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Instacart’s gig workers are planning a nationwide strike

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Re: Instacart’s gig workers are planning a nationwide strike

#141
post #126
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Great. Lets ban gig work and make sure that instead of a crappy income they have no income!" There's a much easier answer and that's just to pay them better.

The consumers who place the orders already have the option, today, of paying them as much as they think the service is worth or should be additionally paid. It’s called tipping. Nothing is standing in the way of them being paid better other than consent. Forcing people to pay for things to which they do not consent is deeply immoral.

I think it's hilarious that you are deeply concerned about the shocking immorality of setting a fair price. But have absolutely no moral problem with large-scale worker exploitation.

For those not quite so consumed by their ideology, let me point out that a market economy can only work when relevant factors are included in the price.

E.g., if we want clean rivers and oceans, we could make everybody who ever makes a purchase study the manufacturing process and supply chain and let them decide as individuals to trade off global pollution against sticker price. But even if companies were incredibly transparent about this, it wouldn't work. We'd all be paralyzed with information and analysis overload every time we tried to buy so much as a pack of gum.

So instead what we do is use regulation to force people to price in the no-brainers, and then try to enforce clear labeling at the margins. E.g., there are legitimate disputes about the environmental impact of farming, so you can pay extra get produce that aims to be lower-impact under the regular "organic" label. Or one way we could solve our global CO2 problem is just to put a price on CO2 emissions and then let pricing adjustments flow through the supply chain.

Here, we already have long societal agreement on what reasonable labor standards are. E.g., the 40-hour work week and the 8-hour day go back more than 100 years. We have worked hard to reduce labor exploitation, and for good reason. So rather than absurdly insisting that each person try to calculate a non-exploitative wage adjustment every time they want a pizza delivered, I think we should just require fair wages and then let companies price that in.

Re: Instacart’s gig workers are planning a nationwide strike

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a source for this that isn't random twitter accounts? Looking at the Senate record[0] I can't see anything about the Senator and there doesn't seem to be any news coverage of his involvement in the bill other than the fact that he missed procedural votes for the initial draft. [0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/354...

I’m sure a lot of negotiations are not done on the record—that’s how it works—but here’s a clip of Sanders advocating: https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4863928/user-clip-corona-viru...

The negotiations were certainly not on the record, but we know who was at the table from reporting and where many provisions came from.

* Senators Hoeven and Stabenow secured the $9.5 billion and other aid for the agricultural industry.

* Senators Thune and Warner pushed for the new tax benefit for employers helping employees pay off student loans.

* Senator Shelby got a cap on funds being used for dredging work on harbors removed.

* Senator Leahy ensured every state got a minimum of $1.5 billion in funds so small states weren't left out.

* Senator Booker got the Bureau of Prisons to making videoconferencing free for inmates.

Obviously Secretary Mnuchin and Senator Schumer did most of the heavy lifting.

I can't find anything about Senator Sanders, and that clip is from after the unemployment provisions were already in the bill. The Senator didn't mention anywhere in that speech that he pushed for the inclusion of the unemployment provisions. He actually said "this isn't the bill I would have written," which I personally would have followed up on with an explanation of what I did to make the bill better if I had worked on it.

Re: Instacart’s gig workers are planning a nationwide strike

#143
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It always amazes me how the discussion can go so quickly go from "The mighty market solves all problems!" to, "The market is an incredibly fragile flower, and the slightest worker protections will result in mass unemployment and starvation!" Before Instacart, people went to the grocery store just fine. If Instacart has to pay workers a living wage, some people at the margins might return to shopping themselves, but I…

It can be exploitative and also better than the alternative at the same time. Those things are not in conflict. I understand the moral satisfaction of punishing the evil profiteer. I don’t see how you can claim to be acting on behalf of the worker when you trade off her livelihood in exchange for that satisfaction.

If you can prove the tradeoff, fine. But until recently, the economy was doing great. There's no reason to think that significant numbers of people would have been totally idle if we required people to be paid living wages. Indeed, we can look at other countries that do require that and see low unemployment rates.

Your bogeyman in particular has been brought up with every advance in worker protections. But the 8-hour day and the 40-hour week did not mean mass starvation due to lack of jobs. Reasonable minimum wages don't appear to harm employment significantly.

The truth is that as a society, we a) create plenty of stuff, and b) have plenty of work that needs doing. The problem is one of allocation, and increasing worker exploitation doesn't solve that at all.

Re: Instacart’s gig workers are planning a nationwide strike

#144
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you realize this is the same argument used in support of child labor.

And in countries where children need income to eat, we've seen that banning child labor pushes children into the sex trade, because they don't stop needing to eat when you make it illegal for them to work. Hardly a good example of why the argument is wrong.

[citation needed]

Further, it's not like the only two options available are "exploit children in factories" and "exploit children in brothels". Things like the bolsa familia, for example, have been very effective.

Re: Instacart’s gig workers are planning a nationwide strike

#145
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in Boston, and AFAIK there's nowhere I can get a test without having severe symptoms that require hospitalization.

Work for a hospital system in Boston and can confirm - testing guidelines here remain quite strict.

I donated blood at MGH yesterday, which is how I checked. I'm just hoping to I don't fall down ill in two weeks' time from having set foot, even masked and hand-sanitized, in a hospital.

Re: Instacart’s gig workers are planning a nationwide strike

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why was the company (and many like it) so vulnerable? Many of my friends wear everlane.

Sales of everything non essential are expected to drop drastically.

Why don’t they have enough cash on hand to weather a few months of no sales? Why are american businesses so vulnerable to a downturn after two decades of discussing “black swan” events and “antifragility”? I am honestly bewildered.

Re: Instacart’s gig workers are planning a nationwide strike

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to admire him for that, but then I re-read that "$500 billion bailout of corporations" part. This movie was terrible the first time I was forced to watch it...

The people who desperately need this relief are going to look past that. Compromise is inevitable.

At least some of those desperate people remember the time they were underwater on their mortgage, and then the bank took their house at the same time the bank was getting bailed out and its execs were getting big bonuses. Well, maybe they bought too big a house, and were rightly punished when real estate crashed? This time around, we'll have to be pretty heartless to blame them for getting fired because of a pandemic. When their house goes up for auction this time, somehow it will be the same people bidding for it again, using free loans from the government. I may be out ahead of this with my cynical take, but the public will catch up with me, just like they did last time. (Actually I have to give a lot of credit to Dylan Ratigan; he figured it out before I did this week.)

Bailouts don't have to go mostly to politically connected rich turds. Somehow they always do...

Re: Instacart’s gig workers are planning a nationwide strike

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sales of everything non essential are expected to drop drastically.

Why don’t they have enough cash on hand to weather a few months of no sales? Why are american businesses so vulnerable to a downturn after two decades of discussing “black swan” events and “antifragility”? I am honestly bewildered.

Because a competitor business will instead use that cash to offer a better product and customers will flock to them.

If you see a new or renovated hotel next to an old one, which one will you stay in? If an airline keeps flying old planes and the other airlines invest in new, nicer planes, which one will you choose to fly on?

We see this story play out on these very Hacker News forum, where the common mantra is businesses that don’t invest in the future, that don’t spend on R&D, that don’t take risks deserve to die out and new businesses that did take risks deserve to take their place.

Re: Instacart’s gig workers are planning a nationwide strike

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who desperately need this relief are going to look past that. Compromise is inevitable.

At least some of those desperate people remember the time they were underwater on their mortgage, and then the bank took their house at the same time the bank was getting bailed out and its execs were getting big bonuses. Well, maybe they bought too big a house, and were rightly punished when real estate crashed? This time around, we'll have to be pretty heartless to blame them for getting fired because of a pandemic…

Run for office if you want to contribute towards a fix.

Re: Instacart’s gig workers are planning a nationwide strike

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least some of those desperate people remember the time they were underwater on their mortgage, and then the bank took their house at the same time the bank was getting bailed out and its execs were getting big bonuses. Well, maybe they bought too big a house, and were rightly punished when real estate crashed? This time around, we'll have to be pretty heartless to blame them for getting fired because of a pandemic…

Run for office if you want to contribute towards a fix.

Does that seem likely to be effective? I don't imagine I'm a better, more politically appealing, or more capable person than e.g. Tulsi Gabbard. She has a great story, and she has been right about everything, every time there has been a political question. Yet she is demonized by the war media and even many Democrats. As long as Gabbard and good people like her are frustrated in their efforts to end our stupid wars and use the trillions saved thereby to help regular people, I doubt my running for anything would contribute anything.

Besides, the fix for the corrupt broken system does not exist in the corrupt broken system.

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