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The gig economy doesn't lead to happy employees- truly shocking. Who wouldn't want to dedicate their body and soul to a silicon valley corporation?! To be a rep

The gig economy doesn't lead to happy employees- truly shocking. Who wouldn't want to dedicate their body and soul to a silicon valley corporation?! To be a replaceable cog in the machine is the American dream.

spaetzleesser 5y ago
“Who wouldn't want to dedicate their body and soul to a silicon valley corporation?” A lot of people here do that but at least they make good money doing it. Gig workers don’t get the money.
oneoff786 5y ago
The funny thing about the American dream is that the quintessential examples used to be blue collar or back office labor jobs like mailroom processors could work hard and rise to the top. Kind of a pipe dream but it did happen. Even if you believe that to still be true, gig workers start even lower, below the bottom rung of the ladder. They’re contractors doing spot jobs in mailrooms. Most janitor jobs are gone. They’re now contractors too. Healthcare is to blame for a lot of this. The cost of a low level employee is simply too high when companies need to cover the healthcare coverage costs.
- onemoresoop 5y ago
  > could work hard and rise to the top What are the odds of that?
  - cbozeman 5y ago
    Not good, because getting to the top of any enterprise is inherently competitive. Everyone wants the job, and there's only one of them to go around. This is the reason you see such similar personalities occupying extremely high positions in companies. You need a certain mentality and dedication to set everything to the wayside for the pursuit of climbing the corporate hierarchy.
    - mistrial9 5y ago
      > Everyone wants the job, and there's only one of them to go around. no, everyone does not want that job. People who do want that job reduce the equation that way, though
  - wyager 5y ago
    If the odds were high that people underwent meteoric career trajectories, that would imply that our sorting mechanisms for placing people into well-matched jobs worked very poorly. In general, I think these mechanisms work pretty well, so people typically end up in gradual career trajectories they're well-suited for.
  - jhgb 5y ago
    Well at the very highest it's 1/N, where N is the number of employees at the organization.
    - lordnacho 5y ago
      There's lateral hires with their eyes on the same job too.
      - jhgb 5y ago
        That's why I wrote "at the very highest". It can't be more that that, but it can be less than that.
      - simplestats 5y ago
        But they leave a company somewhere else so don't affect the average number unless they move from a smaller company.
  - oneoff786 5y ago
    Technically non zero
- tengbretson 5y ago
  >blue collar or back office labor jobs like mailroom processors could work hard and rise to the top The American dream is not about starting low and making it to the top, it's about upward, intergenerational class mobility.
  - diskzero 5y ago
    The definition has changed over time, but you have reduced the definition to a single component. It is true that an element of the ethos is to improve the outcomes of your descendants. The American Dream can be reduced simply to mean America exists as a place where you can live a better life. This concept is predicated on the statement in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal." We may agree that this statement was not enacted with sincerity, but we may hope that is will be. Much of the world views the American Dream as America as a place where one can come, work hard, be treated fairly and be rewarded regardless of social class or circumstances of birth. The extrapolation of this concept into a larger ethos that includes upward, inter-generational class mobility makes sense, but is just one element of an ethos based on the basic principles of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
- medio 5y ago
  Wow this escalated hilariously fast. Coming from a country with universal healthcare, I find it amazing how you believe your absolutely shitty coverage is to blame instead of, I don’t know, corporate greed? But yeah, I guess low-level employees should do without healthcare, they just shouldn’t be poor AND sick after all :)
  - m0lecules 5y ago
    the point is that healthcare costs have to be socialized – if you put the burden on the employer, you necessarily end up with the US system.
    - zmix 5y ago
      In Germany, the employer must pay half of the monthly healtcare plan and the employee pays the other half. Goes like this since decades in one of the strongest economies of the world. Of course, Apple is more worth than the whole DAX...
      - xwolfi 5y ago
        Be careful of market cap numbers, they hide information and are almost meaningless: they don't describe volume behavior. If suddenly people realized Apple had to be sold as fast as possible, most of that value would evaporate to reach a more reasonable tangible asset value. It's possible German stocks are well priced, in a regulated, slow and rational market that cares about fitting the price with the value of the company, and would hold most of their current market cap much more than Apple, were it liquidated.
        ChuckNorris89 5y ago
        >It's possible German stocks are well priced, in a regulated, slow and rational market that cares about fitting the price with the value of the company LOL, well regulated and rational my ass. The Deutsche Bank and Wirecard scandals (puls numerous more) proved the German government is just as corrupt when it comes to manipulating the market and threatening honest journalists, so that some rich and well connected scumbags can get even more obscenely rich. I've worked in several western countries but never saw more high-level corporate corruption than in Germany.
- justtologin 5y ago
  > blue collar or back office labor jobs like mailroom processors could work hard and rise to the top I'd guess a factor in ending this has been the rise or at least growth of an administrative or managerial class in most businesses. An apprenticeship model lets people grow, and to some extent a similar model used to apply in business, where the executives and managers were all career industry people who started on the shop floor. The current system is closer to (closer, not the same as) a feudal system where there is a group of nobility that manages a group of serfs, and there is not much movement between the groups, at least at the same company. Admission into the nobility is based on education and other pedigree, and can never really be had by work experience.
  - ryandrake 5y ago
    Exactly. There is no way to "hard work" your way from junior employee to Founder or CEO. When the CEO leaves, their replacement always comes from the executive class. The junior can work their way up to senior or even low-level manager. But at some point high up on the ladder, employees come from a totally different aristocracy, and you can't work or even buy your way into that clique. Every company I've ever worked for, when they went looking for a VP-Of-Something, they'd never promote from the proletariat--they'd always go externally and look for someone from the nobility.
    - 908B64B197 5y ago
      > Every company I've ever worked for, when they went looking for a VP-Of-Something, they'd never promote from the proletariat--they'd always go externally and look for someone from the nobility. Interestingly, that might be the case for Fortune 500. But among the fortune 10, most CEOs/C-Suite are engineers with long tenures at the company. Actually, if you look back at some of the most influential companies in the Valley at their peak, that's been a rule of thumb since the Fairchild days. Andrew Grove is an example of that [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove
  - mandevil 5y ago
    So one factor here is the actually computers: 50 years ago, store clerk was a medium prestige job, that had medium pay and growth prospects- there are plenty of stories of people who started a clerk and ended up in a senior position. But that was because clerks had to know the prices and goods: a major risk to the store owner was customers swapping price stickers, so you needed a clerk who could spot the difference between the expensive onion and the cheap one and knew what the price should be and these clerks had to stay in one place long enough to know the prices. Then along came the laser/UPC/computer system and deskilled the job. No longer did you need to know the difference, the computer printed up a natural language description of the item. This allowed stores to get much larger, because no one could know all the prices in a large store (early department stores handled the size by making you pay for items in each department, using store balance accounts to not create too much friction). This fundamentally reshaped the relationship between capital (who owned the stores and the computer system) and labor. It's actually the exact same alienation of the individual from their labor that Marx was writing about in the 1850's, just for jobs that didn't get the same attention. Similarly, an in-law worked as a teller at a bank. 50 years ago that job would have more upward mobility because banks managed their risk locally: after many years as a teller and then as a loan officer you could move up to be the local person making the decision on loans. Nowadays large banks have centralized that with fancy computer systems to guide the decision, so there are entire paths of advancement that essentially don't exist anymore because computers spit out the answer. There is only shift and then branch manager, with once again the owners of the computer system using it to de-skill jobs and cut off promotion opportunities. (See, e.g. Better.com, using poorly paid contractors to do all the tedious stuff that can't be automated, and then letting the computer do all the high skill work.) This is, by the by, one of the reasons that computer programmers continue to get paid well, because we are enabling capital to de-skill and bifurcate jobs better and better.
- xwolfi 5y ago
  The American dream was also a concept for non-Americans. I mean, it's not like a formal, natural phenomenon we can just observe, so everyone has its own interpretation. So here is mine, from a French who chose to emigrate in China instead of the US: the idea was that you'd come from your bum-shit country into that vast new land of opportunities where everything was to build, you build it and are rewarded in a fair meritocratic system in ways your rotting homeland could never have provided. But now, you have to get your Twitter account scanned to be allowed entry under a temporary visa (or hey, try a green card lottery), risk upsetting an untreated schizophrenic while crossing the streets, to go to a gun-heavy anti-police protest anarchists use as an excuse to empty their Molotov stock while the police, too happy to finally have a purpose for their military weapon stocks, shoot at random. And if you are at the wrong place at the wrong time, you can be sent to a private jail. All the while, any accident you would have would not have been covered by any sort of socialized insurance but you'd be under one of the most punitive international tax system. And if you're unlucky, you can always take a payday loan, and join the merry mass of indebted grassroot people who have negative equity for no reason a rational mind could understand. The American nightmare, it seems to me :s
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    >here is mine, from a French who chose to emigrate in China instead of the US [...long paragraph of US bashing ...] The American nightmare, it seems to me :s Mighty ironic of you to go on such a lengthy rant to bash the US off your Western European high-horse (white male too I presume?) living in China like a priviledged westerner, but where the stuff you bashed the US for is amateur level stuff. Be careful with all those Winnie the Pooh memes or you might loose your social credit points, comrade. Could you please point out the free nation of Taiwan on the map, in public, for everyone to see please? My geography is a bit rusty. Also, how are them force labor death camps this time of year over there?
- awakeasleep 5y ago
  Your point about employee costs rising with healthcare is terrific and needs wider cultural recognition. This increases the cost of labor, and therefore cost of goods across the economy. Its a big part of the reason why US based manufacturing is increasingly impractical. Your point expands to all social services our government has outsourced, from retirement benefits to transportation, too.
  - gadflyinyoureye 5y ago
    We'd still have the costs if the government took those in-house. Germans pay around $1500 a month (personal + employer costs) for healthcare. Other government programs add more cost. Bring those in cost would not really bring the cost of the employee down. Rather it would expand the weight and power of the government via increased taxes.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - gmadsen 5y ago
      it distributes the cost across all sectors, which as the above poster commented would be beneficial to hiring low skill workers
    - bserge 5y ago
      Germans pay at most $750/month (incl. employer contributions), and that's practically for the upper middle class (4500+/mo). The healthcare tax is capped at that, you can't pay any more. Correct me if I'm wrong. Not that it matters, their healthcare is garbage. Emergency services and surgery, sure, great. For that one time in your 80 years that you need it. Anything non vital? Weeks and months of waiting time. Mental healthcare? Non existent. Want the latest medicine? Fuck off to the US. Homeopathy? Paid for by insurance. You're part of the "Untermensch"? Pay and shut up or fuck off back where you came from, you dirty monkey.
    - oneoff786 5y ago
      It wouldn’t change the actual costs of living, but it would remove the inflection points where a full time employee is suddenly much more expensive than a 38 hour a work employee. And the taxes could be spread more progressively, e.g. to match the rate of wealth accumulation people get from having passively having wealth
- jollybean 5y ago
  The 'American Dream' is not 'Mail room to CEO' though FYI this is still possible. The 'American Dream' is a stable job, a modest home with 'plumbing' and 'electricity' and maybe one car, plastic tupperware, maybe a dishwasher, and a safe community with basic constitutional protections and a justice and democratic system with integrity and legitimacy, decent public schools and some access to higher education. All of that is revolutionary in the grand context of history. The 1950's 'America Middle Class' is the dream, as it is for many migrants to the US for whom those things are like heaven. The '$100K job, BMW and Corner Office' - that's something else, more like icing on the cake. People forget how hard it was for the world to create the basic '1950s middle class standard of living' and frankly how delicate the system we live in is. Within a generation we've come to accept that as more of a 'basic' condition of life, rather than something aspriational, which is a bit tragic. Most immigrants 'get it' though.
skybrian 5y ago
This particular article points out specific problems, but I think your assumption that being a replaceable cog is necessarily bad shows a lack of imagination. An advantage is that you can set your own hours and drop the work whenever you like and not think about it, because someone else will do it. Combined with working from home, it doesn’t seem like all that bad a way to make a few extra bucks? At least, if the problems in the article can be fixed. It seems like a decent fit when something else is more important in your life and the job comes second or third.

spaetzleesser 5y ago

“Who wouldn't want to dedicate their body and soul to a silicon valley corporation?” A lot of people here do that but at least they make good money doing it. Gig workers don’t get the money.

oneoff786 5y ago

The funny thing about the American dream is that the quintessential examples used to be blue collar or back office labor jobs like mailroom processors could work hard and rise to the top. Kind of a pipe dream but it did happen. Even if you believe that to still be true, gig workers start even lower, below the bottom rung of the ladder. They’re contractors doing spot jobs in mailrooms. Most janitor jobs are gone. They’re now contractors too. Healthcare is to blame for a lot of this. The cost of a low level employee is simply too high when companies need to cover the healthcare coverage costs.

onemoresoop 5y ago
> could work hard and rise to the top What are the odds of that?
- cbozeman 5y ago
  Not good, because getting to the top of any enterprise is inherently competitive. Everyone wants the job, and there's only one of them to go around. This is the reason you see such similar personalities occupying extremely high positions in companies. You need a certain mentality and dedication to set everything to the wayside for the pursuit of climbing the corporate hierarchy.
  - mistrial9 5y ago
    > Everyone wants the job, and there's only one of them to go around. no, everyone does not want that job. People who do want that job reduce the equation that way, though
- wyager 5y ago
  If the odds were high that people underwent meteoric career trajectories, that would imply that our sorting mechanisms for placing people into well-matched jobs worked very poorly. In general, I think these mechanisms work pretty well, so people typically end up in gradual career trajectories they're well-suited for.
- jhgb 5y ago
  Well at the very highest it's 1/N, where N is the number of employees at the organization.
  - lordnacho 5y ago
    There's lateral hires with their eyes on the same job too.
    - jhgb 5y ago
      That's why I wrote "at the very highest". It can't be more that that, but it can be less than that.
    - simplestats 5y ago
      But they leave a company somewhere else so don't affect the average number unless they move from a smaller company.
- oneoff786 5y ago
  Technically non zero
tengbretson 5y ago
>blue collar or back office labor jobs like mailroom processors could work hard and rise to the top The American dream is not about starting low and making it to the top, it's about upward, intergenerational class mobility.
- diskzero 5y ago
  The definition has changed over time, but you have reduced the definition to a single component. It is true that an element of the ethos is to improve the outcomes of your descendants. The American Dream can be reduced simply to mean America exists as a place where you can live a better life. This concept is predicated on the statement in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal." We may agree that this statement was not enacted with sincerity, but we may hope that is will be. Much of the world views the American Dream as America as a place where one can come, work hard, be treated fairly and be rewarded regardless of social class or circumstances of birth. The extrapolation of this concept into a larger ethos that includes upward, inter-generational class mobility makes sense, but is just one element of an ethos based on the basic principles of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
medio 5y ago
Wow this escalated hilariously fast. Coming from a country with universal healthcare, I find it amazing how you believe your absolutely shitty coverage is to blame instead of, I don’t know, corporate greed? But yeah, I guess low-level employees should do without healthcare, they just shouldn’t be poor AND sick after all :)
- m0lecules 5y ago
  the point is that healthcare costs have to be socialized – if you put the burden on the employer, you necessarily end up with the US system.
  - zmix 5y ago
    In Germany, the employer must pay half of the monthly healtcare plan and the employee pays the other half. Goes like this since decades in one of the strongest economies of the world. Of course, Apple is more worth than the whole DAX...
    - xwolfi 5y ago
      Be careful of market cap numbers, they hide information and are almost meaningless: they don't describe volume behavior. If suddenly people realized Apple had to be sold as fast as possible, most of that value would evaporate to reach a more reasonable tangible asset value. It's possible German stocks are well priced, in a regulated, slow and rational market that cares about fitting the price with the value of the company, and would hold most of their current market cap much more than Apple, were it liquidated.
      - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
        >It's possible German stocks are well priced, in a regulated, slow and rational market that cares about fitting the price with the value of the company LOL, well regulated and rational my ass. The Deutsche Bank and Wirecard scandals (puls numerous more) proved the German government is just as corrupt when it comes to manipulating the market and threatening honest journalists, so that some rich and well connected scumbags can get even more obscenely rich. I've worked in several western countries but never saw more high-level corporate corruption than in Germany.
justtologin 5y ago
> blue collar or back office labor jobs like mailroom processors could work hard and rise to the top I'd guess a factor in ending this has been the rise or at least growth of an administrative or managerial class in most businesses. An apprenticeship model lets people grow, and to some extent a similar model used to apply in business, where the executives and managers were all career industry people who started on the shop floor. The current system is closer to (closer, not the same as) a feudal system where there is a group of nobility that manages a group of serfs, and there is not much movement between the groups, at least at the same company. Admission into the nobility is based on education and other pedigree, and can never really be had by work experience.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  Exactly. There is no way to "hard work" your way from junior employee to Founder or CEO. When the CEO leaves, their replacement always comes from the executive class. The junior can work their way up to senior or even low-level manager. But at some point high up on the ladder, employees come from a totally different aristocracy, and you can't work or even buy your way into that clique. Every company I've ever worked for, when they went looking for a VP-Of-Something, they'd never promote from the proletariat--they'd always go externally and look for someone from the nobility.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    > Every company I've ever worked for, when they went looking for a VP-Of-Something, they'd never promote from the proletariat--they'd always go externally and look for someone from the nobility. Interestingly, that might be the case for Fortune 500. But among the fortune 10, most CEOs/C-Suite are engineers with long tenures at the company. Actually, if you look back at some of the most influential companies in the Valley at their peak, that's been a rule of thumb since the Fairchild days. Andrew Grove is an example of that [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove
- mandevil 5y ago
  So one factor here is the actually computers: 50 years ago, store clerk was a medium prestige job, that had medium pay and growth prospects- there are plenty of stories of people who started a clerk and ended up in a senior position. But that was because clerks had to know the prices and goods: a major risk to the store owner was customers swapping price stickers, so you needed a clerk who could spot the difference between the expensive onion and the cheap one and knew what the price should be and these clerks had to stay in one place long enough to know the prices. Then along came the laser/UPC/computer system and deskilled the job. No longer did you need to know the difference, the computer printed up a natural language description of the item. This allowed stores to get much larger, because no one could know all the prices in a large store (early department stores handled the size by making you pay for items in each department, using store balance accounts to not create too much friction). This fundamentally reshaped the relationship between capital (who owned the stores and the computer system) and labor. It's actually the exact same alienation of the individual from their labor that Marx was writing about in the 1850's, just for jobs that didn't get the same attention. Similarly, an in-law worked as a teller at a bank. 50 years ago that job would have more upward mobility because banks managed their risk locally: after many years as a teller and then as a loan officer you could move up to be the local person making the decision on loans. Nowadays large banks have centralized that with fancy computer systems to guide the decision, so there are entire paths of advancement that essentially don't exist anymore because computers spit out the answer. There is only shift and then branch manager, with once again the owners of the computer system using it to de-skill jobs and cut off promotion opportunities. (See, e.g. Better.com, using poorly paid contractors to do all the tedious stuff that can't be automated, and then letting the computer do all the high skill work.) This is, by the by, one of the reasons that computer programmers continue to get paid well, because we are enabling capital to de-skill and bifurcate jobs better and better.
xwolfi 5y ago
The American dream was also a concept for non-Americans. I mean, it's not like a formal, natural phenomenon we can just observe, so everyone has its own interpretation. So here is mine, from a French who chose to emigrate in China instead of the US: the idea was that you'd come from your bum-shit country into that vast new land of opportunities where everything was to build, you build it and are rewarded in a fair meritocratic system in ways your rotting homeland could never have provided. But now, you have to get your Twitter account scanned to be allowed entry under a temporary visa (or hey, try a green card lottery), risk upsetting an untreated schizophrenic while crossing the streets, to go to a gun-heavy anti-police protest anarchists use as an excuse to empty their Molotov stock while the police, too happy to finally have a purpose for their military weapon stocks, shoot at random. And if you are at the wrong place at the wrong time, you can be sent to a private jail. All the while, any accident you would have would not have been covered by any sort of socialized insurance but you'd be under one of the most punitive international tax system. And if you're unlucky, you can always take a payday loan, and join the merry mass of indebted grassroot people who have negative equity for no reason a rational mind could understand. The American nightmare, it seems to me :s
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  >here is mine, from a French who chose to emigrate in China instead of the US [...long paragraph of US bashing ...] The American nightmare, it seems to me :s Mighty ironic of you to go on such a lengthy rant to bash the US off your Western European high-horse (white male too I presume?) living in China like a priviledged westerner, but where the stuff you bashed the US for is amateur level stuff. Be careful with all those Winnie the Pooh memes or you might loose your social credit points, comrade. Could you please point out the free nation of Taiwan on the map, in public, for everyone to see please? My geography is a bit rusty. Also, how are them force labor death camps this time of year over there?
awakeasleep 5y ago
Your point about employee costs rising with healthcare is terrific and needs wider cultural recognition. This increases the cost of labor, and therefore cost of goods across the economy. Its a big part of the reason why US based manufacturing is increasingly impractical. Your point expands to all social services our government has outsourced, from retirement benefits to transportation, too.
- gadflyinyoureye 5y ago
  We'd still have the costs if the government took those in-house. Germans pay around $1500 a month (personal + employer costs) for healthcare. Other government programs add more cost. Bring those in cost would not really bring the cost of the employee down. Rather it would expand the weight and power of the government via increased taxes.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - gmadsen 5y ago
    it distributes the cost across all sectors, which as the above poster commented would be beneficial to hiring low skill workers
  - bserge 5y ago
    Germans pay at most $750/month (incl. employer contributions), and that's practically for the upper middle class (4500+/mo). The healthcare tax is capped at that, you can't pay any more. Correct me if I'm wrong. Not that it matters, their healthcare is garbage. Emergency services and surgery, sure, great. For that one time in your 80 years that you need it. Anything non vital? Weeks and months of waiting time. Mental healthcare? Non existent. Want the latest medicine? Fuck off to the US. Homeopathy? Paid for by insurance. You're part of the "Untermensch"? Pay and shut up or fuck off back where you came from, you dirty monkey.
  - oneoff786 5y ago
    It wouldn’t change the actual costs of living, but it would remove the inflection points where a full time employee is suddenly much more expensive than a 38 hour a work employee. And the taxes could be spread more progressively, e.g. to match the rate of wealth accumulation people get from having passively having wealth
jollybean 5y ago
The 'American Dream' is not 'Mail room to CEO' though FYI this is still possible. The 'American Dream' is a stable job, a modest home with 'plumbing' and 'electricity' and maybe one car, plastic tupperware, maybe a dishwasher, and a safe community with basic constitutional protections and a justice and democratic system with integrity and legitimacy, decent public schools and some access to higher education. All of that is revolutionary in the grand context of history. The 1950's 'America Middle Class' is the dream, as it is for many migrants to the US for whom those things are like heaven. The '$100K job, BMW and Corner Office' - that's something else, more like icing on the cake. People forget how hard it was for the world to create the basic '1950s middle class standard of living' and frankly how delicate the system we live in is. Within a generation we've come to accept that as more of a 'basic' condition of life, rather than something aspriational, which is a bit tragic. Most immigrants 'get it' though.

skybrian 5y ago

This particular article points out specific problems, but I think your assumption that being a replaceable cog is necessarily bad shows a lack of imagination. An advantage is that you can set your own hours and drop the work whenever you like and not think about it, because someone else will do it. Combined with working from home, it doesn’t seem like all that bad a way to make a few extra bucks? At least, if the problems in the article can be fixed. It seems like a decent fit when something else is more important in your life and the job comes second or third.