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The Gig Economy Is Being Sued to Death

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Re: The Gig Economy Is Being Sued to Death

#121

Post by cstejerean »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #114
CPLX wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct. Most of the obfuscation comes from the fact that people don't like to follow the rules. It's actually not that hard to sum up the difference between a contractor and an employee. If the suspected employer regulates the time, place, and manner of the work being performed, chances are they're not contractors. Yes, there's more nuance than that. But most of the supposed controversy usually involves peop…

Huh; This is the best argument I've heard for Uber drivers being Contractors rather than Employees. In fact, it's a pretty good argument for all of 'gig culture' being contractors, since you can accept and reject jobs. I'd previously been strongly on the other side.

Except for the manner of the work portion. That part makes it questionable.

Re: The Gig Economy Is Being Sued to Death

#122

Post by rayiner »

pdonis wrote: post #117
rayiner wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coase's theorem doesn't apply when the parties can't transact with each other to shift the burden. Customers can choose to use properly insured drivers but someone who gets hit or has her property damaged by a driver doesn't get to choose one that has the requisite commercial insurance.

> Coase's theorem doesn't apply when the parties can't transact with each other to shift the burden. That's true, but it's irrelevant to the point murbard2 was making. He's not arguing that the person who gets hit should bear the liability; he's arguing that it doesn't necessarily have to be Uber that bears the liability, at least not as an initial condition; it could be either the individual driver or the passenger,…

> You can make an argument that consumers are irrational and are unlikely to really look into whether or not the cars / drivers are insured, but that's a different argument than externalization

This part makes me think that he did not consider the scenario of a driver hitting someone else. It is precisely the problem of externalization. If the initial liability isn't on the company, it will be on a party (the driver or passenger) that won't actually have the assets to pay in the case of an accident. In that case, it is de facto externalized onto the poor sap who gets hit.

Re: The Gig Economy Is Being Sued to Death

#123

Post by waps »

gwern wrote: post #116

One question to ask here is why TaskRabbit and Uber and Handy are going so close to the employee/contractor problem in the first place: why, if the risk is so dire and the issue so well-known (which it is, there's been articles occasionally for years now, and most critical articles or pieces will venture the observation that their contractors are really employees) they are putting in place all those requirements and…

1) cost : contractors without work are free. No insurance (not even with ObamaCare). No providing infrastructure. No nothing ...

2) risk : contractor fucks up, contractor is legally responsible. Employee fucks up, firm is reponsible.

3) Ease of firing and the resulting pressure that can be applied to employees. Contractors don't even have to be fired to be fired.

4) Customer/payment risk. Suppose a customer doesn't pay. In the case of an employee, the employer has to pay the employee and the infrastructure. In the case of a contractor, the contractor is screwed (in some cases they actually have to pay transaction costs even if the customer doesn't pay)

Re: The Gig Economy Is Being Sued to Death

#124

Post by Spooky23 »

mc32 wrote: post #83
techsupporter wrote: post #4

The rules, such as they are, seem fairly straightforward. If, in the case of outfits like Handy and Uber and Instacart, the "employer" is laying down rules, requiring certain performance, setting the price, and enforcing metrics, they are an employer and the person doing the work is an employee who should be treated as such. If, in the case of outfits like Redbeacon, the site is collecting leads and distributing them…

One of the things I find ironic is how many people in tech, as we as those who leach off tech like the tech press, both hailed this new "sharing" economy as it was framed. Disrupting the old antiquated regulations was good, reducing friction was good, democratization of resources was good. Now suddenly its a surprise that the value of these companies was misplaced. That they arguably bring harm. That in the end they…

The "sharing" part is a scam, the same tired nonsense that napster tried. The tech press swallows it hook line and sinker because they are trade rags, and pissing off the cool kids will cut off the flow of future stories.

Many aspects of Uber and Airbnb's business model are awesome. The problem is that they have growth targets to hit which require breaking a few eggs.

Re: The Gig Economy Is Being Sued to Death

#125

Post by pdonis »

rayiner wrote: post #122
pdonis wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Coase's theorem doesn't apply when the parties can't transact with each other to shift the burden. That's true, but it's irrelevant to the point murbard2 was making. He's not arguing that the person who gets hit should bear the liability; he's arguing that it doesn't necessarily have to be Uber that bears the liability, at least not as an initial condition; it could be either the individual driver or the passenger,…

> You can make an argument that consumers are irrational and are unlikely to really look into whether or not the cars / drivers are insured, but that's a different argument than externalization This part makes me think that he did not consider the scenario of a driver hitting someone else. It is precisely the problem of externalization. If the initial liability isn't on the company, it will be on a party (the driver…

> If the initial liability isn't on the company, it will be on a party (the driver or passenger) that won't actually have the assets to pay in the case of an accident.

Why not? In the hypothetical Coasian scenario where the company doesn't have liability but the driver and/or passenger will negotiate with the company to change the terms to compensate, the driver and/or passenger know that they are liable and the company isn't. (If they didn't know, they wouldn't know to renegotiate the terms.)

What you appear to be assuming is that the driver and passenger will not know, i.e., that they will be blindsided by the fact that they are liable, the first time the vehicle gets in an accident. But even if that's the case, why is that the company's fault? Isn't the driver responsible for knowing what he is and is not liable for when he takes paying passengers? Even if he wasn't taking paying passengers, he'd still have to have insurance, so it's not like the concept of him being liable when his car hits someone is new to him. (The passenger has more of an excuse here, since he's not driving and would not be expected to bear responsibility under just about any legal standard currently in play.)

Re: The Gig Economy Is Being Sued to Death

#126

Post by Kalium »

al2o3cr wrote: post #42

"Lose this workforce structure—either by a wave of class-action lawsuits, intervention by regulators, or through the collective action of disgruntled workers—and you lose the gig economy." Hang on, lemme get my tiny violin to properly eulogize the loss of an opportunity for VCs to get rich on the backs of low-wage workers. Won't you please think of the billionaires?

You might consider eulogizing the low-wage workers who suddenly find themselves no-wage unemployed.

Re: The Gig Economy Is Being Sued to Death

#127

Post by Kalium »

smacktoward wrote: post #45
mathattack wrote: post #31

This is a very touchy area. Firms can pay $20 an hour for cleaning services precisely because they're not paying for sick days, health insurance and the like. If they have to pay all that, then the wages go down. This is one of many reasons why a large company will pay a company like Accenture two or three times the salary compensation of it's own employees. (There are other reasons too, like having someone to blame…

> Firms can pay $20 an hour for cleaning services precisely because they're not paying for sick days, health insurance and the like. If they have to pay all that, then the wages go down. Or they could, you know, charge more. The problem with "let the market solve it" is that customers are generally extremely price-sensitive, and if all the other cleaning companies are getting away with misclassifying their workers, t…

What happens if suddenly everyone is charging $25 - and prices for everything else have gone up too - and consumers responding by reducing consumption?

One suspects that both Good Guy Cleaners and Bad Guy Cleaners are going to have problems.

Re: The Gig Economy Is Being Sued to Death

#128

Post by Kalium »

shawnee_ wrote: post #10
toomuchtodo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will never occur, as businesses employing these workers want employee level of control with independent contractor costs.

Bingo. What all of these supposed "gig" economy jobs have in common is the parent company's tendency to shift all the risk to non-employees / ICs while reaping most of the economic value of the reward -- taking a heftier cut than it should from the business transaction. The value derived from being an IC that's truly independent is being able to charge more for the "temporary" nature of the work and the risk of end-c…

> Bingo. What all of these supposed "gig" economy jobs have in common is the parent company's tendency to shift all the risk to non-employees / ICs while reaping most of the economic value of the reward -- taking a heftier cut than it should from the business transaction.

What kind of cut should they be taking? Bear in mind that Uber takes a smaller cut than Apple does. Lyft goes as low as 10%.

Re: The Gig Economy Is Being Sued to Death

#129

Post by ilaksh »

copsarebastards wrote: post #56

A side question: these pages that load with a gigantic graphic that covers the entire screen which I have to scroll past to get to the content have got to die. Is there a plugin which removes these from websites? I haven't found one, but I may be just searching for the wrong keywords.

Their mobile has a bug where the right side of the text is hidden. I clicked the full site link to reload and then could read the article.

Re: The Gig Economy Is Being Sued to Death

#130

Post by ilaksh »

I believe that the "Gig Economy" in a more general sense is now the largest section of the economy. It may have been that way before the apps came out.

The reality is that most small and many large businesses cannot afford to pay their employees fair or competitive wages and benefits. That has been the case for years, especially any time the economy has a downturn.

The internet has made it so that this issue comes out in the open as it presents obviously with large centralized companies that put smaller companies out of business.

I personally have been part of the "Gig Economy" for most of my life. I am an extremely experienced programmer. I rarely have had a real "full-time" job with benefits. Although almost all of my jobs have been full-time, they just haven't included the benefits of a "real full-time" job.

I have done contract and temporary work because I needed to. The option has always seemed to be to struggle for what could be months to land the ultimate "real" full-time job, or to take what was available as contract work. Since, when I need a job, I usually need it then and not X months down the road, I have had to take the contract work.

The reality is that there just isn't enough money circulating out there for the majority of people to have good pay and benefits. So, from what I can see, the traditional economy is useless and there is no point trying to make it work.

We need to take advantage of technology to solve some structural issues. Money is great, but there isn't enough information in it.

Everyone deserves to be able to live. Most, like myself, are just struggling to survive. This is the result of the Social Darwinist structure created which does not place any intrinsic value on human life.

This is my github. http://github.com/runvnc. Maybe I don't deserve to be able to afford health insurance or a car or to be able to pay my taxes. Perhaps I am just a shitty programmer who should have died on the street years ago.

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