201–210 of 330 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not that they actively discriminate. It's because ACA plans are lumped into one big risk pool per market and ACA plans, by nature, attract more expensive people.
But what if it had everyone in the USA in the plan? It seems this, bigger, lumpier pool could aggregate the costs and reduce burden for everyone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not that they actively discriminate. It's because ACA plans are lumped into one big risk pool per market and ACA plans, by nature, attract more expensive people.
Seems like the only answer would be one risk pool then.
This last year, I drove for GrubHub for about 6 months in order to pay rent while trying to build a business as well as do web development contract work(I'm now employed full time). The whole time, I was active in various gig economy subreddits. There are some people out there who only want to drive for companies like GrubHub, but most of the drivers are people who already have jobs and are using the gig as supplemen…
I really get confused about this. I wonder if it is because I'm a bit older. Plenty of part time employment is like that. For example, many people that work retail or service part time have very flexible schedules. They typically have an availability chart and then if they need a day off last minute, they are often required to find someone else to cover for them. The reality is that the contractor part of this is to…
I think you are missing a large part of it. The "gig" economy is "on-demand" labor. There is no schedule to coordinate at the "worker level". Just a network of demand and a worker pool that grows and shrinks to meet demand.
"Oh, I'm free for the next 3 hours, maybe I'll make some money"
vs.
"I need to let my boss know I'm not coming in tomorrow so we have coverage"
That marketplace effect is "freedom".
This last year, I drove for GrubHub for about 6 months in order to pay rent while trying to build a business as well as do web development contract work(I'm now employed full time). The whole time, I was active in various gig economy subreddits. There are some people out there who only want to drive for companies like GrubHub, but most of the drivers are people who already have jobs and are using the gig as supplemen…
I really get confused about this. I wonder if it is because I'm a bit older. Plenty of part time employment is like that. For example, many people that work retail or service part time have very flexible schedules. They typically have an availability chart and then if they need a day off last minute, they are often required to find someone else to cover for them. The reality is that the contractor part of this is to…
It's generally quite the opposite. It's employer regulations hiding the cost of insurance from you. There is nothing stopping you as an individual from buying disability or unemployment insurance.
But insurance typically has a negative expected value. With perfect efficiency the expected value is zero; probability of claim times payout from receiving claim equals average premium. Then you add the costs of administration and insurance fraud and it goes into the red. Whether the peace of mind from having the insurance is worth that cost to you is your own decision.
Requiring employers to provide it does two things. The first is that it hides the cost from you. The employer is a corporation and corporations don't really pay for anything, employees, customers and investors do. It'd be nice to think the investors are paying for it, but the kind of employers who hire unskilled workers are typically not in high margin industries. In practice it's generally going to be the workers and customers. And then people ask for more and more things like that, thinking someone else is paying for it when it's really still them.
Which leads to the second problem, which is that when it's required you can't decline it. If some double digit percentage of the people on unemployment are committing insurance fraud, you may be better off to just put the money you would have paid in premiums into a brokerage account to rely on if you lose your job, but you no longer have that option. You no longer even realize its cost, because you never receive a bill for unjustifiably high insurance premiums, you just get paid that much less or pay more when you buy stuff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really get confused about this. I wonder if it is because I'm a bit older. Plenty of part time employment is like that. For example, many people that work retail or service part time have very flexible schedules. They typically have an availability chart and then if they need a day off last minute, they are often required to find someone else to cover for them. The reality is that the contractor part of this is to…
> When anyone does the math with these gig jobs, they leave out risk. That's the difference. GrubHub is pushing the risk of long term disability, and other things like unemployment due to business slowdown, entirely onto you. As well as other risks they are free from if you are not an employee. It's generally quite the opposite. It's employer regulations hiding the cost of insurance from you. There is nothing stoppin…
Only if you ignore externalities, like uninsured permanently disabled people begging on the streets or starving to death.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really get confused about this. I wonder if it is because I'm a bit older. Plenty of part time employment is like that. For example, many people that work retail or service part time have very flexible schedules. They typically have an availability chart and then if they need a day off last minute, they are often required to find someone else to cover for them. The reality is that the contractor part of this is to…
> When anyone does the math with these gig jobs, they leave out risk. That's the difference. GrubHub is pushing the risk of long term disability, and other things like unemployment due to business slowdown, entirely onto you. As well as other risks they are free from if you are not an employee. It's generally quite the opposite. It's employer regulations hiding the cost of insurance from you. There is nothing stoppin…
I'm talking to an individual. Please refer the comment I was replying to. I'm not trying to make generalized ideological debates about the gig economy or taxation or any other of the typically religious arguments people shout at each other about online.
To an _individual_ it is important for them to realize that they need to account for the risk involved in what they are doing. If you drive for a company as an employee and get injured and can never work again, you will receive payments from them for the rest of your life. If you do it as a contractor you will be disabled and at best be able to receive the very limited US government disability which would force you to live in poverty. Remember, driving all day is one of the most dangerous types of professions. And absolutely no, you cannot get an individual workers compensation policy because it would cost more money than the income from the gig. Its absurd you would think that exists.
Please do not go into online forums and just shoot idealism everywhere. We get it, you hate big government and taxation is theft. We've all heard it 10 million times. Unless it has a unique connection to the topic being discussed, you are just derailing the conversation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> When anyone does the math with these gig jobs, they leave out risk. That's the difference. GrubHub is pushing the risk of long term disability, and other things like unemployment due to business slowdown, entirely onto you. As well as other risks they are free from if you are not an employee. It's generally quite the opposite. It's employer regulations hiding the cost of insurance from you. There is nothing stoppin…
> insurance typically has a negative expected value Only if you ignore externalities, like uninsured permanently disabled people begging on the streets or starving to death.
What you're getting at is that there is a reason people buy insurance anyway -- the peace of mind that that won't happen to you, as I mentioned. Because a million dollars in claims money even if you have to multiply it by the only 2% probability of that happening is worth more to you than the $20,000 in guaranteed premiums you'll have to pay over your life, because if the claim actually happens you need the money more. The value of the same dollar is higher to you then, which you can predict from the beginning and account for.
But that value still has to be balanced against the losses to administration and fraud, and balanced against what you need the money for today. If losing $100/month to premiums causes you to starve now, it doesn't matter that there is a 2% chance that you starve in ten years from now. If the majority of insurance claims are fraudulent, the higher value of the money in case you have a legitimate claim may no longer exceed the losses from buying the insurance.
It's possible that buying insurance makes sense. It's possible that it doesn't. But people should be able to make that choice for themselves instead of having it imposed on them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How could you compare someone voluntarily engaging in employment to slave labor? Is it really voluntary if the alternative is to die of starvation?
Yes? The vast majority of people in the world work in order to feed themselves and their families. This does not make the work “involuntary”. Choice is obviously not an absolute, because we don’t live in magical fairy land. Choice is the ability to decide how you will go about feeding yourself and your family. Gig economy simply increases the available choices, and provides quite a few fairly pleasant options, judgin…
Yes, and this is an inane state-of-affairs given 2019 technology. We could keep the entire world population fed with minimal effort, if we stopped acting in insane ways.
> That small status change is huge. These workers would suddenly get labor protections and benefits that all employees get, such as unemployment insurance, health care subsidies, paid parental leave, overtime pay, workers’ compensation, and a guaranteed $12 minimum hourly wage. That’s an pretty optimistic take on the situation. What these new “employees” are going to get, is fired. I know some people are OK with that…
> What these new “employees” are going to get, is fired. If the choice is between raising prices to support higher employee expenditures, and firing all of their drivers and leaving the California market, you think they'll choose the latter? Or is there a third option I'm not thinking of?
I don't understand the implications of the second item in the test: "doing work that isn’t central to the company’s business." How does this apply to business-to-business contracting arrangements, especially in the world of software engineering? Businesses hire contract labor from vendors all the time--are those laborers to be considered employees of both the vendor and hiring company now?
In most B2B contracting arrangements, the contractors are full-time employees of the contracting firm, and get their benefits from that company. (This was my first job out of college.)
The test as indicated in the article doesn't say anything about this kind of B2B arrangement, though. Why wouldn't this law apply to individuals in this case?