The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death (newyorker.com) 476
Writing for The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino documents stories of several people -- a nine-month pregnant Lyft driver, for instance -- who contribute to companies that work on the model of gig economy. Through these tales, Tolentino underscores an increasingly growing pattern in the Silicon Valley (and elsewhere) where companies offer hard-labor contracts to people, pay them peanuts (with little liabilities), and yet find a reason to celebrate their business and encourage more to come onboard. From the article: Fiverr, which had raised a hundred and ten million dollars in venture capital by November, 2015, has more about the "In Doers We Trust" campaign on its Web site. In one video, a peppy female voice-over urges "doers" to "always be available," to think about beating "the trust-fund kids," and to pitch themselves to everyone they see, including their dentist. A Fiverr press release about "In Doers We Trust" states, "The campaign positions Fiverr to seize today's emerging zeitgeist of entrepreneurial flexibility, rapid experimentation, and doing more with less. It pushes against bureaucratic overthinking, analysis-paralysis, and excessive whiteboarding." This is the jargon through which the essentially cannibalistic nature of the gig economy is dressed up as an aesthetic. No one wants to eat coffee for lunch or go on a bender of sleep deprivation -- or answer a call from a client while having sex, as recommended in the video. It's a stretch to feel cheerful at all about the Fiverr marketplace, perusing the thousands of listings of people who will record any song, make any happy-birthday video, or design any book cover for five dollars. I'd guess that plenty of the people who advertise services on Fiverr would accept some "whiteboarding" in exchange for employer-sponsored health insurance. At the root of this is the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system. The contrast between the gig economy's rhetoric (everyone is always connecting, having fun, and killing it!) and the conditions that allow it to exist (a lack of dependable employment that pays a living wage) makes this kink in our thinking especially clear.
also in the news ... (Score:3, Insightful)
guillotines are being prepared.
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Re:also in the news ... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're a fool. The neighborhood kid isn't working in the gig economy - they're just trying to make a few bucks living at home, with parent(s). So, nice straw man argument there.
The point of the study is that the "gig" economy is "you can work as little or as much as you want" is a way around labor laws, things like 40 hr weeks, paid time off, overtime. The "gig economy" is nothing more than a return to the 19th Century, where you're disposable labor, and if you make any noise other than "yessireeboss", you're out.
This is *exactly* why people created unions. But you don't care... what, you have no life outside work? The rest of us *do* have a life....
Re:also in the news ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Great for you. Not everyone is as awesomely brilliant as you. But that's their tough shit, right?
P.S. Still working on government gigs where you don't have to compete against H1Bs and offshore workers whose cost of living is 1/10th of yours?
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As great as all of these concepts are. Reality is a spectrum. Without any government intervention, you can rest assured the negotiating power will consolidate into a bunch of conglomerates and as much "freedom" as you have will wither away as economic mobility opportunities decrease and labor competition increases.
On the flip side, just trying to legislate good jobs for everyone regardless of talent and/or economic conditions is obviously ridiculous.
Perhaps there's some right amount of government interventi
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Here's your theme song [youtube.com].
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Re:also in the news ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet supposedly if you read other articles, we are moving towards a crisis where humans find themselves in a highly automated society without enough to do, work-wise.
But then we increasingly have people so desperate for immediate financial gain they'll sacrifice their future, a technocratic wealthy elite more than happy to take the better end of that stick, and a populist movement of people so concerned about losing their jobs they'll sign on to just about any anti-immigrant platform no matter how odious.
And on the flip side, even those who welcome immigrants always add "if you are willing to work really, really hard", not just "work".
It's the overdeveloped puritanical work ethic colliding with technology colliding with economic and resource realities. What a schizophrenic nation we have become.
But rest assured, the basic human need to complain about shit will be fulfilled in abundance.
Re:also in the news ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:also in the news ... (Score:4)
They do? Where? Not even abroad. Even in China you don't have poors that get richer. You only have a small group of people who oppress the rest.
It's heartwarming how quickly the commies have embraced capitalist ideals, ain't it?
Huh? (Score:2)
I thought this was a slashvertisments for whatever that 'fiver' company is, but after reading the summary, I still have no idea what that 'fiver' company is, or what the hell this story is about.
Re: Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
I think it's called Fiverr because you work for an hour and earn a fiver, or something.
This article mostly seems to be about stirring up outrage over the fact that people can choose the terms and hours of their work.
Re: Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The thing is, I've used fiverr. I paid $5 to have some EE student in Romania create some parts for KiCAD that I had no time to do myself and then published the parts under an open license for use by others. Once you know how to read a datasheet and use KiCAD, you can whip these things out in minutes. $5 is not much to me, but it's a great gig for a student in a poorer country. Same with 3D models for the same parts -- had some kid in the Philippines whip a few up for me.
I've also used Upwork to have pro
Re: Huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
And your money goes abroad, fueling the economy there instead of here. It's basically the same problem you can potentially have with immigrants who send the money they earn here back home to their family where the 30 bucks surplus they maybe generate are a fortune, while here it's basically a dinner for two at a restaurant.
Now extrapolate and you have a restaurant near you closing down because there aren't enough patrons frequenting it. Leading to its waiters getting unemployed. And the domino line continues.
Sending money abroad weakens your economy. And may eventually endanger your own job.
Re: Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Um... no.
You send money abroad when you buy ANYTHING made in China or wherever.
You send money abroad when using any service which is at some point in its flow using any resources which are not internal to the country you live in.
Those immigrants sending money to their own countries should be VERY low in your priority list.
Your mobile phone, clothes, car, TV, even food, all of them read "money sent abroad" when you look at them. If anything, immigrants actually REDUCE those amounts indirectly through them paying taxes, renting homes locally, eating food locally, etc., although they're subjected to the same issues that you're facing (stuff they use also originates from abroad to some extent).
Unions are the answer. (Score:4, Insightful)
People hate on unions, then wonder why they are treated like crap by employers.
Re: Huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
There are workers marginalized by geography, education, social issues, and family conditions that are poorly utilized; the net effect of this is they cannot demand higher wages. It is hard for me to understand if it is better for them to do nothing, or eke out a little income to help themselves out.
Personally, I know a few people that would rather make $50-75/day from home doing "gigs" than $100-150/day commuting to a job. I think they are approaching the problem illogically, but that is their life and decision.
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They are? Awesome! I decide that I don't work anymore!
Wait. No, I can't do that, then I won't have no money.
Ok, then I decide to only do what I want to do!
Wait, no, that doesn't work either, nobody's going to pay me to post on /. all day.
Ok, then I decide that I find a job where they don't care that I post on /. all day!
Unfortunately such jobs don't exist.
Then I go self-employed and do it!
Yes, but still... nobody's going to pay for that.
Making my own decisions sucks. Mostly because they're not my decisions
Re: Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Tell me, can you find a computer not made in poor working conditions?
Aren't RPis still being made in the UK?
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This works on a retail level but there is no way this can be done at the base material level. How do you boycott a mining company that employs slave labor when their metals pass through several transactions before they end up in your computer?
Re: Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody is forcing you to buy a computer, and I probably can find a computer assembled by people who care about the product and their conditions. If you think there's a substantial unmet demand for that kind of thing, maybe you or a fellow-traveler should start selling artisanal computers made from sustainably sourced, fair-trade components.
You want to "fix" the parts of human nature that you've been brainwashed to find distasteful. Don't expect the rest of us to jump onto your Marxist bandwagon.
Repeat after me: "The market is not a magic fixall for every problem."
How bizarrely deluded must you be to think that this entirely arbitrary concept of market forces is a substitute for actually caring about actual people and their living conditions?
Re: Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
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You want to "fix" the parts of human nature that you've been brainwashed to find distasteful. Don't expect the rest of us to jump onto your Marxist bandwagon.
Found the Libertarian!
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IIRC calling someone a "moron" is one.
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I want to fix the brainwashing that has removed the sense of decency from so many people.
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We also have a choice to become communists, the outcome for most won't be any better ... but we'll drag almost everyone down with us.
So maybe it would in almost everyone's best interest to not let it come to that.
Re: Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
... or you could just have a society with sane and decent regulation. Contrary to what the propaganda says, that is not automatically communism, it's simple human decency.
Talking about decent, I seem to remember that one rather popular religion is preaching this. Something to do with a rebel that got up the nose of the Roman authorities. And isn't there another rather popular religion that has giving to the poor on its shortlist of things you definitely should do? And then there is another religion/philosophy that explains that being decent to your fellows may help you escape suffering in multiple incarnations. Come to think of it, it seems that being decent to your fellow human beings is on the recommended list of just about every religion. Imagine that, perhaps it is just a good idea?
Re: Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Since you are so obviously in favour of choice, for your lunch you have the following choices:
1. Shit sandwich
2. Vomit stew
3. Ground glass hash
Enjoy!
Re: Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Meanwhile, in the real world, I will probably make my own lunch (a departure from my routine, because reasons), but there are plenty of places near me willing to trade tasty, reasonably nutritious food for either a lot of money or a little, as I wish.
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But are you sure those places will still exist after they've been undercut by the flood of cheap crap food vendors?
Even if you do find one, will you be able to afford it?
Re: Huh? (Score:2)
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, chains like McDonald's we're focusing mostly on low prices, and less on quality and nutrition. Somehow, there are more non-chain and small-chain restaurants now than there were then, at least where I've lived.
And having eaten at the second Five Guys location when it was the best one, I get a kick out of its success.
Except for self-deprecating jokey product names, we sure don't seem to be heading towards a Soylent future.
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Re: Huh? (Score:2)
Right, you're talking about somebody you made up. I prefer my anecdotes to be based in fact, preferably where we can explore the details -- so not done random person whose experience is filtered through a journalist with an obvious agenda.
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Re: Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Thanks! If anyone is interested in reading a bit about the theory behind my point of view, the best place to start is David Graeber's magnificent "Debt: The First 5000 Years". You'll be chuckling within a few pages, and awed within the first 100.
You'll also be stunned at all the wrong beliefs that many people accept and take for granted. At the risk of further enraging those of other persuasions, I can reveal that one of Graeber's biggest ideas is that human beings naturally practice a form of "rough communism". Unless educated to do otherwise, we have a strong tendency to cooperate and help out. Here are a couple of choice extracts:
"After all, we do owe everything we are to others. This is simply true. The language we speak and even think in, our habits and opinions, the kind of food we like to eat, the knowledge that makes our lights switch on and toilets flush, even the style in which we carry out our gestures of defiance and rebellion against social conventions – all of this we learned from other people, most of them long dead. If we were to imagine what we owe them as a debt, it could only be infinite. The question is: Does it really make sense to think of this as a debt? After all, a debt is something that we could at least imagine paying back”.
“[Peter] Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him. The man objected indignantly:
“’Up in our country, we are human!’ said the hunter. ‘And since we are human we help each other. We don’t like to hear anyone say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs’.
“The last line is something of an anthropological classic, and similar statements about the refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found throughout the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began ‘comparing power with power, measuring, calculating’ and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt”.
Re: Huh? (Score:2)
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Glad it wasn't just me.
Whoever came up with this (Score:5, Insightful)
"The campaign positions Fiverr to seize today's emerging zeitgeist of entrepreneurial flexibility, rapid experimentation, and doing more with less. It pushes against bureaucratic overthinking, analysis-paralysis, and excessive whiteboarding."
Whoever came up with that deserves excessive waterboarding.
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Do I get to watch?
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There's money to be made by livestreaming that shit.
Clickbait economy (Score:2)
Celebrates trolling people into clicking on bullshit.
People are taking the jobs (Score:2, Insightful)
Who is the sucker here?
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Starvation is not really an acceptable alternative to a shitty job.
Re: People are taking the jobs (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is not companies like Fiverr. The problem is the culture that celebrates it and refuses to acknowledge that the growth of such companies is a symptom of a serious problem (people unable to find reliable income/benefits who have to settle for developing world working conditions), not a positive development. The fact that Americans celebrate and applaud people working underpaid gigs with no private time means American society is fundamentally sick with twisted values.
The American obsession with self-reliance (Score:5, Insightful)
> the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system.
It's a choice between community and individuals. Self-reliance was great back in the day when you could (in theory) walk into the wilds and build your own civilization, but if you want a modern standard of living there are simply too many things to do, too much to know. We rely heavily on people taking on highly specialized roles and ultimately everyone lives better as a result.
Modern 'self-reliance' is more like modern 'fuck you, I got mine'. It's people exploiting others and making them like it by holding out the carrot of their own anomalous success. And we eat it up because the human brain is shitty at probabilities... we all think WE are going to be the next big exploiter when the odds are far better that we'll win the lottery, and the truth is we're more likely to die by lightning strike than have either of those things happen.
Americans have to get over their fear of socialism and accept that, all other things being equal, a community that works together is stronger and more prosperous than one that does not. Or they can watch wealth disparity continue to increase, a smaller and smaller portion of the population living like near-Gods while the greater portion has less and less. It'll take time for that to become apparent, so long as bellies are full and everyone has an Internet connection, but eventually the mob rises up and you get a revolution.
Re:The American obsession with self-reliance (Score:4)
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> the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system.
Americans have to get over their fear of socialism and accept that, all other things being equal, a community that works together is stronger and more prosperous than one that does not.
Except that the concept of "self reliance" is enshrined in the US constitution and is such a part of the American psyche that I don't know if it can ever be removed.
(bear with me .. this may seem like a left wing rant, but it is not)
For example this is seen in the 2nd amendment where the right to bear arms is enshrined. But why would you give someone the right to individually bear arms? That can only be because you want to allow them to be able to unilaterally act in using those arms. Thus in the 2nd ame
Re:The American obsession with self-reliance (Score:5, Interesting)
Americans have to get over their fear of socialism and accept that, all other things being equal, a community that works together is stronger and more prosperous than one that does not.
You are both right and totally wrong at the same time. Socialism isn't about community its about the state as a stand in for community! Yes we need to accept that in the modern world very men can be islands. Bureaucracy isn't the answer though, it does not scale. Just sit an watch Argentina, Greece, and for that matter the whole Western Europe as it faces mass immigration! That is the future socialism results in.
What we need is actually a form of isolationism. We need force the capital class to have some ties to place and their community again. We can't let them just be world tourists! If you make it harder or impossible for them to import labor from elsewhere, make it hard for them to take their capital over national boarders, etc. They will be forced to invest in their local community to secure their own feature. Right now its "I need H1Bs because there are to few qualified Americans" It needs change to "I need to build a science center in $city and donate heavily to the local schools so my business will have pool of qualified people to hire in the future." That is what community is about and that is the relationship between capital and community we need to create.
Re:The American obsession with self-reliance (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the big problems in the US is also regulatory capture. Try fixing that too.
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Americans have to get over their fear of socialism and accept that, all other things being equal, a community that works together is stronger and more prosperous than one that does not.
Like the USSR? Like Venezuela? You're completely wrong. All socialism does is replace a wealthy class that buys political power with a political class that steals wealth. And rapaciously. The end result is everyone (except our political class) begging for $5.
You are utterly wrong in every possible way (Score:3)
It's a choice between community and individuals.
With one statement, you show yourself the fool, utterly lacking in understanding of what individualism is about, or the power of what it can do - not for a person, but for the COMMUNITY.
Individualism is not "I got mine". At the heart it is, if possible do not be a burden to others, because you have taken care of yourself as best you can. If you are personally in good shape then it makes it far easier to help others.
Your philosophy is the truest form of self
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So they MUST be doing something right, right?
The US is strong and going to go to war again because our economy won't support us doing anything else.
There, fixed that for you.
Re:The American obsession with self-reliance (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, it's wonderful.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/03/economic-despair/520473/?utm_source=feed [theatlantic.com]
Re:The American obsession with self-reliance (Score:5, Informative)
I 'like' this graph, it shows it very well what is going on:
https://hbr.org/resources/imag... [hbr.org]
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Re:The American obsession with self-reliance (Score:5, Insightful)
If the modern poor live more comfortably than the kings of old
They don't, though.
Sure, there are a number of aspects of life in which great progress has been made (sanitation, health care, means of communication), but the modern poor still do not have servants, regular feasts with more food and wine than their (many) guests could eat, castles with countless rooms filled with handmade furniture, armies, larges swaths of farmland, stables full of horses, vast private hunting grounds, sailing ships or rooms filled with handmade fine clothing and jewelry.
Would you honestly choose living like a modern poor person in some shitty housing project or trailer park over living like a king of old in a castle with servants? I highly doubt it.
Re:The American obsession with self-reliance (Score:5, Insightful)
You seem to be arguing that willful ignorance and intentional incompetence should be celebrated even more so than they currently are in Hollywood and politics.
Did you read the same comment I did? Please specify which sentence(s) in GP's post led you to that conclusion.
If the modern poor live more comfortably than the kings of old, is that not a reason to celebrate?
You have a pretty shallow notion of comfort. The 'kings of old' enjoyed far more autonomy and freedom than 'the modern poor'; especially the working poor, who may work three jobs to just barely make ends meet, while the largest part of the fruits of their labour is concentrated in the hands of a few people far above them on the socio-economic ladder. A slave is still a slave; it's an existentially uncomfortable position to say the least, even if the slave lives in a palace; and the living conditions of today's slaves are far from palatial.
The Puritan philosophy of human worth (Score:4, Interesting)
This all stems from the widespread adoption in America of the the Puritan philosophy of human worth, best summed up as "the quality, quantity, and duration of achievement."
So, yes, by their standards the ultimate goal is to work hard, until death, to earn a place by the side of god as the most righteous. The bonus is that this also allows the hardest workers in life to demean those who have not worked so hard.
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That's stupid. Simple and plainly.
Work is the necessary evil to get money. Nothing more, nothing less. I can find stuff to do just fine myself, there is no need to keep me occupied. But I need money, like everyone else. That is the only reason to work.
Any work has to provide enough money to make it worth the time wasted on it.
What's the value add for something like Fiver? (Score:2)
Re: What's the value add for something like Fiver? (Score:2)
Fiverr is more of an escrow service than a gig-firm.
I've used it to hire Graphic Designers when I could not find anyone local.
It fills a narrow niche, but they've somehow blown it out if proportion.
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You might be a sucker (Score:5, Insightful)
“You eat a coffee for lunch,” the ad proclaims. “You follow through on your follow through. Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You might be a doer.”
I'll see you and raise you this:
"The busy man is never wise, and the wise man is never busy".
- Lin Yutang
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"You follow through on your follow through"
Gees, I didn't realise you had to shit yourself twice to qualify.
And the point is? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Are you saying Uber, et al are rungs on the ladder? Because they're not. Real rungs on the ladder are things like "education" and "not going into debt forever cause you got sick at 19"
Or, more precisely, that auto plant worker was really working his way up a ladder. But Uber et al explicitly do not allow for advancement.
Company Towns, but on the Internet (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the logical conclusion of all union-busting that we have done last 25 years. While you might hate unions, the alternative is much worse.
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Fivver isn't advertising to their workers (Score:2)
People are starting to notice... (Score:5, Insightful)
American society has always had the obsession on self-reliance, but I'm glad people are starting to see gig economy jobs for what they are. The question is what we do when the possibilities of realistically supporting yourself evaporate completely, and we go back to a semi-feudal system -- the nobles having all the power and letting the peasants who serve them exist at the bare minimum standard.
For decades in the US, the formula was simple:
- If you're smart, go to college and study anything. A large company will hire you at the entry level and take you through to the end of your career
- If you're semi-skilled, go to trade school, become an apprentice and join a trade union; there will be work until you retire.
- If you're less skilled, go join a union and work in a factory -- same deal, there will always be work.
It seems to me like this is gone, and no one noticed until now, or brushed it off. The modern economy is built around steady paychecks -- people can't buy a house for cash, they have to get a mortgage and pay it off as they earn. Same thing for consumer credit...no one is going to go into debt if they feel they can't pay for it, and debt is what drives the economy to some extent.
Steady paychecks are one of the reasons I've stayed out of the IT contracting world, even though I've been told I'd be excellent at it. It's stressful worrying about your job, or where the money is going to come from, and having to constantly hustle to find new work.
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Is there such a thing as a steady paycheck these days? The company could go tits-up tomorrow, or close your department and ship the work to Onlyexistedfortwoyearsistan.
It's a race to the bottom. (Score:2)
Going off-grid an living in middle of nowhere sounds better every day. Of course that is not a effective and sustainable solution that can accomodate everone. :D
Just working hard and long is not the road to a great life if you are working on the wrong thing. Lyft, Uber, Fiverr etc. are among those. Working hard at creating those companies might have been.
Oh, fuck you. (Score:2)
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"little" is better than "zero" (Score:2)
Yeah, they may "pay them little". But if the people taking these jobs had higher paying alternatives, they would be taking them. So, "paying them little" is better than getting no money at all.
Fiver and Foreign Aid (Score:3)
Tools like Fiverr, Mechanical Turk, etc are an amazing way to create positive trade with low-income nations. They get a living wage, we get cheap labor, everyone wins.
They are an abysmal way to run a sustainable first-world economy, due to all the problems listed in the many comments above.
But don't let the shittiness of a gig economy in the US, EU, and other prosperous areas overshadow the value they have in allowing poor areas of the world an instant economic advantage. The Internet has allowed us a way to provide aid without creating beggers, to create a cash flow where value is moving in the both directions, and to allow for economic success in developing nations without sweatshops and mines, without employers siphoning off most of the wealth, or warlords stealing the crops.
Five dollars for an hour of work is shitty here, but when five dollars can be a days wage (or a weeks) in many places it's amazing. If they can get Internet access (and that's a big if...) then it opens up a huge economic opportunity for many of the poorest nations. This kind of opportunity is why Google projects to get the Internet out to rural Africa, India, and South America are so vital.
So yes, it sucks for us here. It should be fought. But the idea itself has merit, it's just where it's being applied that is inappropriate.
Welcome to entrepreneurs (Score:3)
I've been one for three decades now. Self-employed is, and always has been, a recipe for way more work. The benefit, of course, is way more control; you're expected to translate that control into less work over time -- either by shifting the type of work, or by proceduralizing the efforts involved.
A gig, as is being discussed, doesn't provide any control benefits. A lyft driver can't outsource the driving, can't build the better car, and can't make better routes. Similarly, most of the other gigs are already fully proceduralized, and hence are already so commodity-based, that there is no legitimate benefits for improvement. This results in the up-front huge efforts similar to any self-employment, but without any opportunity to reap the benefits of that extra work.
Secondly, and this is probably the bigger deal, most of these gig-workers aren't entrepreneurs. Instead, they are would-be-factory-workers, lured by more-and-flexible hours, unable to see what they've lost as a result. Typical wage-earners usually work full weeks, for reasonable pay, with reasonable hours and reasonable benefits, but dream of "more hours" and "more flexibility". These gigs offer both of those, but don't translate into "more money".
But that's always been the farce of "the american dream". You can come to america, and you have every opportunity to make-it-big. You can be the next mcjagger. Of course, so can everyone else, so you aren't at all likely to be. What percentage of garage-bands become the rolling stones? You're much more likely to fizzle -- on the order of a 100 to 1. Think about it. 300 million americans, 1% make it big, 297 million don't -- and 200 million don't even come close, with 100 million failing miserably.
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http://moscowproject.org/ [moscowproject.org]
to keep up.
Oh, what a relief! For a moment there I thought Microsoft was going into the dairy business.
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Re:then go somewhere else (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not aware of people saying "gee, I really don't want that nine-to-five job, I want to be an uberer/fiverr/lyfter". They* are taking those jobs because they don't have anywhere else to go
*I fully expect a few "disproving anecdotes", the best kind of science. But its overwhelmingly true.
Ah, the great "meaning" argument. Whether they were intended as full-time work originally or not, they most certainly have morphed into that. And I don't really care about motivation as much as impact. And Uber/Lyft with their car leases, definitely are trying to make you think of it as a full-time job.
Which isn't at all the message Fixerr/Uber/Lyft are putting out there.
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Re: then go somewhere else (Score:3)
What is your suggestion? That these people whose alternative is no job take that alternative? That the employers raise prices to support higher wages for their workers, leading to much reduced demand and most of their current workers bring out of work? That the employers start printing money so they can pay more than they take in?
Re: then go somewhere else (Score:5, Insightful)
If their business model can't support paying a living wage, it SHOULD go away rather than damaging the economics of more adequate employers.
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Rubbish. You're just picking winners (e.g. the small number of taxi drivers) over losers (the huge number of Uber or Lyft drivers). And your living wage shtick is fucking risible. It's an analog of the Parable of the Broken Window. Why, if we just make employers pay people more, everyone will benefit because then people will have more money to spend!
Good luck with that in a global economy. I'm sure China and India will be happy to play by those rules and force their own employers to pay people the equiv
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Re:then go somewhere else (Score:5, Insightful)
The gig economy is just gigs for some cash not full time employment.
I frankly don't buy it! There are small groups of people who are interested in that sort of thing. Teenagers who still are largely fed/clothed/housed by their parents, perhaps a stay at home parent needing something to do while the kids are at school, retirees who don't perhaps have savings for entertainment and actually want light work as a diversion. Maybe some trust fund babies that want to make a few bucks without rules attached. I am sure there are others. I am also sure this isn't a large enough labor pool to meet the demand in terms of scale companies like Lyft, Uber, fiverr, Amazon (turk) etc in vision.
The rest of the labor force isn't taking gigs because they want to! They are taking gigs because they are trying to meet needs or at least perceived needs. Most sensible after working a 40-60 hour week want to use their remaining time, to enjoy the home they secured, eat a nice meal, watch a movie, watch the world go by, read a book, talk to family, see friends, etc. Some people who are self employed might be self motivated to work 9 hours + and that might make sense if they are doing it so they can 'get a head' and eventually not have to work so hard etc. Its also different in that they are working for something that is their own, in the same way some of us would work DIY remodeling our own home etc.
Really do think that Uber driver would not be somewhere else if they did not feel like they really needed the money at least on some level? They are doing it out of some kind of insecurity, tangible or emotional. Don't tell me some people just like driving either, I love driving. I take my Sunday drives on the Blue Ridge Parkway either by myself or with my wife. I don't play taxi driver for randos downtown. I don't believe anyone else would either if they were 'entirely free' to decide.
There is some external pressure and its almost certainly in the form under employment, unemployment, under paid and without negotiating leverage, trade competition and similar. The capital owner element of the gig economy is keenly aware of this, its the reason they have a labor pool to hire. I am not saying its exploitative, people should be free to make whatever contract, work whatever job they wish. I just don't have any illusion that this is a bunch of people out there looking to make a little mad money. There are major structural factors at work here and the market is simply responding. I am also of the belief that its response isn't unaffected by governmental policy. They people we voted for are doing this to us.
They have been doing it to us since the 60's. People are getting fed up. Trump is just the tip of the ice burg (hopefully)! The capital class that owns the media and dominates politics are reacting virulently to his populist message and that tells me they are frightened it could endure beyond his presidency. Perhaps someone a little more politically savy will be able to take the Trump ball and run with it.
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Unfortunately this has been proven time and again to be wrong, at least as far as the smart use of credit is concerned. If you want to own a home you're almost always going to have to finance it. If you want to own a car that will give you more than a decade of service with few issues you're probably going to need to finance it. Hell, if you have a skill in a profession that requires materiel or tools that can make you a good income, you might have to finance some business expenses for those tools or for
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Pay peanuts, get code monkeys.
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It's so absurd. If you look at 10k years ago humans probably had an 18 hour a day, 365 days a year "workday" just to survive. 200 years ago, the average person probably needed to work 90 hours a week to have a lifestyle equivalent to a lower (but not lowest) class Indian or Chinese person.
And now people bitch and whine and moan because people who live like kings relative to most of humanity's history have to get by with only enough income to eat, have shelter, and have modern conveniences and entertainment