I'm not saying gig workers' circumstances are nearly as bad as those in the 19th century, I'm just illustrating the principle. The discussion then continues at 'what is an acceptable equilibrium'. Of which certain people, unsurprisingly, find that today's is not OK.
Note that I'm not saying here which side of the discussion I side on (that's a political question not worth rehashing here I think), just pointing out the (rather obvious) argument against total market freedom in this particular market (labor).
Deliveroo bikers have chosen Deliveroo over those, and there must be a reason for that, which the article fails to mention.
I'm also not taking sides, I just want to point out it's flat out wrong to say "if they're doing this in these conditions, it is probably because they don't have a choice".
So, let's say you're an investor. You've got the choice of:
1) invest in a business with traditional happy lifer employees
2) invest in a business that treats its workforce like disposable contractors and may eventually become an Enemy of the People's Press, but offers higher potential returns, and may be able to eke out an existence in a niche that #1 could never serve.
3) invest in some less active financial instrument alchemy that employs zero local people and threatens no publicity waves
There is (maybe) an argument that #1 is preferable to #2, but it's at least complicated. However, I think it's general agreed that both #1 & #2 are preferable to #3.
If we're already talking Unions and unfair treatment of contractors 5 years into the existence of a type 1 here, one that no one knows could even exist under traditional employment circumstances, we may very well be driving funding into the reduced hassle of #3.
That's certainly what it would do to me, though granted my "fuck it" threshold is 5-10x lower than the average person's.
Society should work for the benefit of society, not just those in a position of power. We are seeing a change in how employment works, and we (i.e. society) need to work out how to handle this change. This article is part of the debate. You should not try to shut down the debate.
I think it is generally agreed that #4 is preferable to #3. Because local jobs!111
I mean, seriously? That is your argument?
Keep in mind that early industrialization was mainly subsistence farmers moving into cities to hugely improve their lives. Child labor was the norm, especially on farms, so children working in factories was an improvement. Do you think that accidents didn't happen to kids subsistence farming with their families or starving to death in central Europe?
I take it this was a general rhetorical question and not something you're specifically asking me - but either way, it's irrelevant. The fact is that 'we' (wherever I say 'we' here, I mean 'we as a society') didn't care enough about those children dying in the field or mud huts, but we did care when they started dying in factories (while that may not be 'rational' for a Less Wrong definition of 'rational', experiments on the trolley problem have shown in the past that there might be wide spread ethical intuitions that make this situation 'understandable' - but I digress).
I wasn't stating how things 'ought to be', just 'how things are'. 'How they ought to be' is in this case a trite discussion (at the level and within the means we have here). The OP however asked a facetious or naive question about 'how things are', one for which there is a simple, factual answer.
In any society there will always be people, who don't have the resources/skills to take another job. Either its geographically located elsewhere any you are tied to certain location (there might be plenty of reasons for this). Or the job is above your skill level, and you cannot afford an education. Or you are in a position where you just cannot survive some weeks of financial insecurity.
Thats why "workes rights" are important, its not just about you and me. Its mainly about people who don't have the means to say: "Fuck it I'm outta here!".
Basic income could be societal anchor, that creates the conditions for such an equilibrium.
In that situation I doubt we would see many people taking on these jobs (including the parentheticals you mention) with these conditions.
Such is human nature. Always has been, always will be. We just do the best we can to balance between indulging it with socialism, and leveraging it with capitalism.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/may/22/benefit-sanc...
> For those people interviewed for the study who did obtain work, the most common outcome was a series of short-term, insecure jobs, interspersed with periods of unemployment, rather than a shift into sustained, well-paid work.
Because nobody hires them on positions that have "minimum wage, paid holidays, pensions, protection from discrimination, and trade union rights" because these things cost money and the value they can deliver is below the cost of those things?
Or because flexible hours and flexible employment schedule is worth for them more than trade union rights?
It's unsettling that now every business has a big moral obligation to make sure employees make the best choices for themselves.
I would expect that to be a fairly common sentiment/belief (though I might be wrong).
It comes down to the particular definition of 'unreasonably' that is being used, which different groups can and do disagree about.
It's the choice aspect I focus on. No one is forcing them, and it's borderline elitist of someone with a nice job to say "that's gross work and I think it should go away so things are less gross", along the lines of thinking families straddling the poverty line should simply "eat more quality food"
> unlike, say, immigration law, there is weak enforcement of employment law.
For me in the US, this is the crux of the current wave of anti-immigrant sentiment. The problem isn't "immigrants stealing our jobs." It's shitty jobs that don't cover basic costs and have inhumane working conditions. But the people in power have done a great job of misdirecting people's attention to immigrants. Boy are they going to be disappointed when all the immigrants are gone and they still can't make a living.
1. https://metro.co.uk/2016/08/21/a-banker-a-worker-and-an-immi...
Both immigration (both legal and illegal) and employment regulation should be considered and evaluated accordingly. Dismissing one or the other won’t give us a good understanding of reality.
The people in power who use immigrants as a distraction have no intention of actually getting rid of the immigrants. They know they need them around for blaming.
EDIT: I know the topic of immigration can evoke strong emotions. I’m just pointing out that a decrease in labor pool ought to increase wages. Isn’t this just law of supply/demand?
>Tom Deardorff has had to compete for workers. He's raised their pay by actually quite a lot. Back in 2006, working the celery field paid about $8.70 an hour. Now it pays more than $21 an hour. [...] Tom says his workers all are documented and that even doubling wages hasn't solved the labor problem.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2018/05/03/607996811/worker-shortage-hur...
If that causes celery prices to rise so high that no one wants to buy it, then maybe celery just isn't an economically viable crop.
It works this way if you consider a terrible work environment to be negative wage.
For jobs that hover around minimum wage because of low margins labor shortages mean better working conditions.
For example, if you toss a "must be able to piss clean" requirement on any job that doesn't require the employee to have the sunk cost of years of training and it adds about 50% to the effective hourly wage.
Another example would be university wages. Many departments can only afford work-study student workers. When you need work-study student workers with more than just a pulse you have to treat them better because most students would rather work for dining services and do an equally terrible job with free food.
The problem is that at a state/national level there's so much feedback delay, immigration is not evenly distributed, etc, etc that you can't extrapolate
I’m not advocating a position on immigration itself. Just stating one possible consequence of curtailing immigration.
He has been there several years and is one of the more skilled employees, and makes just under $18,000 per year. No retirement or profit sharing benefits. The work conditions are unsafe, with lax enforcement of safety policies for forklifts, stacks of containers, cleaning chemicals. Most employees are expected to perform the duties of the equivalent of 2-3 workers, including staying late without being paid overtime. The work can be physically grueling at times, even for my brother as inventory clerk, and much worse for some of the general factory floor workers.
The company has three salespeople who make The Office look like it was written by Norman Mailer. They interrupt people to go on diatribes about trite motivational anecdotes, talk about how you have to work hard to get places, and then sit in separate offices playing solitaire on their computers with the door open so that anyone can see them doing it. The company's absentee owner comes in every once in a while and holds catered lunches for the sales team, and literally excludes the ~10 other staff in the warehouse who actually do all of the work. Sales people make 5x-10x what the other staff make, and receive bonuses in the form of fully paid family vacations when they close big sales contracts, despite the fact that the rest of the staff often has to do tons of work to close the contracts, even including assisting the sales people with creating their PowerPoint slides, or pointing out statistical errors in charts and things.
My brother personally has saved them hundreds of thousands of dollars, possibly over a million, just in 2017, by catching quality control issues with batches of metal they received from an overseas supplier, which could have caused the company to lose one of their critical contracts. He also has had to fill in as a last-minute delivery driver for the company delivery van, working late into the night to drive all over a rural area delivering metal parts when the regular delivery driver was out sick.
My brother has 10 days of paid vacation and it's a dogfight every time he wants to use them. His last raise (of $0.25 per hour) was more than a year ago.
The company actively preys upon people with past criminal records, knowing that they are hard up for employment in a region where employment is already hard to find, and that once they are hired they will put up with any degree of degrading treatment. (My brother does not have a criminal record, but about 75% of the general warehouse staff do, and many did not finish high school and have a hard time even understanding the terms of their employment. The current staff are sometimes asked informally if they know any people with criminal records to recommend for open positions). This isn't a case of an employer helping the community by fairly considering ex-criminals for open roles. It's a situation where they tacitly target these people on the assumption they won't have to treat them fairly or respectfully, and can exploit them to a greater degree because they'll have fewer options to leave.
My brother does not have enough personal savings to move away, and likely would have to have a job lined up that paid relocation before he could even consider it, otherwise just moving to a new location would put him at the point of insolvency. Literally, the option of quitting is logically not an option, because it directly implies insolvency and, probably, a dangerously high risk of suicide. So, despite whatever superficial sense one might want to say he is "in a free labor market," it is just disingenuous junk nonsense. No matter how frugally he lives, his amount of salary is just so egregiously low that it could never be possibly to work his way into a better life situation. Not even decades of savings could do it for him, even if he was living at the absolute most extreme end of frugality (which he pretty much already is). He is just not paid a wage that can possibly sustain a viable savings rate, and there are no other jobs nearby, and moving is not economically feasible.
He doesn't have a college degree (dropped out of college due to severe diagnosed clinical depression and anxiety attacks -- still has student loans of course), but is highly intelligent, curious and resourceful. He is one of the few people who can make me laugh. He's a beautiful musician in his spare time, a wonderfully witty writer, and generous with his free time spent helping his friends and family and trying to do odd jobs for extra money when he can find opportunities (not often).
And there are many people in the US with even worse employment exploitation situations than my brother -- and vastly worse situations around the world. His story is already so bad we should be morally outraged by it, and it's not even among the worst stories you'll hear. I can't imagine what it's like to be in a similar situation to his, and then to add racial abuse, sexual harassment, or other forms of discrimination or marginalization on top of it.
It just blows my mind sometimes how ignorant we all can be of the genuine exploitation in our labor market. There's no sense in which it's a morally acceptable reflection of some market equilibrium. It's just: one side has inherited power and uses power to accrue and entrench more power; the other side is literally in serfdom. Even when people "earn" positions of power through economically productive output, it's on the backs of people in these situations, and through infinite other forms of mass exploitation, in the form of regulatory capture, backroom deals, outright fraud, and manipulation of publicly provided resources. The part attributable to any one person's work ethic or natural talent is so fleetingly small that it's just shocking how we still try to glorify it and hold it up as an example of why they "earned" power and wealth, and why those being exploited somehow are always to blame for it.
I'm more skeptical about not being in a free labor market. I know many people in London who get by on the minimum wage (~16K). I doubt the cost of living in a small-town factory in the Midwest is comparable to the cost of living in London.
It's a shitty situation, sure, but it sounds like a far cry from not being able to change jobs because a single day without any income would lead to insolvency.
I'm not saying those people have it easy on £16K, but e.g. consider the insane costs for treating depression that my brother faces, with few assistance options, which he has to balance out of such a low salary already. This kind of thing can also vary greatly state to state, with some states practicing much worse forms of social austerity than others -- and my brother happens to live in a particularly bad state for this.
Many of his coworkers, earning the same or slightly less, also are the sole providers for their family and have dependents they have to support out of this wage too. It's a situation where your car breaking down can be an unmitigated life emergency, and people avoid getting serious medical conditions treated because they can't even afford a copay or afford to fill a prescription.
So you might be surprised that the real cost of living after accounting for this kind of thing translates into a pretty dire situation for someone earning $18K in the US.
I know many people in London who get by on
the minimum wage (~16K).
Many jobs, no, most jobs are combinations of small individual parts of a whole action. And this shows that piecemeal work by dozens of different people not only works, but bypasses the whole level of employee/employer level controls.
Take a lawyer's job for example.. The research can be farmed off crowdsourced style. Nobody has to know what the case is about, only the search parameters given. All the gruntwork can be contracted can be cheaply contracted with little knowledge about the actual case. Then, a paralegal, again contracted out, can sign the appropriate NDA and do the paperwork for the filing. And finally, the actual lawyer just signs their name after a quick review. This is doable right now.
We also see this in medical establishments, where interns (aka: unlicensed people) can actually do surgery under a doctor's license. I could see mega-health orgs using maybe 4-5 doctors, and hire hyperspecialized interns to do the gruntwork. The doctors would primarily overview routine stuff and take over in catastrophes.
The only people who're safe right now are us automators. My labor = 1000 or 10000 physical laborers, as my tools (computers) give me leverage of a massive multiplier. A journeyman's tools maybe provide *5 labor speedup. And these contract delivery people are literally 1x. (It's shitty to compare, but that's what capitalism already does with $$$/yr)
The number of doctors that enter the field is limited not by the number of people who graduate with medical degrees, but by the number of residency positions available for training. Every year, we graduate more medical students than we have residency slots available, and that's not including foreign graduates who do their medical studies abroad but want to practice in the US. There is no artificial limit for residency slots; the limit is the amount of funding available.
Most of these are heavily subsidized by the government. Hospitals are free to create their own positions in addition, if they can fund them themselves. Very few do, because residency programs actually lose money on margin.
The issue as I see it is with people relying on their employer, client, whatever you wish to call it.
Business is business. If you treat it as anything other, you will eventually encounter issues (especially at the lower end).
The union stuff should be seen in that framework. It's a negotiation.
I got on my bike, made ten quid an hour in some free time, got a bit of exercise, and that was that. It's obviously not a career.
It's kind of frustrating to see people hypothesise. Go and apply and do it and see what it's like, the barrier to entry is near zero.
So this is basically Snow Crash.
I would guess a lot of these Couriers are quite happy with their existence. It enables them to earn some money on the side, while they try to become starving artists or whatever.
In any case, the cure for worker exploitation is not more rules. It is creating more jobs. Then workers with bad jobs can simply switch to a better job.