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I have yet to see a convincing argument, here on HN or elsewhere, about how these companies are taking advantage of workers. Most of us are old enough to have

I have yet to see a convincing argument, here on HN or elsewhere, about how these companies are taking advantage of workers. Most of us are old enough to have seen these companies spring into existence, so here are the steps: 1) 100% of people are employed or unemployed. Uber (for example) doesn't exist 2) uber starts existing, some previously unemployed people and some previously employed people start working for uber 3) those people that willingly took those jobs are being taken advantage of What is the principal that justifies 3? People are not agents of free will, and any sub-utopic framework they have to participate in is immoral? Even if that's the case, I'd like to see the argument that those people who chose and choose to work at uber have worse outcomes than they otherwise would.

dylan604 4y ago
Uber originally hired licensed drivers and paid them handsomly. As Uber continued to become Uber, the deals the drivers had kept changing. That by itself is being taken advantage of from the driver's perspective. It only got worse from there.
teaearlgraycold 4y ago
The argument I’d make is that Uber game-ifies payouts, so it can be hard to actually know how much you’re making and it could take a while to realize if you’re profiting. Throw in some wishful thinking and gambling tendencies and you can quite easily take advantage of human psychology. Separately - companies in the US take advantage of most employees. So I’d say any large employer could do with an FTC shakedown.
- kansface 4y ago
  So you’d be OK with requirements that eg Uber provides those numbers in plain English?
  - teaearlgraycold 4y ago
    I think the system needs to change. You have no idea if the ride in that zone will take you 30 minutes away so you actually need to drive back unpaid to get higher fares. I think with enough transparency it can be fair to the drivers - but to the detriment of the customer experience.
- specialist 4y ago
  Yes and: rampant, systemic wage theft.
fabianhjr 4y ago
> 3) those people that _willingly_ took those jobs are being taken advantage of There is of course no threat of homelessness or starvation and those that were unemployed could have "chosen" to remain unemployed rather than taking those gig employment offers. Also as per your example, clearly everyone that started working at Uber knew they had to take into account costs such as the replacement cost of their vehicle, higher maintenance cost due to a huge increase on average kilometers driven per month, higher insurance costs, cleaning and repair cost to seats due to higher usage, etc. If people could choose to not work and not starve/lose their home I would somewhat agree most of those picking up employment as pauperized gig workers would do so willingly.
- carom 4y ago
  >There is of course no threat of homelessness or starvation and those that were unemployed could have "chosen" to remain unemployed rather than taking those gig employment offers. This is not really the company's fault that the system is set up so people must work. Address that at the societal level. We can start with building enough housing so people can afford rent making $3 per hour. I have a bunch of keywords watchers for a site I am building (AI). They also hit some gig worker subreddits due to data labeling. There is so much demand for click work it is insane. The sad thing about it all is that, at least for remote work, US workers are competing against cheaper overseas labor. I could hire some labelers, pay them per label a rate that comes to ~$10 per hour, and get completely undercut by someone who clones the business model but hires people from (e.g.) Brazil. It is a tough situation but the demand for work is there. I'd be interested in any policies that create good jobs for American workers.
  - solarmist 4y ago
    > This is not really the company's fault that the system is set up so people must work. The problem is companies like this take advantage of this as a feature of the system, not a bug. > Address that at the societal level. And how’s that working? It’s needs to be addressed at multiple levels simultaneously for any progress to be made. >We can start with building enough housing so people can afford rent making $3 per hour. This is a ridiculous statement. Yes, there needs to be more housing, but resources aren’t infinite so there will always be a floor that steadily increases and systems based in reality must take that into account.
SQueeeeeL 4y ago
Unironically, hating on gig labor is just a proxy for hating on wage labor and capitalism. It has basically shown an even more effective way to exploit people than wage labor (because now you don't even have to guarantee them hours, a minimum wage, or even that their job will still be accessible to them tomorrow) People who get super pissed at Uber without materialism just have a narrow perspective (Uber's still evil tho)
moralestapia 4y ago
>I have yet to see a convincing argument, here on HN or elsewhere, about how these companies are taking advantage of workers. I'll try :). A right, by definition, is a moral or legal entitlement to have or obtain something or to act in a certain way. (Legal) Rights cannot be taken away from you. Make sure you understand that before the next step. Now read -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_rights and make sure you spend ample time becoming acquainted with the kind of rights that are bestowed to workers in countries like the US. Now make a judgment on whether you think some of these companies are infringing some of these rights. If you also have trouble with that, let me know and I'll help as well!
- PubliusMI 4y ago
  This comment is all over the place. If a right is a moral entitlement, then it's not bestowed upon you and it can't be taken from you. If a right is a legal entitlement, then it certainly can!
- abigail95 4y ago
  It is downright obsecene to say Uber is breaking the law how it currently operates. By violating labor rights. Governments may, at their discretion change the rules about how Uber might deal with its workers. California recently did this. > Now make a judgment on whether you think some of these companies are infringing some of these rights Maybe you could post your own analysis instead of having a sparse wikipedia page do the heavy lifting? For legal: What law are they breaking by paying drivers as contractors? For moral: Given that 1099 status is legal, why don't drivers have a right to be classified as such? The law provides me the opportunity to work as a self employed contractor. I drive for Uber, Lyft, any whoever else. I end up making less than minimum wage. Who has violated my moral entitlement? Was it Uber? Did I violate my own rights? Why don't I have the right not to make minimum wage?
  - everforward 4y ago
    In my opinion, they're using the 1099 status in a way it was not meant to be used. The history of the 1099 lends itself toward high-risk, high-reward employment. People who started their own businesses and accepted the risk of poor wages or failure in exchange for the chance to have a successful business. The gig 1099 is a form of moderate-risk, low-reward employment. The risks are slightly lower because of piggybacking on a successful company, but the workers will never become independent of Uber, nor will they ever have a chance of "making it big". Their future is inexorably tangled with that of Uber/Lyft/whoever. > Did I violate my own rights? Why don't I have the right not to make minimum wage? The structure of our society mandates that people work. There are generally more people than jobs (as evidenced by a permanent unemployment rate). Allowing some classes of workers to work for below minimum wage can depress wages, because workers without other options will have to accept those below-minimum wages. Then there's a risk it spreads once normalized. Imagine big box stores and fast food switching to 1099's. A lot of those workers won't have the option to just work for someone else for minimum wage, because they lack the skills to switch to a new vertical. They either work for less than minimum wage, or they don't work. The overarching idea is that it's better to take the right to work for less than minimum wage away to preserve a livable wage for people who won't have any other options.
pkrotich 4y ago
We can all agree that no one is forcing anyone to work for these companies… as I see it, the main issues are; 1) how said workers are classified (1099 vs. W-2) 2) Benefits and lack thereof based on the classification 3) Hidden cost of using your own equipment. 4) Real pay once you factor in 1-3. That said, it’s not any different than say Walmarts of the world - where most of their full time W-2 employees are in public assistance simply because of the pay. Reality, in the capitalism anyhow, is - if you’re working for someone they’re not going to pay you more than what they can get out of you or the next sucker willing to work for less - the question is how much?! And what’s fair.
jrajav 4y ago
The elephant in the room is that the US labor market is, as a whole, already taking advantage of lowest earners across the board. They are getting paid less than the lowest earners from any prior time historically, while cost of living is only getting higher, and working conditions have been on a steady decline too - all this while the productivity they generate is at an all time high. For many workers, there is a total absence of a 'good' choice. This is why when one company manages to lower the bar just a bit further and find new loopholes to exploit to pay workers less, give them even worse working conditions and benefits, or give them even less power and autonomy, it sticks out more than it normally would in a healthy labor economy.
- kmod 4y ago
  > all this while the productivity they generate is at an all time high I see this claim repeated a lot but you didn't say where it comes from so it's a bit hard to discuss. In particular, you are making a claim about the productivity of low earners but I don't think this is something that is measured in the US? My understanding is the BLS computes industry-wide productivity measures, ie mean productivity (as opposed to say median productivity), and one would expect this distribution to be significantly right-tailed and the mean to be mostly influenced by the right tail. I haven't seen any data that breaks down productivity growth by income, so if you have a source for your claim I'd love to update myself. When I search for "productivity growth by income" I see versions of your claim but again they are all about population _means_.
  - uoaei 4y ago
    - PubliusMI 4y ago
  - jrajav 4y ago
    There are several sources that measure with this in mind, focusing on production and non-supervisory workers, or by breaking it down by sector. Here's one such: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ I haven't yet seen a source, whether it's a total average measure or bucketed, that doesn't at least show that productivity has always continued increasing year-over-year - not always at pace with GDP growth, but "productivity at an all-time high" still holds true. I think this tracks intuitively too, given that we continue to add infrastructure and technology to support production and services. The key point is that lowest earner's share of income has consistently decreased at the same time. That discrepancy alone, and the fact that the discrepancy has been allowed to widen for many decades now, is what gets us to the situation we're in today.
judge2020 4y ago
> 1) 100% of people are employed or unemployed. Uber (for example) doesn't exist Contract work (1099) existed for a long time before Uber.
hintymad 4y ago
I think the title is kinda vague. What FTC really tries to do is "Commission outlined a number of issues facing gig workers, including deception about pay and hours, unfair contract terms, and anticompetitive wage fixing and coordination between gig economy companies." That sounds legitimate to me. If "take advantage of" is not well defined as you said, then it reminds me how intellectuals and young people loved Soviet Union in the 30s and 40s, and how European countries and Japan had so many communist parties and political assassinations after WWII. The word "taking advantage of" and "exploit" have such a great appealing to people's righteousness that even the US government can use them freely to gain support from a large number of people. edit: read the actual announcement and added a paragraph accordingly.
ep103 4y ago
Its comments like this that have caused me to really lose faith in the quality of conversation on Hacker News. By your logic above, an indentured servitude would count as a "not being taken advantage of" and by implication, reasonable moral form of employment. Each of the following questions in your final paragraph are similarly shallow. > People are not agents of free will, and any sub-utopic framework they have to participate in is immoral? This is a straw man argument to its core. No one is, or has suggested that all labor should be abolished unless it meets a utopian ideal. > Even if that's the case It is not the case > I'd like to see the argument that those people who chose and choose to work at uber have worse outcomes than they otherwise would Interestingly, this is the same argument that was used in favor of slavery.
- deleted 4y ago
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- mylons 4y ago
  - mylons 4y ago
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- andai 4y ago
  I don't understand the parallel between working for uber and indentured servitude?
  - NegativeLatency 4y ago
    In both instances workers are being taken advantage of by an employer because of asymmetric power in the system.
    - echelon 4y ago
      But there are thousands of other jobs to choose from. The government itself has a bunch of jobs that require similar skills.
grumple 4y ago
An agreement between a worker and a company does not absolve either of their legal responsibilities. Structures made to evade or abuse the letter of the law while violating the spirit are what we're seeing cracked down on here. So that's what's happening legally. Morally, there are a few issues: 1) Workers are coerced into working because they need money to live. When it's between a life of despair and working for a shitty employer, workers will choose the latter. Laws are meant to prevent abuse in this situation. 2) The information disparity between the two parties means workers cannot make informed decisions, making them abuse their cars and insurance for less profit than expected. 3) The company can still abuse employees, for example by unfairly controlling rideshare rates, refusing to give them things they are supposed to get as employees (the nature of that relationship being defined by the state for the protection of the people).
sandworm101 4y ago
So we should also give up on minimum wages? Heath codes? Safety rules? Just let the market sort it out? Last time we tried that it did not end well. Regulation is necessary for a practical (not-highschool-textbook) economy.
- dataviz1000 4y ago
  We read Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" in our high school economics class as an aside. Then again, I went to a high school where the government civics class started with reading the Mayflower Compact, The Social Contract, Wealth of Nations, and several excerpts from other sources which inspired the American Founding Fathers before spending the second half of the semester reading and discussing the Constitution line by line. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle
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- specialist 4y ago
  Yup. Games generally need rules and referees. To be at least somewhat fair.
theonemind 4y ago
We have a middle-class levy in the form of tax medallions. So they have found a way to undermine that levy in a gray area of the rules society has set up. They exploit the worker by underpaying them and treating them badly by the standards of the old levy, the taxi medallion. They exploit society by hollowing out the middle class. We actually need a middle class for the benefit of the masses, and even the ultra-wealthy, though only a few of them seem aware of it, like Henry Ford paying his workers enough to buy his cars. H. Ford seemed to lack any goodness of heart--he just had the brains to recognize that no one could buy his cars if they didn't make enough money to buy them. I think we should intervene in markets to sustain a middle class, which makes society better and richer on the whole. Unchecked free markets eventually seem to end up with a power-law winner-take-all type wealth distribution. Even the ultra-wealthy suffer compared to the ideal in societies with large wealth inequality. They don't live as long. They will have less things like the iphone, which the ultra-wealthy can't really even get a better core version of; they can, perhaps, buy one encased in gold. No middle class, no iphone and things like it.
- clcaev 4y ago
  > think we should intervene in markets to sustain a middle class Should interventions be limited to supporting a middle class?
  - edmundsauto 4y ago
    Interventions should be focused on dampening the spring action - less rich "rich people" and less poor "poor people". I think there is an argument that could be made to consider these policies from an overall "growing of the pie" perspective. IE, do these policies inhibit total growth and make everyone worse off? However, my limited understanding is this is essentially trickle down economics and the evidence this occurs (versus rich people hoarding wealth) is limited. So I'm open to the argument but it would need quite a bit of rigor.
rconti 4y ago
In order for your framework to, well, work, you have to make a lot of assumptions. Things like: * Jobs are not sticky (eg, there are 0 switching costs once you are 'stuck' at an employer) * Employers cannot change their character or terms (eg, it was a good place to work yesterday, now it has become a bad place to work) * Employers cannot drag an entire industry or employment segment down (eg, race to the bottom) * Employers cannot do anti-competitive/restrictive things (eg, you must drive this kind of car, you must work these hours, you cannot work for a competitor, you cannot negotiate on the terms of your pay structure) I'm generally (and historically; eg, younger me) very sympathetic to the idea of freedom to contract for any terms. However, it is not a zero-sum game. A previously-unemployed person does not become employed and then be magically better for life. That would assume they would have been unemployed forever had this business not come along, and it would also assume that this business cannot become worse to work for over time or limit one's prospects. I used to be very opposed to the concept of wage floors, however what's changed my mind has been the impact of unemployment to drag down wages. As long as there is >0 unemployment, there can and will be a race to the bottom in terms of the wages and conditions of marginal employment. This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if the employment market was a fixed pie (again, zero sum game), but that's not the way the real world works.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Excellent list. Another thing I'd add is size asymmetry. Markets and negotiations work best when deal participants are of roughly equal power. That's rare with labor; people tend to have 1, maybe 2 jobs, while companies tend to have a lot more employees. Bad-actor companies can devote a lot more attention and effort to screwing people over than workers can to figuring out the situation. That means if we want optimal outcomes, we need things like labor regulation and unions to balance the asymmetries.
- kukx 4y ago
  I think you brought up some interesting points. You increased the complexity of the model by adding new dimensions. But you did not explain how including these would change the conclusion. Does assuming the switching cost makes a gig work opportunity a net negative for those seeking a job? The pros and cons should be quantified somehow, but that is probably almost impossible to do. In that case I am inclined to make sure as many people as possible have the opportunity to work, since I believe that not being able to be a productive member of a society is very bad for a man.
feet 4y ago
People actually do not have free will, we are all part of a deterministic system
5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
from the article > deception about pay and hours > unfair contract terms > anticompetitive wage fixing https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/amazon-ftc-pay-flex-drivers-stolen-tips.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/amazon-ftc-pay-f... https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/11/25/bay-areas-doordash-to-pay-2-5-million-after-being-accused-of-stealing-drivers-tips/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/11/25/bay-areas-doordash-to... i guess you also would have had no problem when steve jobs and other SV companies colluded to wage fix? https://www.theregister.com/2015/09/03/apple_wagefixing_closed/ https://www.theregister.com/2015/09/03/apple_wagefixing_clos...
- throwaway09223 4y ago
  Yes, but those problems are ubiquitous. I have the same types of problems with employers for my absurdly lucrative software engineering positions. Looking at these issues in context, this industry seems no worse than any other.
wpietri 4y ago
What you're missing is the centuries of detail we have about how companies screw over vulnerable workers. I'd suggest you start reading some labor history. E.g.: https://www.amazon.com/History-America-Ten-Strikes-ebook/dp/B078XKHSSB https://www.amazon.com/History-America-Ten-Strikes-ebook/dp/...
tshaddox 4y ago
This isn’t an answer, but another question. Is there anything that you would consider to be “a company taking advantage of workers” short of direct physical coercion?
annoyingnoob 4y ago
I think the first misnomer is calling it employment, calling Uber driving a job. It is self-employment at the moment, it is running a business. People starting their own business should be doing the math ahead of time, understanding costs and income. Uber attempts to obscure information around pay where you do not always know what you are being paid, and makes it hard to tell when you are running at a loss. By controlling pricing and access Uber takes business decisions away from drivers while at the same time calling them independent.
jrochkind1 4y ago
Just to be clear, your argument is basically that no employer can ever take advantage of any employee/worker, by definition?
- uoaei 4y ago
  The argument is basically "Ayn Rand was right", for which there are an almost innumerable amount of rebuttals already in the literature and regular discourse.
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unity1001 4y ago
It does not matter how you reach a bad outcome. Be it through legal and moral means, be everything legitimate, a bad outcome is a bad outcome. And if that is bad for the society, that must be addressed. Because, 'Oh, its just happened so' cannot fix things.
LinkLink 4y ago
Would you be upset if somebody shot you? Why! It's perfectly reasonable that given enough time and proximity to the inherent risk of life that among the billions of people on earth that you would be in a situation where it resulted in you being shot? Seems logical to me? Sometimes people want the world to be better than the bare minimum. And sometimes but clearly not in your case they feel sympathy and empathy.
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naet 4y ago
Some companies have basically skirted many existing regulations and worker protections by using the gig worker tax classification, to avoid being on the hook for certain basics like healthcare coverage even though they are acting as the primary employer for a large amount of people.
themitigating 4y ago
"Slaves are better off because they are housed and fed"
reillyse 4y ago
Well I guess the companies have nothing to worry about so.
barrysteve 4y ago
As a series of propositional arguments frozen in time, it's a little difficult. As a story it's a little easier. Licenses to drive taxicabs, called Taxi Medallions used to limit the number of taxicab drivers below demand. Buying the license to operate was a valid investment choice, for hundreds of thousands of dollars. This ensured secure work, wages and support admin for taxis. It wasn't perfect, it just was what it was. Gig economy apps disrupted this process heavily by soaking up the demand for extra taxi cab services and providing a plug'n'play model for contractors to drive for their taxi service. This was a good deal in the beginning as wages were favourable and lower overheads gave individual drivers a chance to compete with taxicab co's. Medallion prices cratered, meaning a 600k+ medallion had to be bought out by the gov years later a one-sixth the price. Prices and wages dropped on Apps. Apps never stopped signing up drivers, leading to a glut of taxi drivers that exceeded demand. App surge-pricing models meant the best times to drive were the most expensive for the customer and the highest-competition for the glut of drivers. Drivers could not guarantee consistent customers and therefore wages, or growth in wages so they had varying degrees of economic pressure. Some with car rental payments and personal expenses can not break even. Apps do not enforce normal working conditions, so if someone cannot meet financial requirements with an 8hr shift, they are incentivized to hit 12hrs driving, for an average wage. When do you get a new job when you're trapped in a 12hr shift, dead end job with no growth or exit strategy? It's lose-lose. Or maybe lose-break even.
tlogan 4y ago
Full time drivers are taken advantage of because full time drivers are not really free contrators: they can drive only for Uber and nothing else. Before UBer, these people had full time jobs as limo drivers, personal drivers, or something like that. Of course, there are also people who have other jobs (firefighters, nurses, teachers, etc), students, between jobs and they love it. And regulations like this will hurt them. I hope my argument make sense.
- lstodd 4y ago
  > they can drive only for Uber and nothing else Is this really the case? Because every gig driver I rode with effectively worked for all locally available gigs at once.
giaour 4y ago
It doesn't follow from your second point that Uber is non-exploitative. US law recognizes limits to the right to contract (e.g., one cannot agree to sell one's labor for less than minimum wage[0]), so the fact that some have chosen to work for Uber doesn't in and of itself demonstrate that Uber's employment terms are legal. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Coast_Hotel_Co._v._Parrish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Coast_Hotel_Co._v._Parris...
- lolinder 4y ago
  OP isn't saying that #2 implies non-exploitation, OP is saying that they can't see how #2 implies exploitation. Non-exploitation is the null hypothesis, we assume it to be the case until proven otherwise.
  - giaour 4y ago
    No one is arguing that #2 implies exploitation. That would mean that everyone who has a job or has signed a contract is being exploited.
- abigail95 4y ago
  I'm not going to hear any more nonsense about how what Uber is doing is illegal until I see some a serious legal analysis. 1099 is legal. It is explicitly legal to work as a self employed contractor and not make minimum wage. That is legally true. Whether you link a case that was decided for political reasons does not affect this.
  - giaour 4y ago
    I never said anything Uber was doing was illegal. OP said that the fact that people choose to work for Uber means that Uber’s employment practices are therefore legal, because it was the employee’s free choice. I don’t think that’s a sound argument. I suspect based on the original article that you may have the opportunity to read the legal analysis you ask for soon if the FTC determines any specific company violated labor law wrt gig work.
creamynebula 4y ago
The fact that they willingly took those jobs does not mean they are being treated fairly, it means they had no better option and need to survive.
intrasight 4y ago
Labor laws exist for reasons which, apparently, your education did not impart upon you.
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sschueller 4y ago
I assume you are located in a country with poor to no worker protection laws or you would not be asking such a question. In most European countries workers have protections which include paid sick leave, worker comp, social security payments, pension payments, maternity leave, etc. etc. All these are required by law to be provided partially or fully by the employers. Uber does not pay any of those. They expect you to be self-employed and pay for all these things yourself yet dictate the price which makes it impossible to live. If you were truly self-employed you would not take the project at that price.
- lolinder 4y ago
  This doesn't answer the question of why people choose to work at Uber if there are jobs available that provide all of these things. People in Europe have the opportunity to work in a job that covers for all of these benefits. Driving for Uber isn't mandatory. Is the implication that the adults working for Uber just aren't smart enough to know they're being exploited?
  - kyleee 4y ago
    There is no doubt some paternalism at play here, without making a value judgement
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    The bigger argument is that they don't have the power to avoid being exploited. You could compare too-low wages in many situations to a prisoner's dilemma or tragedy of the commons. Being smart can't save you; you need solidarity/regulation.
erdos4d 4y ago
I think this completely glosses over the uncomfortable fact that uber is a billion dollar VC backed company that operates by: 1) Targeting a market with established taxi companies offering a legally regulated service requiring background checks, insurance, and driving/car safety standards. 2) Illegally setting up an unregulated competing taxi service which relies on the local police/elite being unable/unwilling(bribed) to enforce the existing taxi regulations in light of the size and effort uber puts into its racket. In the process it hires up anyone willing to do it, regardless of if their car is safe, they are actually a good driver or not, meet the insurance requirements of a taxi driver, and so on. 3) Pushing taxi drivers out of work because they can't compete with the obviously cheaper illegal competitor. 4) Hiring many of these now unemployed taxi drivers up as gig workers and paying them far less than they got before for doing a legal job. This is their model and it is outright exploitative. It is literally just using money to wantonly break the law and rig a market. It is also pretty much what Airbnb and a lot of other silicon valley firms have been up to in recent years, since they obviously ran out of actual innovation to sell.
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code_duck 4y ago
The fallacy is the idea that people desperate for money choose gig work out of “free will”. They accept the terms dictated to them due to lack of options. True that they could choose to lose their homes and vehicles and live in a tent by the freeway.
- abigail95 4y ago
  Who among us doesn't face that choice? I work or I starve. If I don't work, and I don't starve - someone else must be working. If someones sole and only option was to work for Uber: Is Uber the one at fault here? If Uber didn't exist and person had zero options, would this be neutral, worse, or better compared to the former scenario? It's not a fallacy because people have different moral standards about whether you should be employed at $7.25 or unemployed at $15. Personally I consider it my absolute right to mow lawns at $5/day if I choose to do it. If you think I'm not making enough money, you can give me more! Don't force the people alreaday paying me to pay more. The EITC gives more benefits than any minimum wage will and more than any 1099 law reform.
  - code_duck 4y ago
    There are so many easily addressable fallacies in this that I am not sure if I need to bother. > If someones sole and only option was to work for Uber: Is Uber the one at fault here? Nobody really cares who’s fault it is. Of course Uber is going to attempt to pay as little as they can for labor under existing laws. > If Uber didn't exist and person had zero options, would this be neutral, worse, or better compared to the former scenario? So, you mean if there was unfulfilled demand for transportation and a duopoly who abused labor didn’t exist? > It's not a fallacy because people have different moral standards about whether you should be employed at $7.25 or unemployed at $15. However, the real economy does actually exist and it is not possible to sustain any sort of lifestyle at $7.25 an hour. $15 is not even sustainable currently. So, to rephrase the question, should people working full-time be able to afford living in a house without government assistance, or should they be able to afford an apartment? > Personally I consider it my absolute right to mow lawns at $5/day if I choose to do it. I don’t think that grocery stores or landlords care about your beliefs. If you’re satisfied living in a tent by the interstate or outside and abandoned building, or at your parents house, or have a family or partner who can support you, that’s great. Otherwise, I suppose you can afford Steel Reserve, eat at a homeless shelter and sleep in a tent by the sidewalk at $5 an hour. However, such lifestyles incur significant expense to taxpayers. > I work or I starve. If I don't work, and I don't starve - someone else must be working. I have had jobs where I hardly worked at all, yet I received about 10 times minimum wage. Who is supporting the people in such positions?
majormajor 4y ago
Scale is a meaningful thing to think about here. Many pro-Uber arguments point out how rigged against everyday drivers the medallion system in some cities was. Precarious contract labor with all the power in the medallion owner's court. In theory, "optional light second job or side work while a student" things sound great. In practice, if you find that that's not the case for the majority of these workers, and that in many cases you've just enlarged an existing problem that was there, but largely ignored, in the case of taxi drivers and some other niches... then it's time to consider regulating this new system. (The taxi system also wasn't much in the news, but this newcomer was, well, news... so that's also gonna play a role.) (You could also make full-time-employment less of a requirement for things like affordable health care - the market rates for individuals are still very different than what my employer pays for my coverage - but that's an even bigger political non-starter in the US...)
amelius 4y ago
Let me explain it in a way that you might understand: 1) there are kids in the schoolyard. 2) all the kids are free to move around; they can talk to anybody else and do things to have fun. 3) a kid can decide to punch another kid; but the unwritten laws of the schoolyard prevent that, because the other kid might throw a punch back. But now ... 4) a group of 5 kids decide to bully a kid that is standing alone. How is this possible? Why don't the unwritten laws of the free schoolyard protect the kid? Good thing there are teachers around to regulate the schoolyard!
throwaboo100 4y ago
> Even if that's the case, I'd like to see the argument that those people who chose and choose to work at uber have worse outcomes than they otherwise would. It only takes one common situation, right? They go into debt on the vehicles they lease from the company or from an agent. They were given deliberately incomplete information about how much money they would make, so taking into account all the circumstances, they wind off worse than they would be at a standard, legal job. In other words, "by some process" of deception, they wind up below minimum wage.
- bombcar 4y ago
  If Uber could buy the vehicles and hire drivers directly, then they’d do that. Since they don’t, someone else is taking on those costs and risks. But who?
ivalm 4y ago
(3) doesn’t come from (2), but (2) doesn’t negate (3) either. There are people in (1) who are desperate, when (2) occurs those desperate people freely choose this opportunity. Whether this opportunity is exploitative needs to be argued outside of (2) or (3). Here are two example of how society doesn’t allow certain freely chosen compensations schemes. (A) suppose one could offer money for organ donation, we would see increase in donations. As a society we do not allow it because it is exploitative. (B) More extreme, suppose someone could offer money for the right to kill a volunteer, with enough money I’m sure there would be volunteers, but we don’t allow that because it is also exploitative. The OPs (2) is less extreme than my (A) or (B), but I hope my examples show that (2) and (3) can be both true.
thr0wawayf00 4y ago
Imagine a world where all software developers are converted to contractors and have to work through a platform like Toptal, Upwork, etc. because it's easier for employers since the platforms do all of the background check and technical assessment for them. All the companies have to do is pick their technical resources and go. As a developer, you have to compete against everyone else in the world on the platform, regardless of your COL and previous salary expectations. The only power you have as a developer is to walk away from the platform and do something else for work (like drive Uber). Your work has been completely commoditized and you have few rights since you're a contractor. You're working for yourself and thus you're expected to be responsible for your own benefits. You willingly took a job and in that scenario, you wouldn't feel taken advantage of at all? Uber completely destroyed the taxi industry, for better or worse. Contracting engagements are on the rise and it's not that farfetched to see a future where software developers are treated this way too. Why would any of us assume that we're immune from this commoditization, and if we can all agree that we wouldn't want to be subjected to it ourselves, why do we accept it for others?
- guywithahat 4y ago
  Except talented developers on those platforms make ~$120 and hour and up, the people who make smaller salaries are usually either just starting out or don't have unique skills. I wouldn't want to live in this world because I don't like remote work, however from a salary perspective I don't think it would be that bad
Viliam1234 4y ago
In game theory, sometimes giving people extra options can make their situation worse. I am not saying that this is necessarily the case of e.g. Uber drivers. I am just arguing in general around the argument structure of "the old options are still there, a new one was added, people have free will, therefore they cannot possibly be harmed by this".
lhorie 4y ago
From what I've seen, the majority of arguments against gig work is a combination of information asymmetry (usually that a worker does not know the "true" payout of such work because they haven't accounted for things like depreciation and car maintenance costs) and the idea that you can't "overcharge" for unskilled labor. E.g. one could make the same argument that a general contractor also "does not know the true payout" of their contracts since they also have various difficult-to-calculate cost-of-of-doing-business costs, but the rebuttal is that these costs can be built into the cost of the service. Something that I think a lot of these discussions fail to account for (and was, incidentally, an underlying theme for California's Prop 22) is that gig companies artificially create a type of market that would otherwise cannibalize itself into a different type of market. If one were to follow the ideals of increasing payouts to [whatever arbitrary point is deemed acceptable], the logical conclusion is that either demand has to increase proportionally to create upward price pressure - and there's no reason to believe the market would simply increase demand just because one wishes for it - or service volume has to decrease (the service becomes less affordable, meaning less demand from price-sensitive customers, which in turn means less drivers on the road, longer wait times, etc). But once we get into these terms, we run into the classic "I got mine" mentality. Then it's complaints that taxis aren't reliable, or smugness about how one doesn't even use these services in the first place. Well, which is it, does one supposedly "care" or is it really insofar as it doesn't become an inconvenience to themselves? Easier to just blame the companies for everything, right? The one group that does truly care about the payouts is drivers themselves. From what I see in driver youtube channels, they can in fact become quite savvy about how much they can expect to take home, and come to their own data-based conclusions about whether new features or bonus structures are good or not. Common themes: two [gig companies] are better than one, long term is worse than short term, weekends are better than tuesdays. And to tie back to supply and demand, gig worker supply base is highly elastic, aggressively more so than any other type of business. Uber's CEO even said inflation helps business because with rising cost of living, more people look to gig work to make a few extra bucks. So, in a way, sure, gig companies promote an environment where more workers can freely come in a take a piece of a pie (which is not infinite). The thing is everyone wants more of it and there's only so much to go around. Is setting up such a system akin to taking advantage of these people? In a way yes because it's playing to their desires to earn more in a world that is largely structured to think payouts should always go up over time, whereas the reality is that they're exposed to these raw supply-and-demand market forces more directly. But also no, because they wouldn't have that opportunity to make extra cash at all otherwise.
xani_ 4y ago
Because the people that are clueless about business can easily price their service below even minimum wage and companies use it exactly for that reason You get paid per service of moving people around, but might not be knowledgable enough to calculate deprecation and other stuff correctly. More than that, any problem with the car is also on you, not on company car, so you'd have to budget for that too. It's a way for company to shift the risk entirely to the lowest paid worker, including every risk involved with car itself. It's even worse in say food delivery when the couriers are bidding for who can ship it the cheapest. You're essentially getting bidded out in race for bottom if there is enough competition, again going around minimum wage. > 3) those people that willingly took those jobs are being taken advantage of > What is the principal that justifies 3? People are not agents of free will, and any sub-utopic framework they have to participate in is immoral? Even if that's the case, I'd like to see the argument that those people who chose and choose to work at uber have worse outcomes than they otherwise would. Because as society we decided letting capitalism exploit dumbasses willing to work for half-free is a bad thing. That's why we have minimum wages. That's why jobs like that should have unions. Because without body to represent them there always will be someone willing to do it for half free.
VictorPath 4y ago
Many Cherokee lived freely not all that long ago. Now some are wage slaves for Uber. Some west Africans lived freely, then were slaves in the USA, and their descendants now out of Jim Crow are wage slaves for gig companies. For others groups this process happened earlier. There are those who work, and then there is an idle class aristocracy of heirs who do not work, but who expropriate surplus labor time from those of us who do work. It is not the job of the working class to make convincing arguments to the parasites who live off their labor, it is the historical mission of the working class to eliminate the parasitic class which does not work, and which lives off worker's expropriated surplus labor time surplus.
ckw 4y ago
< I have yet to see a convincing argument, here on HN or elsewhere, about how these companies are taking advantage of workers. Some issues referenced in the link the FTC intends to address: Misrepresentations about the nature of gig work: While gig companies promote independence to potential workers, in practice these firms may tightly prescribe and control their workers’ tasks in ways that run counter to the promise of independence and an alternative to traditional jobs. Holding companies accountable for claims and conduct about costs and benefits: Gig companies must not be deceptive in their claims to prospective gig workers about potential earnings, and they must be transparent and truthful about costs borne by workers. You may object that workers can just quit if they find the work unsatisfactory, but people often commit large investments of time or money to get these jobs. As a personal example, I once worked as a google search query evaluator. The job was advertised as paying $14.50 per hour, and you could work at any time. It required studying a ~100-150 page manual of search query evaluation minutiae, and passing a test demonstrating mastery of the material. Once I started, I found out the advertisement was a misrepresentation. You would periodically be given some allotment of work, it could be several hours worth, it could be two minutes worth. You might go weeks without being assigned work, and you had to login to check if any had been added to your queue. To be paid you would submit a timesheet weekly, where you would note each type of task completed, alongside the count, and the time spent. There were target rates and minimum accuracy levels for each type of task. Failure to meet accuracy requirements resulted in termination. If you submitted a timesheet where the calculated rate was lower than the target rate for any category of task, the timesheet would be flagged, and you would be enjoined to ‘correct’ it. I’m sure most people simply lied and decreased the time billed in these situations, accepting tacitly a wage far below that represented to them. The thing is the target rate for most tasks was impossible. It wasn’t based on people’s ability to complete tasks, but by the degree to which they could be squeezed. Concentrated markets: Markets populated by gig companies are often concentrated, resulting in reduced choice for workers, customers, and businesses. These companies may be more likely to exert their market power in anticompetitive ways that harm workers’ wages, job quality, and other aspects of gig work. Combating unlawful practices and constraints imposed on workers: Gig companies using artificial intelligence or other advanced technologies to govern workers’ pay, performance, and work assignments are still required to keep promises they make to workers. Companies must also ensure that any restrictive contract terms, including those limiting workers from seeking other jobs, do not violate the FTC Act or other laws. Policing unfair methods of competition that harm gig workers: The FTC will investigate evidence of agreements between gig companies to illegally fix wages, benefits, or fees for gig workers that should be open to competition. The FTC will also investigate exclusionary or predatory conduct that could cause harm to customers or reduced compensation or poorer working conditions for gig workers.
anigbrowl 4y ago
You left out 2a-z, Uber serially changes working conditions after achieving market dominance, and I think you know this quite well.
zackees 4y ago
stevenicr 4y ago
There are many ways these companies are taking advantage of people, I have some small data points / insights, it would be easy to mark some of them as 'well they designed for this one thing and did not think about the other thing, so it was not intentional' - but for example, if you look at how the office folks are treated at lyft compared to how the driver 'hiring people' are treated, and how the drivers are treated, and how the customers are treated - you can easily see some very stark differences in many things.. and so it is intentional. Sure they have free will and all that - but certain dark patterns definitely take advantage, and other omissions are an issue as well. 'The game theory' that keeps people driving and picking up more people and guiding them to hot spots for bonuses for example is not helping the driver be more healthy and alert and safe - it helps the company get coverage where they are lacking. Quick payments could be advertised as bonus help - but if we are totally honest it helps attract and keep people who are trapped in addictions to keep doing things - so it may be a good thing but also in some cases a take advantage of people thing. The 'money earned' thing is gamified in many ways.. from the emails saying 'make X dollars per week / month when you come back to drive with us' - to the lack of showing expenses.. many people are ignorant of what they make each week after expenses and have zero clue about tax burdens, and lack of investment in social security and other things they would glean from standard jobs. Hey I am not hating on this - and it can be super great for the single parent who need super flexible work option temporarily for example- but it's a farce. I frequently talked to drivers who were all shiny happy people showing they made "$1,000 this week' - but had no real understanding that they spent $400 on gas this past week compared to the 200 the week before, did not account for the car maintenance and no clue about the taxes owed. At least in the market around here, I calculated the average money made to be about $6 per hour once considering taxes and gas.. and this is for a semi-dangerous job - no not talking about the passengers which are mostly okay - just driving around streets that many more hours is adding that much more danger of wrecks and such. It would be trivial for these companies to add in expense reporting, scheduling for maintenance and taxes and bathroom breaks - but they don't - and we know why - it's the start-up- gig culture trying to maximize the valuation for wall street at the expense of those who are less educated about the sacrifices being made in the short term. I have many more small data points to add - from pics of the tires some of these drivers are using to the lack of transparency about surges in more drivers coming - to uncompensated long drives to last minute cancelled rides - all sorts of things that are at the expense of those that can least afford it - and at this point these companies should know better about a lot of these things - but they are purposefully kicking those cans down the line to future issues in order to prop up the quarterlies for the short term benefit of those who do know better. This could be a blog post with some pics and screenshots for better examples I guess. Oh, and the effects on the riders.. so many things to add - but the question was proof of taking advantage of gig workers.
BizarroLand 4y ago
3) Uber finds a loophole that allows them to pay people in #3 less than the federally required minimum wage, exploiting the very people that they rely on to exist as a functional company. Somehow people are confused how a voluntary action can be illegal if the circumstances that surround that action are not legal.

dylan604 4y ago

Uber originally hired licensed drivers and paid them handsomly. As Uber continued to become Uber, the deals the drivers had kept changing. That by itself is being taken advantage of from the driver's perspective. It only got worse from there.

teaearlgraycold 4y ago

The argument I’d make is that Uber game-ifies payouts, so it can be hard to actually know how much you’re making and it could take a while to realize if you’re profiting. Throw in some wishful thinking and gambling tendencies and you can quite easily take advantage of human psychology. Separately - companies in the US take advantage of most employees. So I’d say any large employer could do with an FTC shakedown.

kansface 4y ago
So you’d be OK with requirements that eg Uber provides those numbers in plain English?
- teaearlgraycold 4y ago
  I think the system needs to change. You have no idea if the ride in that zone will take you 30 minutes away so you actually need to drive back unpaid to get higher fares. I think with enough transparency it can be fair to the drivers - but to the detriment of the customer experience.
specialist 4y ago
Yes and: rampant, systemic wage theft.

fabianhjr 4y ago

> 3) those people that _willingly_ took those jobs are being taken advantage of There is of course no threat of homelessness or starvation and those that were unemployed could have "chosen" to remain unemployed rather than taking those gig employment offers. Also as per your example, clearly everyone that started working at Uber knew they had to take into account costs such as the replacement cost of their vehicle, higher maintenance cost due to a huge increase on average kilometers driven per month, higher insurance costs, cleaning and repair cost to seats due to higher usage, etc. If people could choose to not work and not starve/lose their home I would somewhat agree most of those picking up employment as pauperized gig workers would do so willingly.

carom 4y ago
>There is of course no threat of homelessness or starvation and those that were unemployed could have "chosen" to remain unemployed rather than taking those gig employment offers. This is not really the company's fault that the system is set up so people must work. Address that at the societal level. We can start with building enough housing so people can afford rent making $3 per hour. I have a bunch of keywords watchers for a site I am building (AI). They also hit some gig worker subreddits due to data labeling. There is so much demand for click work it is insane. The sad thing about it all is that, at least for remote work, US workers are competing against cheaper overseas labor. I could hire some labelers, pay them per label a rate that comes to ~$10 per hour, and get completely undercut by someone who clones the business model but hires people from (e.g.) Brazil. It is a tough situation but the demand for work is there. I'd be interested in any policies that create good jobs for American workers.
- solarmist 4y ago
  > This is not really the company's fault that the system is set up so people must work. The problem is companies like this take advantage of this as a feature of the system, not a bug. > Address that at the societal level. And how’s that working? It’s needs to be addressed at multiple levels simultaneously for any progress to be made. >We can start with building enough housing so people can afford rent making $3 per hour. This is a ridiculous statement. Yes, there needs to be more housing, but resources aren’t infinite so there will always be a floor that steadily increases and systems based in reality must take that into account.

SQueeeeeL 4y ago

Unironically, hating on gig labor is just a proxy for hating on wage labor and capitalism. It has basically shown an even more effective way to exploit people than wage labor (because now you don't even have to guarantee them hours, a minimum wage, or even that their job will still be accessible to them tomorrow) People who get super pissed at Uber without materialism just have a narrow perspective (Uber's still evil tho)

moralestapia 4y ago

>I have yet to see a convincing argument, here on HN or elsewhere, about how these companies are taking advantage of workers. I'll try :). A right, by definition, is a moral or legal entitlement to have or obtain something or to act in a certain way. (Legal) Rights cannot be taken away from you. Make sure you understand that before the next step. Now read -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_rights and make sure you spend ample time becoming acquainted with the kind of rights that are bestowed to workers in countries like the US. Now make a judgment on whether you think some of these companies are infringing some of these rights. If you also have trouble with that, let me know and I'll help as well!

PubliusMI 4y ago
This comment is all over the place. If a right is a moral entitlement, then it's not bestowed upon you and it can't be taken from you. If a right is a legal entitlement, then it certainly can!
abigail95 4y ago
It is downright obsecene to say Uber is breaking the law how it currently operates. By violating labor rights. Governments may, at their discretion change the rules about how Uber might deal with its workers. California recently did this. > Now make a judgment on whether you think some of these companies are infringing some of these rights Maybe you could post your own analysis instead of having a sparse wikipedia page do the heavy lifting? For legal: What law are they breaking by paying drivers as contractors? For moral: Given that 1099 status is legal, why don't drivers have a right to be classified as such? The law provides me the opportunity to work as a self employed contractor. I drive for Uber, Lyft, any whoever else. I end up making less than minimum wage. Who has violated my moral entitlement? Was it Uber? Did I violate my own rights? Why don't I have the right not to make minimum wage?
- everforward 4y ago
  In my opinion, they're using the 1099 status in a way it was not meant to be used. The history of the 1099 lends itself toward high-risk, high-reward employment. People who started their own businesses and accepted the risk of poor wages or failure in exchange for the chance to have a successful business. The gig 1099 is a form of moderate-risk, low-reward employment. The risks are slightly lower because of piggybacking on a successful company, but the workers will never become independent of Uber, nor will they ever have a chance of "making it big". Their future is inexorably tangled with that of Uber/Lyft/whoever. > Did I violate my own rights? Why don't I have the right not to make minimum wage? The structure of our society mandates that people work. There are generally more people than jobs (as evidenced by a permanent unemployment rate). Allowing some classes of workers to work for below minimum wage can depress wages, because workers without other options will have to accept those below-minimum wages. Then there's a risk it spreads once normalized. Imagine big box stores and fast food switching to 1099's. A lot of those workers won't have the option to just work for someone else for minimum wage, because they lack the skills to switch to a new vertical. They either work for less than minimum wage, or they don't work. The overarching idea is that it's better to take the right to work for less than minimum wage away to preserve a livable wage for people who won't have any other options.

pkrotich 4y ago

We can all agree that no one is forcing anyone to work for these companies… as I see it, the main issues are; 1) how said workers are classified (1099 vs. W-2) 2) Benefits and lack thereof based on the classification 3) Hidden cost of using your own equipment. 4) Real pay once you factor in 1-3. That said, it’s not any different than say Walmarts of the world - where most of their full time W-2 employees are in public assistance simply because of the pay. Reality, in the capitalism anyhow, is - if you’re working for someone they’re not going to pay you more than what they can get out of you or the next sucker willing to work for less - the question is how much?! And what’s fair.

jrajav 4y ago

The elephant in the room is that the US labor market is, as a whole, already taking advantage of lowest earners across the board. They are getting paid less than the lowest earners from any prior time historically, while cost of living is only getting higher, and working conditions have been on a steady decline too - all this while the productivity they generate is at an all time high. For many workers, there is a total absence of a 'good' choice. This is why when one company manages to lower the bar just a bit further and find new loopholes to exploit to pay workers less, give them even worse working conditions and benefits, or give them even less power and autonomy, it sticks out more than it normally would in a healthy labor economy.

kmod 4y ago
> all this while the productivity they generate is at an all time high I see this claim repeated a lot but you didn't say where it comes from so it's a bit hard to discuss. In particular, you are making a claim about the productivity of low earners but I don't think this is something that is measured in the US? My understanding is the BLS computes industry-wide productivity measures, ie mean productivity (as opposed to say median productivity), and one would expect this distribution to be significantly right-tailed and the mean to be mostly influenced by the right tail. I haven't seen any data that breaks down productivity growth by income, so if you have a source for your claim I'd love to update myself. When I search for "productivity growth by income" I see versions of your claim but again they are all about population _means_.
- uoaei 4y ago
  - PubliusMI 4y ago
- jrajav 4y ago
  There are several sources that measure with this in mind, focusing on production and non-supervisory workers, or by breaking it down by sector. Here's one such: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ I haven't yet seen a source, whether it's a total average measure or bucketed, that doesn't at least show that productivity has always continued increasing year-over-year - not always at pace with GDP growth, but "productivity at an all-time high" still holds true. I think this tracks intuitively too, given that we continue to add infrastructure and technology to support production and services. The key point is that lowest earner's share of income has consistently decreased at the same time. That discrepancy alone, and the fact that the discrepancy has been allowed to widen for many decades now, is what gets us to the situation we're in today.

judge2020 4y ago

> 1) 100% of people are employed or unemployed. Uber (for example) doesn't exist Contract work (1099) existed for a long time before Uber.

hintymad 4y ago

I think the title is kinda vague. What FTC really tries to do is "Commission outlined a number of issues facing gig workers, including deception about pay and hours, unfair contract terms, and anticompetitive wage fixing and coordination between gig economy companies." That sounds legitimate to me. If "take advantage of" is not well defined as you said, then it reminds me how intellectuals and young people loved Soviet Union in the 30s and 40s, and how European countries and Japan had so many communist parties and political assassinations after WWII. The word "taking advantage of" and "exploit" have such a great appealing to people's righteousness that even the US government can use them freely to gain support from a large number of people. edit: read the actual announcement and added a paragraph accordingly.

ep103 4y ago

Its comments like this that have caused me to really lose faith in the quality of conversation on Hacker News. By your logic above, an indentured servitude would count as a "not being taken advantage of" and by implication, reasonable moral form of employment. Each of the following questions in your final paragraph are similarly shallow. > People are not agents of free will, and any sub-utopic framework they have to participate in is immoral? This is a straw man argument to its core. No one is, or has suggested that all labor should be abolished unless it meets a utopian ideal. > Even if that's the case It is not the case > I'd like to see the argument that those people who chose and choose to work at uber have worse outcomes than they otherwise would Interestingly, this is the same argument that was used in favor of slavery.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mylons 4y ago
- mylons 4y ago
  [flagged]
andai 4y ago
I don't understand the parallel between working for uber and indentured servitude?
- NegativeLatency 4y ago
  In both instances workers are being taken advantage of by an employer because of asymmetric power in the system.
  - echelon 4y ago
    But there are thousands of other jobs to choose from. The government itself has a bunch of jobs that require similar skills.

grumple 4y ago

An agreement between a worker and a company does not absolve either of their legal responsibilities. Structures made to evade or abuse the letter of the law while violating the spirit are what we're seeing cracked down on here. So that's what's happening legally. Morally, there are a few issues: 1) Workers are coerced into working because they need money to live. When it's between a life of despair and working for a shitty employer, workers will choose the latter. Laws are meant to prevent abuse in this situation. 2) The information disparity between the two parties means workers cannot make informed decisions, making them abuse their cars and insurance for less profit than expected. 3) The company can still abuse employees, for example by unfairly controlling rideshare rates, refusing to give them things they are supposed to get as employees (the nature of that relationship being defined by the state for the protection of the people).

sandworm101 4y ago

So we should also give up on minimum wages? Heath codes? Safety rules? Just let the market sort it out? Last time we tried that it did not end well. Regulation is necessary for a practical (not-highschool-textbook) economy.

dataviz1000 4y ago
We read Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" in our high school economics class as an aside. Then again, I went to a high school where the government civics class started with reading the Mayflower Compact, The Social Contract, Wealth of Nations, and several excerpts from other sources which inspired the American Founding Fathers before spending the second half of the semester reading and discussing the Constitution line by line. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
specialist 4y ago
Yup. Games generally need rules and referees. To be at least somewhat fair.

theonemind 4y ago

We have a middle-class levy in the form of tax medallions. So they have found a way to undermine that levy in a gray area of the rules society has set up. They exploit the worker by underpaying them and treating them badly by the standards of the old levy, the taxi medallion. They exploit society by hollowing out the middle class. We actually need a middle class for the benefit of the masses, and even the ultra-wealthy, though only a few of them seem aware of it, like Henry Ford paying his workers enough to buy his cars. H. Ford seemed to lack any goodness of heart--he just had the brains to recognize that no one could buy his cars if they didn't make enough money to buy them. I think we should intervene in markets to sustain a middle class, which makes society better and richer on the whole. Unchecked free markets eventually seem to end up with a power-law winner-take-all type wealth distribution. Even the ultra-wealthy suffer compared to the ideal in societies with large wealth inequality. They don't live as long. They will have less things like the iphone, which the ultra-wealthy can't really even get a better core version of; they can, perhaps, buy one encased in gold. No middle class, no iphone and things like it.

clcaev 4y ago
> think we should intervene in markets to sustain a middle class Should interventions be limited to supporting a middle class?
- edmundsauto 4y ago
  Interventions should be focused on dampening the spring action - less rich "rich people" and less poor "poor people". I think there is an argument that could be made to consider these policies from an overall "growing of the pie" perspective. IE, do these policies inhibit total growth and make everyone worse off? However, my limited understanding is this is essentially trickle down economics and the evidence this occurs (versus rich people hoarding wealth) is limited. So I'm open to the argument but it would need quite a bit of rigor.

rconti 4y ago

In order for your framework to, well, work, you have to make a lot of assumptions. Things like: * Jobs are not sticky (eg, there are 0 switching costs once you are 'stuck' at an employer) * Employers cannot change their character or terms (eg, it was a good place to work yesterday, now it has become a bad place to work) * Employers cannot drag an entire industry or employment segment down (eg, race to the bottom) * Employers cannot do anti-competitive/restrictive things (eg, you must drive this kind of car, you must work these hours, you cannot work for a competitor, you cannot negotiate on the terms of your pay structure) I'm generally (and historically; eg, younger me) very sympathetic to the idea of freedom to contract for any terms. However, it is not a zero-sum game. A previously-unemployed person does not become employed and then be magically better for life. That would assume they would have been unemployed forever had this business not come along, and it would also assume that this business cannot become worse to work for over time or limit one's prospects. I used to be very opposed to the concept of wage floors, however what's changed my mind has been the impact of unemployment to drag down wages. As long as there is >0 unemployment, there can and will be a race to the bottom in terms of the wages and conditions of marginal employment. This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if the employment market was a fixed pie (again, zero sum game), but that's not the way the real world works.

wpietri 4y ago
Excellent list. Another thing I'd add is size asymmetry. Markets and negotiations work best when deal participants are of roughly equal power. That's rare with labor; people tend to have 1, maybe 2 jobs, while companies tend to have a lot more employees. Bad-actor companies can devote a lot more attention and effort to screwing people over than workers can to figuring out the situation. That means if we want optimal outcomes, we need things like labor regulation and unions to balance the asymmetries.
kukx 4y ago
I think you brought up some interesting points. You increased the complexity of the model by adding new dimensions. But you did not explain how including these would change the conclusion. Does assuming the switching cost makes a gig work opportunity a net negative for those seeking a job? The pros and cons should be quantified somehow, but that is probably almost impossible to do. In that case I am inclined to make sure as many people as possible have the opportunity to work, since I believe that not being able to be a productive member of a society is very bad for a man.

feet 4y ago

People actually do not have free will, we are all part of a deterministic system

5350-uiop-1130 4y ago

from the article > deception about pay and hours > unfair contract terms > anticompetitive wage fixing https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/amazon-ftc-pay-flex-drivers-stolen-tips.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/amazon-ftc-pay-f... https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/11/25/bay-areas-doordash-to-pay-2-5-million-after-being-accused-of-stealing-drivers-tips/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/11/25/bay-areas-doordash-to... i guess you also would have had no problem when steve jobs and other SV companies colluded to wage fix? https://www.theregister.com/2015/09/03/apple_wagefixing_closed/ https://www.theregister.com/2015/09/03/apple_wagefixing_clos...

throwaway09223 4y ago
Yes, but those problems are ubiquitous. I have the same types of problems with employers for my absurdly lucrative software engineering positions. Looking at these issues in context, this industry seems no worse than any other.

wpietri 4y ago

What you're missing is the centuries of detail we have about how companies screw over vulnerable workers. I'd suggest you start reading some labor history. E.g.: https://www.amazon.com/History-America-Ten-Strikes-ebook/dp/B078XKHSSB https://www.amazon.com/History-America-Ten-Strikes-ebook/dp/...

tshaddox 4y ago

This isn’t an answer, but another question. Is there anything that you would consider to be “a company taking advantage of workers” short of direct physical coercion?

annoyingnoob 4y ago

I think the first misnomer is calling it employment, calling Uber driving a job. It is self-employment at the moment, it is running a business. People starting their own business should be doing the math ahead of time, understanding costs and income. Uber attempts to obscure information around pay where you do not always know what you are being paid, and makes it hard to tell when you are running at a loss. By controlling pricing and access Uber takes business decisions away from drivers while at the same time calling them independent.

jrochkind1 4y ago

Just to be clear, your argument is basically that no employer can ever take advantage of any employee/worker, by definition?

uoaei 4y ago
The argument is basically "Ayn Rand was right", for which there are an almost innumerable amount of rebuttals already in the literature and regular discourse.
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unity1001 4y ago

It does not matter how you reach a bad outcome. Be it through legal and moral means, be everything legitimate, a bad outcome is a bad outcome. And if that is bad for the society, that must be addressed. Because, 'Oh, its just happened so' cannot fix things.

LinkLink 4y ago

Would you be upset if somebody shot you? Why! It's perfectly reasonable that given enough time and proximity to the inherent risk of life that among the billions of people on earth that you would be in a situation where it resulted in you being shot? Seems logical to me? Sometimes people want the world to be better than the bare minimum. And sometimes but clearly not in your case they feel sympathy and empathy.

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naet 4y ago

Some companies have basically skirted many existing regulations and worker protections by using the gig worker tax classification, to avoid being on the hook for certain basics like healthcare coverage even though they are acting as the primary employer for a large amount of people.

themitigating 4y ago

"Slaves are better off because they are housed and fed"

reillyse 4y ago

Well I guess the companies have nothing to worry about so.

barrysteve 4y ago

As a series of propositional arguments frozen in time, it's a little difficult. As a story it's a little easier. Licenses to drive taxicabs, called Taxi Medallions used to limit the number of taxicab drivers below demand. Buying the license to operate was a valid investment choice, for hundreds of thousands of dollars. This ensured secure work, wages and support admin for taxis. It wasn't perfect, it just was what it was. Gig economy apps disrupted this process heavily by soaking up the demand for extra taxi cab services and providing a plug'n'play model for contractors to drive for their taxi service. This was a good deal in the beginning as wages were favourable and lower overheads gave individual drivers a chance to compete with taxicab co's. Medallion prices cratered, meaning a 600k+ medallion had to be bought out by the gov years later a one-sixth the price. Prices and wages dropped on Apps. Apps never stopped signing up drivers, leading to a glut of taxi drivers that exceeded demand. App surge-pricing models meant the best times to drive were the most expensive for the customer and the highest-competition for the glut of drivers. Drivers could not guarantee consistent customers and therefore wages, or growth in wages so they had varying degrees of economic pressure. Some with car rental payments and personal expenses can not break even. Apps do not enforce normal working conditions, so if someone cannot meet financial requirements with an 8hr shift, they are incentivized to hit 12hrs driving, for an average wage. When do you get a new job when you're trapped in a 12hr shift, dead end job with no growth or exit strategy? It's lose-lose. Or maybe lose-break even.

tlogan 4y ago

Full time drivers are taken advantage of because full time drivers are not really free contrators: they can drive only for Uber and nothing else. Before UBer, these people had full time jobs as limo drivers, personal drivers, or something like that. Of course, there are also people who have other jobs (firefighters, nurses, teachers, etc), students, between jobs and they love it. And regulations like this will hurt them. I hope my argument make sense.

lstodd 4y ago
> they can drive only for Uber and nothing else Is this really the case? Because every gig driver I rode with effectively worked for all locally available gigs at once.

giaour 4y ago

It doesn't follow from your second point that Uber is non-exploitative. US law recognizes limits to the right to contract (e.g., one cannot agree to sell one's labor for less than minimum wage[0]), so the fact that some have chosen to work for Uber doesn't in and of itself demonstrate that Uber's employment terms are legal. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Coast_Hotel_Co._v._Parrish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Coast_Hotel_Co._v._Parris...

lolinder 4y ago
OP isn't saying that #2 implies non-exploitation, OP is saying that they can't see how #2 implies exploitation. Non-exploitation is the null hypothesis, we assume it to be the case until proven otherwise.
- giaour 4y ago
  No one is arguing that #2 implies exploitation. That would mean that everyone who has a job or has signed a contract is being exploited.
abigail95 4y ago
I'm not going to hear any more nonsense about how what Uber is doing is illegal until I see some a serious legal analysis. 1099 is legal. It is explicitly legal to work as a self employed contractor and not make minimum wage. That is legally true. Whether you link a case that was decided for political reasons does not affect this.
- giaour 4y ago
  I never said anything Uber was doing was illegal. OP said that the fact that people choose to work for Uber means that Uber’s employment practices are therefore legal, because it was the employee’s free choice. I don’t think that’s a sound argument. I suspect based on the original article that you may have the opportunity to read the legal analysis you ask for soon if the FTC determines any specific company violated labor law wrt gig work.

creamynebula 4y ago

The fact that they willingly took those jobs does not mean they are being treated fairly, it means they had no better option and need to survive.

intrasight 4y ago

Labor laws exist for reasons which, apparently, your education did not impart upon you.

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sschueller 4y ago

I assume you are located in a country with poor to no worker protection laws or you would not be asking such a question. In most European countries workers have protections which include paid sick leave, worker comp, social security payments, pension payments, maternity leave, etc. etc. All these are required by law to be provided partially or fully by the employers. Uber does not pay any of those. They expect you to be self-employed and pay for all these things yourself yet dictate the price which makes it impossible to live. If you were truly self-employed you would not take the project at that price.

lolinder 4y ago
This doesn't answer the question of why people choose to work at Uber if there are jobs available that provide all of these things. People in Europe have the opportunity to work in a job that covers for all of these benefits. Driving for Uber isn't mandatory. Is the implication that the adults working for Uber just aren't smart enough to know they're being exploited?
- kyleee 4y ago
  There is no doubt some paternalism at play here, without making a value judgement
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  The bigger argument is that they don't have the power to avoid being exploited. You could compare too-low wages in many situations to a prisoner's dilemma or tragedy of the commons. Being smart can't save you; you need solidarity/regulation.

erdos4d 4y ago

I think this completely glosses over the uncomfortable fact that uber is a billion dollar VC backed company that operates by: 1) Targeting a market with established taxi companies offering a legally regulated service requiring background checks, insurance, and driving/car safety standards. 2) Illegally setting up an unregulated competing taxi service which relies on the local police/elite being unable/unwilling(bribed) to enforce the existing taxi regulations in light of the size and effort uber puts into its racket. In the process it hires up anyone willing to do it, regardless of if their car is safe, they are actually a good driver or not, meet the insurance requirements of a taxi driver, and so on. 3) Pushing taxi drivers out of work because they can't compete with the obviously cheaper illegal competitor. 4) Hiring many of these now unemployed taxi drivers up as gig workers and paying them far less than they got before for doing a legal job. This is their model and it is outright exploitative. It is literally just using money to wantonly break the law and rig a market. It is also pretty much what Airbnb and a lot of other silicon valley firms have been up to in recent years, since they obviously ran out of actual innovation to sell.

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code_duck 4y ago

The fallacy is the idea that people desperate for money choose gig work out of “free will”. They accept the terms dictated to them due to lack of options. True that they could choose to lose their homes and vehicles and live in a tent by the freeway.

abigail95 4y ago
Who among us doesn't face that choice? I work or I starve. If I don't work, and I don't starve - someone else must be working. If someones sole and only option was to work for Uber: Is Uber the one at fault here? If Uber didn't exist and person had zero options, would this be neutral, worse, or better compared to the former scenario? It's not a fallacy because people have different moral standards about whether you should be employed at $7.25 or unemployed at $15. Personally I consider it my absolute right to mow lawns at $5/day if I choose to do it. If you think I'm not making enough money, you can give me more! Don't force the people alreaday paying me to pay more. The EITC gives more benefits than any minimum wage will and more than any 1099 law reform.
- code_duck 4y ago
  There are so many easily addressable fallacies in this that I am not sure if I need to bother. > If someones sole and only option was to work for Uber: Is Uber the one at fault here? Nobody really cares who’s fault it is. Of course Uber is going to attempt to pay as little as they can for labor under existing laws. > If Uber didn't exist and person had zero options, would this be neutral, worse, or better compared to the former scenario? So, you mean if there was unfulfilled demand for transportation and a duopoly who abused labor didn’t exist? > It's not a fallacy because people have different moral standards about whether you should be employed at $7.25 or unemployed at $15. However, the real economy does actually exist and it is not possible to sustain any sort of lifestyle at $7.25 an hour. $15 is not even sustainable currently. So, to rephrase the question, should people working full-time be able to afford living in a house without government assistance, or should they be able to afford an apartment? > Personally I consider it my absolute right to mow lawns at $5/day if I choose to do it. I don’t think that grocery stores or landlords care about your beliefs. If you’re satisfied living in a tent by the interstate or outside and abandoned building, or at your parents house, or have a family or partner who can support you, that’s great. Otherwise, I suppose you can afford Steel Reserve, eat at a homeless shelter and sleep in a tent by the sidewalk at $5 an hour. However, such lifestyles incur significant expense to taxpayers. > I work or I starve. If I don't work, and I don't starve - someone else must be working. I have had jobs where I hardly worked at all, yet I received about 10 times minimum wage. Who is supporting the people in such positions?

majormajor 4y ago

Scale is a meaningful thing to think about here. Many pro-Uber arguments point out how rigged against everyday drivers the medallion system in some cities was. Precarious contract labor with all the power in the medallion owner's court. In theory, "optional light second job or side work while a student" things sound great. In practice, if you find that that's not the case for the majority of these workers, and that in many cases you've just enlarged an existing problem that was there, but largely ignored, in the case of taxi drivers and some other niches... then it's time to consider regulating this new system. (The taxi system also wasn't much in the news, but this newcomer was, well, news... so that's also gonna play a role.) (You could also make full-time-employment less of a requirement for things like affordable health care - the market rates for individuals are still very different than what my employer pays for my coverage - but that's an even bigger political non-starter in the US...)

amelius 4y ago

Let me explain it in a way that you might understand: 1) there are kids in the schoolyard. 2) all the kids are free to move around; they can talk to anybody else and do things to have fun. 3) a kid can decide to punch another kid; but the unwritten laws of the schoolyard prevent that, because the other kid might throw a punch back. But now ... 4) a group of 5 kids decide to bully a kid that is standing alone. How is this possible? Why don't the unwritten laws of the free schoolyard protect the kid? Good thing there are teachers around to regulate the schoolyard!

throwaboo100 4y ago

> Even if that's the case, I'd like to see the argument that those people who chose and choose to work at uber have worse outcomes than they otherwise would. It only takes one common situation, right? They go into debt on the vehicles they lease from the company or from an agent. They were given deliberately incomplete information about how much money they would make, so taking into account all the circumstances, they wind off worse than they would be at a standard, legal job. In other words, "by some process" of deception, they wind up below minimum wage.

bombcar 4y ago
If Uber could buy the vehicles and hire drivers directly, then they’d do that. Since they don’t, someone else is taking on those costs and risks. But who?

ivalm 4y ago

(3) doesn’t come from (2), but (2) doesn’t negate (3) either. There are people in (1) who are desperate, when (2) occurs those desperate people freely choose this opportunity. Whether this opportunity is exploitative needs to be argued outside of (2) or (3). Here are two example of how society doesn’t allow certain freely chosen compensations schemes. (A) suppose one could offer money for organ donation, we would see increase in donations. As a society we do not allow it because it is exploitative. (B) More extreme, suppose someone could offer money for the right to kill a volunteer, with enough money I’m sure there would be volunteers, but we don’t allow that because it is also exploitative. The OPs (2) is less extreme than my (A) or (B), but I hope my examples show that (2) and (3) can be both true.

thr0wawayf00 4y ago

Imagine a world where all software developers are converted to contractors and have to work through a platform like Toptal, Upwork, etc. because it's easier for employers since the platforms do all of the background check and technical assessment for them. All the companies have to do is pick their technical resources and go. As a developer, you have to compete against everyone else in the world on the platform, regardless of your COL and previous salary expectations. The only power you have as a developer is to walk away from the platform and do something else for work (like drive Uber). Your work has been completely commoditized and you have few rights since you're a contractor. You're working for yourself and thus you're expected to be responsible for your own benefits. You willingly took a job and in that scenario, you wouldn't feel taken advantage of at all? Uber completely destroyed the taxi industry, for better or worse. Contracting engagements are on the rise and it's not that farfetched to see a future where software developers are treated this way too. Why would any of us assume that we're immune from this commoditization, and if we can all agree that we wouldn't want to be subjected to it ourselves, why do we accept it for others?

guywithahat 4y ago
Except talented developers on those platforms make ~$120 and hour and up, the people who make smaller salaries are usually either just starting out or don't have unique skills. I wouldn't want to live in this world because I don't like remote work, however from a salary perspective I don't think it would be that bad

Viliam1234 4y ago

In game theory, sometimes giving people extra options can make their situation worse. I am not saying that this is necessarily the case of e.g. Uber drivers. I am just arguing in general around the argument structure of "the old options are still there, a new one was added, people have free will, therefore they cannot possibly be harmed by this".

lhorie 4y ago

From what I've seen, the majority of arguments against gig work is a combination of information asymmetry (usually that a worker does not know the "true" payout of such work because they haven't accounted for things like depreciation and car maintenance costs) and the idea that you can't "overcharge" for unskilled labor. E.g. one could make the same argument that a general contractor also "does not know the true payout" of their contracts since they also have various difficult-to-calculate cost-of-of-doing-business costs, but the rebuttal is that these costs can be built into the cost of the service. Something that I think a lot of these discussions fail to account for (and was, incidentally, an underlying theme for California's Prop 22) is that gig companies artificially create a type of market that would otherwise cannibalize itself into a different type of market. If one were to follow the ideals of increasing payouts to [whatever arbitrary point is deemed acceptable], the logical conclusion is that either demand has to increase proportionally to create upward price pressure - and there's no reason to believe the market would simply increase demand just because one wishes for it - or service volume has to decrease (the service becomes less affordable, meaning less demand from price-sensitive customers, which in turn means less drivers on the road, longer wait times, etc). But once we get into these terms, we run into the classic "I got mine" mentality. Then it's complaints that taxis aren't reliable, or smugness about how one doesn't even use these services in the first place. Well, which is it, does one supposedly "care" or is it really insofar as it doesn't become an inconvenience to themselves? Easier to just blame the companies for everything, right? The one group that does truly care about the payouts is drivers themselves. From what I see in driver youtube channels, they can in fact become quite savvy about how much they can expect to take home, and come to their own data-based conclusions about whether new features or bonus structures are good or not. Common themes: two [gig companies] are better than one, long term is worse than short term, weekends are better than tuesdays. And to tie back to supply and demand, gig worker supply base is highly elastic, aggressively more so than any other type of business. Uber's CEO even said inflation helps business because with rising cost of living, more people look to gig work to make a few extra bucks. So, in a way, sure, gig companies promote an environment where more workers can freely come in a take a piece of a pie (which is not infinite). The thing is everyone wants more of it and there's only so much to go around. Is setting up such a system akin to taking advantage of these people? In a way yes because it's playing to their desires to earn more in a world that is largely structured to think payouts should always go up over time, whereas the reality is that they're exposed to these raw supply-and-demand market forces more directly. But also no, because they wouldn't have that opportunity to make extra cash at all otherwise.

xani_ 4y ago

Because the people that are clueless about business can easily price their service below even minimum wage and companies use it exactly for that reason You get paid per service of moving people around, but might not be knowledgable enough to calculate deprecation and other stuff correctly. More than that, any problem with the car is also on you, not on company car, so you'd have to budget for that too. It's a way for company to shift the risk entirely to the lowest paid worker, including every risk involved with car itself. It's even worse in say food delivery when the couriers are bidding for who can ship it the cheapest. You're essentially getting bidded out in race for bottom if there is enough competition, again going around minimum wage. > 3) those people that willingly took those jobs are being taken advantage of > What is the principal that justifies 3? People are not agents of free will, and any sub-utopic framework they have to participate in is immoral? Even if that's the case, I'd like to see the argument that those people who chose and choose to work at uber have worse outcomes than they otherwise would. Because as society we decided letting capitalism exploit dumbasses willing to work for half-free is a bad thing. That's why we have minimum wages. That's why jobs like that should have unions. Because without body to represent them there always will be someone willing to do it for half free.

VictorPath 4y ago

Many Cherokee lived freely not all that long ago. Now some are wage slaves for Uber. Some west Africans lived freely, then were slaves in the USA, and their descendants now out of Jim Crow are wage slaves for gig companies. For others groups this process happened earlier. There are those who work, and then there is an idle class aristocracy of heirs who do not work, but who expropriate surplus labor time from those of us who do work. It is not the job of the working class to make convincing arguments to the parasites who live off their labor, it is the historical mission of the working class to eliminate the parasitic class which does not work, and which lives off worker's expropriated surplus labor time surplus.

ckw 4y ago

< I have yet to see a convincing argument, here on HN or elsewhere, about how these companies are taking advantage of workers. Some issues referenced in the link the FTC intends to address: Misrepresentations about the nature of gig work: While gig companies promote independence to potential workers, in practice these firms may tightly prescribe and control their workers’ tasks in ways that run counter to the promise of independence and an alternative to traditional jobs. Holding companies accountable for claims and conduct about costs and benefits: Gig companies must not be deceptive in their claims to prospective gig workers about potential earnings, and they must be transparent and truthful about costs borne by workers. You may object that workers can just quit if they find the work unsatisfactory, but people often commit large investments of time or money to get these jobs. As a personal example, I once worked as a google search query evaluator. The job was advertised as paying $14.50 per hour, and you could work at any time. It required studying a ~100-150 page manual of search query evaluation minutiae, and passing a test demonstrating mastery of the material. Once I started, I found out the advertisement was a misrepresentation. You would periodically be given some allotment of work, it could be several hours worth, it could be two minutes worth. You might go weeks without being assigned work, and you had to login to check if any had been added to your queue. To be paid you would submit a timesheet weekly, where you would note each type of task completed, alongside the count, and the time spent. There were target rates and minimum accuracy levels for each type of task. Failure to meet accuracy requirements resulted in termination. If you submitted a timesheet where the calculated rate was lower than the target rate for any category of task, the timesheet would be flagged, and you would be enjoined to ‘correct’ it. I’m sure most people simply lied and decreased the time billed in these situations, accepting tacitly a wage far below that represented to them. The thing is the target rate for most tasks was impossible. It wasn’t based on people’s ability to complete tasks, but by the degree to which they could be squeezed. Concentrated markets: Markets populated by gig companies are often concentrated, resulting in reduced choice for workers, customers, and businesses. These companies may be more likely to exert their market power in anticompetitive ways that harm workers’ wages, job quality, and other aspects of gig work. Combating unlawful practices and constraints imposed on workers: Gig companies using artificial intelligence or other advanced technologies to govern workers’ pay, performance, and work assignments are still required to keep promises they make to workers. Companies must also ensure that any restrictive contract terms, including those limiting workers from seeking other jobs, do not violate the FTC Act or other laws. Policing unfair methods of competition that harm gig workers: The FTC will investigate evidence of agreements between gig companies to illegally fix wages, benefits, or fees for gig workers that should be open to competition. The FTC will also investigate exclusionary or predatory conduct that could cause harm to customers or reduced compensation or poorer working conditions for gig workers.

anigbrowl 4y ago

You left out 2a-z, Uber serially changes working conditions after achieving market dominance, and I think you know this quite well.

zackees 4y ago

stevenicr 4y ago

There are many ways these companies are taking advantage of people, I have some small data points / insights, it would be easy to mark some of them as 'well they designed for this one thing and did not think about the other thing, so it was not intentional' - but for example, if you look at how the office folks are treated at lyft compared to how the driver 'hiring people' are treated, and how the drivers are treated, and how the customers are treated - you can easily see some very stark differences in many things.. and so it is intentional. Sure they have free will and all that - but certain dark patterns definitely take advantage, and other omissions are an issue as well. 'The game theory' that keeps people driving and picking up more people and guiding them to hot spots for bonuses for example is not helping the driver be more healthy and alert and safe - it helps the company get coverage where they are lacking. Quick payments could be advertised as bonus help - but if we are totally honest it helps attract and keep people who are trapped in addictions to keep doing things - so it may be a good thing but also in some cases a take advantage of people thing. The 'money earned' thing is gamified in many ways.. from the emails saying 'make X dollars per week / month when you come back to drive with us' - to the lack of showing expenses.. many people are ignorant of what they make each week after expenses and have zero clue about tax burdens, and lack of investment in social security and other things they would glean from standard jobs. Hey I am not hating on this - and it can be super great for the single parent who need super flexible work option temporarily for example- but it's a farce. I frequently talked to drivers who were all shiny happy people showing they made "$1,000 this week' - but had no real understanding that they spent $400 on gas this past week compared to the 200 the week before, did not account for the car maintenance and no clue about the taxes owed. At least in the market around here, I calculated the average money made to be about $6 per hour once considering taxes and gas.. and this is for a semi-dangerous job - no not talking about the passengers which are mostly okay - just driving around streets that many more hours is adding that much more danger of wrecks and such. It would be trivial for these companies to add in expense reporting, scheduling for maintenance and taxes and bathroom breaks - but they don't - and we know why - it's the start-up- gig culture trying to maximize the valuation for wall street at the expense of those who are less educated about the sacrifices being made in the short term. I have many more small data points to add - from pics of the tires some of these drivers are using to the lack of transparency about surges in more drivers coming - to uncompensated long drives to last minute cancelled rides - all sorts of things that are at the expense of those that can least afford it - and at this point these companies should know better about a lot of these things - but they are purposefully kicking those cans down the line to future issues in order to prop up the quarterlies for the short term benefit of those who do know better. This could be a blog post with some pics and screenshots for better examples I guess. Oh, and the effects on the riders.. so many things to add - but the question was proof of taking advantage of gig workers.

BizarroLand 4y ago

3) Uber finds a loophole that allows them to pay people in #3 less than the federally required minimum wage, exploiting the very people that they rely on to exist as a functional company. Somehow people are confused how a voluntary action can be illegal if the circumstances that surround that action are not legal.