always be people, who don't have the resources/skills to take another job. Either its geographically located elsewhere any you are tied to certain location (there might be plenty of reasons for this). Or the job is above your skill level, and you cannot afford an education. Or you are in a position where you just cannot survive some weeks of financial insecurity. Thats why "workes rights" are important, its not just about you and me. Its mainly about people who don't have the means to say: "Fuck it I'm outta here!". Basic income could be societal anchor, that creates the conditions for such an equilibrium.
isoprophlex 8y ago
A slippery slope-style argument, as described at the end of the article (the rise of zero hour contracts): some workers will accept even the worst possible conditions, and this will shift the entire economy towards seeing this as acceptable.
davidhyde 8y ago
I think that this is a failing of the author of the article itself. Did they interview a couple of random deliveroo contractors and to build up some statistics or did they simply interview the union representative and a handful cherry picked others and conclude that this was the consensus of all deliveroo contractors.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
DanBC 8y ago
The UK system of benefit conditionality forces people into these shitty jobs. The don't have a choice. They need to take the work or lose their benefit. There's an assumption from the Department for Work and Pensions that any work offered in the UK is legal. That's a reasonable assumption, but they could do with being a bit more proactive at protecting workers at the scummier end of the market. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/may/22/benefit-sanctions-found-to-be-ineffective-and-damaging https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/may/22/benefit-sanc... > For those people interviewed for the study who did obtain work, the most common outcome was a series of short-term, insecure jobs, interspersed with periods of unemployment, rather than a shift into sustained, well-paid work.
smsm42 8y ago
> If the conditions are just that bad, why even bother to work for them? Because nobody hires them on positions that have "minimum wage, paid holidays, pensions, protection from discrimination, and trade union rights" because these things cost money and the value they can deliver is below the cost of those things? Or because flexible hours and flexible employment schedule is worth for them more than trade union rights?

jesdjkeujjuju 8y ago

Good that it is absolutely not an one-sided article, favoring the viewpoint of the union exclusively. Garnered with some anecdotes of somebody having had an accident on the job once, or people sometimes not having assignments, to make it all seem oh so horrible. I would guess a lot of these Couriers are quite happy with their existence. It enables them to earn some money on the side, while they try to become starving artists or whatever. In any case, the cure for worker exploitation is not more rules. It is creating more jobs. Then workers with bad jobs can simply switch to a better job.

justherefortart 8y ago
Lmfao, simply switch to a better job. Simple solution for a simple mind.
throwaway426079 8y ago
It is clearly marked as being opinion, rather than news reporting.

justherefortart 8y ago

Too bad the governments of the world seem more interested in protecting the corporations than the general population.

msiyer 8y ago
Government is a corporation. Corporations are the government.

crankylinuxuser 8y ago

On a different reading and assessment: Many jobs, no, most jobs are combinations of small individual parts of a whole action. And this shows that piecemeal work by dozens of different people not only works, but bypasses the whole level of employee/employer level controls. Take a lawyer's job for example.. The research can be farmed off crowdsourced style. Nobody has to know what the case is about, only the search parameters given. All the gruntwork can be contracted can be cheaply contracted with little knowledge about the actual case. Then, a paralegal, again contracted out, can sign the appropriate NDA and do the paperwork for the filing. And finally, the actual lawyer just signs their name after a quick review. This is doable right now. We also see this in medical establishments, where interns (aka: unlicensed people) can actually do surgery under a doctor's license. I could see mega-health orgs using maybe 4-5 doctors, and hire hyperspecialized interns to do the gruntwork. The doctors would primarily overview routine stuff and take over in catastrophes. The only people who're safe right now are us automators. My labor = 1000 or 10000 physical laborers, as my tools (computers) give me leverage of a massive multiplier. A journeyman's tools maybe provide *5 labor speedup. And these contract delivery people are literally 1x. (It's shitty to compare, but that's what capitalism already does with $$$/yr)

amelius 8y ago
Except lawyers and doctors are highly protective of their employment and status. There's often a numerus clausus in universities, limiting the number of doctors that enter the field. And there's the FDA which controls medical practices, and since they consist of medically trained people, they are probably also highly protective of the status quo.
- chimeracoder 8y ago
  > There's often a numerus clausus in universities, limiting the number of doctors that enter the field. The number of doctors that enter the field is limited not by the number of people who graduate with medical degrees, but by the number of residency positions available for training. Every year, we graduate more medical students than we have residency slots available, and that's not including foreign graduates who do their medical studies abroad but want to practice in the US. There is no artificial limit for residency slots; the limit is the amount of funding available. Most of these are heavily subsidized by the government. Hospitals are free to create their own positions in addition, if they can fund them themselves. Very few do, because residency programs actually lose money on margin.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

My brother works as an inventory clerk in a small-town factory in the midwest that makes small batches of custom metal parts sold to other factories. He has been there several years and is one of the more skilled employees, and makes just under $18,000 per year. No retirement or profit sharing benefits. The work conditions are unsafe, with lax enforcement of safety policies for forklifts, stacks of containers, cleaning chemicals. Most employees are expected to perform the duties of the equivalent of 2-3 workers, including staying late without being paid overtime. The work can be physically grueling at times, even for my brother as inventory clerk, and much worse for some of the general factory floor workers. The company has three salespeople who make The Office look like it was written by Norman Mailer. They interrupt people to go on diatribes about trite motivational anecdotes, talk about how you have to work hard to get places, and then sit in separate offices playing solitaire on their computers with the door open so that anyone can see them doing it. The company's absentee owner comes in every once in a while and holds catered lunches for the sales team, and literally excludes the ~10 other staff in the warehouse who actually do all of the work. Sales people make 5x-10x what the other staff make, and receive bonuses in the form of fully paid family vacations when they close big sales contracts, despite the fact that the rest of the staff often has to do tons of work to close the contracts, even including assisting the sales people with creating their PowerPoint slides, or pointing out statistical errors in charts and things. My brother personally has saved them hundreds of thousands of dollars, possibly over a million, just in 2017, by catching quality control issues with batches of metal they received from an overseas supplier, which could have caused the company to lose one of their critical contracts. He also has had to fill in as a last-minute delivery driver for the company delivery van, working late into the night to drive all over a rural area delivering metal parts when the regular delivery driver was out sick. My brother has 10 days of paid vacation and it's a dogfight every time he wants to use them. His last raise (of $0.25 per hour) was more than a year ago. The company actively preys upon people with past criminal records, knowing that they are hard up for employment in a region where employment is already hard to find, and that once they are hired they will put up with any degree of degrading treatment. (My brother does not have a criminal record, but about 75% of the general warehouse staff do, and many did not finish high school and have a hard time even understanding the terms of their employment. The current staff are sometimes asked informally if they know any people with criminal records to recommend for open positions). This isn't a case of an employer helping the community by fairly considering ex-criminals for open roles. It's a situation where they tacitly target these people on the assumption they won't have to treat them fairly or respectfully, and can exploit them to a greater degree because they'll have fewer options to leave. My brother does not have enough personal savings to move away, and likely would have to have a job lined up that paid relocation before he could even consider it, otherwise just moving to a new location would put him at the point of insolvency. Literally, the option of quitting is logically not an option, because it directly implies insolvency and, probably, a dangerously high risk of suicide. So, despite whatever superficial sense one might want to say he is "in a free labor market," it is just disingenuous junk nonsense. No matter how frugally he lives, his amount of salary is just so egregiously low that it could never be possibly to work his way into a better life situation. Not even decades of savings could do it for him, even if he was living at the absolute most extreme end of frugality (which he pretty much already is). He is just not paid a wage that can possibly sustain a viable savings rate, and there are no other jobs nearby, and moving is not economically feasible. He doesn't have a college degree (dropped out of college due to severe diagnosed clinical depression and anxiety attacks -- still has student loans of course), but is highly intelligent, curious and resourceful. He is one of the few people who can make me laugh. He's a beautiful musician in his spare time, a wonderfully witty writer, and generous with his free time spent helping his friends and family and trying to do odd jobs for extra money when he can find opportunities (not often). And there are many people in the US with even worse employment exploitation situations than my brother -- and vastly worse situations around the world. His story is already so bad we should be morally outraged by it, and it's not even among the worst stories you'll hear. I can't imagine what it's like to be in a similar situation to his, and then to add racial abuse, sexual harassment, or other forms of discrimination or marginalization on top of it. It just blows my mind sometimes how ignorant we all can be of the genuine exploitation in our labor market. There's no sense in which it's a morally acceptable reflection of some market equilibrium. It's just: one side has inherited power and uses power to accrue and entrench more power; the other side is literally in serfdom. Even when people "earn" positions of power through economically productive output, it's on the backs of people in these situations, and through infinite other forms of mass exploitation, in the form of regulatory capture, backroom deals, outright fraud, and manipulation of publicly provided resources. The part attributable to any one person's work ethic or natural talent is so fleetingly small that it's just shocking how we still try to glorify it and hold it up as an example of why they "earned" power and wealth, and why those being exploited somehow are always to blame for it.

raisethrowdrop 8y ago

I have worked as a Deliveroo courier in London for a good while. I had no problems with it. The issue as I see it is with people relying on their employer, client, whatever you wish to call it. Business is business. If you treat it as anything other, you will eventually encounter issues (especially at the lower end). The union stuff should be seen in that framework. It's a negotiation. I got on my bike, made ten quid an hour in some free time, got a bit of exercise, and that was that. It's obviously not a career. It's kind of frustrating to see people hypothesise. Go and apply and do it and see what it's like, the barrier to entry is near zero.

moe98ntuin34 8y ago

To me, the real takeaway is this: > unlike, say, immigration law, there is weak enforcement of employment law. For me in the US, this is the crux of the current wave of anti-immigrant sentiment. The problem isn't "immigrants stealing our jobs." It's shitty jobs that don't cover basic costs and have inhumane working conditions. But the people in power have done a great job of misdirecting people's attention to immigrants. Boy are they going to be disappointed when all the immigrants are gone and they still can't make a living.

sykh 8y ago
Shouldn’t the decrease in available labor as a result of decreased immigration lead to wage increases? Particularly for jobs that aren’t going to be shipped overseas (construction, manual labor..). EDIT: I know the topic of immigration can evoke strong emotions. I’m just pointing out that a decrease in labor pool ought to increase wages. Isn’t this just law of supply/demand?
- rhizome 8y ago
  Get ready for $12 lettuce.
  - sykh 8y ago
    That may be a result of decreased immigration. I’m only pointing out that if illegal immigration were wiped out then wages would increase.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  >Shouldn’t the decrease in available labor as a result of decreased immigration lead to wage increases? It works this way if you consider a terrible work environment to be negative wage. For jobs that hover around minimum wage because of low margins labor shortages mean better working conditions. For example, if you toss a "must be able to piss clean" requirement on any job that doesn't require the employee to have the sunk cost of years of training and it adds about 50% to the effective hourly wage. Another example would be university wages. Many departments can only afford work-study student workers. When you need work-study student workers with more than just a pulse you have to treat them better because most students would rather work for dining services and do an equally terrible job with free food. The problem is that at a state/national level there's so much feedback delay, immigration is not evenly distributed, etc, etc that you can't extrapolate

andrewingram 8y ago

One thing to note, whilst article claims that nobody would utilise the substitution clause, this is false. It's unusual, but it does happen. I work for a business with Deliveroo couriers as customers, and it's occasionally asked by some of them whether we support substitute drivers.

kyle-rb 8y ago

>Such a system encourages riders to travel at dangerous speeds: once, 25-year-old Mohaan came off his motorbike and badly injured his knee cap, but continued to his destination for fear that terminating the job would get him the sack. So this is basically Snow Crash.