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This is just another paean to making all white-collar work "gig" work, undermining the security and benefits of traditional employment, in favor of making bette

This is just another paean to making all white-collar work "gig" work, undermining the security and benefits of traditional employment, in favor of making better-looking numbers on balance sheets for startups. Don't buy into this. Some people can do it; other's can't. I could, but I don't want to. It's too much stress on my interpersonal skills. The single, biggest, best change we could make with employment in this country -- which would benefit employer and employee alike -- is to decouple health insurance from it. It'd be better to break it out and let us buy health insurance like car insurance, but we'll eventually get nationalized health care or socialized medicine or whatever you want to call it. Either way, this will alleviate a lot of pressure on companies on their hiring decisions, and on people who get locked in jobs because of health issues.

cadamson 5y ago
What are/is the security and benefits of traditional employment?
- sklargh 5y ago
  Directly to this question - paid sick leave (generally), limited protection from physical harm and healthcare (US). In Europe, extensive protection from the unemployment’s demonstrated nearly irreparable harms, including hunger and reduced lifespan. Broadly - oh my goodness, this article is pure regulatory arbitrage amalgamated with some kind of hellscapish McKinsey/VC dross. Net - firms would like to reduce you to an expendable, unprotected line item without recourse to traditional employment law. There is nothing innovative or interesting here, a pure desire to extract maximum value from fellow humans without consideration or care for what we owe each other. Enough of this shit, in particular the aggregation of labor for the purpose of building a surveillance sensor aperture for ads.
  - TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
    Exactly, on all points. For instance, I got hammered by COVID, and was almost useless for about 4 weeks. My boss was only concerned that I get better, and wasn't concerned that I go on some sort of short-term disability or FLMA. The person who wrote that article would have simply not paid me for that month, and not guaranteed work after I got better, which would have made the situation much more stressful, removed income at a time I needed it most to cover medical expenses, and added insult to injury. My company is very "woke," and I know a lot of people have problems with such things, but one very welcome outcome of this is that they really do put people first, and the bottom line second. In a pure gig economy, there's no chance of having a "human" relationship with your employer like this.
    - Mezzie 5y ago
      > For instance, I got hammered by COVID, and was almost useless for about 4 weeks. My boss was only concerned that I get better, and wasn't concerned that I go on some sort of short-term disability or FLMA. The person who wrote that article would have simply not paid me for that month, and not guaranteed work after I got better, which would have made the situation much more stressful, removed income at a time I needed it most to cover medical expenses, and added insult to injury. Yup, and now add on family or other responsibilities. It's also a way to keep hiring 22-year olds right out of school who won't stand up for themselves and don't have the experience to ask to be treated better. Likewise, a great way to keep anyone with a family out of the workforce/desperate. > My company is very "woke," and I know a lot of people have problems with such things, but one very welcome outcome of this is that they really do put people first, and the bottom line second. Be careful with this; it can go either way: Either they're great OR the wokeness is a great cover for complete exploitation. One good way to figure out is to ask how they address disability; it's the one identity that can impact somebody's ability to produce, and it will tell you if they see their workers as people or if they're more interested in diversity check-boxes for the sake of funding/PR.
    - betwixthewires 5y ago
      If you think about paid leave schemes like sick leave, vacation time, parental leave and the like, they're actually counter to ensuring people can afford time off. What's going on amounts to a company managed savings trust. What companies should be doing is making sure to pay people enough money when they are working to where they can afford to put some back for those times when they can't work (and won't get paid). This then puts the onus on the person to manage their finances adequately, and enables them to have more flexibility about when and why they take time off. Instead we have a situation where people basically cannot be trusted to save for times when they can't work and that compensation is held in trust by the company, which then enables the company to manipulate with it and hold it over people's heads. People feel stuck at their job for this compensation just like with healthcare, to reference a point you made elsewhere in the thread, why not decouple them both? IMO if we are going to have these paid time off schemes, they should be negotiable (in the banking sense) by law so that people who want to receive the compensation as money rather than time off can do so. Some companies do this, others do not, but these are part of our compensation, we should still receive it if we don't use it, like we otherwise would if we were just working for money.
- Mezzie 5y ago
  In my experience as somebody who's worked as a freelancer/for myself and also as an employee, I like that I don't have to find my own work. That tends to be its own job on top of the work I actually like to do. I also don't need to brand myself or maintain a bunch of public projects so I can work in a few months. In addition, taking a few months and putting in almost no effort at work to focus on other parts of your life has a lot of value and that's really hard to pull off in the gig-type economy. The last few months, I've been giving very little at work due to some mental health issues (I've still done my job just fine, but the extra things I do to build my skills + benefit my company aren't getting done), which in the long term is going to do way more for my productivity and quality of life than chasing the next gig. This can also be true of health, or family (e.g. if a family member needs your help after surgery). There are benefits and drawbacks to each work arrangement. Take this with a grain of salt, though, as I don't work in tech, and the primary reason why is because I wasn't willing to forego all my other hobbies for it. Tech is for fun: The times I've to support myself with my tech skills I hated it. A lot of the benefit of conventional employment in my experience is being more able to leave work at work. It's also, in some ways, more beneficial as you age and are more likely to accumulate additional non-work responsibilities. That said, this is only if you get DECENT traditional employment. I'd take gig work over what they do to retail and food-service workers ANY day of the week.
- ebiester 5y ago
  Minimum wage, protections against discrimination, safe working laws, unemployment...
try_again 5y ago
When you state "in this country", please specify what country that is. Despite the use of English as the lingua franca here we're amongst a geographically diverse group. I'm going to assume you mean the US. If that's a correct guess, as a European the US work standards frighten me. Health insurance so tightly coupled to work that if you get into an accident shortly after being laid off and don't have (expensive) private insurance you could be bankrupted by it. Two weeks vacation per year seems to be common and I've repeatedly heard that employees are being pressured to not actually use their full paid time off. Maybe I've just been too coddled by the working conditions here in Belgium but I simply can't imagine working in the US without going completely mad or sinking into a depression. I know that I pay incredibly high taxes, but a higher income at the cost of living in such a cutthroat environment simply doesn't seem worth it to me. And to be honest I consider my standard of living to be very high and comfortable, both in spite of and thanks to taxes.
- TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
  This is a forum run by a US VC firm talking about US startups. One could almost forgive the assumption that people would understand that I was referring to the US. ;-)
- graycat 5y ago
  > you could be bankrupted by it It's tough to be an expert, to be well informed on how US medical care gets paid for. I'm no expert, but I know a little more than nothing: So, for "bankrupted", yes, sort of .... But the US has Hill-Burton hospitals, likely named after two guys in Congress who got the bill passed. With the Hill-Burton act, if are starting a hospital, then can get funding via the act. BUT: Have to accept all patients independent of ability to pay. Soooo, a large fraction of city hospitals are Hill-Burton. Then there are the medical school teaching-research hospitals -- again commonly or always, patients are accepted independent of ability to pay. If someone really is broke, then they can qualify for Medicaid -- "never receive a bill for medical care." For people old enough to be retired, there is Medicare. Part A covers a major fraction of hospital charges and is free. Part B covers physician charges, and is not free, maybe a few $hundred a month. There is another part for drugs. For poor people, there is the HRSA (Federal Health Resources Services Administration) or some such -- clinics with sliding scale charges based on ability of patients to pay. It goes on this way. It's a patchwork system. Not all the important details are really clear. E.g., there is a lot of over billing, that is, charging too much, and in this case the insurance company has a talk with the physician/hospital and negotiates lower charges. For drugs, the prices can vary enormously based on whatever. There has been at least one effort to get the medical providers to publish a price list, i.e., to clear up the lack of cost information. I don't know all the details, but my understanding is that it is very rare for medical care charges actually to bankrupt someone. E.g., one approach is for a patient who owes big bucks to pay, say, $10 a month for 6 years -- then by laws of debts, the rest owed is forgiven, that is, not owed. One way and another, in summary, from 50,000 feet up, generally, the US tries really hard not to have all of medical care run by the Federal government, or any level of government. E.g., there could be a system single payer where the there is only one entity that pays for anything about medical care; of course, that entity likely is run by the Federal government and gets a lot of tax money. Single payer has been proposed 220,872,879 times and rejected by that many times. Some of the scare is that single payer would result in some or all of (a) taxes way too high, (b) too much just wasteful, silly, and unneeded medical care, (c) low quality of care and, thus, too many people hurt or dead, (d) too little capacity where too many patients die from waiting too long for care, etc. I don't know what if anything is right/wrong with (a) -- (d), but these are concerns commonly voiced. Maybe the US could borrow from, at least learn from, Switzerland, England, .... But actually bankrupt from just losing a job? I suspect that is actually not very common. Oh, by the way, if fired, then commonly get to continue medical insurance coverage for some length of time.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
Health care being linked to employment in the US is a form of 'golden handcuffs', a means to keep you at an employer and persist even though you're dissatisfied. Some IT companies (especially startups, but it varies) do it with stocks or stock options as well, tying them to your employment. Anyway, no civilized country should require you to be employed to be entitled to health care. Not making health care available to everyone, regardless of wealth or employment status, is classist eugenics.
- PopAlongKid 5y ago
  There was a major change in this regard with the Affordable Care Act (now in place over 10 years). It eliminated the ability of insurers to deny health coverage if you have a pre-existing condition and have not maintained continuous creditable coverage. So the risk of leaving a job and losing health insurance is now much lower, since you can always get insurance later, or get it as an unemployed individual with a large subsidy if you don't have much total income. Neither of these things was true before.
  - beckman466 5y ago
    > So the risk of leaving a job and losing health insurance is now much lower, since you can always get insurance later, or get it as an unemployed individual with a large subsidy if you don't have much total income. tell me that these laws don't apply to you and that you've not had to struggle with them to get health insurance without telling me that these laws don't apply to you and that you've not had to struggle with them to get health insurance
    - PopAlongKid 5y ago
      I'm not sure what you are trying to tell me. If it matters, I have direct personal experience with this. In 2020, I voluntarily ended employer group health coverage, at the time of my choosing, because I knew that I could get subsidized coverage through CoveredCA, the California web site that serves both federal ACA (Obamacare), plus California's own version of the ACA (very similar to federal). Through the exchange, without a struggle, I received insurance comparable to what I had before, no questions asked about my existing health condition, with a subsidy to help pay. The best I could have hoped for previously would have been up to six months only of COBRA coverage, at 102% of my employer's cost, no subsidy. And if I chose to go without any coverage at all for a few months, in the past I would have had to divulge any pre-existing "conditions" as part of the application process.
betwixthewires 5y ago
While I'm with you on decoupling health insurance from employment, I'm not too convinced that moving white collar work into "the gig economy" is bad. IMO the two things appear to go hand in hand. The security benefits of being a company man are to be weighed by each individual against their own priorities. For some, doing whatever work a company needs how and when they need it in exchange for a secure paycheck or other benefits is the smart choice. For others, the lowered perceived security is worth being able to decide what to work on and how and when to work. Generally speaking, if those security benefits that come with giving one entity a monopoly over your skills and productivity were as strong as they once were the gig economy wouldn't exist. The benefits IMO are overstated. In a world where these entities treat professionals as fungible, it only makes sense that the professionals treat those entities as fungible as well, and it is only fair, and freeing and empowering, if that sort of thing appeals to you.

cadamson 5y ago

What are/is the security and benefits of traditional employment?

sklargh 5y ago
Directly to this question - paid sick leave (generally), limited protection from physical harm and healthcare (US). In Europe, extensive protection from the unemployment’s demonstrated nearly irreparable harms, including hunger and reduced lifespan. Broadly - oh my goodness, this article is pure regulatory arbitrage amalgamated with some kind of hellscapish McKinsey/VC dross. Net - firms would like to reduce you to an expendable, unprotected line item without recourse to traditional employment law. There is nothing innovative or interesting here, a pure desire to extract maximum value from fellow humans without consideration or care for what we owe each other. Enough of this shit, in particular the aggregation of labor for the purpose of building a surveillance sensor aperture for ads.
- TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
  Exactly, on all points. For instance, I got hammered by COVID, and was almost useless for about 4 weeks. My boss was only concerned that I get better, and wasn't concerned that I go on some sort of short-term disability or FLMA. The person who wrote that article would have simply not paid me for that month, and not guaranteed work after I got better, which would have made the situation much more stressful, removed income at a time I needed it most to cover medical expenses, and added insult to injury. My company is very "woke," and I know a lot of people have problems with such things, but one very welcome outcome of this is that they really do put people first, and the bottom line second. In a pure gig economy, there's no chance of having a "human" relationship with your employer like this.
  - Mezzie 5y ago
    > For instance, I got hammered by COVID, and was almost useless for about 4 weeks. My boss was only concerned that I get better, and wasn't concerned that I go on some sort of short-term disability or FLMA. The person who wrote that article would have simply not paid me for that month, and not guaranteed work after I got better, which would have made the situation much more stressful, removed income at a time I needed it most to cover medical expenses, and added insult to injury. Yup, and now add on family or other responsibilities. It's also a way to keep hiring 22-year olds right out of school who won't stand up for themselves and don't have the experience to ask to be treated better. Likewise, a great way to keep anyone with a family out of the workforce/desperate. > My company is very "woke," and I know a lot of people have problems with such things, but one very welcome outcome of this is that they really do put people first, and the bottom line second. Be careful with this; it can go either way: Either they're great OR the wokeness is a great cover for complete exploitation. One good way to figure out is to ask how they address disability; it's the one identity that can impact somebody's ability to produce, and it will tell you if they see their workers as people or if they're more interested in diversity check-boxes for the sake of funding/PR.
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    If you think about paid leave schemes like sick leave, vacation time, parental leave and the like, they're actually counter to ensuring people can afford time off. What's going on amounts to a company managed savings trust. What companies should be doing is making sure to pay people enough money when they are working to where they can afford to put some back for those times when they can't work (and won't get paid). This then puts the onus on the person to manage their finances adequately, and enables them to have more flexibility about when and why they take time off. Instead we have a situation where people basically cannot be trusted to save for times when they can't work and that compensation is held in trust by the company, which then enables the company to manipulate with it and hold it over people's heads. People feel stuck at their job for this compensation just like with healthcare, to reference a point you made elsewhere in the thread, why not decouple them both? IMO if we are going to have these paid time off schemes, they should be negotiable (in the banking sense) by law so that people who want to receive the compensation as money rather than time off can do so. Some companies do this, others do not, but these are part of our compensation, we should still receive it if we don't use it, like we otherwise would if we were just working for money.
Mezzie 5y ago
In my experience as somebody who's worked as a freelancer/for myself and also as an employee, I like that I don't have to find my own work. That tends to be its own job on top of the work I actually like to do. I also don't need to brand myself or maintain a bunch of public projects so I can work in a few months. In addition, taking a few months and putting in almost no effort at work to focus on other parts of your life has a lot of value and that's really hard to pull off in the gig-type economy. The last few months, I've been giving very little at work due to some mental health issues (I've still done my job just fine, but the extra things I do to build my skills + benefit my company aren't getting done), which in the long term is going to do way more for my productivity and quality of life than chasing the next gig. This can also be true of health, or family (e.g. if a family member needs your help after surgery). There are benefits and drawbacks to each work arrangement. Take this with a grain of salt, though, as I don't work in tech, and the primary reason why is because I wasn't willing to forego all my other hobbies for it. Tech is for fun: The times I've to support myself with my tech skills I hated it. A lot of the benefit of conventional employment in my experience is being more able to leave work at work. It's also, in some ways, more beneficial as you age and are more likely to accumulate additional non-work responsibilities. That said, this is only if you get DECENT traditional employment. I'd take gig work over what they do to retail and food-service workers ANY day of the week.
ebiester 5y ago
Minimum wage, protections against discrimination, safe working laws, unemployment...

try_again 5y ago

When you state "in this country", please specify what country that is. Despite the use of English as the lingua franca here we're amongst a geographically diverse group. I'm going to assume you mean the US. If that's a correct guess, as a European the US work standards frighten me. Health insurance so tightly coupled to work that if you get into an accident shortly after being laid off and don't have (expensive) private insurance you could be bankrupted by it. Two weeks vacation per year seems to be common and I've repeatedly heard that employees are being pressured to not actually use their full paid time off. Maybe I've just been too coddled by the working conditions here in Belgium but I simply can't imagine working in the US without going completely mad or sinking into a depression. I know that I pay incredibly high taxes, but a higher income at the cost of living in such a cutthroat environment simply doesn't seem worth it to me. And to be honest I consider my standard of living to be very high and comfortable, both in spite of and thanks to taxes.

TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
This is a forum run by a US VC firm talking about US startups. One could almost forgive the assumption that people would understand that I was referring to the US. ;-)
graycat 5y ago
> you could be bankrupted by it It's tough to be an expert, to be well informed on how US medical care gets paid for. I'm no expert, but I know a little more than nothing: So, for "bankrupted", yes, sort of .... But the US has Hill-Burton hospitals, likely named after two guys in Congress who got the bill passed. With the Hill-Burton act, if are starting a hospital, then can get funding via the act. BUT: Have to accept all patients independent of ability to pay. Soooo, a large fraction of city hospitals are Hill-Burton. Then there are the medical school teaching-research hospitals -- again commonly or always, patients are accepted independent of ability to pay. If someone really is broke, then they can qualify for Medicaid -- "never receive a bill for medical care." For people old enough to be retired, there is Medicare. Part A covers a major fraction of hospital charges and is free. Part B covers physician charges, and is not free, maybe a few $hundred a month. There is another part for drugs. For poor people, there is the HRSA (Federal Health Resources Services Administration) or some such -- clinics with sliding scale charges based on ability of patients to pay. It goes on this way. It's a patchwork system. Not all the important details are really clear. E.g., there is a lot of over billing, that is, charging too much, and in this case the insurance company has a talk with the physician/hospital and negotiates lower charges. For drugs, the prices can vary enormously based on whatever. There has been at least one effort to get the medical providers to publish a price list, i.e., to clear up the lack of cost information. I don't know all the details, but my understanding is that it is very rare for medical care charges actually to bankrupt someone. E.g., one approach is for a patient who owes big bucks to pay, say, $10 a month for 6 years -- then by laws of debts, the rest owed is forgiven, that is, not owed. One way and another, in summary, from 50,000 feet up, generally, the US tries really hard not to have all of medical care run by the Federal government, or any level of government. E.g., there could be a system single payer where the there is only one entity that pays for anything about medical care; of course, that entity likely is run by the Federal government and gets a lot of tax money. Single payer has been proposed 220,872,879 times and rejected by that many times. Some of the scare is that single payer would result in some or all of (a) taxes way too high, (b) too much just wasteful, silly, and unneeded medical care, (c) low quality of care and, thus, too many people hurt or dead, (d) too little capacity where too many patients die from waiting too long for care, etc. I don't know what if anything is right/wrong with (a) -- (d), but these are concerns commonly voiced. Maybe the US could borrow from, at least learn from, Switzerland, England, .... But actually bankrupt from just losing a job? I suspect that is actually not very common. Oh, by the way, if fired, then commonly get to continue medical insurance coverage for some length of time.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

Health care being linked to employment in the US is a form of 'golden handcuffs', a means to keep you at an employer and persist even though you're dissatisfied. Some IT companies (especially startups, but it varies) do it with stocks or stock options as well, tying them to your employment. Anyway, no civilized country should require you to be employed to be entitled to health care. Not making health care available to everyone, regardless of wealth or employment status, is classist eugenics.

PopAlongKid 5y ago
There was a major change in this regard with the Affordable Care Act (now in place over 10 years). It eliminated the ability of insurers to deny health coverage if you have a pre-existing condition and have not maintained continuous creditable coverage. So the risk of leaving a job and losing health insurance is now much lower, since you can always get insurance later, or get it as an unemployed individual with a large subsidy if you don't have much total income. Neither of these things was true before.
- beckman466 5y ago
  > So the risk of leaving a job and losing health insurance is now much lower, since you can always get insurance later, or get it as an unemployed individual with a large subsidy if you don't have much total income. tell me that these laws don't apply to you and that you've not had to struggle with them to get health insurance without telling me that these laws don't apply to you and that you've not had to struggle with them to get health insurance
  - PopAlongKid 5y ago
    I'm not sure what you are trying to tell me. If it matters, I have direct personal experience with this. In 2020, I voluntarily ended employer group health coverage, at the time of my choosing, because I knew that I could get subsidized coverage through CoveredCA, the California web site that serves both federal ACA (Obamacare), plus California's own version of the ACA (very similar to federal). Through the exchange, without a struggle, I received insurance comparable to what I had before, no questions asked about my existing health condition, with a subsidy to help pay. The best I could have hoped for previously would have been up to six months only of COBRA coverage, at 102% of my employer's cost, no subsidy. And if I chose to go without any coverage at all for a few months, in the past I would have had to divulge any pre-existing "conditions" as part of the application process.

betwixthewires 5y ago

While I'm with you on decoupling health insurance from employment, I'm not too convinced that moving white collar work into "the gig economy" is bad. IMO the two things appear to go hand in hand. The security benefits of being a company man are to be weighed by each individual against their own priorities. For some, doing whatever work a company needs how and when they need it in exchange for a secure paycheck or other benefits is the smart choice. For others, the lowered perceived security is worth being able to decide what to work on and how and when to work. Generally speaking, if those security benefits that come with giving one entity a monopoly over your skills and productivity were as strong as they once were the gig economy wouldn't exist. The benefits IMO are overstated. In a world where these entities treat professionals as fungible, it only makes sense that the professionals treat those entities as fungible as well, and it is only fair, and freeing and empowering, if that sort of thing appeals to you.