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I like gig work. I like the freedom. We need fewer restrictions not more. Forcing businesses to hire only full-time workers reduces the number of jobs. They wo
by xhkkffbf 7y ago
I like gig work. I like the freedom. We need fewer restrictions not more.
Forcing businesses to hire only full-time workers reduces the number of jobs. They won't hire someone unless there's
2000 hours of work to fill up a year.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago* Decouple healthcare from employment (Universal healthcare) * Enable robust safety nets so lack of enough gig work doesn’t mean someone is homeless or goes hungry. Can we find middle ground? People can’t live good lives with excessive uncertainty and stress, and quality of life is what we should optimize for (like New Zealand is attempting), versus GDP. I concede gig work type employment has a place in our modern economy if workers are vigorously protected from exploitation. Sidenote: I’d also like a 4 day work week, considering productivity gains over the last 50 years, but that might be a separate discussion.
- xhkkffbf 7y agoThe safety nets in the US are independent of the businesses. It's not like having a "full-time job" is a safety net. Ask all of the "full-time" employees at airlines, restaurants, hotels and other places discovered after COVID-19 hit. I'm totally cool with decoupling health insurance. I think Uber would love that. The great thing about the independent contractor life that Uber is expousing is that you can have your four day work week. And you can jump up to six days when you've got the time and drop to one day if you don't.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoYou cannot have your four day work week if your gig work income doesn't cover your rent, food, and healthcare (non-discretionary expenses) and you have no other income. We're arguing where the quality of life floor is.
- tathougies 7y agoDownvoted because this is true of any job. You cannot have a five day 9-5 work week if your salary income doesn't cover your rent, food, and healthcare and you have no other income. Gig work is no more or less special than that.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoFull time employment comes with benefits and protections gig work does not (the entire point of this article).
- tathougies 7y agoIf healthcare is decoupled from employment, as the comment chain suggests, what benefit is tied in with full-time employment. We should be seeking to decouple benefits from employment not solidifying the arrangement. What protections does employment have? Hopefully very little.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoI am entirely happy to revisit employment arrangements....once universal healthcare has been delivered, and not a moment sooner. It is an atomic commit.
- bhupy 7y agoAnd I am entirely happy to revisit universal healthcare once employment arrangements are fixed, and not a moment sooner. It is an atomic commit, after all. This line of uncompromising thinking is not really constructive.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoYou want to pull out one of the few safety nets left for American citizens (employment benefits) without providing for healthcare needs. Sometimes compromise isn’t possible. Whomever comes with the most leverage wins. I acknowledge my side needs additional leverage. Maybe that’s COVID, maybe that’s the ensuing global recession.
- Der_Einzige 7y agoUber won't like that one bit because it's going to be tax increases on either wealthy people or corporations (or both) to pay for universal health care. Don't pretend that the rich want universal health care. they don't.
- bhupy 7y ago> The safety nets in the US are independent of the businesses I think the fact that health insurance is tied to employment is one of the few things both sides agree is bad. Decoupling health insurance from employment can go a long way to making the distinction between "full time" and "gig worker" unimportant.
- TedDoesntTalk 7y agoI’d like a trip to the Greek Isles. Why won’t your taxes pay for that?
- toomuchtodo 7y agoAre you comparing luxury travel to basic human rights?
- leetcrew 7y agothere are no basic human rights. there's only what we can agree upon or fight for.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rch 7y agoThey do. My bartender friends travel all the time but since most of their income is in tips, they have subsidized healthcare (thankfully).
- cactus2093 7y ago100% agree with these. And it seems like decoupling healthcare and other benefits from full-time employment opens the door to your last point, a 4-day work week. Right now in almost full-time job, if you want to switch to 4 days a week you need to basically get a different job. You'll lose your benefits like healthcare, paid vacation, 401k matching, so even though you'd be working 80% as many hours your effective pay at the same hourly rate would be much less than 80% of what you made previously. The more that benefits are decoupled from work, the easier it would be view employment on a more sliding scale for many jobs - i.e here's the hourly rate, you can work 2 days a week or 5, it's up to you, but you'll still be a "full" employee in the sense that full-time workers are today. Obviously not all kinds of work lends itself to this flexibility. If you're trying to climb the ladder and get promoted quickly you'll probably still need to work a lot. But for a lot of jobs, for instance for IC software engineers, I don't see why this flexibility wouldn't work.
- zozbot234 7y ago> Decouple healthcare from employment (Universal healthcare) No, fix healthcare costs instead. Given current healthcare cost structure, even 'universal' healthcare will not decouple it from employment. Fix the cost problem, and everything else gets way easier, including safety nets.
- airstrike 7y ago> I like the freedom. You do you, but I just wanted to provide an alternative view: that freedom might be great when you're young and equally free, but IMHO it doesn't work as well when you're 40 years old trying to ensure stable income to support your family
- xhkkffbf 7y agoWell, sure, but then you go and get one of those jobs. It's not like banning gig workers will make those jobs appear. If there's 3000 hours of work to be done, a business will hire one worker to do 2000 hours and turn down the 1000 hours of work. A business can't magically "round up". The money for the extra work needs to come from somewhere.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoIf your business doesn't generate enough revenue to hire staff for the work you want done, you're unable to hire the staff. There's plenty of work to be done if we don't have to pay anyone anything, there is a reason we don't permit that though.
- itake 7y agoAs a someone that works full time and freelances on the side, I love working for businesses that only need me for 15-20 hours per week.
- majormajor 7y agoThat's less about uber or employment status and more about "disruption" in general. Rapid innovation is great for advancing the state of the art but terrible for all the people in society who had made a life around doing work for a decade or two that is suddenly no longer a viable career. We (as a civilization) need to take care of the people who aren't the ones making the new fortunes.
- mirimir 7y ago
- KaoruAoiShiho 7y agoMe too, but the answer is to give Uber drivers more independence not to get rid of their contractor status. If this results in gig workers being able to for example do multiple jobs at once, being able to choose their own clients, etc then it could be a win for society?
- tathougies 7y agoI thought uber drivers can drive for whomever they want? I often make deals with uber drivers to arrange for scheduled pickups (rather give them the full money than uber getting a cut), outside the app, and uber can't do anything to prevent this.
- KaoruAoiShiho 7y agoAFAIK you can't decline clients without getting punished by the company? Sure this ensures service and prevents discrimination but forced worked hurts driver independence.
- hirundo 7y agoLabor groups tend to thrive on restrictions. They benefit from many and often successfully lobby for exceptions to the others. They're natural opponents to a free market for labor. Larger corporations tend to be as well, since smaller competitors have more trouble complying, they get an advantage. So they cooperate with labor groups to oppose trends like the gig work. I was surprised that the gig economy grew so far before the regulators started to crush it. I hope they don't get to finish the job.
- save_ferris 7y agoHow has the average American worker benefited from free market labor over the last 40 years? Free market labor has given us, among many other things: - binding arbitration in labor disputes that heavily tip the scales in favor of the company - stagnating wages while the pace of income inequality continues to grow - large corporations that are deemed too important to fail by the Fed and therefore not fully held accountable for egregious mismanagement and worse - unequal access to benefits like insurance, which corporations lobby heavily to restrict access to - restrictive non-compete clauses that subject workers to completely unnecessary legal liability and influence over their careers We’ve also seen huge companies in the tech industry collude to suppress wages (Pixar), insert themselves as middlemen to capture and intentionally maintain a fundamentally obsolete tax collection infrastructure (TurboTax), catalyze genocide in Myanmar (Facebook, internet.org), and spread misinformation throughout the globe in order to interfere in elections. How exactly does one overcome these kinds of challenges if not through grassroots organized movements?
- kyuudou 7y ago>How exactly does one overcome these kinds of challenges if not through grassroots organized movements? Don't work for them, don't buy their products, spread the word. It's not easy but nothing worth doing is.
- CJefferson 7y agoUber isnt freedom. If they let you set your price, and let customers easily rebook with you, then you would have freedom. Uber want perfectly controlled interchangable cogs.
- strictnein 7y agoCar services have worked like that for decades. My uncle has had his same driver for something like 40 years. The driver is not an employee, he is a contractor.
- kube-system 7y agoThat might be true, but in a nutshell, the IRS classifies employees based upon how much control the business has upon the worker. It is a very grey area, but every point of control is an argument for being W2. https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/employee-or-independent-contractor-know-the-rules https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/employee-or-independent-contrac... Your uncle may also have been miscategorized. Uber isn't the first company to play fast and loose with worker classification. It wasn't uncommon before the modern 'gig economy' either: https://hbr.org/2017/07/lots-of-employees-get-misclassified-as-contractors-heres-why-it-matters https://hbr.org/2017/07/lots-of-employees-get-misclassified-...