Live data from Hacker News

California passes bill that classifies gig economy workers as employees

nytimes.com

721–730 of 754 posts

Re: California passes bill that classifies gig economy workers as employees

#721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the answer, but I'm afraid I didn't understand anything of what you said.

A CENG is a Charted Engineer like a PE in Canada, the BCS is the British Computer society which works with the IEEE on the certification part. The other part was at my first Job I was on the Vocation track in mech eng and got to the first rung on the Certification track. "technician engineer" I think it was called

Thanks for the clarification!

Re: California passes bill that classifies gig economy workers as employees

#722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US public does not want this That's far from clear. Polling fairly consistently shows that the US public favors at least some degree of it (particularly shifting the healthcare burden from employers to government, other benefits have less political salience), though any particular plan for the detailed mechanism may have trouble gaining majority support.

Honestly, I really wish people would stop basing so many decisions on Polls. There are so many problems with accurately polling people's opinions because generating a truly random dataset is really hard. Unless people have some sort of financial stake in the outcome you're only going to hear what they want to happen instead of what they think will happen.

> generating a truly random dataset is really hard

IMO it's not just hard but impossible for polls to be unbiased, because people that don't like answering polls are never represented. If the subset of people that don't answer polls isn't itself following the same distribution over all possible opinions as the rest of the population the results are biased, and by definition we can't test for these correlations.

Re: California passes bill that classifies gig economy workers as employees

#723
They are trying to put the fast growing market of freelancers under control. I don't see it as a bad move. The market is becoming bigger every year. Eventually everybody will be freelancers. You like this videos of Yegor, he is constantly speaking about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gnDmr_H2Ks

Re: California passes bill that classifies gig economy workers as employees

#724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That "flexibility" means precarity as the majority of gig employees do this full-time: >In California, the legislation will affect at least one million workers who have been on the receiving end of a decades-long trend of outsourcing and franchising work, making employer-worker relationships more arm’s-length. Many people have been pushed into contractor status with no access to basic protections like a minimum wage…

>Experts said that there is nothing in the bill that requires employees to work set shifts, and that Uber and Lyft are legally entitled to continue allowing drivers to make their own scheduling decisions. Well yeah, it doesn't force them to. Who are these "experts"? If Uber takes on 100,000 new employees and all of the costs that go along with them, why wouldn't they also manage them like... employees? You can't have…

Increased pay and more time off!

I think, really, progress often comes when a side of a contested issue gets it two ways.

Which of course, I don't mean that one side getting it both ways is always progress, just that it's not a real argument.

Re: California passes bill that classifies gig economy workers as employees

#725
post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When an individual creates an enterprise it's expected to fail in 2 years. It does not mean death of the individual, but often it makes 'em go broke. Only one company in a hundred is successful. Other are doomed. Government-run projects do not live in alternative dimension. It is affected by the same things any private organization is affected. It is expected that a country would exist longer than an individual compa…

The idea of universal health care hasn't been tested by time yet (and in principal it will fail due to things I described above), so it's very reasonable that the US public rejects it. Uhhh... nearly every other country other than the US has had some form of national health service for decades and they spend less on healthcare per capita for comparable quality. What you're spouting is nonsense.

> for decades You are retelling what happens in a very short period of time, ignoring dynamics. Decades is nothing for a country. You could look at second-world countries which were pioneers in universal healthcare and universal pension funds. For most of them it didn't last long. Even though the "universality" was questionable. These systems won't survive 100 year run in countries with tens of millions. Then, private healthcare is not the reason why Americans pay for it that much. There are lots of factors that drastically worsen the situation. People in the US are the ones who finance medical R&D, results of which are used by other countries relatively for free as individual American companies are forced to negotiate their contracts with governments. Which could be mitigated if American government would enforce for these countries to pay for their share in R&D. Then, perhaps I am mistaken, but the US is the only place (or one of the few places) where doctors have to study twice to become doctors: first at regular colleges then in medical schools. It cuts out lots of people who could've been doctors, not to mention education costs. Other thing that affects the costs is the fact that medical debts of individuals could be reimbursed by the government (the same applies to education). It creates incentives to actually make people go broke as insurers have nothing to loose in this case, but gain much more from the government which play along.

Re: California passes bill that classifies gig economy workers as employees

#726
post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When an individual creates an enterprise it's expected to fail in 2 years. It does not mean death of the individual, but often it makes 'em go broke. Only one company in a hundred is successful. Other are doomed. Government-run projects do not live in alternative dimension. It is affected by the same things any private organization is affected. It is expected that a country would exist longer than an individual compa…

- sovereign governments (which fund many government projects) can literally create money; individuals cannot - government projects often have multi-year funding commitments legally bound by legislation; virtually no private enterprises have such guaranteed runways - goals of government projects are often not "survive then maximize profit at all costs"; in fact, the idea behind infrastructure projects is for extreme l…

>sovereign governments (which fund many government projects) can literally create money; individuals cannot The only government that can "literally create money" is the American one. >government projects often have multi-year funding commitments legally bound by legislation That was my point. When it breaks, everyone would pay for it, and not in money. >goals of government projects are often not "survive then maximize profit at all costs"; in fact, the idea behind infrastructure projects is for extreme long term payoffs, virtually impossible for from-scratch private projects due to lack of capital whereas .gov projects don't have the survival component That what I meant when I said that governments don't live in alternative dimensions where they have unlimited resources. It just looks for an individual that omnipotent governments can do anything, but they have the same limitations as anyone of us. If there are X of something and government would print X*3 equivalent of paper to pay for it, it would denominate the value of the paper the government call money, but won't make more of X. What they can do (the same goes with corporations) is to expand their spending at expensive of individuals and business, present and future. You don't see it in static. But that what helps most government projects to survive. I already described what happens when they have no space to expand. >(imagine 100 sewer companies with 100 sets of pipes, ...) Sewers, pipes, wires and similar entities are physically bound. Pension funds and healthcare organizations do not provide anything that are bound to specific place. I am not preaching "rampant theoretical capitalism". I am telling that these things, "alternatives" are doomed from their start as governments exist in the same world as individuals and companies. There is no magic behind it. They are fine now and here, but that won't last forever.

Re: California passes bill that classifies gig economy workers as employees

#728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I cringe every time somebody says "Oh but Lyft treats drivers so much better than Uber, right?" I'm somebody who genuinely thought this was the case. Would you mind elaborating?

Ok, here's the rant I really try not to give to my passengers. I apologize for the length. TL;DR - Do you want to date an emotionally unavailable a-hole, or an emotionally manipulative a-hole? Pick your poison. Lyft's president once said regarding Uber, "We're not the nice guys. We're a better boyfriend." This statement describes Lyft so much better than I ever could. They don't care about doing the right thing, they…

> The notion of keeping independent contractors busy is a strange one. This seems so clearly anti-competitive I don't know how it's even legal.

If my company is paying contractors, they generally want them to be busy; I'm not sure what you mean by that

WRT the anti-competitive statement, are you suggesting that lyft is intentionally making it harder to drive XL for both uber and lyft? TBH, I'm not sure that'd hit on any competition laws but I'm willing to be convinced

Thank you for your post, it lets me see a lot of things I would have never put together. It's impressive how much thought lyft put into their platform to monetize guilt, and ensure "stickiness" of their platform / drivers

Re: California passes bill that classifies gig economy workers as employees

#729
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being profoundly unqualified to evaluate legislation, the electorate is highly susceptible to well-crafted advertising on ballot measures and can easily end up voting for something that they don't philosophically agree with. This is why direct democracy is generally considered a failed concept and why California's state administration is generally considered a failure, propped up only by the nearly incomprehensible a…

Speak for yourself. I am no less qualified than my elected reps. You don’t know what’s best for me. Don’t like voting on the laws that govern you? Then don’t vote.

That’s like saying “I can fly this plane better than this pilot.” If it’s true, you need to be hiring better pilots.

Re: California passes bill that classifies gig economy workers as employees

#730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you'd rather drive without a guaranteed minimum wage, possibility for unemployment benefits, or health care benefits? I fail to see how that leaves the driver in a better position.

Better position compared to what? > a guaranteed minimum wage A min-wage guarantee implies Uber and Lyft will tell you when and where to drive because it would demolish the fundamental mechanism we drivers use to allocate ourselves. Otherwise we would all clump up in a parking lot somewhere trying to insulate ourselves from the costs of driving people around while collecting $10/hr. > possibility for unemployment ben…

> Life's rough. Hopefully I solve this problem with a better job in the near future.

A nation of temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

Post reply on HN