> > Progressive thinking is "Maybe we shouldn't let businesses set the rules for how they treat employees?" > Right, so make regulators get off their asses and

> > Progressive thinking is "Maybe we shouldn't let businesses set the rules for how they treat employees?" > Right, so make regulators get off their asses and start draft up some reasonable regulations where workers can work freely like they can with uber and mechanical turk? Just banning that sort of freedom entirely is conservative thinking, since it aims to preserve the shitty situation we have where everyone needs to have a "job". Trying to pass such regulations runs against massive lobbying efforts by companies. Amazon, Uber don't care about giving employees flexibility. They are free to give workers the flexibility, nothing is preventing them from doing it. They use this model to reduce benefits to give their workers. It is incredibly hard to pass regulations against these lobbying efforts. However regulations that companies need to give their workers benefits do already exist, that's why Ubers operations were deemed illegal in places. > Today people can't even imagine a society where you don't have a job, you just go and do things that are useful and get rewarded the full fruit of your labour, that sort of thing is possible with Ubers offerings and a bit of regulations, why go all in on preventing that future from happening? The argument is that the future is that people don't have the choice of " just go and do things that are useful and get rewarded the full fruit of your labour," but instead are locked into highly unfavourable situations, with no choice (because of their economic situation) and at the same time skirting around tax obligations, just to enrich the investor class behind Uber. That did already happen, just look at what Über did with the Uber Black loans where drivers got enticed into car loans with promises of guaranteed income, just for Uber to reduce the fares. This is essentially the same as how servdom in Russia worked. > So what is the problem, just regulate it and everything gets better than under the old Taxi systems. Why is this so hard to imagine? That's the whole point about the Uber leaks. Uber was not willing to work under the existing worker protection frameworks, they even exited markets where they were forced to (e.g. Switzerland).