4 ms·

You are just repeating the Uber party line that somehow "employment" is antithetical to flexible work hours. It's frightening to see people just lap that up be

You are just repeating the Uber party line that somehow "employment" is antithetical to flexible work hours. It's frightening to see people just lap that up because it happens to coincide with their day job. But nothing in labor law prevents a company like Uber from "disrupting work" and offering that flexibility to employees.

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
The current employee model as codified in our tax and legal system definitely has lots of assumptions around only having a single W2 employer. Certaintly not impossible, but definitely not a good fit. I agree with the OP, and I am not just "repeating the Uber party line". I believe 3 categories of work are needed: 1. Employee (e.g. current W2), where you have a single full-time employer who is primarily responsible for your wages and benefits. 2. Independent Contractor, where the IC has full control over their rates, where they do the work, their tools, etc. 3. "Flexible" employee, where the employee has full control over their hours and availability, and to work for multiple employers, but doesn't have control over rates or how the work is done.
- brianpgordon 7y ago
  Many people have multiple jobs (even full-time jobs) and receive multiple W2s in the mail every year. I'm not an expert in employment law but I haven't seen evidence that the current multi-job system isn't workable here. You can have multiple part time jobs, and if one job goes over a certain threshold of hours then they have to provide you benefits. If you have multiple full-time jobs, all of them are required to offer you participation in employer-sponsored benefits, although you typically only pick one. Is that not how it works?
  - spookthesunset 7y ago
    Uber and lyft and DoorDash etc aren’t paid as wall clock hours though. You can be “clocked in” to as many as you want at once. One drive you might be working for Uber and the very next might be some Postmates order. Maybe even both on the same trip. Focusing on wall clock hours doesn’t make sense for these kinds of jobs.
    - brianpgordon 7y ago
      I have a few parallel objections: 1. It's not like it would be difficult to track all of the little chunks of time worked and add them all up. Everything is automated anyway, and nobody is filing time cards. 2. In the end, the wall clock is how workers experience time when they're out doing work for these companies. They get their bike out and go deliver food for a few hours, or get in their car and drive around the city picking up and dropping off passengers. It's not clear to me that the interstitial minutes between gigs should be considered free time for the workers that goes uncompensated. If they drop off a passenger and pick up a new one within five or ten minutes, they've been working continuously. They haven't had a chance to go home and take their socks off and relax. They're working. It seems like a step backwards for everyone's mental well-being to use technology to clock the exact minutes that they produce value for the company, and cut off their pay the instant they stop producing. It's like a widget assembly line monitored by cameras where workers get automatically clocked in only when they're physically touching the widgets, so that if they sit up to stretch, or walk over to the cabinet to grab a different tool, or even if the conveyor belt is sending the next widget over to be worked on, they stop getting paid. I wouldn't want to work like that. 3. The fact that someone can be doing work for multiple companies at the same time doesn't seem like such a big problem to me. If they're on a segment of a route in which they're simultaneously delivering a passenger and someone's lunch, they should get paid for both. And the same contiguous-time rules I mentioned in #2 above can apply - as long as they're continuously picking up lunches and passengers within a certain interval, they're working two jobs.
      - s1artibartfast 7y ago
        in response to 2 and 3: What about the status quo where gig workers are running 2-5 apps at once. If they are payed between trips, do they collect minimum wage from all companies?
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > The current employee model as codified in our tax and legal system definitely has lots of assumptions around only having a single W2 employer. No, it doesn't; multiple W-2 employees is a common thing and the law has no assumptions that conflict with it. (Multiple full-time W-2 employers, maybe, are something of an issue, but not merely multiple W-2 employers.) > "Flexible" employee, where the employee has full control over their hours and availability, and to work for multiple employers, but doesn't have control over rates or how the work is done. This seems like regular on-demand temp work, where pretty much every feature of that is routine, and has always been W-2. Sure, technology including platforms like Uber, et al., make it practical to have more rapid offer/accept cycles and finer-grained work assignments, but they don't fundamentally change the nature of on-demand temp work in a way which requires any different treatment legally than such work has historically been given.
pishpash 7y ago
"Nothing" you say? It's called market forces that will remove flexibility from employees, because that's less costly.

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago

The current employee model as codified in our tax and legal system definitely has lots of assumptions around only having a single W2 employer. Certaintly not impossible, but definitely not a good fit. I agree with the OP, and I am not just "repeating the Uber party line". I believe 3 categories of work are needed: 1. Employee (e.g. current W2), where you have a single full-time employer who is primarily responsible for your wages and benefits. 2. Independent Contractor, where the IC has full control over their rates, where they do the work, their tools, etc. 3. "Flexible" employee, where the employee has full control over their hours and availability, and to work for multiple employers, but doesn't have control over rates or how the work is done.

brianpgordon 7y ago
Many people have multiple jobs (even full-time jobs) and receive multiple W2s in the mail every year. I'm not an expert in employment law but I haven't seen evidence that the current multi-job system isn't workable here. You can have multiple part time jobs, and if one job goes over a certain threshold of hours then they have to provide you benefits. If you have multiple full-time jobs, all of them are required to offer you participation in employer-sponsored benefits, although you typically only pick one. Is that not how it works?
- spookthesunset 7y ago
  Uber and lyft and DoorDash etc aren’t paid as wall clock hours though. You can be “clocked in” to as many as you want at once. One drive you might be working for Uber and the very next might be some Postmates order. Maybe even both on the same trip. Focusing on wall clock hours doesn’t make sense for these kinds of jobs.
  - brianpgordon 7y ago
    I have a few parallel objections: 1. It's not like it would be difficult to track all of the little chunks of time worked and add them all up. Everything is automated anyway, and nobody is filing time cards. 2. In the end, the wall clock is how workers experience time when they're out doing work for these companies. They get their bike out and go deliver food for a few hours, or get in their car and drive around the city picking up and dropping off passengers. It's not clear to me that the interstitial minutes between gigs should be considered free time for the workers that goes uncompensated. If they drop off a passenger and pick up a new one within five or ten minutes, they've been working continuously. They haven't had a chance to go home and take their socks off and relax. They're working. It seems like a step backwards for everyone's mental well-being to use technology to clock the exact minutes that they produce value for the company, and cut off their pay the instant they stop producing. It's like a widget assembly line monitored by cameras where workers get automatically clocked in only when they're physically touching the widgets, so that if they sit up to stretch, or walk over to the cabinet to grab a different tool, or even if the conveyor belt is sending the next widget over to be worked on, they stop getting paid. I wouldn't want to work like that. 3. The fact that someone can be doing work for multiple companies at the same time doesn't seem like such a big problem to me. If they're on a segment of a route in which they're simultaneously delivering a passenger and someone's lunch, they should get paid for both. And the same contiguous-time rules I mentioned in #2 above can apply - as long as they're continuously picking up lunches and passengers within a certain interval, they're working two jobs.
    - s1artibartfast 7y ago
      in response to 2 and 3: What about the status quo where gig workers are running 2-5 apps at once. If they are payed between trips, do they collect minimum wage from all companies?
dragonwriter 7y ago
> The current employee model as codified in our tax and legal system definitely has lots of assumptions around only having a single W2 employer. No, it doesn't; multiple W-2 employees is a common thing and the law has no assumptions that conflict with it. (Multiple full-time W-2 employers, maybe, are something of an issue, but not merely multiple W-2 employers.) > "Flexible" employee, where the employee has full control over their hours and availability, and to work for multiple employers, but doesn't have control over rates or how the work is done. This seems like regular on-demand temp work, where pretty much every feature of that is routine, and has always been W-2. Sure, technology including platforms like Uber, et al., make it practical to have more rapid offer/accept cycles and finer-grained work assignments, but they don't fundamentally change the nature of on-demand temp work in a way which requires any different treatment legally than such work has historically been given.

pishpash 7y ago

"Nothing" you say? It's called market forces that will remove flexibility from employees, because that's less costly.