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Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

nytimes.com

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Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#61

Post by briandear »

the_cat_kittles wrote: post #48
lalos wrote: post #5

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 man…

bring back unions

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?

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#62

Post by throwawayjava »

kjeetgill wrote: post #15
lkrubner wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know much about the subject. How do we measure productivity? What units do we use? I ask because it _feels_ like everything has changed since 1973 at least. So I'm curious where my intuition differs from reality.

> How do we measure productivity?

Productivity as typically reported is a statistic called "Total Factor Productivity" (TFP).

Here's how it's calculated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_factor_productivity#Calc...

> What units do we use?

TFP is unitless.

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#63

Post by robotbikes »

tmpz22 wrote: post #38
sotojuan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#64

Post by pilsetnieks »

kbenson wrote: post #53
nerdponx wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 c…

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?)

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#65

Post by xkcd-sucks »

sotojuan wrote: post #30
nerdponx wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

"chained down" -> "securely anchored"

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#66

Post by elvirs »

sotojuan wrote: post #30
nerdponx wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

out of all 'on demand' companies Fiverr should keep its mouth shut. The quality of work there is pure garbage

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#67

Post by throwaway37585 »

nerdponx wrote: post #14
lalos wrote: post #5

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 man…

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…

> helping anyone but business owners

So you’re saying customers use those services for literally no reason.

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#68

Post by RandallBrown »

kbenson wrote: post #45
lalos wrote: post #5

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 man…

> 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. Unfortunatel…

Uber has partnered with several rental companies specifically to rent out cars for ride sharing. https://www.uber.com/drive/vehicle-solutions/

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#69

Post by paulie_a »

BartBoch wrote: post #4

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

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#70

Post by gorpomon »

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.

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