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I meant something like "fraction of the employee's time spent on what the employer considers to be productive/useful work". Contrast it with a typical salaried
by elvinyung 8y ago
I meant something like "fraction of the employee's time spent on what the employer considers to be productive/useful work".
Contrast it with a typical salaried job. In such a position, people basically get paid to take bathroom breaks, chat with coworkers, check social media, eat lunch, etc. and they might not even be in the office for the full 40 hours a week. They get to eat up even more resources by participating in benefits like health insurance, paid time off, and pensions. Isn't that such a waste of resources?
- maxerickson 8y agoOptimize that ratio, ignore productivity, achieve glory. That salary work mostly pays a lot more than gig work tells you something about the economic impact of both. Gig work might be more efficient than hourly pay for the same work, but it isn't maximizing overall economic efficiency, it's a middle man capturing more of the value.
- elvinyung 8y agoBut salaried work also needs things like a university degree (mostly). What I'm worried about isn't so much that there will always (or for the foreseeable future) be "skilled" and "unskilled" buckets of labor, but that there's this self-reinforcing loop that creates a permanent underclass of gig workers.
- maxerickson 8y agoLots of skilled jobs don't need college degrees, employers just require them because it's convenient filter that doesn't have much of a downside for them.
- chrisweekly 8y agoYou did qualify your assertion with "mostly", but IME (I switched from trad salaried employment to FT consulting 2 years ago), there's a lot more money to be made in the latter. You have to deal with more risk and more uncertainty, but in terms of income, the upside is way, way higher.
- edoceo 8y agoConsulting is not a "gig economy" type job
- maxerickson 8y agoI get that there is linguistic overlap and some similar conditions, but business consulting is better described as a professional service (like lawyering or accounting) than it is as gig labor.
- bicubic 8y agoMarx discussed this thoroughly. The same thing is happening to salaried jobs, just to a lesser extent. This phenomenon was one of his bigger objections to capitalism. All productive labour is being broken down into pipelined work streams where any individual worker performs as simple and as well defined a task as you can give them, and performs that task all day every day. This increases the economic efficiency of the worker, at the expense of depriving their work life of any meaning and turning them into an unremarkable, disposable, exchangeable cog in a machine. Pretty much every industry in the developed world follows this trend, including tech.
- elvinyung 8y agoYes, exactly. It almost feels like secure salaried positions were actually the abnormal deviation in history, a small island of stability caused by a temporary surge of social democratic politics in the post-Great Depression era.
- antidesitter 8y ago> democratic socialist politics Do you mean social democratic?
- elvinyung 8y agoGah, sorry, fixed -- thanks!
- bachbach 8y agoQuibble - this comes from Smith. It's not specifically a Marxist complaint - just one popular with them.
- bicubic 8y agoMind referencing where Smith highlights this as a drawback of capitalism? I'd like to learn more.
- pmorici 8y agoEfficiency, to me, means getting the same result for less inputs. This could take the form of a less expensive method for performing some work or a higher utilization of existing time / equipment. A lot of these gig employers aren't increasing efficiency they are just shifting costs to unsophisticated workers who don't realize it.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> A lot of these gig employers aren't increasing efficiency Regarding ridesharing, I disagree. App-based hailing is objectively more efficient and scalable (to lower population densities) than street hailing, and more efficient than privately-owned cars requiring massive, distributed investments in parking infrastructure.
- radiantswirl 8y agoApp-based hailing increases efficiency for SOME people in SOME domains, but studies show that App-based hailing unequivocally REDUCES efficiency in terms of traffic and pollution on a city-wide scale because it incentivizes people to take car trips they wouldn't have otherwise taken and because Uber/Lyft drivers wind up clogging the streets with single-rider cars as they drive to their next fare. TL;DR: App-based hailing does increase efficiency of transportation for consumers in the very short term, but it definitely DECREASES the efficiency of transportation for cities as a whole in the longer term. Allowing Ride-sharing to exist is a Faustian bargain that cities have made with VC-Funded tech "bullies" like Trav Kalanick. The cities win in the short term on an individual basis for each of its residents, but the cities lose as a collective in the long term. It's a version of the Faustian bargain America made by replacing trains with cars -- yes, cars bring greater transportation efficiency ON AN INDIVIDUAL LEVEL but they massively reduce it on a collective level. Ride-sharing apps do the same thing. Individualism and collectivism are both Faustian bargains in different ways. We need a balance between the two ideologies that allows will-to-power Nietzchean entrepreneurial folks to generate value without shitting on the less-energetic people who create less value through no fault of their own. We need Minimum Viable Individualism. Uber, Lyft, and -- depending who you ask, cars themselves -- are examples of Individualism Run Amok because they empower the Nietzchean folks (Trav Kalanick, Henry Ford & Co) at the direct expense of the Lower-Energy folks (Uber Drivers and the pedestrians they annoy) instead of creating a win-win situation like the Hyperloop, or other more innovative transportation-tech plans that are admittedly idealistic but at least aren't transparently exploitative of "the little guys" as a collective (of both drivers and pedestrians) like ride-sharing apps so obviously are.
- moorhosj 8y agoBy hiring a salaried worker, you are essentially locking all of their work to your company's benefit. A quality gig worker can finish an assignment at your company and go work for your biggest competitor. There is value in monopolizing their value to your organization.
- Latteland 8y agoIn practice this switching ability isn't true or easy. Sandwich workers in Seattle had to sign non-competes and couldn't go work at other restaurants. There was a lawsuit from the city to stop it.
- lovich 8y agoSame in Massachusetts with sandwich workers, they finally had to make a law limiting no competes even though there had been political opposition to that idea for years. Companies are attempting to monopolize the employees output, but only pay for the seconds the employee is producing for them
- moorhosj 8y agoSandwich workers are hourly not salaried.
- leetcrew 8y agosalary vs contractor is pretty similar to wholesale vs retail. if you know up front that you need a large amount of work from someone over a long period of time, you hire them as an FTE with a salary. the wholesale rate for developer time is much lower than what a comparable contractor will charge you per hour for the convenience of only paying for the hours where they do useful work. a possible reason why it is uneconomic to give gig economy workers salaries is because the necessary discount would put them below minimum wage.