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I definitely see the argument to classify workers as a more "permanent" status and guarantee all the benefits that come with that. But that would likely increas

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• qbasic_forever 3y ago
  It doesn't have to increase prices, it could decrease executive pay (which has grown far, far faster than worker pay) instead!
  • eru 3y ago
    If they could just decrease executive pay, why aren't they doing that already? In a sense, executive pay comes straight out of shareholders' pockets, so they would clearly have an incentive to decrease it, if they could. Executive pay seems fairly independent of the issue at hand.
    • anticensor 3y ago
      Some executives are themselves shareholders and want to pay themselves twice.
      • eru 3y ago
        Yes, but in that case it doesn't matter, a dollar is a dollar and they can't make extra dollars this way.
        • liquidjems 3y ago
          The different tax treatments of the two suggests otherwise.
          • eru 3y ago
            Giving money to shareholders via buybacks is typically taxed less than giving money to executives.
    • komali2 3y ago
      > If they could just decrease executive pay, why aren't they doing that already? Counterpoint: if they could extract more profit from the market by increasing prices, why haven't they done so already? Market determines viable price for service, not cost. If the cost of doing business can't find a balance at rates the market will pay at acceptable profit margin, the business simply doesn't exist. Many aspects of our lives suffer from this reality: renewable energy companies in many places survives only because they're propped up by government subsidy. The answer to "why aren't the executives cutting pay" is obvious: it's up to the executives, and why on earth would they cut their own pay, when they could instead simply decrease worker conditions and cut cost of labor? Without a union, executives have literally all the power. Executive pay + shareholder profits (through stock buybacks, dividends) are where all the massive margins go to right now. There's no more profit to extract from the market (unless the finance team is terrible at their jobs and have been leaving money on the table) so that's where the money to cover increased cost of labor needs to come from. I'm not really upset at the idea of CEOs making less money, I don't get what the big deal is.
      • ffhhttt 3y ago
        > and why on earth would they cut their own pay So market set the pay for services however executive pay is not affected by the market at all? Uber pays its executives what it does because other comparable companies pay the same. If they cuts that people they’d want to hire will choose to work for other places and they will have to find someone who agrees to work for less (which might or might not be bad a thing)
        • eru 3y ago
          Thanks for making my argument more explicit. And arguable, executive pay is perhaps a lot more elastic than ordinary workers' pay. Companies aren't shy about paying huge bonuses to their CEO one year, but cutting them to nothing the next. Ordinary workers have a much steadier pay check, even when working for Uber. Similarly, most companies are also quite willing to hire and fire CEOs. Statistical distribution of CEO tenures is a well studied subject.
      • eru 3y ago
    • themitigating 3y ago
      Are you asking why executives aren't decreasing their own pay?
      • eru 3y ago
        Executives are supposed to work for the shareholders. If the executives of Uber could just ignore shareholders, they wouldn't need to worry about profits at all.
        • themitigating 3y ago
          They do work for shareholders but since shareholders aren't equally divided, i.e. one person or company may own a larger portion, and it's difficult to sue over this, executive can ignore the shareholders to an extent. How would you prove a decision was wrong without hindseight? How would you prove an executive shouldn't make X amount of money? Imagine I'm the CEO of Nike, I make $100 million a year. The company is doing amazing. Is that because of decisions I made, marketing, good product, word of mouth, things that happened before I was CEO. Prove that I shouldn't get that money.
          • eru 3y ago
            There's no need to prove anything: the shareholders can replace the CEO (via some indirection) at will. They don't get the money back they already spent, of course.
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• faeriechangling 3y ago
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  • gtowey 3y ago
    > We can have higher employment and cheaper prices than we have now if we literally reinstate slavery. Agreed. And companies would do it too if they didn't also need us to buy their products. It's basically what has happened to manufacturing. Offshore factories are making products at literal slave wages and they get to sell to Americans for higher prices.
    • flextheruler 3y ago
      This is a common misconception. The wages are slave wages to the first world economies, but not to the developing world. China for example has seen a massive decrease in the percentage of the population living below the poverty line as they’ve become the largest manufacturer. At the end of the day these people are choosing to leave their farms to work in these factories because it enriches them. I’m not saying they’re great jobs, especially to us, but it’s not slavery.
      • gtowey 3y ago
        > This is a common misconception. > The wages are slave wages to the first world economies, but not to the developing world. I know of this rationalization, but I don't agree it makes things ok. Look at the Foxconn debacle where employees were committing suicide and strikes for better conditions were met with violence. It doesn't matter if their wages are technically slightly higher than the prevailing local wages. If you look at their quality of life, it's deplorable. Health care? Clean water? Safe homes? Paid sick leave? Work-life balance? Disability protection? Retirement plans? Do workers in China not deserve those things? Why aren't first world business paying first world wages no matter where their workers are? They know they extract profits at the cost of human dignity for their workers. They know that offshoring jobs allows them to ignore American labor laws. It's not ethical. But as long as it happens somewhere else we can pretend it's not our problem.
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• Retric 3y ago
  The underlying economics don’t change if workers are paid per gig or per hour, so the customer is unlikely to notice anything. What changes is the information asymmetry where Uber etc knows a lot more about the conditions of people working for them than the people taking these jobs do. As a general rule those with more information are simply in a vastly better negotiating position.
  • eru 3y ago
    You could have made the information asymmetry arguments perhaps a few years ago. But these days Uber's practices are fairly well known, so no one has to go in blind.
    • Retric 3y ago
      It’s all about edge cases, ie what specifically happens when a customer throws up in your car. That’s not something the average person off the street is going to ask. But many are going to be pissed learning they will reimburse you for paying someone to clean your car but not the time it takes you to do it yourself, nor the lost wages until it’s clean.
      • eru 3y ago
        If you take the inside view and look inside Uber, you might find that they handle each specific edge case according to specific rules. But taking the outside view, you don't need to know all the specifics. You can just check Uber's general reputation (or lack thereof perhaps) for fair dealings with drivers. That general reputation will reflect how they are dealing with those edge cases in general. Just like in the 2010s you could be reasonable certain that a job at Google meant you got free food, even if you didn't know the exact specific rules about what food would be available when and where.
        • Retric 3y ago
          Reputation is something companies manage, which introduces bias. If people get a worse impression than reality they can release more information, but if the public has a better impression than reality then they have zero incentives to say anything. Information asymmetry isn’t about people knowing nothing. If you’re offended a job at some salary you know roughly how much they are willing to pay but you don’t know the minimum you can negotiate for. Similarly, companies don’t know the minimum you’re willing to accept but they do know quite a bit about market rates.
• arrosenberg 3y ago
  > But that would likely increase prices, decrease demand and cause some drivers to lose jobs. In California Uber and Lyft rammed through a proposition to enable them to continue their labor abuses. Anecdotally, the prices have gone through the roof and I've never had more trouble getting rides, so I don't believe that. It's a failed business model because Uber has to provide a return to investors and livery is basically a race to the bottom without some form of price controls.
  • eru 3y ago
    > It's a failed business model because Uber has to provide a return to investors and livery is basically a race to the bottom without some form of price controls. Sounds good for customers?
    • massysett 3y ago
      No, because if there is no viable business model then the business simply won’t exist, leaving customers to rely on…the bus? Or just not traveling.
      • toofy 3y ago
        or taxis, i mean, they’ve been around since the horse and buggy days and probably even way before that, i don’t know enough about the history, but i’m guessing taxi style travel services were even around during the silk road era. uber didn’t invent travel for hire. this is going to be a rant, but i mean… the reason uber and lyft (and countless other “disrupters”) disrupted anything is they pretended the externalities didn’t exist/ignored the very externalities the already existing industry had previously already sorted out and lived through. and lo and behold, no one even halfway intelligent is shocked that all of these issues arose at scale. i’ll repeat what i’ve said countless other times: anyone who thinks they have a “disruptive” idea yet hasn’t extensively studied why the already existing industry does things a certain way, is an absolute lightweight and no one should be investing in with them. we have a major problem in some of our industries of people who have deluded themselves that the people who came before were somehow primitive or less enlightened. we see this all over the place, from people who want entirely rebuild large software packages from the bottom up, from submarine tourism companies, to “house flippers”, to short-term rental apps, who because their egos refuse to let them explore the history of their project, they just end up in the exact same place. only they took a really long, wasteful, and stupid detour to get there. if an industry is doing something you think is wrong, explore the history of why it is done this way. don’t pretend like that problem doesn’t exist and then call yourself a disrupter. this is a recipe to have everyone laugh and go “it’s not like you weren’t warned there was giant hole around the corner and then you drove right into it.” and even worse, if they have explored the history of their project, know very well the problems coming, but try to externalize that to wider society, it’s outright malicious. > leaving customers to rely on…the bus? Or just not traveling. again, taxis have been around for pretty much ever.