When I first arrived in London my English was not good enough to speak on the phone, I had no idea what the London job market for developers looked like, I had no idea where should I live and where should I settle.
So for the first 3-4 months, I did some wine waiting as a gig(agency work, no fixed place or hours. Like with Uber, you provide your own gear - like uniforms, bottle openers etc.) at the finest, the most iconic places in London. I worked at the Shard, I worked at the Cafe Royal, I worked at Four Seasons in events where celebrities like Victoria Beckham or Prince Harry were guests. I did my jubilee at BAFTA's after party, I was the wine waiter for the award-winning team that made the Amy Winehouse documentary. That night I had a chance to meet with pretty much every single celebrity(900+ guests from the industry), I was a huge Breaking Bad fan and I had the chance to speak with Walter White.
How to get into this gig business without ever working in this industry? 1 day of training and boom, I'm a waiter at the fines restaurants in the world.
It was such an amazing experience but whoever imagines living like that forever should have poor judgement. I was there to make some money until I get a real job and open a bank account(really hard to do because of catch 22) and most people who worked with me were either new arrivals like me or Australians who came to the UK to experience Europe for a year or 2(They come just before or after college with 2 year work visa, work for few months and travel Europe).
The world is transforming, the employment contracts are not the driving force. They are a reaction to the new needs. I think it's alright, an equilibrium will be reached.
To expand on what mrtksn means: in the UK, it is difficult to get a bank account without proof of address. It is also difficult to rent a flat without a UK bank account. There are a few ways around this:
- Have a friend put you on their water bill and use this as proof of address. I suspect this is illegal.
- Join a flatshare without getting on the lease, pay for your portion of the rent with Transferwise or something, and have your flatmate put you on the water bill. I sure hope this is legal.
- Find a bank which is a bit lax about proof of address and is willing to accept things like proof of employment. Lloyds used to do this, but I've heard they no longer do.
That's correct. After 2 months of working and not being able to get paid, finally, someone at an HSBC branch accepted the letter from the agency and opened my account. With the statements of that account now I have proof of address and I can open as many bank accounts as my heart desires :)
Later I got a job as an UI developer in the City, but the first few months were hard.
The bank side of the equation has become a lot easier. New services like Monese and Revolut make it trivial to get a basic bank account without proof of address. You can open an account in minutes and start receiving payments from an employer or send payments to a landlord.
The rental side has become more tricky. The Immigration Act 2015 made it a criminal offence to rent a property to someone who does not have the legal right to live in the UK, with a maximum penalty of 5 years imprisonment and an unlimited fine. Unless you have an EEA passport, it can be very difficult to find somewhere to live. Some landlords are even more cautious/discriminatory and won't rent to anyone who seems foreign. It's another embarrassing symptom of Theresa May's illiberal and inhumane "hostile environment".
Monzo(It was Mondo back then) recently introduced current accounts and I see that Revolut too now offers a real current account. That's great news, but still, you'll have trouble wherever proof of address is needed since these apps don't send paper statements as far as I know.
You can just chat Monzo in the app and ask for a paper statement. They will mail you one with a official looking stamp on it. Worked fine for me when the idiotic government bureaucracy required I produce such an archaic thing.
Monzo Bank no longer requires any proof of address. They are doing this specifically to address the issue immigrants have with access to banking [0]. They are a fully licensed and regulated UK bank, and have built their entire infrastructure from the ground up (zero legacy mainframe software) [1]
You can mail your debit card to any address you choose, no verification required.
“When you sign up through the Monzo app, we’ll ask you to take a picture of that ID and a short video of yourself. That’s it! You’ll need a UK address where we can send your debit card, and then you’re good to go.”
Same situation I had moving to ireland. Cant have account without proof of address, can’t have proof of address (an utility paid in your name) without renting and very hard to find a rental unit without a letter from the bank.
Eventually the employer strongarmed the bank to open an account for me.
It's a UK thing -- everything has to not work in the most ridiculous way possible.
This also applies to anti-money-laundering stuff: it's better to affect loads of people really badly who are most certainly not money laundering as long as it does not affect the people who are money laundering at scale.
That said, there are people who don't really understand that people on social media paying you for access to your bank account are probably money laundering.
This is in a country where it is perfectly permitted to open several stores of the same chain of gambling establishments in the same street with fixed-odds betting machines and no questions of where the large sums of cash being handed over come from.
This is painfully accurate. Buying a house now involves proving that your funds came from bona fide sources (i.e. that you are not a criminal), thanks to new anti money laundering regulations.
Apparently in the past people with questionable sources of income used to open fake accounts to move money and the banks were happy to do it until the regulators slammed them with fines.
Also, when you have a bank account you can get things like a phone contract with a direct debit payment. Apparently, some people made it a habit to leave the UK without paying their bills after they are done with their seasonal work.
I'm sure some people run much more elaborate scams.
It is simply incredible how governments do never decided that banking is a public service and should be regulated as such (it's been what? 300 years? Maybe that's still too little)
A passport is enough to prove your identity isn't fake. But since it's not enough to give you a credit line, banks simply refuse the service. There are way too many people with no access to banks.
Yeah, I tried that but it was not accepted. One branch told me that some countries are considered higher risk than others so they need to be stricter and want a utility bill or a statement from another bank.
I am curious if a hack exists to have an account in a bank in UK if you use the same bank in another country. For example, if you are a software developer with a good salary being an HSBC Premier customer can be easy in developing countries, you then go to places like US and they treat you like an HSBC Premier there where you just need to show you are a customer in another country and they use your overseas address as a proof to open the account.
Yes, I did exactly this when I moved from the UK to the US. As an existing Premier customer, I was able to open a bank account and provide the necessary verification at a later date.
AFAIK, it doesn't work for Santander (both in the US,UK and Spain, based on a colleagues account) as they treat each country and separate.
Wow, I'm from the UK but emigrated to Spain after Uni.
I never knew it was so hard for new arrivals in the UK - here in Spain it was pretty easy, the hardest thing was getting the appointment for the ID card.
I lived in Germany for a bit too and there it was also easy.
I really think we need some ID system like the NIE or Anmeldung in the UK as I can't drive and always had to use my passport as ID which is a massive pain - it'd make stuff like this easier too.
Banks were surprisingly hostile, tried that with few branches but they first did not acknowledge the existence of the account and later they found a way to say that I do not qualify.
I had to make my agency write the employment letter multiple times because the banks always found something wrong. Finally, it was a week before Christmas and I had to beg the HSBC employee to accept the letter and open my account because I was running out of cash on Christmas.
>So for the first 3-4 months, I did some wine waiting as a gig(agency work, no fixed place or hours. Like with Uber, you provide your own gear - like uniforms, bottle openers etc.) at the finest, the most iconic places in London. I worked at the Shard, I worked at the Cafe Royal, I worked at Four Seasons in events where celebrities like Victoria Beckham or Prince Harry were guests.
The the "finest, the most iconic places in London" hire cheap sweatshop, bring your own tools, amateur labor.
It might be a good chance for a newcomer to the business, but it also kills the business long term (just hire newcomers and pay them shit forever), and cheapens their whole experience to Las Vegas level for me.
Why places that charge $20 for a drink (or way more) are so greedy to not properly pay wait staff and keep qualified teams longterm, is beyond me...
I think it's mostly about the workforce supply flexibility. Agency workers are paid more than the regular staff at the same position and there is the agency fee on top of the hourly rate.
We were also called "candidate" as if we are permanent job candidates. That was actually true for some people who actually persued jobs in the hospitality industry and when someone gets a permanent job the employer pays the agency a fee.
Yup. It's interesting. On the one hand, they could have an employee with impeccable skills, background, training, etc, but have to pay them well, guarantee benefits, hours, etc.
Or they can outsource the contract to a 3rd party, let that company deal with coming up with hired guns, liability, etc, and just hope it all works out. And if it doesn't, it's a lot easier to fire a contract company and find a new one, than to fire actual employees.
While I did enjoy the story, I don't think I agree with your conclusion.
What most people seems to think is happening is that as information (and related technologies like communication) has become abundant it also became really important. And that people working in the "gig economy" is adapting to this reality.
I don't think that is how things work. When something becomes abundant it is the other things that become important. As information has become abundant things like housing, education, security, recognition and contacts is what lets you leverage the abundance of information to create opportunities.
People working in the "gig economy" isn't adapting to a new reality, they are victims of the people who are now favored because of their access to housing, education and security.
This is of course counter to what should be happening. Any nation who want to take advantage of the abundance of information should make those other things readily available instead of letting them be captured by rent-seekers.
Not as a sommelier but a wine waiter and no, my English was not rudimentary but I did not have much practice at speaking so I had very hard time on the phone(I guess I was used to do lips reading?).
There are also roles that require almost no interaction with the guest and these roles were filled with immigrants that barely speak any English. Roles like bringing the plates or collect the empty glasses and dishes.
Also, it's not like they had much choice, In these 4 months I haven't met a single British person as a colleague but Spanish, Italians, French, Bulgarians, Romanians, Iranians, Brazilians, South Africans, Kiwis and of course a lot of Australians.
The pay was just above the minimum wedge. Later I actually built an app to help these agencies organize their workforce but it turned out that they were happy with Excel, e-mails and Whatsapp.
Talking on the phone is a unique thing, and takes more skill than talking in person. Not only does sound get somewhat distorted on the phone, but you don't have as many cues to take from when speaking. You can't see their facial expressions, for example. These help you understand words you aren't as familiar with. Not only that, but most folks are less patient on the phone than in person. You can be at an intermediate level of language and still have problems on the phone.
Not only that, but he's talking job-interview skill level phone-talking. Speaking in a second language is much more difficult under stress. This is exactly why I tend to use English instead of Norwegian with doctors and dentists.
In person, folks are more relaxed. If you forget a word, people fill it in. And with his job, he could easily learn the lingo he needed to do the job. He would have a limited context of things he actually knew, small talk isn't so bad, and for everything else you can ask.
Sounds like they were working in catering for events, which has traditionally been a job you can show up and get with no skill (unlike sommelier which is highly skilled).
Correct, it starts with events but as you gain some experience agencies start giving you shifts in restaurants. I worked at some seriously fancy restaurants. It was very interesting to observe and interact with extremely rich people or people in position.
A French accent , for example, would probably gather more respect, London can be quite a pretentious place at times. (Hell even I would say that the average French person probably knows a lot more about wine than the average Brit).
For most people (not highly sought after programmers), its an erosion of what paltry remnant of their workers rights remains.
Last time wealth inequality peaked, the robber barons had strike breakers and whatnot.
This time (with wealth inequality continuing to soar to historically unprecedented heights) they have the 'gig economy'.
Considering they drew parallels with strike breakers, I don't think that was the point.
Many Americans are stuck with dead-end low-wage low/no-benefit part-time jobs (plural) trying to make ends meet - the weak job market offers few alternatives, while the gig economy (ubiquitous temp workers) stands as an implicit threat against workers organizing.
The job market in the US is booming. It's the exact opposite of a weak job market.
The manufacturing unemployment rate is 2.x%.
GDP will grow by a trillion dollars in 2018, nearly equal to the entire size of Mexico's economy. The US economy will expand at a rate three times faster than the EU economy this year (this quarter will be seven times faster than the growth rate in Germany, and Japan's economy is shrinking again by contrast).
Nearly one million full-time jobs were gained in the month of May [1], with a large decline in part-time jobs. That's the largest full-time monthly job gain in 20 years.
The U6 unemployment rate is back down to a level that is historically considered very healthy.
Wages are rising at the fastest rate in a decade.
There are more job openings than there are people looking for jobs, the first time that has happened in decades.
A dead-end job is still a job. Unemployment rates are historically low.
In the future, most people will become “gig” workers of some sort due to ubiquitous automation.
Giving everyone a job is not, and should never be, the goal of a society. In the early twentieth century American workers were killed fighting for the right to support themselves working 40 hours a week but for much the population that option has evaporated. I know people in the bay area working 70 hours a week at dead end jobs barely making ends meet; a fact I consider unacceptable given the wealth they are surrounded by.
It has to be the goal of society - assuming you expect other people in society to continue working to provide a surplus to support you rather than, say, taking Friday off.
We trade lifetime with each other. It may take less and less lifetime to produce a loaf of bread, but it still requires some people somewhere to be there babysitting a machine.
There has to be a mechanism by which you can give up your time for the benefit of others, so that others will continue to give up their time for the benefit of you. Even if that is done via the mechanism of public goods (clean street, flowers on lampposts, better libraries, community centres, active church, etc.)
> I know people in the bay area working 70 hours a week at dead end jobs barely making ends meet; a fact I consider unacceptable given the wealth they are surrounded by.
By what means is this unacceptable? "I find myself working 40 hours a week to afford cable and a new iphone. I consider that unacceptable given the wealth I am surrounded by."
Those two statements are qualitively equivalent. Because you move to a nicer neighborhood, you shouldn't have to put up with things other people put up with? Huh?
I'm pretty sure you own a cell phone and a laptop.
And most of your things are made by people working comparable hours for much less money and a lower of standard of living. Yet you somehow find that "acceptable" even though you're still complicit in their exploitation.
I fail to see why geographic proximity makes things less acceptable. If we could ship the fruits of their labor from overseas, that would be ok?
The job market is so bad people are willing to scrounge for scrapes - their reserves have been depleted and credit maxed out. Unemployment is low because people can no longer say no.
One of many reasons people draw parallels between today and the Gilded Era or Roaring twenties.
> Unemployment is low because people can no longer say no.
Succinctly put. I'd say this was also a reason why, 9 years ago during the big crash, we saw "productivity" measures go up, and continue to rise even after the 'recovery', even with companies working with fewer people. They managed to get the same results out of fewer people (or... close enough results), and those people really couldn't say 'no' because... they'd rather have some job than none at all (or, again, they needed something vs nothing).
This is correct. And to add more clarity about the oft-cited labor shortage, I was at an event where the President of the Minneapolis Fed talked about how when he asked employers when the best of times was w/respect to hiring, their response was 2008 - 2010. He went on to say that the issue isn't really about a labor shortage but an unwillingness to raise wages because the employers were spoiled by applicants' desperation during the cited period.
I remember multiple news reports and hour-long news stories on the inability of people to get jobs because of their unemployed status. There were so many people to choose from, companies would generally ignore someone who was unemployed, regardless of the reason, preferring only to hire people who were already employed. I have no doubt that delayed the start of a recovery for months.
Except it’s not at all like the 20s. Human mortality is at record lows, and you won’t die from contracting the flu. Credit is a function of interest rates and has nothing to do with employment. I’m really disappointed that people on HN don’t have an understanding of basic macroeconomics.
I read the bit where the statistics deliberately excludes people who do it in addition to their regular job so e.g. folks renting out a spare room on airbnb don't count but that is definitely work.
That's the failing of the 'free market'. There is no alternative.
And you fix that by making an alternative.
As Beveridge put it (in 1944): "The labour market should always be a seller's market rather than a buyer's market. For this, on the view of society underlying this Report - that society exists for the individual - there is a decisive reason of principle. The reason is that difficulty in selling labour has consequences of a different order of harmfulness from those associated with the difficulty in buying labour. A person who has difficulty in buying labour suffers inconvenience or reduction in profits. A person who cannot sell his labour is in effect told that he is of no use. The first difficulty causes annoyance or loss. The other is a personal catastrophe."
My friend used to use this argument when I complained that Uber / Deliveroo were a bag of crap. I didn´t have a great counterargument, I just mumbled something about workers rights.
What is a convincing argument that this line of thinking is wrong?
If I put a gun to your head and say "Your wallet or your life," are you free?
If I lay a trap, and you fall into it, and I offer to release you if you give me your bank details, are you free?
If it's a disaster and I charge $10000 for a bottle of clean water, are you free?
If a society requires you to work in order to live but only offers you poor options for work, are you free?
We generally talk as though, as long as there is no specific person intentionally coercing you, you're free to choose. But those particular elements don't actually make much difference to your freedom. It seems to me that being set up with only unfavorable options is different from being really free to choose.
By the logic you use here, there is no such thing as freedom. There are always limits imposed on people by others, situations, society, nature, and physics. Therefore, there is no actual freedom for anyone.
It seems to me that invalidating the notion of freedom might not be what you set out to do. Instead, you're trying to make a point wherein people are only truly free if they have some options that are favorable. Do I interpret you correctly?
In that case, what's "favorable"? Who defines and judges such things? What standards are used? I know people who are capable and skilled and thus offered highly remunerative positions that they don't want to take because of who is hiring - is that favorable or unfavorable? Reasonable arguments for both spring readily to mind. Are we to use an individual's personal preferences only?
I always considered "free" as lack of "coersion", where "coersion" has an agent/subject that can be removed to make situation better. Under that definition, the answers are:
> If I put a gun to your head and say "Your wallet or your life," are you free?
No -- the subject is you and your gun, if you remove them the situation improves.
> If I lay a trap, and you fall into it, and I offer to release you if you give me your bank details, are you free?
No -- the subject is your trap, if you remove it the situation improves.
> If it's a disaster and I charge $10000 for a bottle of clean water, are you free?
Yes -- while there is a subject (you), removing it will not make situation any better at all.
> If a society requires you to work in order to live but only offers you poor options for work, are you free?
Depends?
In USSR, with exit visas and "social parasitism" laws, no. Agent is state, and removing will make a situation better -- yes, you would still be hungry, but at least they would not arrest you, and you could try your luck in another country.
In USA, mostly yes. There is nothing you can remove to get better options for work, or to allow living without work. There are some exceptions -- like anti-vagrnacy laws and job licensing -- but they do not affect most people.
I join in the argument that labor is coerced into participating in the free market in the US. The agent/subject that you're missing is the government and their enforcement of laws pertaining to property.
I would argue that labor is only as free as the social net for unemployed is strong. The coercion comes from the fact that your landlord can have the sheriff evict you (or your bank can foreclose and do the same) and the place where you help yourself to food without paying can have the police arrest you. Likewise if you try to oppose that physically, or, say, gain employment by selling illicit drugs, there's a system already in place to confine you to a jail or prison.
> I would argue that labor is only as free as the social net for unemployed is strong.
You're arguing that labor is only free so long as it can hold a gun to someone else's head (the evil 10%) and force them to support said labor via welfare by taking the fruits of the labor that the 10% produce. As though one has an inherent right to someone else's very life and property (if you did, you wouldn't need a gun to steal that property). Communism, because it has worked out so well over the last century.
It's a contradiction. You're actually saying some people get to be 'free' using coercion and overt threats of force, by enslaving other people to fulfill their needs via welfare transfers based on the taxation of other better off persons income.
The system of welfare transfers, much less actual Socialism, requires extreme force to be applied at all times to keep the system functioning, as such there can be no freedom at all - there's always a gun pointed at your head.
The whole prerequisite of welfare is to take excess resources to redistribute.
Now who decides what is excess? Definitely not the person who has it and is greedy. So or societies have decided that majority or representative of the majority decided this. Reasonably equitable system, but not exactly colouring or incorruptible.
I am not arguing that Communism is free of coersion.
I don't think free markets exist, I believe they are an idealized model. I think this is especially true for the labor market.
Likewise, I don't believe there are coersion-free societies. But that does not mean I'm willing to overlook some baseline level of coersion as not being coersion at all. Governments (regardless of economic policy) tend to assert a monopoly on the use of violence in an area, and that monopoly on violence means their policies are enforced through coersion.
I can see your point about property laws restricticting freedom.
But If you say that property laws are coercion, you cannot then say that social net for unemployment helps one be free. The coercion agents are still out there, waiting for you.
After all, you were not not free in USSR even if you had a job - freedom is about possibilities.
Does the existence of the gig economy eliminate good options? If the gig economy were regulated to zero tomorrow, who would find better options, and why aren’t they finding those options now?
Short Uber etc. specific point: "Uber's market is not a free market".
But more broadly… it depends whether someone is a dogmatic free-marketer fundamentalist or just someone who was swayed by the arguments from that dogma. For the fundamentalists, forget it.
For those actually open-minded, take the scientific argument. Start with confirming agreement that you're both pro-social instead of anti-social (you both actually want what maximizes overall flourishing and well-being and don't prioritize some other value or dogma). Then get them to acknowledge that the free-market argument is a model that needs to be backed by empirical evidence to be accepted as actually describing reality instead of being just an untested hypothesis.
If you can get them to thus at least accept that understanding the complex factors in play is daunting and we can't just take an elementary principle and blindly apply it to any situation conclusively… well, then you can have a discussion with them over the next couple years about behavioral economics, psychology, culture, power…
My general go-to is emphasizing that employer power comes largely from being organized. It's not like each interviewer completely makes their own decision about hiring anyone with no rules or restrictions from the company (unless the interviewer is a sole-proprietor themselves hiring one other employee or contractor). The power in the corporation comes specifically from the organized structure of the company. The individuals on the other side of a contract are divided. They use things like unions and government to have power in solidarity, and without that, they can never have comparable power in negotiations.
So, either we accept the impulse for workers to build organizations or use government for solidarity or we insist that companies shouldn't exist either and need to just be free-market masses of independent actors too or we drop the pretense that we're describing some sort of equal-enough, voluntary free-market negotiation.
You have a dogma yourself. that's ok, just be aware that you have one, and are espousing one.
> "Then get them to acknowledge that the free-market argument is a model that needs to be backed by empirical evidence to be accepted as actually describing reality instead of being just an untested hypothesis."
The free market is one of the most tested ideas out there.
> "They use things like unions and government to have power in solidarity, and without that, they can never have comparable power in negotiations."
law is really important for most forms of economic systems to work. I think the fact that social media and perception drivings things so much could have a positive outcome in this area. Companies should see the welfare of their employees as an important role in making the world 'better'.
I see a lot of tech companies saying they want to make the world a better place, yet for instance, they have abysmal 401k matching plans. melinials are not saving enough for retirement, and that bad behavior in tech is not helping the future crisis. I wish a tech company would decide to be a true leader on this
> You have a dogma yourself. that's ok, just be aware that you have one, and are espousing one.
I completely deny this. I am anti-dogma and presume at this point that you are either just lumping me in with dogmatic people who say things that my points remind you of or that you are otherwise misinterpreting me.
What's my dogma? Are you just conflating "dogma" with things like "bias" and "perspective" because I certainly have those, I'm just one person and not omniscient.
> The free market is one of the most tested ideas out there.
The free-market as a MODEL is well-tested and understood. There are cases where reality fits the model pretty well, but they are isolated. The vast majority of reality is far enough from the free-market model that it's impossible to use reality as a test of "the free market" because most markets in reality aren't fully free.
I suspect you're equating "market" with "free market". All the complex parameters of pricing, supply-and-demand, basic market economics… that's all present in most markets, free or non-free. It's not like when there are regulations or power imbalances, cartels etc. etc. that all of market economics disappears. But there's so rarely any example of completely free market to even study, we can't accurately accept that it's well-tested.
We can't study free-markets in a lab the way we can study basic physics or cell biology or whatever.
Besides, the vast majority of economics as a field has been practiced in ways that are nowhere near the scientific rigor of many other fields.
> [your last two paragraphs]
I'm not sure I follow the relevance here. Are you assuming that you're talking to some dogmatic ideologue such that the plain things you state which seem sensible enough is a counter to anything I think or wrote?
You just mean the market as we know it today. There is no generic "the free market" in existence.
Even Somalia, the market is affected greatly by the military context of what's going on. It's got less centralized control, but it's not an actual free market entirely. A true free market as a complete overall social system is probably just a fantasy idea.
Please note that capitalism means private ownership of core resources and means of production. It doesn't specify whether we have free or semi-free markets or whatever. Markets (free or not) have great value and are bigger and independent of capitalism (for perspective, markets are much older).
> It's ironic. The free market requires a form of socialism to actually work.
Its not ironic, the requirement is called rule of law, and its a foundational stone from the philosophers that brought that royalty and religion from the State.
The recognition of private property has been recognized as a necessity from the get go in classical philosophy and economics.
It needs more than that if you have a labour market based around money and full time jobs.
Odd as it may sound, full time jobs are essentially what cause involuntary unemployment because you are not market testing your position on a daily basis.
But of course you need full time jobs to have any sort of efficiency in a business using labour - and to have any stability in the customer product market where it uses debt (housing for example) or fixed pricing rather than auctions.
The gig economy is an attempt to deskill working to such an extent that individuals can be hired and fired on a daily basis - which would correct for involuntary unemployment if everybody is hired and fired on that basis and everything is bought and sold at auction.
An interesting expose, though I dont know how this actually reinforces the idea that free markets need socialized services to survive (other than the aforementioned private property, life and liberty). I want to answer any way because its interesting tho!
> Odd as it may sound, full time jobs are essentially what cause involuntary unemployment because you are not market testing your position on a daily basis.
Sure, it might decrease labor flexibility which can increase unemployment, but how big an effect can that actually be? And what is the proposed solution to fix that if its an actual problem?
> The gig economy is an attempt to deskill...
The gig economy is not de-skilling workers, its consuming the labor of unskilled workers because the price-ratio works. Those very same companies pay 6 figure salaries to a lot of people, that provide utility to the company as well. Neither by design, or in theory, do companies increase their profits by reducing the skill of their labor, they do it by increasing their productivity.
I see a tenuous relationship with the reserve army concept of Marx trying to be used here, but I'm not buying it.
The labor market is never free, because living isn't free - almost every participant is coerced.
We're all trading time and willpower for money. If the gig economy has a poor ROI, people can end up in poverty traps - stuck working a couple shitty jobs because they need the money to survive, but the jobs consume so much time/will-power that they can't pursue alternatives.
This becomes a huge issue for Uber-style companies where workers buy their own tools (cars), in exchange for uncertain per-trip wages with no benefits. They're called "contractors", but realistically what can they do if Uber "fires" them? Work for Lyft? Same shit, different logo.
Uber's practices are outright deceptive - they compare very optimistic ridesharing wages to hourly employee wages, without considering their car ownership/fuel/taxes/maintenance/insurance costs. I did some napkin math a while back which suggested quite a few drivers are actually losing money in the long-run (primarily maintenance and lower auto resale value).
> The labor market is never free, because living isn't free - almost every participant is coerced.
Your actual post is mostly reasonable arguments, but this premise is not realistic. This is stretching the word 'coerced' to the point where it doesn't mean anything. The fact that resources are limited and we need the average person to add about as much value as they consume is not coercion. It is a (very sad) fact. There is no element of force involved except maybe the enforcement of property rights, which is one of the most reasonable things we ask our governments to undertake.
> They're called "contractors", but realistically what can they do if Uber "fires" them? Work for Lyft? Same shit, different logo.
Are these people born with "only allowed to work as a car driver" stamped on their forehead? If the market rate driving cars is so terrible, they need to find a different industry. The difficulties of moving between industries are real, I'll acknowledge them and say maybe there is a role for the government to facilitate this aspect. However, as a practical point, I don't think governments generally do. When we as a society decide who is responsible for employees moving between industries, we basically have to choose between this being the employers problem, this being the individuals problem or this being someone else's problem. I'm very happy to contend that, even though it is not very fair, the person who has the most control is the individual and they are the only one who is ultimately responsible for themselves.
There are a lot of problems with companies like Uber. The car drivers are clearly employees in every way except technicalities, and the practice of making them bring their own tools is reprehensible. But it is by far better to try and solve that problem by encouraging the growth of better alternatives than by dropping the hammer of regulation. When they regulated the taxi industries, my memory is in a lot of major areas the actual taxi drivers didn't end up benefiting and random licensed taxi owners did. Depends on the country and city.
> Are these people born with "only allowed to work as a car driver" stamped on their forehead?
Did you see what I said about poverty traps? Once someone is stuck, it's very challenging to break out without outside help.
> The difficulties of moving between industries are real, I'll acknowledge them and say maybe there is a role for the government to facilitate this aspect. However, as a practical point, I don't think governments generally do. When we as a society decide who is responsible for employees moving between industries, we basically have to choose between this being the employers problem, this being the individuals problem or this being someone else's problem. I'm very happy to contend that, even though it is not very fair, the person who has the most control is the individual and they are the only one who is ultimately responsible for themselves.
Personally, I'd like to see free or heavily subsidized public adult education. There is no need to regulate unethical employment practices when laborers have the freedom to seek employment elsewhere - the market can sort it out. But we need freedom of horizontal movement first.
> There is no need to regulate unethical employment practices when laborers have the freedom to seek employment elsewhere - the market can sort it out. But we need freedom of horizontal movement first.
And yet even in the supposedly so competitive SV tech market, abusive practices like forcing employees to sign arbitration agreements, at-will employment (can be dismissed with zero notice or severance and for no or any reason not prohibited by law), "unlimited" vacation that is really meant to discourage you from taking it, and long workweeks with no overtime pay are common.
Who doesn't get to deal with any of the above? Union employees (for the most part).
The theory goes: Poor people who need a car should buy a modest car, and keep it running for as long as they possibly can. But some poor people don't do this. They buy an expensive car using weird debt structures that they don't understand, and then when a minor thing goes wrong (traffic ticket for example) they get trapped in a cycle of debt.
I think this probably does happen, but I'd be interested to know how many people are stuck in debt because they bought a product using a financial product they didn't understand vs it just happened.
There's an episode of econtalk with Elizabeth Anderson you should listen to. She basically says employers are similar to communist dictatorships. In the same way that the 'freedom' to move from one communist dictatorship to another isn't real freedom, the 'freedom' to move from one employer to another isn't real freedom. Check it out, she makes the argument better than I do, obviously.
Beverdige: difficulty in selling labour has consequences of is a different order of harmfulness than those associated with difficulty in buying labour.
Essentially firms only hire if they can make a profit, where has an individual has to get hired to eat and have a sense of long-term usefulness in society.
Plenty of people take that freedom as an axiomatic, inviolable good or right, but reasonable people can have different values.
Some people believe that those freedoms are necessarily a net win for the economy, but that's a pretty shallow argument too.
Maybe workers' rights are a race to the bottom, a tragedy of the commons -- perhaps some small amount of regulation would be good for business and for workers, by forcing companies to spend a small amount more to get a more sustainable workforce without giving up advantages to competitors.
Obviously these freedoms and protections exist on a continuum. We've mostly come down on the side of minimum wages, which is a compromise on those fundamental, absolute freedoms -- in a sense all "workers rights" are curtailments of "jobseekers rights".
the full claim being countered wasn't "workers should be free to participate in the gig economy", it included "it's a free market" which is the part more easily countered.
Uber's market is a market, but it's certainly not a free market.
It did reshape it. Turns out you can offload your costs to your 'employees' that hardly will organize and project costs and earnings to the future (like a competent business). I've talked with bunch of car sharing drivers who were bamboozled with car loans, get hit by traffic infractions, costs of maintenance and the list goes on and on. I feel that the gig economy preys on people who have not developed that risk management and are lured by the promise of easy money (make $500 this weekend). That can be verified by reading on what kind of game theory the big companies investing in (how to sweeten a deal, making people decide on the spot yes or no, etc). It's an interesting state, but I hope they turn it around. There is potential.
Interesting that this thread and the "chatbots aren't so great after all" thread hit the front page on the same day.
Anyone who actually thought people gave a shit about chatbots was either deluded, a chatbot API salesman, or a manager/owner trying to cut costs by downsizing their call/chat support center.
Anyone who actually thought the gig economy was helping anyone but business owners was either deluded or a shill.
>> Anyone who actually thought the gig economy was helping anyone but business owners was either deluded or a shill.
That's quite a generalization you're making.
Just because business owners are benefiting by pushing wages as low as the market will bear and reaping profits/growth, doesn't mean consumers/drivers aren't benefiting from the arrangement as well.
Service providers are granted an additional at-will income opportunity.
Consumers are granted a high-value low-cost service.
Many will argue that the service providers are being tricked into the arrangement through hidden costs. However, a large sector of drivers actually rent their cars, which pretty much removes all hidden costs and proves to me that these gigs are a viable alternative to employment.
I am a Software Developer with a decent salary for where I live. I got offered a job a couple of years ago, where 3/4 of my wage was through an international company and the rest through a normal Spanish one. When I saw the amount going into my account every month, I thought I had hit the jackpot as it was way more than I expected.
A while later when I got converted to a full Spanish contract, and my manager advised me to make sure I wasn't getting screwed. It was only then that I realized I hadn't actually been getting the pension payments on the 3/4 of my international contract up until then. What looked like a good deal hadn't actually been one at all.
I would be surprised if people less educated than me would understand all the hidden costs.
"Many will argue that the service providers are being tricked into the arrangement through hidden costs. However, a large sector of drivers actually rent their cars, which pretty much removes all hidden costs and proves to me that these gigs are a viable alternative to employment."
I'm going to highly disagree with you, there. I had a friend who tried renting the car from one of those companies. Nothing could be further from the truth than what you posted. It was basically the old "company store".
> Anyone who actually thought people gave a shit about chatbots was either deluded
People don't need to give a shit about chatbots. A large amount of people deal with them all the time. Every time you decide to use chat to get help from some site that provides s service for you, what do you think the odds are you're first connected to a human? By having chatbots do the initial contact and information gathering, you can streamline the actual process and seamlessly connect and hand off to a real support rep after the rote info gathering is done, and provide them with the account number, a generalized idea of what the problem is, etc. Some requests can probably be handled entirely by the bot (need to change your password? That's easy to script).
Chatbots are all around us, supplementing formal interactions.
Chatbot and phone robots are all around, gathering information, forwarding you to humans, who promptly ask you all the information again since they can't rely on the chatbots.
But that's not all it purported to be - sort of like a more intelligent IVR for customer support. Instead chatbots were promised to replace or supplement many online interactions, most notably shopping. But I guess people still go to Amazon in their browser or app, instead of trying to interact with a robot (Facebook Messenger? Whatsapp? Slack?)
Except everyone just spams 0 or "Representative" until they hit a real person, so the actual effect of the chatbot is a lot of money and hype wasted, and irritation on the end-user side.
The idea that “consumers” are a separate class from employees is specious. There’s only labor and Capital owners, with the latter doing a wonderful job of turning the former against themselves.
Perhaps people can benefit from something in their capacity as a consumer while it being a downside in their capacity as an employee, and then on net as a person either benefit from or experience a detriment from the change, depending on which of the two was larger?
Like, suppose someone is selling some good and they get paid on commission, as like, some proportion of the purchase cost. If the price of goods of that sort go down (maybe one of the materials needed to manufacture it became more abundant?), then they would receive less income, but also not have to pay as much for different similar goods, and whether they are overall better or worse off would depend on the details.
The roles of consumer, employee and employer are relative with respect to industry. The same person could occupy all three roles in different parts of their life (e.g small business owner who outsources, does GrubHub deliveries when business is slow, and uses Uber when they go out drinking. I'm not saying labor vs capital isn't also a useful perspective, but to say it's the only one ignores the complexity of reality.
Well clearly a consumer in one context is usually an employee (or capital owner) in another.
In this particular case the consumers who are benefiting are generally a different group than the employees who are losing out, so I don't see why you bothered to point this out.
You won't. An economist would point out that capital owners are also consumers and often employees, meaning that there's really only one class of people.
Which parent would not agree with, as they are offering a straightforward Marxist reading.
You'll have to be more specific about "okay" and "developed world."
A lot of Americans point to Canada as an example, but it's a pretty bad example. If healthcare was so great in Canada, then there wouldn't be private hospitals in the United States that cater only to Canadians who go to America for the healthcare they can't get in Canada, or can't get in a timely fashion.
In American towns where a lot of Canadians spend the winter, the radio stations are full of ads for these hospitals. (Palm Springs, for example.)
If you mean the UK, the news over there is constantly full of horror stories about its NHS.
Or they did the Fiverr ads for the NYC subways. There’s one that makes fun of people with white collar careers by calling them “chained down” and declaring that working for Fiverr in the gig economy is better.
I really wanted to ask the people who worked there about their employment contracts. Surely the CEO was contingent, right? Their coders were all at-whim employees, living in the New Style, pushing code for $$ when they wanted to.
Saw this on the of a bus in SF and started laughing. Low pay contractor work is the way to get unchained in SF? You won't even be able to make rent unless you're in the top percentile.
I saw someone on fiverr offering to install Java on Ububtu Linux starting at 100$. That sounds about right. For the most part these sort of race to the bottom gigs would only work if your cost of living were really low relative to the $ amount. I did Amazon Turk work mainly out of curiosity/boredom, at one point I transcribed a conference call for some UK non-profit. I think it paid like 3-4$ and took me a few hours. I couldn't imagine actually living on that but I'm sure Amazon made some profit.
Good riddance to the poorly upkept taxis with the aggressive drivers, and expensive rides.
I feel like the drivers are not paid adequately though, esp. given the hidden expenses. I talk with them regularly and think many don't realize those costs.
I always tip as a result, and I think Uber/Lyft give me better drivers as a result, though I can't be sure.
> I feel like the drivers are not paid adequately though, esp. given the hidden expenses. I talk with them regularly and think many don't realize those costs.
I think that these kind of thoughts are simply not economics. If driving is bad money after all of that, eventually people will realize and it will all come crumbling down. But it cant be true if drivers keep working for years like this.
It is also a stance that you can take only because you think there is something the government should do about it. There a a lot of carrers that are not financially sensical by some interpretation. Should artsists be banned or licensed to limit the number? Should Actors? Should QA analysts? etc etc.
My point is that even if it is a bad deal for drivers, its their choice to make, and its not going to lead to a better outcome to make the choice for them.
This is a good point. I was probably a little hyperbolic in my post. The existence of Uber has done a tremendous amount good in breaking up entrenced taxi industries, bringing service to some seriously under-served areas.
The problem is that “deluded” and “personally invested in” form a venom diagram that looks a lot like a big circle, especially on business and tech sites.
It helps the business owner and the consumer. Let’s not forget the consumer here. It also helps those willing to engage in gig activities. If Uber wasn’t marginally beneficial to drivers, why do they do it? Acting like Uber drivers are all idiots and need “protecting” is idiotic. If the economics don’t work, they quit.
It's a negotiation with severe information asymmetry.
The business does hiring many times, so they reap the efficiencies of scale and get increasingly adept over time at hiding the risks they offload onto the contractors.
To balance the information asymmetry, the contractors would need to pool their efforts similarly, and improve their ability to discover the true compensation. In other words, collective bargaining, with specialists who understand the full terms of the contract including all that's hidden in the fine print.
<snark cantresist="true">All those government officials who pass laws crippling unions should stop treating business owners like idiots who need "protecting".</snark>
Increasing unionizion has many side effects on the wider economy, and it's not my purpose to flog them. Instead, I'm merely trying to illustrate that each individual contractor is at a significant disadvantage when negotiating.
You can't just quit a car loan. Switching costs. "Marginal benefit" isn't a win overall if it's combined with excessive fixed costs over overhead. This is basic Econ 101/102 stuff. If you fall in a hole, you get marginal benefits from trying to climb out. That doesn't make the hole good for you.
Healthy and marginally beneficial aren't really synonymous. People value things other than just their health.
Now, that isn't to say that it wouldn't be better if people consumed less HFCS. (But, isn't the ubiquity of HFCS partially due to corn subsidies? I think I heard that.)
So, uh, when people purchase foods with HFCF I think it makes sense that this aligns with their marginal preferences. Does this mean it is to thei benefit? Hmm.
This seems like an overly reactionary take. There's a lot of noise in any given hype cycle, distinguishing between unusual preferences people happen to have and manufactured interest isn't always easy.
(See: The curious curious phenomena that humans put most of their personal information on the Internet where other people can see it.)
We need to take time to think things through, use critical thinking, decide for yourself, see behind the motivations and incentives. Never drink the kool-aid, but you can taste it and decide for yourself. Consider all stakeholders (not only investors and owners) and the impact on society. Us in tech are the ones that are implementing the vision, we are responsible too.
Would not go to extremes and say everybody is a shill, since there has been serious innovation but we should be transparent of what is the cost of all that innovation. Just be honest with oneself (e.g. I'm working with this new fancy decentralized database instead of just buzzwording your way to success by blockchaining everything, etc). We need to drop the ego and work on what we love.
> I've talked with bunch of car sharing drivers who were bamboozled with car loans, get hit by traffic infractions, costs of maintenance and the list goes on and on.
I've seen a lot of the people that some cases of people that do it that are future minded and care about running the numbers just rent a car for the day. All of a sudden, you've abstracted away a lot of those variable costs to a third party. Unfortunately, I think the rental companies wised up after a while, and have wording in the contracts about ride-sharing now.
I imagine in a large enough metro area, someone could (or has) abstract the vehicle and maintenance portion of the larger taxi services to specialized rental service for people that work in ride-sharing. Rent a ride-share car for a day, or more likely by the hour, and they'll make sure it's clean and in good running condition and meets the requirements for ride sharing service X, Y or Z. Specialized ride-sharing insurance optional...
Actually, I imagine some of the existing taxi services in larger cities might have already shifted to this. Seems like a natural pivot, since they already have the majority of what's needed in place.
The gig enconomy's innovation was offloading risk entirely onto the "employees" who aren't employees, but "independent contractors" with no rights or recourse. This is a wealth consolidation practice yet again. The gig runners make money off the independent contractors because they take all the risk.
and what would these same people do instead? you’re pretending there’s some much better job out there waiting from the uber is preventing them from taking
I think unions would work best as a replacement for the "good" (to workers) part of "HR".
For any unionized category/shop there should be a grouping of unions (adding a new union to that group should require a simple majority among a voting quorum of all active employees) which could thus collectively bargain between a large business and/or group of businesses and the workers that make that possible.
I also like the idea that unions on strike (in this case, groups of them; they'd agree to go out on strike together and vote together for it) don't disrupt business, but rather nullify profits. Maybe they agree that during "strikes" all compensation gets divided by charity/etc. This goes for the workers AND the businesses; both of whom still have to pay normal costs.
-- edit --
I forgot one other critical feature. Just like employees might take an employee though any of the unions, so to can the employee switch unions (I assume seniority and compensation offers would be favorable to prompt such a switch.)
I don't know if we need unions, but we need to recognize that the incentive for a business is only to be maximally profitable. And they are only responsible to their shareholders.
It would be nice if Governments properly recognized the value businesses provide with long term stable jobs, and aligned the incentive in a way that creates more stable and happy communities in the distant future.
Right now governments will give anything to Amazon to get them to move to town and bring all those jobs with them. But how much will we incentive McDonald's to keep jobs, and not to replace all their employees with perfect hamburger vending machines?
Are individuals incapable of making decisions on their own? Why shouldn’t the individual have the choice to drive or not drive as well as making decisions about their economic situation?
Nobody is forced to drive. Nobody is forced to work for less than they value their labor. Unionizing Uber means dramatically high prices, which means less demand. There isn’t a magic pot of money just waiting to be distributed. If comes from consumer pockets. If Uber gets more expensive, I’ll drive myself. So that guy that would have made $10, now makes zero because he thinks he deserves $20. So he is actually worse off now. Markets don’t work in a vacuum — there are substitutes and you can’t “fix” a problem without unintended consequences.
Let supply and demand work. Those that think they should earn more can quit and to sell their services to someone willing to pay their desired rates. If nobody will pay that desired rate, then it’s clear that the market doesn’t value that service that much.
Why is supply and demand so hard for people to understand? We oppose industrial monopolies, why would we advocate for labor monopolies via unions?
I don't think your examples paint the picture you intended here, instead it comes across as entitled and lacking in empathy.
> "...he thinks he deserves $20."
Who said anything about deserving? You said as much that you'd drive yourself when it came to a $20 ride; you wouldn't drive yourself if it was $10. This more or less suggests the only reason Uber provides value to you is because it charges less than what you'd charge if you were providing it, because you think you deserve $20. In that instance it's not unfair to say that you get value out of Uber undercutting the competition.
> "Those that think they should earn more can quit..."
I suppose they just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps too? Not many of us can enjoy the privilege of quitting our jobs because we know we're worth more than we're getting. I have that privilege and I use it often, like many of us do in tech. For as long as we value low prices at all costs, there will always be someone who is forced into taking on this kind of job because they don't have the luxury of choice that we do. They can't quit because it's either the $10 you want to give them, so you can save $10 for yourself, or nothing.
It's been clear enough for a long time that those who enjoy the services from others won't really advocate for them, and neither will their employers, so unions and regulations are there to sort that out.
Who said anything about monopolies? I though a union was just workers banding together and using their strength in number to negotiate better working conditions, better pay and so on?
It's easy for someone with a sought after talent to say normal workers can just "quit and sell their services to someone willing to pay more", but that isn't an actual option for many many people.
Unions solve the coordination problem and nullify the leverage a corporation has over workers. This leverage imbalance creates imperfect markets, it doesn't facilitate it. People need to eat, they need to take time to find a new job, they need to build skills. High prices of medicine is a great example: They can get away with charging so much simply because there is an imbalance between how much you need them versus how much they need you.
Could you elaborate? Why does employer have leverage? Other employers compete for labor and are willing to increase wages if that's what it takes to get the staff they need. There's already a law that prohibits multiple employers from colluding to reduce that competition.
People(most people) like to do the same thing every day. Even me, I'm a programmer and have different tasks, but I get most of my work through one client. I would hate to be chasing down new clients all the time.
When I was freelancing, most of my projects were about 2-3 weeks in length. I had to find new work while trying to complete work. Difficult clients did not help that situation at all, nor intense deadlines. So truthfully, too much time would lapse between gigs, and running the numbers showed me that freelancing was earning around minimum wage, but I was working many more hours.
My best situation was when I had a client that was acting as a project manager and would feed me lots of work when I needed it.
Is that true, do most people like doing the same thing every day? It certainly is not true for me.
EDIT: A few repliers clarified that it's probably about the stable and reliable income, and not about the nature of the work that's done every day. I can agree with that!
i think OP meant more along the lines of: people like stability and ones with families can't rely on an inconsistent income that the freelance world generally provides. not actually doing the exact same thing everyday
I'd guess everyone is different. A pastry chef might see every tasty creation as a new opportunity to bring joy & happiness into the world. For me, cooking is a chore, and every pastry I have to make after the first is no longer something new.
Working on new projects every couple of weeks would be fun.
Learning a new set of APIs, version control strategies, team members, platform peculiarities, build systems, bug reporting and issue tracking software, groupware... fuck that. I could sort of do it when I was in my early 30s but not now.
Pretty sure most people doing "gig economy" crap arent doing it because they wanna do different tasks, and arent leaving it because they wanna do the same thing each day.
That's not really surprising at all. The article says the category of workers in "gig" type of jobs went from 11% in 2005 to 10% in 2017. To change this number above some level of statistical significance, people would have to move away from salaried work to gig jobs en masse or vice-versa, but that's not really how skillsets and careers work.
You don't wake up one day and say: "geez, I'm going to stop being a lawyer and go drive for Uber to spend more time with my kids". It is much more likely that a person flipping burgers somewhere might try being an Uber driver and that an Uber driver somewhere else might get fed up and end up going back to one of the low-skill alternatives (flipping burgers, retail, etc) at roughly equal rates.
Maybe productivity metrics aren't a perfect measure of society. On many qualitative dimensions we have a much higher quality of living now because of computers: You can talk to anyone almost anywhere in the world for free, instantly. You can recall any information or media instantly. The list goes on..
Continuing the beer theme of my sidethread comment, I read a piece years ago making the point that the then-current explosion of microbreweries looked like a productivity disaster -- microbreweries produce a gallon of beer for a much higher cost than Anheuser-Busch does, so when an economist working with national-level data divides "beer produced in 2011" by "dollars spent producing beer in 2011", it looks like beer productivity has cratered compared to the golden age of the 1950s.
In reality, of course, a can of Budweiser is cheaper than ever (productivity is up) while the populace has become so rich that it's voluntarily spending extra money on what it perceives as higher-quality beer. But there is no conceptual place for this in "beer" productivity statistics.
This is great, it's one of those ideas I'll come back to later and think about again, applying to different stuff.
Economics is such a tragedy, because on the one hand it's so elegant and satisfying, but on the other it seems sufficiently incomplete to be considered broken. Maybe it's the newtonian version of something.
You mean current methods will be replaced by more nuanced and accurate methods. Not that economics will be replaced. That'd be like physics being replaced instead of the methods changing.
Newtonian methods had known flaws before relativity replaced them and quantum mechanics expanded that. Current economic methods also have known flaws. We're just waiting for Einstein.
The application to the beer example is that as high-cost beers displace low-cost beers from the market, the cost-per-beer-sold rises even as the price of low-cost beer and the price of high-cost beer are both falling.
> Economics is such a tragedy, because on the one hand it's so elegant and satisfying, but on the other it seems sufficiently incomplete to be considered broken.
The study of economics is as much a framework for asking questions as it is for answering them. National-level economic systems are inherently to complicated to do meaningful experiments on, so we don't get to use the tools we normally do to find our way. Economics isn't broken, but the view of economics as a sister to physics is.
I was being generous hoping it's on a similar path to physics, because even in earlier stages physics produced something other than fascinating thought experiments and directly conflicting advice.
> One is much cheaper and frees up money to be spent on other things.
The "other things" that people would spend on are just other vehicles for acquiring utility. If the customer enjoys the better coffee enough to justify the higher cost, then spending on that is exactly in line with "better for the economy".
This is a good comment. It is interesting to consider how much rhetoric there is about robots and AI and Machine Learning and how these technologies can revolutionize work and lead to big productivity gains. And yet, in reality, the economy shows no sign of this. Productivity growth was very strong in the mid-20th century, but since 1973 productivity growth has been stagnant.
AI and Machine Learning are newer, and probably have plenty of productivity gains to point to, but the thing that comes to mind for me is the amount of CAD and computer analysis that goes into our products these days. You can make a car that lasts twice as long and is more aerodynamic. Musk's rockets use computers for design and algorithms to land. The down stream effect is new satellites with more bandwidth (e.g. Iridium).
In the end, a designer can make a product people get more use out of.
Productivity has been stagnant, or productivity growth has been stagnant?
Constant productivity growth is a terrible argument that computers haven't contributed to productivity. No single innovation, however broadly defined, will produce constant growth. As one source of growth peters out, another one picks up.
Call centers, accounting, and help desk and other things that used to take a small army are now a subscription service for far less money. The “efficiency” rating is probably wrong if it doesn’t think that’s increased efficiency.
Even Brynjolfsson's ultimate thesis was not that "computers don't induce growth in TFP", but rather that "computers and business practices need to converge in order for computers to have an effect on TFP".
The linked article is about how despite those services obviously having value to their users, they aren't accounted for in economic statistics, e.g. in measuring productivity, because they are "free" (i.e. paid for by subjecting oneself to advertising/tracking).
I am suspect of this being true because GDP is measured in several ways, and you can measure the contribution of tech companies through their salaries and profits or through their expenditures and sales to ads. (i.e. their contribution to GDPcan be measured in their revenue)
But this is also a red-herring, its at most an accounting issue, not a real economy issue.
This is nonsense. The inflation-adjusted cost of producing one can of beer would be a pretty standard measure of productivity (in the beer industry). It can rise and fall completely independently of whether beer companies all use the same strategies or all use unique strategies.
And yet, secretaries have been replaced by e-mail and calendars, human computers have been replaced by Excel, and armies of bean-counters have been replaced by business CMS systems that cost one fifth as much to maintain. People who used to do those jobs are now making lattes and avocado toast.
This is nonsense because anyone can see that the technology facilitated outsourcing and offshoring and logistics. The productivity that should have been in the old industrial heartlands happened - it just happened in China instead.
The reduction in jobs in the gig economy has to be a direct result of the overall recovery of the economy. We are at a point where there are more jobs than workers to fill the jobs. Why would anyone take a crap gig job if they can get a steady paycheck? There are people that like the flexibility but the pay sux and no benefits for most of those jobs. The gig economy job is the new temp job. Just like temp jobs, they will start to increase as the economy cools. But for now, there's little incentive to get one over one with a steady paycheck.
Why would anyone take a crap gig job if they can get a steady paycheck? There are people that like the flexibility
I think you're underestimating how important that flexibility is to a large contingent of people. I have talked a lot of Uber/Lyft drivers and have heard a ton of stories about how valuable that flexibility is. It's huge for students who are in school, for people who already work another job but want supplemental income, people who are mostly retired (or never worked) but have some new expense come up (one lady I spoke to recently started driving for Uber just to help pay for her daughter's upcoming wedding), people who are pursuing careers in music or other artistic endeavors, entrepreneurs who need a way to pay the rent while getting their business bootstrapped, etc.
For a lot of people in those situations, the control over their time really is a crucial aspect of what makes Uber/Lyft desirable.
Granted, that's just one aspect of the gig economy, but it seems to be a big one.
Strongly disagree. Waiting tables or bartending at high-end restaurants could be considered gig work. Wedding photography is gig work. I have a friend who runs a stationary side business as a "gig". These jobs, if you are able to market yourself effectively and gain a good reputation and some solid contacts, can pay extremely well. I have a nice 9-5 with benefits and stability, but my friends in the above positions earn about the same I do and work close to half of my hours.
That obviously isn't the case for everyone who does these, but I don't think you can make the claim "the pay sux" for all gig work.
One note from that story was they missed 25M low-income workers.
Jennifer Curry, a senior director at Samaschool, a San Francisco training program for low-income contract workers, estimates the government left out 25 million to 30 million freelance or contract workers who do some part-time work.
It's easy to get cynical about the gig economy. But I try and remember that the original spirit of it has been largely successful. The promise of the app economy was that you could take an idea like "I wish I could drive people around for extra money" and make it real, and now it's only real, but for people like my driving-averse mom it's revolutionary.
But distortions to the dream have come from all sides. Customers demand the low cost, high quality service that independent contracts inherently don't provide. Customers also fail to recognize that your driver is an independent contractor, but they treat them like any service industry employee. Rideshare companies actively decide to offload employment costs to drivers while treating them just like employees. Drivers too violate the spirit of this idea, many immediately turn it into a full-time gig without organizing larger efforts to improve it. The spirit is that these gigs augment income, not become a sole source of it.
But almost across the board, these are messaging problems, and we as a society are really good at fixing messaging, despite how it feels at time. We are living in a time of massive message correction, and millions of previously marginalized people benefit.
Is the gig economy ideal? No. Eminently fixable? Yes.
That's completely revisionist history. No one was going around thinking, "I wish I could drive people around for extra money." No one. You literally just made that up. If you wanted to drive people around for money you became a taxi driver or got a passenger carrier permit and became a private limo driver. Back in 2008 no one was thinking about how great it would be to drive random strangers around for minimum wage while assuming massive amounts of personal liability and destroying their car in the process.
Uber started as a way to fill the downtime that professional drivers had between clients and jobs. They said, "Hey, there is a workforce with 50% of it
s hours idle. I bet we can turn the into cash." It was a brilliant idea. Airbnb started with a similar proposition. It was a derivative of couch surfing—find some excess supply and monetize it. People are doing this for free, I bet we can do it better and make a few bucks. And then in morphed into the abomination we have today.
It wasn't until Lyft and the competitive market saw what was happening and people thought, "What if we just ignore safety regulations and licensing by declaring that we are in a new industry? There's money to be made there." That's what the gig economy ended up being. It wasn't intentional. It was a way to avoid COSTS by ignoring safety, training, benefits, licensing, insurance, zoning and minimum wage laws. And that's where 90% of the value comes from. If these companies had to play by the same rules as everyone else they wouldn't exist because there wouldn't be enough money to be made.
> Uber started as a way to fill the downtime that professional drivers had between clients and jobs. They said, "Hey, there is a workforce with 50% of it's hours idle. I bet we can turn the into cash."
Yeah, black cars with chauffeur licenses only. I remember thinking "a cab to the airport would be cheaper, but I'll pay a bit more to pamper myself -- I've never been in a black car!" just before I ordered my first ever Uber in 2012.
UberX, with "normal people" picking you up in their personal cars, wasn't until April 2013.
UberX actually didn't start with normal unlicensed, uninsured drivers. UberX started as a "green" initiative. When UberX first started drivers still had to have a passenger carrier permit (TCP sticker) and commercial driving insurance. They just also had to have a Prius instead of a black car, and the cost was a little bit less. I think it was $10 or $12 minimum instead of $15. It wasn't until Lyft started by allowing any random person to drive at a much lower cost that Uber pivoted and turned UberX into what it is today.
It never even occurred to Uber that it would be possible to let random, uninsured people drivers others around for peanuts, or that people would be so desperate for cash that they'd even be willing to do that. It was purely a function of the financial collapse that made it possible.
Your example is a tweet from a wealthy software developer in 2018?
When unlicensed, unisnured people started driving for Uber and Lyft it wasn't because they wanted part-time work with "flexibility". It was because it was right after 2009, the unemployment rate was 10%, and people were desperate.
"The spirit is that these gigs augment income, not become a sole source of it."
Says who? If the jobs are moving to the gig economy, then what income is a person supposed to augment? I find this argument both false and harmful to understanding the situation at hand.
I agree that there are certain workers who benefit from the gig economy (those living in mom's basement, have a working partner, etc.). What I disagree about (and thus possess cynicism) is that the "majority" will benefit from the transition of many positions from traditional employment to contracting.
I think one of the main issues is that the current employment classification is too binary. There are independent contractors, who are really independent small businesses: set their own rates, do their own advertising, choose their own customers, and keep all of the profit. And employees, who work for their employer for set hours, and get a stable salary and benefits in return.
We need a new third category: dependent contractor. Once that exists, we can start a more meaningful debate on what freedoms vs stability guarantees are best for it, without trying to force people into one extreme or the other.
Probably a modification to the 14-point test the IRS uses to determine whether or not someone is an employee vs a contractor. You'd have to modify the questions to inquire about whether or not the person in question was either downgraded to contract status from a full job or was hired as a contractor even though the job posting implied full time W2 work.
Offloading all of the costs and risks on to your unorganized "independent contractors" is the whole point of the gig economy from the business side. You can't disrupt things if you behave responsibly.
It seems to me that this article (and many others, and the underlying statistics they report on) are lumping together a lot of different things under the same label, that aren't all that similar. I am a contract programmer, but my typical contract is 6-9 months in duration, and I get paid well. Is that part of the "gig economy"? It's not much like driving for Uber, I think, but it is neither part-time nor permanent employment, so it would often get lumped in there. Some truck-drivers work on a per-gig basis, but even though they are driving things for money it doesn't work all that much like Uber, in terms of pay or how you get treated or what your leverage in the market. I think the term "gig economy" is too broad to say anything meaningful about.
I have no data for this, but I suspect an ethnographic study of gig workers would find their behaviors mirror that of entrepreneurs. If true, you can probably draw a lot of conclusions about gig work from all the other studies done.
In short, I suspect gig work is much more mentally taxing than typical work, since it isn't reliable or rooted in routine. I think that's why gig work is estimated at roughly the same percentage of the population as entrepreneurs.
I think the Gig Economy is supplementing regular economy, provides a good chance for certain people to break off the 9-5 and gives more of a positive social impact than a negative one.
While anecdotal and definitely not a high percentage, but I have met quite a few Uber drivers that just like to stay active and meet people. They tend to be the most interesting to chat with. They don't seem to be doing it for the money, more so just to be out and about. Im sure the supplemental income is helpful but it didn't seem like that was the primary reason.
Edit: Aditionally usually those have been the best drivers
If you read it closely, the article basically says "We don't really know what is going on, in part because our survey isn't really designed to capture data on the gig economy."
I have done gig work for over six years. At the moment, I am working more like a traditional entrepreneur, but I can do that in part because I have the security of gig work to fall back on if I can't drum up enough clients. If I could get the kind of job I want, I would take it.
That last statement is a relatively recent development. I have health issues and doing gig work made it possible for me to have some earned income under really challenging circumstances where that really should not have been possible. Being able to access earned income while I'll and homeless allowed me to work on improving my health, allowed me to make working in my health a priority in a way that regular employment would not have facilitated.
I think this is the real revolution that isn't being talked about. Having a serious career requires you to have your act together in many important ways. You need energy, mental focus, some idea of what you like doing and are good at, etc. Gig work gives people options for muddling through or supplementing your income during difficult transitions.
Some years ago, I read a comment that was an A-ha! moment for me. Instead of attributing recessions to mysterious forces somewhere out there in the ether, it attributed them to human nature. It suggested we get lazy and complacent during good times, then work hard to get back on track after things start coming apart at the seams.
I am sure there are also large scale forces impacting people, but I dropped out of college in part because I knew people with college degrees and student loans who were mooching off of relatives and delivering newspapers. I felt I could deliver newspapers without a degree and would be better off for not being saddled with debt. It was very clear to me at the age of 20 that the "promise" I was hearing that a degree was a guaranteed ticket to a serious career and the good life was a myth. There is more to career success than getting X credential.
Large scale trends are not just the result of public policy at the federal level or real world phenomenon like Peak Oil. They are also the cumulative result of many individuals making choices.
The gig economy provides some fluidity and flexibility for workers who are handicapped, have a health issue, are having trouble breaking into their chosen career etc. Yes, I am aware that if gig work is all that is available, this can be a serious problem. But, in the other hand, another observation someone made that was an epiphany for me is that layoffs are part of the price we pay for having stable corporate jobs for some. When there isn't enough work to go around, someone gets shafted because of it. There is no magic way to make that not happen.
I'm aware there are people being shafted here. I think in the US, they are being shafted much more by our lack of universal health coverage than by gigs lacking benefits per se.
Sort of rambly. I don't have a specific point per se. More like thinking out loud, I guess.
So for the first 3-4 months, I did some wine waiting as a gig(agency work, no fixed place or hours. Like with Uber, you provide your own gear - like uniforms, bottle openers etc.) at the finest, the most iconic places in London. I worked at the Shard, I worked at the Cafe Royal, I worked at Four Seasons in events where celebrities like Victoria Beckham or Prince Harry were guests. I did my jubilee at BAFTA's after party, I was the wine waiter for the award-winning team that made the Amy Winehouse documentary. That night I had a chance to meet with pretty much every single celebrity(900+ guests from the industry), I was a huge Breaking Bad fan and I had the chance to speak with Walter White.
How to get into this gig business without ever working in this industry? 1 day of training and boom, I'm a waiter at the fines restaurants in the world.
It was such an amazing experience but whoever imagines living like that forever should have poor judgement. I was there to make some money until I get a real job and open a bank account(really hard to do because of catch 22) and most people who worked with me were either new arrivals like me or Australians who came to the UK to experience Europe for a year or 2(They come just before or after college with 2 year work visa, work for few months and travel Europe).
The world is transforming, the employment contracts are not the driving force. They are a reaction to the new needs. I think it's alright, an equilibrium will be reached.