Silicon Valley Has Been Treating Workers 'Miserably' Since the 1970s, Economic Historian Says (recode.net) 153
Don't blame Uber for the problems of the gig economy -- they didn't start it, economic historian Louis Hyman says. Recode: "Uber is the waste product of the service economy," Hyman said on the latest episode of Recode Decode, a podcast. "It relies on a bunch of people who don't have an alternative." Hyman told Recode that the number of people who have to rely on temporary, freelance or other "alternative work arrangements" has been growing since the 1970s, when the era of bloated corporations gave way to businesses that optimized for short-term profits and began treating workers as disposable. "The alternative to driving for Uber is not a good job in a factory with a union wage or working in a stable office job, it's slinging coffee at a Starbucks where you may or may not get the hours you need," he said. "That is what people are shoring up. They're shoring up getting enough hours, trying to make ends meet. Oftentimes, people talk about the gig economy as 'supplementary income' ... It's not supplemental if you need it to pay for your kids' braces, or food, or rent." Hyman argued that this phenomenon could be traced back to the legions of undocumented migrant laborers who built early computers, before those manufacturing jobs moved overseas.
Entrepreneurship is a powerful drug (Score:1)
People will accept inhumane working conditions to be in on the ground floor of something big. It's too bad that 99.9999% of companies never turn out to be that "something big."
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Do you really think some slob with a soldering iron in his hand for 12 hours a day thought he was "in on the ground floor of something big"? Do you really?
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Not so difficult.
For a new start up company if you are getting paid little and so is the owner with all the money going to the business. You would feel like you are the Next Wozniak or Paul Allen. Where once the product kicks off you will believe that the boss will properly compensate you for your sacrifice as well.
Where what will happen when the product kicks off, you keep your job, and they hire more qualified people at the higher pay to continue on.
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Oh ya, some people do think that, I've seen them. They see examples of other companies striking it big, even if rare, and think it will happen to them. The probably need to get to gambler's anonymous though. But they don't often think that even when the company strikes it big that most employees aren't necessarily becoming independently wealthy. You gotta compare how many stocks you have to the total outstanding, and what class of shares you have (first in line vs the grubby ones for people who use a sol
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I would ask the Woz.
Make up your mind already. (Score:5, Funny)
California is a communist welfare state that suffocates business with regulation, taxes, and worker rights.
California is a corporate welfare state that exploits workers to feed big business.
Re:Make up your mind already. (Score:5, Insightful)
California has extremely high worker mobility and that is key to success.
Non-competes are illegal. (This is key. Noncompetes murdered the 'silicon valley' of other states right in the cradle. Being able to hop jobs promotes the sharing of ideas and enables employees to advocate for what's in their own best interest)
SV companies are largely union free (Unions aren't all pro-labor. They're mostly pro-incumbent-labor and are detrimental to worker mobility.)
California is generally pro immigration, and that labor supply is key to growth.
California is an at-will employment state (Employers can let you go with no notice, for any reason other than reasons that are illegal under labor law) which further increases worker mobility. (Companies don't have to hold on to employees they don't need or want and are free to hire ones they do)
Lefties tend to see immagrant labor is exploitative of the worker, when in reality these people are simply more free to fill the labor demand as the market needs. This leads to growth and California's huge economy is proof. Restrictions on labor distort the market and harm workers because demand is not met.
The far-right tends to see immigrant labor as labor being stolen from natives, when in fact the extra labor is needed to fill demand. If the native workforce was able to fill demand importing labor would not be necessary. Restrictions on labor distort the market and harm workers because demand is not met.
California is not a lefty paradise/hellhole as many portray. It's a healthy centrist combination of pro-labor and pro-business that's made the region one of the largest economies in the world.
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Re:Make up your mind already. (Score:5, Interesting)
When I see job insecurity called "labor mobility", my BS meter goes up. You pegged it and then smoke started coming out!
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You're
Re:Make up your mind already. (Score:5, Interesting)
It wasn't that long ago when the common expectation was that you would graduate, then get a job you would be at until you retired. It wasn't that uncommon that jobs becoming obsolete would be vacated mostly through attrition or the workers would be retrained to fill another position at the same company. Many employers felt a duty to their loyal employees.
That was the social contract.
These days, it's not that uncommon to be laid off and end up doing the same job somewhere else.
As long as the world won't let me plow my yard for cropland and go hunting in the neighborhood, it does, in fact, owe me an alternative.
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According to official figures today, 4.6 years i now the median time one spends at a job. That would suggest more than 8 jobs in a career.
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That's ~8 jobs, but not more than 8 careers.
from Australia (first relevant link I found but I forgot to copy the link - doh)
"More than half (57 per cent) of Aussies surveyed by job site SEEK have thrown caution to the wind and pursued a new path and one in five did so in the past 12 months.
Of people who have made a career change, most (38 per cent) have made just one but more than a quarter (29 per cent) have made two and 33 per cent have made three or more."
Those statistics seem a bit mixed and maybe contradictory without more detail, though. (With more detail there might be no contradiction).
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And what I was talking about was JOBS.
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As long as the world won't let me plow my yard for cropland and go hunting in the neighborhood, it does, in fact, owe me an alternative.
The neighbor's kids probably aren't very good anyways.
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Many if not most suburban areas have restrictions on what you can do with your own yard and restrictions on hunting.
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Labor mobility is the ability to move to another job. Being forced to move to another job is employment insecurity.
Kind of like the ease with which a person can end up on skid row is technically social mobility, calling it that is very much BS newspeak.
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Anatole France famously noted that “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
Failure to have a safety net or bottom to fall to makes the world more like India and less like a civilized society. In India, if you fall through the cracks, you're done.
In civilized Western countries - most of them European - the social safety net is a chance to recover from adversity and become productive once again.
In the
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Labor mobility is ultimately about freedom.
Who's freedom?
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Freedom of big capital to more fully exploit laboring people.
Re:Make up your mind already. (Score:5, Funny)
The far-right tends to see immigrant labor as labor being stolen from natives, when in fact the extra labor is needed to fill demand.
This is called Schrödinger's Immigrant.
Simultaneously doing nothing but collecting welfare and stealing your job at the same time.
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The far-right tends to see immigrant labor as labor being stolen from natives, when in fact the extra labor is needed to fill demand.
This is called Schrödinger's Immigrant.
Simultaneously doing nothing but collecting welfare and stealing your job at the same time.
Does anyone actually complain about immigrants stealing jobs these days? If memory serves, that was the talking point in the Clinton era, when the left was against illegal immigration because they thought it benefitted big corporations. Of course, now that immigration has become a social justice issue, their stance has completely flipped.
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Does anyone actually complain about immigrants stealing jobs these days? If memory serves, that was the talking point in the Clinton era, when the left was against illegal immigration because they thought it benefitted big corporations. Of course, now that immigration has become a social justice issue, their stance has completely flipped.
There is a lot of different opinions, but yes, some do https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]
You don't hear as much about it these days because (I suspect) that as immigrants are kickd out, many of the low skilled american born low skilled citizens are kind of worried that the may be asked to take those jerbs that they bitched about imgrunts stealing. from them. Sometimes the worst thing you can get is what you asked for.
The problems to me are twofold.
Want to stop immigrant workers? Catch one, and impri
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Go to hell you despicable running dog. American working people WANT the jobs that were stolen from them to fatten the wallets of contemptible shitlords like you.
The only reasons you don't hear about this issue all day every day is are A) you don't associate with a single working class person, because you consider them below yourself; and B) you willingly indoctrinate yourself with semi-official propaganda, and the resulting myopia you call enlightenment.
Ohhhh, you are just adorable!
Re:Make up your mind already. (Score:5, Insightful)
If the native workforce was able to fill demand importing labor would not be necessary.
The native workforce is able to fill demand; many employers do not want to pay them American wages to do so.
Imported people are used to artificially change the market and depress wages.
How the *bleep* are unions detrimental to worker? (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now we're seeing something never before: near full employment but wages are declining. Economists have mostly agreed this is caused by two things: Low wage jobs replacing high wages ones (factory jobs replaced with fast food & Walmart) and the end of collective bargaining reducing workers ability to negotiate better wages. Notice I didn't use the "U" word there. Neither do they. There's been a non-stop anti-Union propaganda campaign from the mega corporations (which, let's be real, own the mass media). So much so that you're not generally allowed to say anything as simple as "Wages are down because one guy on his own can't negotiate the same rates as half a million workers".
You don't have to take my word for it, just google what Walmart does everytime their employees try to Unionize. Or look at Disney, where the workers just got bumped to $15/hr because they organized. No Man is an Island. Collective bargaining works.
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You're emphasizing the macro economic forces of the labor market. Where this argument always falls apart is in the impersonal nature of macro economics to the very personal nature of a job to every one of the individual players, the laborer. The wealth of a region like California can also be attested to the growth of personal income through both housing and some savings and investment in opportunity, which requires stability for the individual players. Macroeconomic analysis is always weak when it glosse
Re: Make up your mind already. (Score:1)
This "nearness to Asia" theory of economic prosperity seems fairly unique. Have you any statistics that support this idea? Why has the rest of the American West coast not been similarly affected? Sure, the coasts are generally more prosperous than the rest of America, but California, Florida and New York have the greatest concentrations of wealth in the U.S.. The Asian influence in New York is especially pronounced but that example goes directly against your theory.
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Well, it can be both, provided that the political leadership doesn't have any principles other than getting elected.
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California is a communist welfare state that suffocates business with regulation, taxes, and worker rights.
California is a corporate welfare state that exploits workers to feed big business.
Surely it has to "be" both, to justify continuing crisis response and ever increasing regulation?
It's still Sinclair's jungle out there! Has to be ...
And Seattle too (Score:2)
I think I first heard the term "Seattle Hundreds" about twenty years ago.
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We've required 16 hour days for nearly two years since we hand-off to a team in India at night and have to attend scrum that's at the start of our day and the end of their day. Also, that means we're expected to be in the office on Sunday nights for their Monday mornings, but of course we can't leave early on Friday nights to compensate.
I'd quit and try finding another job, but most of my friends in my field here in Seattle are also working long hours so I'm not confident of finding a better job.
Re: And Seattle too (Score:1)
Take a vacation to job search. I guarantee you'll find a job with much better conditions. It's pretty easy to get the sense of work hours during an interview as well.
The reason bad work conditions exist is because people like yourself put up with them. You could also try forming a union but that's riskier than quitting.
Open borders! (Score:5, Insightful)
Industry loves an unending flow of people too inexperienced to know that they are being taken advantage of. It wants people age 25-35 that it can grind up, spit out, and roll right over. Instead of focusing on working smarter, our industry has become a mill into which we pour youngsters and out of which fall cynical outsiders.
Industry anthropomorphization (Score:2)
Pick out specific bad actors and focus your attention there, ex: "Walmart is an exploitative company that deserves to burn in hell for
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No, he gave it to CORPORATIONS, you fucking retarded treasonous faggot liar.
OK (Score:1)
Fuck them back (Score:2, Insightful)
If you have an in-demand skill, I recommend you learn how to use the word "no" until the people you're negotiating with tack on enough zeros. As sad as it is, it's a dog-eat-dog world, and you definitely want to be the dog with a full belly.
If you don't have in-demand skills, you'd better get on it or you'll continue to get shit on.
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And 90% of Americans don't have enough cash to pay for a major medical event, a major home repair, or even a major car repair via savings.
The real problem here is when you look at CTO, CEO, et-cetera salaries and compare with inflation. Some of those guys are only hitting middle class.
Poverty is moving up the food chain, and if we don't find something to do about it well. Game over.
If the CTO has a mattress in their office, ask them when they intend to install barracks, a cafeteria, and force work in shif
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Re:Fuck them back (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems that you're living in that Conservative SimplisticFantasyLand where workers can easily acquire new skills while at the same time living decently, raising a family, negotiating with bosses who actually give a bubbly fart about investing in their own employees....Keep reading that Ayn Rand crap, but it fails the Reality World test...BIGLY!
Nope. Just thought and planned ahead. You do know that kids and families are preventable, right?
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In other words, the rich give the poor the choice between either breeding or survive, presentig it as if it was part of a fair game, or part of nature. How smart they are, learning from the turkish mistake with the armanians. Instead of making a group of people extinct directly, just prevent them from breeding.
Less workers (Score:1)
Miserable, or just not paying very well? (Score:4, Insightful)
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You apparently flunked reality. Must have job to live. Only job available is crappy gig economy job. So YES, forced to be an Uber driver.
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You apparently flunked reality. Must have job to live.
So those are zombies I see hanging on the corners?
Granted, some of them maybe ...
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Am I just imagining the police that run them off because it's not really legal to be homeless? Have you SEEN the death rate among the homeless as compared to the general population?
Silicon Valley vs USSR (Score:1)
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There were UNIONS protecting workers
It was republican'ts who eliminated the protectors
Not surprising to me (Score:5, Interesting)
Today, other than some special mil-spec companies, ZERO electronics are made here. THIS is what brought us to this point: that either you're an app-appy developer or a low-tier drone with no room to grow. Basically, we've squeezed the piss out of the entire industry's middle with most of the rewards going to the Squillionaires and the rest of us left fighting over - Yes! As Pelosi said - "the crumbs".
I'm glad I got the chance to ride the wave long enough, but the tide has been going out for decades.
Boy, Asian workers are way better off than us... (Score:3)
Look, it doesn't matter what you are manufacturing or what part of the world you are in. Manual labor jobs are 20th century jobs, and its all going away.
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Today, other than some special mil-spec companies, ZERO electronics are made here.
Not a lot that you see, but certainly not zero. At my previous job, the product was largely made in the USA. The circuit boards were made there (I believe--that was subcontracted), the boards were populated, the cases finished and assembled and then everything packaged up into the final packaging all in Texas.
I visited the factory of course and they seemed to be making a fair amount of stuff. What doesn't get done is the huge
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ROHS made this inevitable. It wasn't CA - It was Europe and the regulation is absolutely required. In Europe the soil is acidic. This means you cannot bury rubbish, it will be dissolved over decades and poison the groundwater. Much of the waste is burned instead in incinerators. As a consequence, heavy metals in the waste stream is a big no for health reasons.
Therefore, the EU doesn't import lead in electronics and hasn't for a long time (ROHS). Companies for about a decade have very much preferred lead fre
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Very long time (Score:3)
binary (Score:2)
"It relies on a bunch of people who don't have an alternative."
Surely that's not binary? There's a continuum?
Surely it's also not new?
The best description of Uber and Lyft I ever heard (Score:2)
was driving for them is taking out a pay day loan against your car. I know people who do this. Hyman or whatever is dead on.
Most people aren't doing this because they want to, they do it because they have no other options and are lucky enough to have a car (often one their parents bought them).
Extremely misleading (Score:2)
Actual tech employees are treated much better in Sillicon Valley than tech or non tech employees anywhere else. Granted you have to be not stupid enough to work for Apple. But in most places, there are smart managers who care more about your long term potential than making you slog on a given weekend. As for Uber drivers, you may want to consider their options before Uber. Why are they doing that job if they have something better lined up?
California poverty rate (Score:4, Informative)
We decided to fact-check whether the report Mayes cited really shows that California has the highest poverty rate in the nation. [politifact.com]
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Supply vs Demand.
In the broad scale (they are exceptions) how much a person gets paid, isn't how hard they work, how smart they are, or how good of a person they are.
It is based on the number of people with such skill sets and how many other people want these people with the skill sets.
So if you are working at a fast food place. If you are a Hard Worker, you may get a raise because the supply of hard workers at a fast food place is lower however it is something people want. But it will reach a point, you w
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Only the BEST for the 1%. The rest of you get the fuck back to work, you fucking peons.
captcha: monopoly
Not true. According to the Washington Post the fact that you are an American puts you into the top 1% of the world. This was published in 2016, even more true today. Your life really is awesome compared to the rest of the world. Remember that when you're bitching over nothing. Things can be much worse. If you're one of the ones doing the bitching, in the black outfits? Yea, you're one of the first ones they'll kill.