13 ms·

Algorithmic Wage Discrimination (2023)

149 points by tacon 2y ago

stretchandahalf 2y ago
[flagged]
- vundercind 2y ago
  > There's no discrimination here because Uber and Doordash aren't treating minorities different from what they treat anyone else. You’ve misunderstood the use of “discrimination” in the paper. It’s as in “price discrimination” (a parallel the introduction draws explicitly, if the play on words didn’t come through in the title).
  - stretchandahalf 2y ago
    The second sentence of the article reads "For many low-income and subordinated racial minority workforces in the United States, however, on-the-job data collection and algorithmic decisionmaking systems are having a more profound yet overlooked impact" I'm sorry, but it's clearly pushing an agenda.
    - vundercind 2y ago
      If the described effects do exist, I think it would be a much more surprising finding if they didn’t disproportionately affect cohorts that tend to have weaker labor-rate bargaining positions than others. Do you see problems with the core argument of the paper?
    - singleshot_ 2y ago
      > As is to be expected from a lawyer talking about algorithms and economics. What’s wrong with lawyers studying these things?
- Etheryte 2y ago
  All of this is covered in the article, if you actually bothered to read it past the introduction. Your comment doesn't even apply to the article, it's just fighting made up windmills. Algorithmic wage discrimination is not about minorities, race, or anything like that, which you would know, again, if you actually read the article. > Algorithmic wage discrimination” refers to a practice in which individual workers are paid different hourly wages [...] for broadly similar work. As a wage-pricing technique, algorithmic wage discrimination encompasses not only digitalized payment for completed work but, critically, digitalized decisions to allocate work, which are significant determinants of hourly wages and levers of firm control.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  The way you're using "logic" and "evidence" here is nonstandard, and you seem to be in favor of concealing evidence that minorities are overwhelmingly affected by something. Does "a commitment to logic" requires all unfairness to be universal, or else be deemed divisive and tangential? When I was a kid, I detasseled corn in Iowa (you walk up the rows sexually mutilating hybrid corn by hand where the machine missed.) I was able to get on a white crew as a black kid who showed up with white friends. The guy who put our crew together had to negotiate with every farmer that we worked for because seeing a black person on the crew made them think that they should be paying a Mexican rate for me; Mexicans were paid about half of what white people were paid, regardless of output. Instead, he would sell me as an honorary white man (because it was clear I was with my white friends.) I also have no doubt that he accepted a Mexican rate for me at least once or twice, and just covered out of his own pocket; he was a nice old hippie, and didn't want me to feel bad. > It really is tiring. It feels like I'm alone in a world that's been co-opted by virtue signaling rather than a commitment to logic. Good luck trying to get disparities like that prioritized when they don't harm (and may benefit) anyone who sets priorities. You've literally exhausted yourself complaining about people bringing them up. The challenge minorities have to having their issues paid attention to is you. You're also using "virtue signalling" and "ideological posturing" as euphemisms for "speaking about ethnicity and minorities." Virtue signalling is when you advertise the pureness of your belief to no particular end other than to be recognized as a better person than others. > It’s like fighting an uphill battle, trying to stay grounded in principles of clear and honest engagement. The art of being rational isn’t lost, but finding it in today's discourse seems more challenging than ever.
WalterBright 2y ago
I.e. workers who produce more get paid more, those who produce less get paid less. It's always been that way, though it is usually difficult to measure accurately.
- uoaei 2y ago
  Technically true, while ignoring all details of how "productivity" is defined. Claiming it's an issue of measurement and not definition implies you believe there's some ironclad and universally applicable definition of productivity, i.e., once again imposing your own ideology without any good faith efforts to include other perspectives.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    > Technically true, while ignoring all details of how "productivity" is defined. There's a specialty profession called "cost accounting" whose sole purpose is to accurately define it. Just like insurance companies do risk assessments. > implies you believe You're just making things up. > without any good faith efforts Give the rudeness a rest.
    - myhf 2y ago
      It's dishonest to say in one comment that certain workers "produce more" and in the next that you are speaking in terms of "cost accounting" productivity (that is, identifying which workers are likely to accept less pay for the same task).
      - WalterBright 2y ago
        > It's dishonest Being rude doesn't make your argument any better. You know that workers are not perfectly interchangeable, everybody with any sense knows that. You also know that cost accounting isn't an exact science when it comes to the variability of people. But if cost accountants were worthless, businesses wouldn't employ them.
    - uoaei 2y ago
DeliriousDog 2y ago
There was a (now deleted comment) about how there is no proof of wage discrimination for Uber/Lyft drivers, which was posted with no evidence. This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEXJmNj6SPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEXJmNj6SPk) was recently published which shows drivers being offered the same gigs, but different payment amounts. Note that I could not find a published version of the data they collected in this video. That is not explicitly proof of wrongdoing, but clearly algorithmic price setting can be demonstrated as not always offering the same payment to the same drivers for the same work. There may be a valid reason to why this is the case, but as the calculation method is closed source, the individuals being offered the wage are unaware of why they would be paid less than their peers. This is work that is often considered "low skill" - which should actually make it extremely cut and dry as to why an individual would be paid more or less. Are they making their pickups faster? Are their customers more satisfied? If that's the case, why would they sometimes be offered more money than their peers and sometimes less money? Almost all workers here are price takers, and suffer greatly from the information asymmetry present. Companies hiding behind "oh but the algorithm says..." is a poor excuse for inequality. Edit: Because discrimination is in the title of the OP, I feel the need to clarify: in no way is the above saying that the video posted is proof of discrimination. Inequality need not be discrimination. When there is inequality without any measurable source, we need to be skeptical of the reason. Maybe one driver has better customer feedback, therefore they get offered a higher wage. There are many logical explanations for the result, but Uber/Lyft do not seem to engage with the discussion. This should raise red flags. That does not conclude that they are discriminating against anyone, and that would be a poor conclusion to draw without a true investigation.
- stretchandahalf 2y ago
  [flagged]
- mananaysiempre 2y ago
  Not deleted, just (formerly?) flagged to death by other users: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41513943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41513943. (The HN software seems to kill newer users’ comments more readily, is my impression.) You can enable “showdead” on your profile page if you want to see such comments.
itake 2y ago
Typically, workers are paid a flat rate, businesses buffer the worker's income generating activities, such that the business owners pocket high income activities (like serving drinks and being tipped) with low income activities (like washing the dishes at the end of the night). Any money left over after wages, is pocketed by the business owner, to be used on a day with low income day (think Friday night vs Sunday night at a restaurant). Dynamic pricing allows workers more exposure to the value they generate, thus enabling them to capture higher pay.
- vundercind 2y ago
  That might be what dynamic labor pricing implemented by a disinterested third party would do. An interested party can use it to do other things.
  - itake 2y ago
    What other things? For decades, restaurants have paid their labor with dynamic “algorithmic” wages: work during peak shifts, get more tips. Why haven’t people been up in arms about how bar tenders working a Friday night near more than bartenders working a Monday afternoon?
    - vundercind 2y ago
      The article is about subjecting workers to discriminated pay rates for reasons: that are not clear to the workers; that may not be within the power of the workers to control; that cannot be predicted in advance; and that may vary per worker rather than being offered the same to all workers at once; with that last also based on factors unknown to the workers—including, potentially, personal information about the worker or about their compensation history. The paper is explicitly not (as in: the intro outright states this is not what it’s about) traditional forms of variable pay.
      - itake 2y ago
        > that are not clear to the workers; that may not be within the power of the workers to control; that cannot be predicted in advance; and that may vary per worker rather than being offered the same to all workers at once; You’re literally describing tipping. When a worker starts their shift, they do not know how much they will earn. Tips vary per worker for sexism, racism, ageism reasons, or just plain luck.
vundercind 2y ago
The reaction here has been interesting. As someone with a heavier social-science and politics background than most HNers, I started reading the introduction before there were any comments here and went “oh my god, of course this is a thing, why did it never occur to me both that this would/is happen/happening, and to put it in these terms“, and my mind started chasing down the mechanisms by which it must work. Bombshell is a word that came to mind as soon as it dawned on me what the paper’s getting at. Then I came back to this thread and had a similar experience to when I checked on the Internet’s reaction to The Last Jedi after I got out of the theater, and was surprised to find that my experience of it as the only almost-actually-good SW film since the original trilogy was, um, not what most others had taken away.
- Etheryte 2y ago
  It's always useful to keep in mind the wide variety of HN users. For certain cohorts, the likes of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and such are considered the pinnacle of their aspirations, and abusing workers is viewed as business smarts.
  - szundi 2y ago
    Who goes to work for Elon cannot really be so-called abused - already knew what is coming when applied
  - vundercind 2y ago
    I think one thing going on is that the form of argument is unfamiliar to a lot of readers. Many seem to have taken away that the paper’s about the concerns the “Blueprint” it mentions sets out to address, or about traditional bonus structures or variable or productivity-based pay, because the intro covers both of those things in some detail—rather, the paper is laying those out as background. The paper is not about those. This is a common form for papers and arguments in the social sciences, but maybe a lot of HNers aren’t used to it. [edit] to be clear, the paper lays out plainly that this is the case, and a person unfamiliar with this way of writing could figure it out from the text per se, but if one is not looking out for this kind of structure I can see how one might overlook the parts where it straight-up says “that’s not what this is about: here is what this is about”
advael 2y ago
As with price discrimination, I think there are only two possible ways this can go: Either we pass some laws that deeply upset some oligarchs and future eras see this one as a "wild west" of data-driven exploitative practices, or we permanently destroy the bargaining power of everyone not big enough to be doing mass-surveillance, which is effectively the end of markets and the rise of a sort of advanced feudalism (which some would argue is quite far along already) One obviously seems better to me, but to be fair I am biased, being in the class of people who don't own an enormous corporation
- Spivak 2y ago
  If history is any teacher here it's going to be latter with the loudest voices of support coming from people are convinced that these systems couldn't and aren't possibly harming them, that they are above-average and therefore benefiting, and only those slack-jawed lazy nonspecific others who aren't (but absolutely are) working hard will be the target.
  - advael 2y ago
    That's definitely the recent history, and the current propaganda strategy of modern oligarchs, but looking even a little beyond living memory there are many other solutions history can offer us, including labor solidarity, trust-busting, and of course more extreme measures that most would likely prefer to avoid, but which history shows us do happen sometimes
- scarmig 2y ago
  The third way is that companies find hiring workers, with all their complaints and needs and desire for dignity, too inconvenient, so they replace them with things that have none of those. Particularly relevant since this paper is primarily about ride hailing and delivery services.
  - advael 2y ago
    Despite all the hand-wringing most claims to be able to do this seem pretty implausible at this stage. But for the sake of argument, assuming this happens, this is not different from the second scenario I've described. Of course, if there are no workers, one wonders how companies might find "consumers" against whom to price-discriminate, but with companies unilaterally and individually controlling both what people pay and are paid, the whole system of labor and consumption as a market is a fiction anyway. It's crazy that so many people seem to think that transformative technologies will both somehow replace all human labor and keep all present economic relations intact except for the ability of anyone to get a job, given how many economic choices have been made to center labor as the primary means by which people are supported. To reiterate, the options are prevent this nonsense through collective action (either in the form of a government or through other forms of coordination) or move to a more oppressive relationship between a tiny population of oligarchs and everyone else than the "labor market" that is ostensibly the way this economic relationship is currently arranged
mrguyorama 2y ago
If this outcome is a surprise to you, you have not been paying attention. Managers and Owners dream of reducing wages every single night. Every penny they aren't paying you is a penny they keep, and they, for some reason, think they are rightfully entitled to every penny, while you are a brat for feeling entitled to even a few pennies. More importantly, if your boss doesn't think like that, you can expect his boss to replace him with a manager that DOES. This downward force on labor prices is basically the entire point of the gig economy, and even youtubers whose only formal training is in how to write a high school essay figured this out. For this reason, there is institutional pressure to turn anything they can into gig economies. If you don't have empathy for the uber drivers who sleep in their car to be able to make as many rides as they can and still somehow end up below minimum wage, don't worry, they'll come for you soon. And when they've made the gig economy literally the only gig in town, it doesn't matter how savvy you think you are at "negotiation", you will get fucked too. Go read up on your labor rights history. None of what we have is a default, and the "haves" HATE it.
foolofat00k 2y ago
The thing that people consistently miss with these types of conversations is that any increase in the sophistication of the tech that exists to measure the world gives a relative benefit to corporations over individuals. This is because those organizations almost always have more resources to dedicate towards making effective use of that information than do individuals. Very often you as an individual are up against a team of PhDs and engineers whose job it is to enable the corporation to beat you, and the more data they have, the more likely they are to win. In this respect, there is basically no tech that does not benefit corporations more strongly than it benefits individuals. This is one of the reasons that regulation is important.
- CatWChainsaw 2y ago
  They don't "miss" this fact. It's inconvenient to libertarian la-la land dreams so it's ignored with prejudice, especially here. So many temporarily embarrassed millionaires on HN.
- tbrownaw 2y ago
  > any increase in the sophistication of the tech that exists to measure the world gives a relative benefit to corporations over individuals. We are far more able to measure the world than we were in the middle ages, or before the civil war, or even during the world wars. You can see how strong this claimed relative benefit and it's effects are by how the increasing ability to measure the world over that time has led people to become consistently more oppressed as time goes by.
  - foolofat00k 2y ago
    I'm not sure if you disagree with me or not from this comment. Tech isn't the only thing that affects the relative strength of individuals vs corporations (regulation, social pressures, etc). Also I think it's not unreasonable to argue that corporations are more powerful today than they were during any of the time periods you've listed here.
_gmax0 2y ago
Off-topic, does anyone know whether the source code for this UI is open source?
josefritzishere 2y ago
This is very apropos after seeing the Pave post.
Manuel_D 2y ago
"Wage discrimination" as described in the article is not an unfair or illegal practice: > “Algorithmic wage discrimination” refers to a practice in which individual workers are paid different hourly wages—calculated with ever-changing formulas using granular data on location, individual behavior, demand, supply, or other factors—for broadly similar work. Surge pricing is a form of "algorithmic wage discrimination". Driving for Uber on a Friday night will net you more than a Monday at noon. Likewise, the fact that wages are higher in expensive metros is another form of "algorithmic wage discrimination." People hired during periods of a labor shortage may have a higher wage than a co-worker hired during an economic downturn. I am skeptical many would point at these scenarios as unfair - but all of these fall under the category of "wage discrimination" as discussed in the article. I also think this article unnecessarily injects racial messaging and leads readers to think that the algorithms are discriminating on the basis of protected class. That is not alleged in this article.
Wolfenstein98k 2y ago
"Subordinated racial minority". "Informational capitalism". "how should the law intervene" (no 'if'). "For workers, these practices produce unsettling moral expectations about work and remuneration". Big hmm. As always, truly objective metrics - such as pay based on output (rather than time spent) is viewed as harmful to minorities. Is it, though? Or is it actually more fair?
fmajid 2y ago
Not so coincidentally, the EU is mandating salary transparency: https://fikku.com/111920 https://fikku.com/111920

149 points by tacon 2y ago

stretchandahalf 2y ago

[flagged]

vundercind 2y ago
> There's no discrimination here because Uber and Doordash aren't treating minorities different from what they treat anyone else. You’ve misunderstood the use of “discrimination” in the paper. It’s as in “price discrimination” (a parallel the introduction draws explicitly, if the play on words didn’t come through in the title).
- stretchandahalf 2y ago
  The second sentence of the article reads "For many low-income and subordinated racial minority workforces in the United States, however, on-the-job data collection and algorithmic decisionmaking systems are having a more profound yet overlooked impact" I'm sorry, but it's clearly pushing an agenda.
  - vundercind 2y ago
    If the described effects do exist, I think it would be a much more surprising finding if they didn’t disproportionately affect cohorts that tend to have weaker labor-rate bargaining positions than others. Do you see problems with the core argument of the paper?
  - singleshot_ 2y ago
    > As is to be expected from a lawyer talking about algorithms and economics. What’s wrong with lawyers studying these things?
Etheryte 2y ago
All of this is covered in the article, if you actually bothered to read it past the introduction. Your comment doesn't even apply to the article, it's just fighting made up windmills. Algorithmic wage discrimination is not about minorities, race, or anything like that, which you would know, again, if you actually read the article. > Algorithmic wage discrimination” refers to a practice in which individual workers are paid different hourly wages [...] for broadly similar work. As a wage-pricing technique, algorithmic wage discrimination encompasses not only digitalized payment for completed work but, critically, digitalized decisions to allocate work, which are significant determinants of hourly wages and levers of firm control.
pessimizer 2y ago
The way you're using "logic" and "evidence" here is nonstandard, and you seem to be in favor of concealing evidence that minorities are overwhelmingly affected by something. Does "a commitment to logic" requires all unfairness to be universal, or else be deemed divisive and tangential? When I was a kid, I detasseled corn in Iowa (you walk up the rows sexually mutilating hybrid corn by hand where the machine missed.) I was able to get on a white crew as a black kid who showed up with white friends. The guy who put our crew together had to negotiate with every farmer that we worked for because seeing a black person on the crew made them think that they should be paying a Mexican rate for me; Mexicans were paid about half of what white people were paid, regardless of output. Instead, he would sell me as an honorary white man (because it was clear I was with my white friends.) I also have no doubt that he accepted a Mexican rate for me at least once or twice, and just covered out of his own pocket; he was a nice old hippie, and didn't want me to feel bad. > It really is tiring. It feels like I'm alone in a world that's been co-opted by virtue signaling rather than a commitment to logic. Good luck trying to get disparities like that prioritized when they don't harm (and may benefit) anyone who sets priorities. You've literally exhausted yourself complaining about people bringing them up. The challenge minorities have to having their issues paid attention to is you. You're also using "virtue signalling" and "ideological posturing" as euphemisms for "speaking about ethnicity and minorities." Virtue signalling is when you advertise the pureness of your belief to no particular end other than to be recognized as a better person than others. > It’s like fighting an uphill battle, trying to stay grounded in principles of clear and honest engagement. The art of being rational isn’t lost, but finding it in today's discourse seems more challenging than ever.

WalterBright 2y ago

I.e. workers who produce more get paid more, those who produce less get paid less. It's always been that way, though it is usually difficult to measure accurately.

uoaei 2y ago
Technically true, while ignoring all details of how "productivity" is defined. Claiming it's an issue of measurement and not definition implies you believe there's some ironclad and universally applicable definition of productivity, i.e., once again imposing your own ideology without any good faith efforts to include other perspectives.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  > Technically true, while ignoring all details of how "productivity" is defined. There's a specialty profession called "cost accounting" whose sole purpose is to accurately define it. Just like insurance companies do risk assessments. > implies you believe You're just making things up. > without any good faith efforts Give the rudeness a rest.
  - myhf 2y ago
    It's dishonest to say in one comment that certain workers "produce more" and in the next that you are speaking in terms of "cost accounting" productivity (that is, identifying which workers are likely to accept less pay for the same task).
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      > It's dishonest Being rude doesn't make your argument any better. You know that workers are not perfectly interchangeable, everybody with any sense knows that. You also know that cost accounting isn't an exact science when it comes to the variability of people. But if cost accountants were worthless, businesses wouldn't employ them.
  - uoaei 2y ago

DeliriousDog 2y ago

There was a (now deleted comment) about how there is no proof of wage discrimination for Uber/Lyft drivers, which was posted with no evidence. This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEXJmNj6SPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEXJmNj6SPk) was recently published which shows drivers being offered the same gigs, but different payment amounts. Note that I could not find a published version of the data they collected in this video. That is not explicitly proof of wrongdoing, but clearly algorithmic price setting can be demonstrated as not always offering the same payment to the same drivers for the same work. There may be a valid reason to why this is the case, but as the calculation method is closed source, the individuals being offered the wage are unaware of why they would be paid less than their peers. This is work that is often considered "low skill" - which should actually make it extremely cut and dry as to why an individual would be paid more or less. Are they making their pickups faster? Are their customers more satisfied? If that's the case, why would they sometimes be offered more money than their peers and sometimes less money? Almost all workers here are price takers, and suffer greatly from the information asymmetry present. Companies hiding behind "oh but the algorithm says..." is a poor excuse for inequality. Edit: Because discrimination is in the title of the OP, I feel the need to clarify: in no way is the above saying that the video posted is proof of discrimination. Inequality need not be discrimination. When there is inequality without any measurable source, we need to be skeptical of the reason. Maybe one driver has better customer feedback, therefore they get offered a higher wage. There are many logical explanations for the result, but Uber/Lyft do not seem to engage with the discussion. This should raise red flags. That does not conclude that they are discriminating against anyone, and that would be a poor conclusion to draw without a true investigation.

stretchandahalf 2y ago
[flagged]
mananaysiempre 2y ago
Not deleted, just (formerly?) flagged to death by other users: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41513943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41513943. (The HN software seems to kill newer users’ comments more readily, is my impression.) You can enable “showdead” on your profile page if you want to see such comments.

itake 2y ago

Typically, workers are paid a flat rate, businesses buffer the worker's income generating activities, such that the business owners pocket high income activities (like serving drinks and being tipped) with low income activities (like washing the dishes at the end of the night). Any money left over after wages, is pocketed by the business owner, to be used on a day with low income day (think Friday night vs Sunday night at a restaurant). Dynamic pricing allows workers more exposure to the value they generate, thus enabling them to capture higher pay.

vundercind 2y ago
That might be what dynamic labor pricing implemented by a disinterested third party would do. An interested party can use it to do other things.
- itake 2y ago
  What other things? For decades, restaurants have paid their labor with dynamic “algorithmic” wages: work during peak shifts, get more tips. Why haven’t people been up in arms about how bar tenders working a Friday night near more than bartenders working a Monday afternoon?
  - vundercind 2y ago
    The article is about subjecting workers to discriminated pay rates for reasons: that are not clear to the workers; that may not be within the power of the workers to control; that cannot be predicted in advance; and that may vary per worker rather than being offered the same to all workers at once; with that last also based on factors unknown to the workers—including, potentially, personal information about the worker or about their compensation history. The paper is explicitly not (as in: the intro outright states this is not what it’s about) traditional forms of variable pay.
    - itake 2y ago
      > that are not clear to the workers; that may not be within the power of the workers to control; that cannot be predicted in advance; and that may vary per worker rather than being offered the same to all workers at once; You’re literally describing tipping. When a worker starts their shift, they do not know how much they will earn. Tips vary per worker for sexism, racism, ageism reasons, or just plain luck.

vundercind 2y ago

The reaction here has been interesting. As someone with a heavier social-science and politics background than most HNers, I started reading the introduction before there were any comments here and went “oh my god, of course this is a thing, why did it never occur to me both that this would/is happen/happening, and to put it in these terms“, and my mind started chasing down the mechanisms by which it must work. Bombshell is a word that came to mind as soon as it dawned on me what the paper’s getting at. Then I came back to this thread and had a similar experience to when I checked on the Internet’s reaction to The Last Jedi after I got out of the theater, and was surprised to find that my experience of it as the only almost-actually-good SW film since the original trilogy was, um, not what most others had taken away.

Etheryte 2y ago
It's always useful to keep in mind the wide variety of HN users. For certain cohorts, the likes of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and such are considered the pinnacle of their aspirations, and abusing workers is viewed as business smarts.
- szundi 2y ago
  Who goes to work for Elon cannot really be so-called abused - already knew what is coming when applied
- vundercind 2y ago
  I think one thing going on is that the form of argument is unfamiliar to a lot of readers. Many seem to have taken away that the paper’s about the concerns the “Blueprint” it mentions sets out to address, or about traditional bonus structures or variable or productivity-based pay, because the intro covers both of those things in some detail—rather, the paper is laying those out as background. The paper is not about those. This is a common form for papers and arguments in the social sciences, but maybe a lot of HNers aren’t used to it. [edit] to be clear, the paper lays out plainly that this is the case, and a person unfamiliar with this way of writing could figure it out from the text per se, but if one is not looking out for this kind of structure I can see how one might overlook the parts where it straight-up says “that’s not what this is about: here is what this is about”

advael 2y ago

As with price discrimination, I think there are only two possible ways this can go: Either we pass some laws that deeply upset some oligarchs and future eras see this one as a "wild west" of data-driven exploitative practices, or we permanently destroy the bargaining power of everyone not big enough to be doing mass-surveillance, which is effectively the end of markets and the rise of a sort of advanced feudalism (which some would argue is quite far along already) One obviously seems better to me, but to be fair I am biased, being in the class of people who don't own an enormous corporation

Spivak 2y ago
If history is any teacher here it's going to be latter with the loudest voices of support coming from people are convinced that these systems couldn't and aren't possibly harming them, that they are above-average and therefore benefiting, and only those slack-jawed lazy nonspecific others who aren't (but absolutely are) working hard will be the target.
- advael 2y ago
  That's definitely the recent history, and the current propaganda strategy of modern oligarchs, but looking even a little beyond living memory there are many other solutions history can offer us, including labor solidarity, trust-busting, and of course more extreme measures that most would likely prefer to avoid, but which history shows us do happen sometimes
scarmig 2y ago
The third way is that companies find hiring workers, with all their complaints and needs and desire for dignity, too inconvenient, so they replace them with things that have none of those. Particularly relevant since this paper is primarily about ride hailing and delivery services.
- advael 2y ago
  Despite all the hand-wringing most claims to be able to do this seem pretty implausible at this stage. But for the sake of argument, assuming this happens, this is not different from the second scenario I've described. Of course, if there are no workers, one wonders how companies might find "consumers" against whom to price-discriminate, but with companies unilaterally and individually controlling both what people pay and are paid, the whole system of labor and consumption as a market is a fiction anyway. It's crazy that so many people seem to think that transformative technologies will both somehow replace all human labor and keep all present economic relations intact except for the ability of anyone to get a job, given how many economic choices have been made to center labor as the primary means by which people are supported. To reiterate, the options are prevent this nonsense through collective action (either in the form of a government or through other forms of coordination) or move to a more oppressive relationship between a tiny population of oligarchs and everyone else than the "labor market" that is ostensibly the way this economic relationship is currently arranged

mrguyorama 2y ago

If this outcome is a surprise to you, you have not been paying attention. Managers and Owners dream of reducing wages every single night. Every penny they aren't paying you is a penny they keep, and they, for some reason, think they are rightfully entitled to every penny, while you are a brat for feeling entitled to even a few pennies. More importantly, if your boss doesn't think like that, you can expect his boss to replace him with a manager that DOES. This downward force on labor prices is basically the entire point of the gig economy, and even youtubers whose only formal training is in how to write a high school essay figured this out. For this reason, there is institutional pressure to turn anything they can into gig economies. If you don't have empathy for the uber drivers who sleep in their car to be able to make as many rides as they can and still somehow end up below minimum wage, don't worry, they'll come for you soon. And when they've made the gig economy literally the only gig in town, it doesn't matter how savvy you think you are at "negotiation", you will get fucked too. Go read up on your labor rights history. None of what we have is a default, and the "haves" HATE it.

foolofat00k 2y ago

The thing that people consistently miss with these types of conversations is that any increase in the sophistication of the tech that exists to measure the world gives a relative benefit to corporations over individuals. This is because those organizations almost always have more resources to dedicate towards making effective use of that information than do individuals. Very often you as an individual are up against a team of PhDs and engineers whose job it is to enable the corporation to beat you, and the more data they have, the more likely they are to win. In this respect, there is basically no tech that does not benefit corporations more strongly than it benefits individuals. This is one of the reasons that regulation is important.

CatWChainsaw 2y ago
They don't "miss" this fact. It's inconvenient to libertarian la-la land dreams so it's ignored with prejudice, especially here. So many temporarily embarrassed millionaires on HN.
tbrownaw 2y ago
> any increase in the sophistication of the tech that exists to measure the world gives a relative benefit to corporations over individuals. We are far more able to measure the world than we were in the middle ages, or before the civil war, or even during the world wars. You can see how strong this claimed relative benefit and it's effects are by how the increasing ability to measure the world over that time has led people to become consistently more oppressed as time goes by.
- foolofat00k 2y ago
  I'm not sure if you disagree with me or not from this comment. Tech isn't the only thing that affects the relative strength of individuals vs corporations (regulation, social pressures, etc). Also I think it's not unreasonable to argue that corporations are more powerful today than they were during any of the time periods you've listed here.

_gmax0 2y ago

Off-topic, does anyone know whether the source code for this UI is open source?

josefritzishere 2y ago

This is very apropos after seeing the Pave post.

Manuel_D 2y ago

"Wage discrimination" as described in the article is not an unfair or illegal practice: > “Algorithmic wage discrimination” refers to a practice in which individual workers are paid different hourly wages—calculated with ever-changing formulas using granular data on location, individual behavior, demand, supply, or other factors—for broadly similar work. Surge pricing is a form of "algorithmic wage discrimination". Driving for Uber on a Friday night will net you more than a Monday at noon. Likewise, the fact that wages are higher in expensive metros is another form of "algorithmic wage discrimination." People hired during periods of a labor shortage may have a higher wage than a co-worker hired during an economic downturn. I am skeptical many would point at these scenarios as unfair - but all of these fall under the category of "wage discrimination" as discussed in the article. I also think this article unnecessarily injects racial messaging and leads readers to think that the algorithms are discriminating on the basis of protected class. That is not alleged in this article.

Wolfenstein98k 2y ago

"Subordinated racial minority". "Informational capitalism". "how should the law intervene" (no 'if'). "For workers, these practices produce unsettling moral expectations about work and remuneration". Big hmm. As always, truly objective metrics - such as pay based on output (rather than time spent) is viewed as harmful to minorities. Is it, though? Or is it actually more fair?

fmajid 2y ago

Not so coincidentally, the EU is mandating salary transparency: https://fikku.com/111920 https://fikku.com/111920