16 ms·

The Modern Workforce

124 points by _nvs 11y ago

p0cket 11y ago
Great read. Although services like Uber and Lyft are getting more popular, I didn't know the freelance/part-time market as a whole was growing.
- Delmania 11y ago
  In various business publications, it's referred to as the "sharing economy".
  - gaius 11y ago
    In the UK, "zero hours contracts".
  - whyaduck 11y ago
    It's not a euphemism, it's a crowd-sourced renaming.
altcognito 11y ago
The statement: > The better our software gets, the more companies are able to hire. Good, well-paying, well-placed jobs results in happy people. That’s pretty rewarding, if you ask me. is in direct conflict with what the market desires: Market forces desire resources that labor that is mobile across the country, requires no long term commitment, has a low risk hiring and comes at minimum cost. I don't see how the market you are creating will serve labors need. Your goal is to turn labor pools into a commodity. This is covered by the heading: > “You better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone / For the times, they are a-changing” - Bob Dylan But hey, you're touching lives.
- gaius 11y ago
  Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9391711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9391711
- steamy 11y ago
  It's been always like this for human labor throughout history and more specifically since the Agricultural Revolution. Human labor is always in surplus and this resource has been exploited by economic powers and interested parties in many ways from hardcore slavery to modern wage slavery but what changed recently was technology made it easier and more efficient to tap into this resource for anyone interested and thus this imbalance of power shifted in favor of the capitalists and business owners. It seems that most of the gains that we take for granted like weekends and paid vacations and so and so forth that the labor movement acquired over the years since the advent of socialism are up for grabs and at risk of evaporating altogether.
sydneyliu 11y ago
"While HR SaaS is never sexy" <---I disagree
- idlewords 11y ago
  So hard right now
- Splendor 11y ago
  Sorry you're being downvoted. It might help if you explain why you disagree.
Flemlord 11y ago
We've been hiring recently and have been using RecruiterBox for resume tracking. It makes it easy to communicate with applicants, move them through our different stages of hiring and schedule things with the rest of the team. We absolutely love it.
doki_pen 11y ago
Turning ordinary employees in to independent contractors is a disturbing trend that is eliminating traditional workers rights. Although some new companies have legitimate reasons for hiring contractors, for most it's not part of some new amazing model of labor, it's simply a way to save money. Usually it's illegal, but the IRS is being destroyed by budget cuts and can no longer enforce the law. Filing against your employer in these cases takes years to resolve. I guess if you believe in no protection of workers and mass exploitation of the working class, then it's a good thing. I personally think it's destroying a lot of markets. If people don't have any money they can't buy your shiny new product.
- colechristensen 11y ago
  It depends on the relationship, being an actual independent contractor is truly liberating. Choosing your own hours, working only on things you want to, setting your own salary based on how much you want to t work. There is real freedom in that as long as you get paid appropriately and actually get that freedom. Companies wanting to save money on benefits while having 9-5 workers with no freedom of choice of when or how to work and no freedom to take other jobs? That's abuse of the system and illegal. The difference is important.
  - SonicSoul 11y ago
    > Choosing your own hours, working only on things you want to, setting your own salary you pretty much described the best case scenario here. On the contrary my dad was an independent contractor most of his life in construction (which was a also in a boom period making some people rich). For him this meant working 6-7 days / week (10-14 hrs), clipping coupons, and saving for a decade to buy a $70k house to avoid getting in debt. This while having sub-contractors working for him. He eventually did well (decades of hard work later) but I believe this situation is not so rosy for an average contractor unless you are at the top of your game in a very in demand industry
  - doki_pen 11y ago
    Yes, but when this article talks about the growing number of contract workers, that growing number is people doing regular jobs and being labelled contractors. I'm working right now, but feel free to google about this growing problem of workers being illegally mislabeled as contractors.
bernardlunn 11y ago
Can we please call BS on the sharing economy name. It is is the "squeeze cash out of spare personal resources economy" (resources being time, car, house etc).
- makeitsuckless 11y ago
  Nah, that's another layer of the smokescreen. Lift the veil and you'll find an all out war against the rights of the "little people", be it consumer rights, labor rights, what have you. The sharing economy is to ordinary people what strip mining is to nature.
- gaius 11y ago
  It's also the screw-your-neighbour economy. If your little AirBnB money-spinner increases wear-and-tear on the common areas of the building, it's the other tenants who will pick up the costs of the extra maintenance. In time it will come to be seen as profoundly anti-social. Not to mention, if you're running a business you should be paying business rates and taxes... Remind me where is the "sharing"?
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    If I leave town and rent out my flat, wear and tear on the elevator goes up relative to me not leaving town?
    - alexqgb 11y ago
      Are you trolling again, yummy? Or are you honestly too thoughtless to recognize that a stream of people who have no long-term stake in a building do not conduct themselves in the same community-oriented way that's normal among those who do?
      - pc86 11y ago
        I prefer to believe that most people do not treat common areas of buildings like garbage. There are exceptions, of course, but it's not like having an apartment that you rent out a few weeks a year will throw the apartment building into a constant state of disrepair.
Delmania 11y ago
Ecclesiastes 1:9: What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Uber, Lyft, and the whole "sharing economy" is nothing more than another iteration of line balancing. Retails centers do this during the holiday seasons by hiring temp workers and call centers are always doing this. I'll agree normal HR is not well tuned for quickly hiring large amounts of people, so the Uber model of deploying an app, and letting people "hire themselves" is interesting case study in ways to quickly ramp up your operations, but the I think enough has been said about how this is essentially exploitation of workers.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
mc32 11y ago
I think this is a double edged sword. On the one hand things/resources can be easily shared among many people. This is good, fewer resources into supporting a population. It also allows people who seek marginal income increase to do do on a part time basis. This I not good if the economy evolves to make this marginal income system into the main and default way foe people to engage into the economy -"a race to the bottom". It also puts son pressure on producers who must now adapt to the new status where big ticket items can be shared among many (vehicles, mowers, etc). Perhaps a move to higher quality higher priced lower volume. The labor unit granularity would make these workers, on average, less valuable. And the advantage goes to the educated, more skilled. This devolution into a person to person economy where the main beneficiary is the "platform" will not bode well for the average person.
maceo 11y ago
Before the industrial revolution we had serfs and artisans. As the factories absorbed both the serfs and the artisans, the serfs saw it as an upgrade, while the artisans resented the new way of life. Through workplace organization, which usually involved serious risks, working conditions improved for everybody and reached a certain equilibrium by the 1950's. The lessons learned through workplace struggles in the last 150 years have been forgotten. The notion that "you should feel lucky just to have a job" has such a firm grip on the imagination of the American worker, that we've lost all sense of class consciousness and are accepting a return to serfdom without even putting up a fight. Today you might be an engineer with a comfortable job, but the 'modern workplace' will soon eat you up just like it did the artisans. The Luddites of industrial England were not afraid of new technology. They smashed machines in the workplace to gain a better bargaining position and prove a point to capital. And today, being against the sort of arrangement that's sprung up around the on-demand workforce doesn't mean that you're against technology. For me, it means that I am for respecting the dignity of the worker and ensuring that the sacrifices our forefathers made were not done in vain. If technology can develop within those constraints, I'm all for it. Otherwise, I say smash the machines.
- cgag 11y ago
  Private companies have hired planes to drop bombs on striking working coal miners: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain People should take a look at the list of "Major armed conflicts in American labor union history" at the bottom of the page and get a feel for how many people died for the more comfortable version of wage-slavery we have to day.
  - Chinjut 11y ago
    I'm likely in agreement with you on the politics of this discussion. However, I will note, pedantically, that "the only time people have been bombed in america" is not a great way of putting it, given, e.g., the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
    - log_n 11y ago
philip1209 11y ago
Thanks for the StaffJoy shout-out, Jeremy! We're finishing up our first week of deployment with a real workforce and finding that automated shift scheduling that better fits supply to labor demand can save about 10% on labor costs, which is a huge amount. Modern workforces get better margins through efficiency and automation, and that creates the opportunity for a new generation of mathematically-driven workforce management tools like OnFleet, Instacart, and AnalyticsMD. We're entering alpha testing with customers in the bay in the next two weeks - if you're interested in trying our product, shoot me an email - philip at staffjoy.com.

124 points by _nvs 11y ago

Great read. Although services like Uber and Lyft are getting more popular, I didn't know the freelance/part-time market as a whole was growing.

Delmania 11y ago
In various business publications, it's referred to as the "sharing economy".
- gaius 11y ago
  In the UK, "zero hours contracts".
- whyaduck 11y ago
  It's not a euphemism, it's a crowd-sourced renaming.

altcognito 11y ago

The statement: > The better our software gets, the more companies are able to hire. Good, well-paying, well-placed jobs results in happy people. That’s pretty rewarding, if you ask me. is in direct conflict with what the market desires: Market forces desire resources that labor that is mobile across the country, requires no long term commitment, has a low risk hiring and comes at minimum cost. I don't see how the market you are creating will serve labors need. Your goal is to turn labor pools into a commodity. This is covered by the heading: > “You better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone / For the times, they are a-changing” - Bob Dylan But hey, you're touching lives.

gaius 11y ago
Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9391711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9391711
steamy 11y ago
It's been always like this for human labor throughout history and more specifically since the Agricultural Revolution. Human labor is always in surplus and this resource has been exploited by economic powers and interested parties in many ways from hardcore slavery to modern wage slavery but what changed recently was technology made it easier and more efficient to tap into this resource for anyone interested and thus this imbalance of power shifted in favor of the capitalists and business owners. It seems that most of the gains that we take for granted like weekends and paid vacations and so and so forth that the labor movement acquired over the years since the advent of socialism are up for grabs and at risk of evaporating altogether.

sydneyliu 11y ago

"While HR SaaS is never sexy" <---I disagree

idlewords 11y ago
So hard right now
Splendor 11y ago
Sorry you're being downvoted. It might help if you explain why you disagree.

Flemlord 11y ago

We've been hiring recently and have been using RecruiterBox for resume tracking. It makes it easy to communicate with applicants, move them through our different stages of hiring and schedule things with the rest of the team. We absolutely love it.

doki_pen 11y ago

Turning ordinary employees in to independent contractors is a disturbing trend that is eliminating traditional workers rights. Although some new companies have legitimate reasons for hiring contractors, for most it's not part of some new amazing model of labor, it's simply a way to save money. Usually it's illegal, but the IRS is being destroyed by budget cuts and can no longer enforce the law. Filing against your employer in these cases takes years to resolve. I guess if you believe in no protection of workers and mass exploitation of the working class, then it's a good thing. I personally think it's destroying a lot of markets. If people don't have any money they can't buy your shiny new product.

colechristensen 11y ago
It depends on the relationship, being an actual independent contractor is truly liberating. Choosing your own hours, working only on things you want to, setting your own salary based on how much you want to t work. There is real freedom in that as long as you get paid appropriately and actually get that freedom. Companies wanting to save money on benefits while having 9-5 workers with no freedom of choice of when or how to work and no freedom to take other jobs? That's abuse of the system and illegal. The difference is important.
- SonicSoul 11y ago
  > Choosing your own hours, working only on things you want to, setting your own salary you pretty much described the best case scenario here. On the contrary my dad was an independent contractor most of his life in construction (which was a also in a boom period making some people rich). For him this meant working 6-7 days / week (10-14 hrs), clipping coupons, and saving for a decade to buy a $70k house to avoid getting in debt. This while having sub-contractors working for him. He eventually did well (decades of hard work later) but I believe this situation is not so rosy for an average contractor unless you are at the top of your game in a very in demand industry
- doki_pen 11y ago
  Yes, but when this article talks about the growing number of contract workers, that growing number is people doing regular jobs and being labelled contractors. I'm working right now, but feel free to google about this growing problem of workers being illegally mislabeled as contractors.

bernardlunn 11y ago

Can we please call BS on the sharing economy name. It is is the "squeeze cash out of spare personal resources economy" (resources being time, car, house etc).

makeitsuckless 11y ago
Nah, that's another layer of the smokescreen. Lift the veil and you'll find an all out war against the rights of the "little people", be it consumer rights, labor rights, what have you. The sharing economy is to ordinary people what strip mining is to nature.
gaius 11y ago
It's also the screw-your-neighbour economy. If your little AirBnB money-spinner increases wear-and-tear on the common areas of the building, it's the other tenants who will pick up the costs of the extra maintenance. In time it will come to be seen as profoundly anti-social. Not to mention, if you're running a business you should be paying business rates and taxes... Remind me where is the "sharing"?
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  If I leave town and rent out my flat, wear and tear on the elevator goes up relative to me not leaving town?
  - alexqgb 11y ago
    Are you trolling again, yummy? Or are you honestly too thoughtless to recognize that a stream of people who have no long-term stake in a building do not conduct themselves in the same community-oriented way that's normal among those who do?
    - pc86 11y ago
      I prefer to believe that most people do not treat common areas of buildings like garbage. There are exceptions, of course, but it's not like having an apartment that you rent out a few weeks a year will throw the apartment building into a constant state of disrepair.

Delmania 11y ago

Ecclesiastes 1:9: What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Uber, Lyft, and the whole "sharing economy" is nothing more than another iteration of line balancing. Retails centers do this during the holiday seasons by hiring temp workers and call centers are always doing this. I'll agree normal HR is not well tuned for quickly hiring large amounts of people, so the Uber model of deploying an app, and letting people "hire themselves" is interesting case study in ways to quickly ramp up your operations, but the I think enough has been said about how this is essentially exploitation of workers.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

mc32 11y ago

I think this is a double edged sword. On the one hand things/resources can be easily shared among many people. This is good, fewer resources into supporting a population. It also allows people who seek marginal income increase to do do on a part time basis. This I not good if the economy evolves to make this marginal income system into the main and default way foe people to engage into the economy -"a race to the bottom". It also puts son pressure on producers who must now adapt to the new status where big ticket items can be shared among many (vehicles, mowers, etc). Perhaps a move to higher quality higher priced lower volume. The labor unit granularity would make these workers, on average, less valuable. And the advantage goes to the educated, more skilled. This devolution into a person to person economy where the main beneficiary is the "platform" will not bode well for the average person.

maceo 11y ago

Before the industrial revolution we had serfs and artisans. As the factories absorbed both the serfs and the artisans, the serfs saw it as an upgrade, while the artisans resented the new way of life. Through workplace organization, which usually involved serious risks, working conditions improved for everybody and reached a certain equilibrium by the 1950's. The lessons learned through workplace struggles in the last 150 years have been forgotten. The notion that "you should feel lucky just to have a job" has such a firm grip on the imagination of the American worker, that we've lost all sense of class consciousness and are accepting a return to serfdom without even putting up a fight. Today you might be an engineer with a comfortable job, but the 'modern workplace' will soon eat you up just like it did the artisans. The Luddites of industrial England were not afraid of new technology. They smashed machines in the workplace to gain a better bargaining position and prove a point to capital. And today, being against the sort of arrangement that's sprung up around the on-demand workforce doesn't mean that you're against technology. For me, it means that I am for respecting the dignity of the worker and ensuring that the sacrifices our forefathers made were not done in vain. If technology can develop within those constraints, I'm all for it. Otherwise, I say smash the machines.

cgag 11y ago
Private companies have hired planes to drop bombs on striking working coal miners: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain People should take a look at the list of "Major armed conflicts in American labor union history" at the bottom of the page and get a feel for how many people died for the more comfortable version of wage-slavery we have to day.
- Chinjut 11y ago
  I'm likely in agreement with you on the politics of this discussion. However, I will note, pedantically, that "the only time people have been bombed in america" is not a great way of putting it, given, e.g., the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
  - log_n 11y ago

philip1209 11y ago

Thanks for the StaffJoy shout-out, Jeremy! We're finishing up our first week of deployment with a real workforce and finding that automated shift scheduling that better fits supply to labor demand can save about 10% on labor costs, which is a huge amount. Modern workforces get better margins through efficiency and automation, and that creates the opportunity for a new generation of mathematically-driven workforce management tools like OnFleet, Instacart, and AnalyticsMD. We're entering alpha testing with customers in the bay in the next two weeks - if you're interested in trying our product, shoot me an email - philip at staffjoy.com.