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> "Gig-style businesses tend to vastly underpay employees." to your point, this is a function of information asymmetries in the labor market. based on a rough

> "Gig-style businesses tend to vastly underpay employees." to your point, this is a function of information asymmetries in the labor market. based on a rough calculation from a couple years ago, a gig driver needs to make about $18/hour (including downtime between rides) to break even against a minimum wage job. between that and additional tax and benefits burden, it's no wonder most people forgo deeper consideration and focus on the gross income of gig work. it's obvious that workers need to be given direct and upfront information about this. another remedy is to make it as easy to comply with labor, tax and other regulations as a w-2 job (where the employer does nearly all the work). you could also let workers set their prices, but riders hate having prices fluctuate a lot so maybe the platform needs to take on some of that risk. lot's of things could be changed to make it a more even playing field between worker and platform.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago
> based on a rough calculation from a couple years ago, a gig driver needs to make about $18/hour (including downtime between rides) to break even against a minimum wage job. Is this counting the similar uncompensated costs for ordinary wage labor? Most minimum wage workers can't afford to live in the city center even though that's where jobs are concentrated. If you live 60 miles from work, that's not just 120 miles a day of uncompensated driving expense, it's two hours of uncompensated time. If you use .55/mile as the transportation cost with that long of a commute for a job that pays $7.25/hour for eight hours, that worker makes... uh, negative $8/day. Which I guess makes the two extra uncompensated hours they spend commuting a benefit because they get to amortize their losses over ten hours instead of eight and lose $.80/hour instead of $1/hour? This might explain why a lot of people prefer making "less money" working for Uber.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago

> based on a rough calculation from a couple years ago, a gig driver needs to make about $18/hour (including downtime between rides) to break even against a minimum wage job. Is this counting the similar uncompensated costs for ordinary wage labor? Most minimum wage workers can't afford to live in the city center even though that's where jobs are concentrated. If you live 60 miles from work, that's not just 120 miles a day of uncompensated driving expense, it's two hours of uncompensated time. If you use .55/mile as the transportation cost with that long of a commute for a job that pays $7.25/hour for eight hours, that worker makes... uh, negative $8/day. Which I guess makes the two extra uncompensated hours they spend commuting a benefit because they get to amortize their losses over ten hours instead of eight and lose $.80/hour instead of $1/hour? This might explain why a lot of people prefer making "less money" working for Uber.