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'The Gig Economy' Is the New Term for Serfdom

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Re: 'The Gig Economy' Is the New Term for Serfdom

#201

Post by gringoDan »

Lavery wrote: post #138
jillesvangurp wrote: post #109

How can you write an article like this without bringing up self driving cars? The end game for Uber is to get drivers out of the loop completely. So, this is just a temporary problem. It's going to get a whole lot worse if your plan in life is to drive vehicles around to make money. This is not about the gig economy but simply about a lot of jobs becoming commodities before being automated away completely. Anyone wit…

People constantly cite self-driving cars as Uber's salvation, but never really seem to think through the implication. Hypothetically, let's say that self-driving cars are invented next year. Necessarily, these will start in high-end vehicles (as nearly all new car features do) before getting rolled out to the broader ecosystem. Now if you're Uber you face one of two choices: 1) You enter into perhaps the most capital…

Building on this analysis: Self-driving cars will DESTROY Uber. In the long-run, self-driving car networks will become a regulated utility.

Uber's current business:

Uber is the middleman in a two-sided marketplace. It connects drivers with passengers, and takes a cut for this service.

Uber's competitive advantage is that it had the capital to attract drivers - with lots of drivers on its network, costs & wait times are lower for passengers, so passengers use Uber. And so on and so forth, flywheel metaphor, etc.

Self-driving:

Assuming self-driving car saturation, Uber's competitive advantage completely disappears. As a passenger, all I care about is getting from point A to point B safely, quickly, and cheaply.

As a manufacturer of self-driving cars, why would I sell or lease them to a middleman (or if we're getting extreme, even to consumers!) to take the profits in this space? As Tesla, GM, etc. I am going to pump out a fleet of self-driving cars and have consumers pay for a subscription plan (X number of minutes / miles per month on my fleet). Because this is a very capital-intensive business, the government will then grant local monopolies to different providers and regulate the prices, much as it does today with telecoms.

Uber provides no value in this scenario unless it can figure out how to develop the best self-driving software that is installed in these cars (and that seems extremely unlikely). The winners in this space are going to be car manufacturers and the developers of the self-driving tech that get legal approval. I'd imagine these software companies negotiate a great licensing deal to the car manufacturers.

I suppose since the rollout of self-driving tech will be slow, Uber can continue to operate in a hybrid space with some self-driving cars and some drivers. Whether or not it will be profitable is a different question altogether. But I have no faith in the long-term viability of Uber's business model once we reach a saturation point of self-driving cars. We are going to look back on this time in 20 years and talk about how VCs subsidized a lot of cab rides.

Re: 'The Gig Economy' Is the New Term for Serfdom

#202

Post by zanny »

merpnderp wrote: post #34
shusson wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is we are heading in the direction of more inequality where people feel like slaves to the economy.

Slaves because they have to work at all? Or slaves because flipping burgers doesn't pay for for a McMansion? Because someone else makes millions does that absolve someone else from working at all at whatever value they can provide?

More like a studio apartment today costs as much as a McMansion did per month 20 years ago. Wages went up 30%, price of housing went up 300%.

The relevant statistic is that there are simply not enough jobs paying living wages relative to the number of people that need them. Flipping burgers is not a livable job in 90% of the places where corporations want burgers flipped (ie fast food joints in cities where cost of living is astronomical).

Re: 'The Gig Economy' Is the New Term for Serfdom

#203

Post by TACIXAT »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #162
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if we get a universal basic income, all prices will just increase to compensate. I don't believe it'll be possible. It would need to be at or above minimum wage. It would have to be adjusted to location, so someone in SF would make $100K / year off basic income. And that in turn would cause fraud, e.g. registering you're living in SF while living somewhere cheap. It's some weird Star Trek utopic vision, but I…

A lot of the problem could be solved with public provision in such a way as to force the price down. A "national housing service" charging break-even rents would make it impossible for private landlords to capture UBI with a raised rent, for example.

It would be much nicer to just build more housing, rather than taking away landlords' profits while not addressing the lack of supply.

Re: 'The Gig Economy' Is the New Term for Serfdom

#204

Post by reading-at-work »

emodendroket wrote: post #189
reading-at-work wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but in the context of this article it's just embellishment to whip up the reader's anger at the supposed injustice of Uber and Lyft. It doesn't contribute to any fact-based arguments and it shows the author as incredibly biased against big business in general.

But it's an opinion piece in a left-wing publication.

You can still formulate opinions based on facts instead of on sensationalist fear-mongering.

Re: 'The Gig Economy' Is the New Term for Serfdom

#205

Post by bbddg »

turc1656 wrote: post #183
bbddg wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He doesn't pay them how much their work is worth. He pays less, that's how he makes money.

That's how every single profitable business operates. It's not a bad thing, it's a requirement. If a business pays you exactly the value you bring to them, then they do not earn anything from employing you, and have no profits to reinvestment into the business or reward investors for taking the risk of investing in the business. For this reason, not a single person who isn't self-employed ever gets paid "what they ar…

Yeah thanks, I understand how it works. I happen to think it is a bad thing.

Re: 'The Gig Economy' Is the New Term for Serfdom

#206

Post by grasshopperpurp »

reading-at-work wrote: post #170
grasshopperpurp wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, which parts do you disagree with? Or, do you just disagree with the sensationalist language?

I agree that humans in general with unchecked power can become dictatorial maniacs. I disagree that the CEOs of ride-hailing companies specifically will become dictatorial maniacs. I think that kind of sensationalist language discredits the article to a large degree, and doesn't contribute to the author's argument in a concrete way. It's an appeal to emotion, not a rational and defensible argument.

Appreciate you breaking that down, and I agree that the sensationalist language is not helpful (preaching to the choir, etc.), but I think discredits goes too far. I can say something completely true in the most obnoxious way possible, and it can turn off a lot of people, but it doesn't alter the truth.

I believe that he's harping on CEOs of ride-hailing companies, because they're the obvious example that everyone is familiar with. His overall statement, as I read it, is closer to:

>humans in general with unchecked power can become dictatorial maniacs.

And, I think that's the salient point. Others have hit on it, but if a society is too Capitalistic or too Socialistic, the power-hungry people (who always have and, presumably, always will exist) will take advantage of the imbalance, and the people (general population) will suffer as a result. On a large scale, it shouldn't matter how evil/greedy any CEO or politician is, because their power should be limited. The problem, of course, is finding the right balance.

Re: 'The Gig Economy' Is the New Term for Serfdom

#207

Post by Broken_Hippo »

jumbopapa wrote: post #80
reading-at-work wrote: post #67

"The reign of the all-powerful capitalist class has returned with a vengeance. The job conditions of working men and women, thrust backward, will not improve until they regain the militancy and rebuild the popular organizations that seized power from the capitalists." ... "The ruling capitalists will be as vicious as they were in the past. Nothing enrages the rich more than having to part with a fraction of their obs…

I agree. The whole article is basically saying that it's unfair that they have competition now. Sure, cab drivers may not be making as good of a living as before, but in general everyone else has gained a lot in regards to lower fares.

This isn't so much about competition. It is about unfair competition. One side has rules and regulations they need to abide by. Many are simply there to make things fair (like meters). Some are safety (not mentioned, but requiring a different class of drivers license). Some are things that obviously should be changed (car models, for example, or the medallion system). Some things are probably a mixture of safety and ridiculousness (special car colors help folks know it isn't just some person acting like a cab, but ridiculous in the manner that there are other ways to do such things).

Not everyone gains by having lower fares if you need to get to work during a busy hour, as mentioned in the article. Surge pricing and weird pricing schemes makes it difficult to plan when money is tight.

And they do mention that Uber drivers aren't exactly better off. "not as good of a living" is one thing. Poverty and homelessness is quite another, and seems to be happening on both sides of this.

Want competition? Fine. Make sure folks are playing by the same rules and regulations.

Re: 'The Gig Economy' Is the New Term for Serfdom

#208

Post by emodendroket »

reading-at-work wrote: post #185
bbddg wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when people were trying to overthrow monarchies to introduce democracy and capitalism it didn't exactly go smoothly either. Capitalism in America might not have even been possible without the extensive use of slave labor and the genocide of an entire continent of people. There is such an ahistorical bend to anti-socialist rhetoric that is so pervasive in our society it's nearly impossible to see.

"Capitalism in America might not have even been possible without the extensive use of slave labor and the genocide of an entire continent of people" Rolling my eyes pretty hard at that one. Can you elaborate? Do you really think the whole system would have failed without slave labor? How was the capitalist economy different back then, such that free labor was absolutely necessary for it to be sustained? "There is suc…

Counterfactuals are difficult, but surely you'd agree that the Triangle Trade was important to the economies that actually ended up leading the Industrial Revolution.

Although I have not read it, I think Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery is an influential work well known for forcefully arguing for a link between the eponymous phenomena (of course not everyone agrees with its claims).

Re: 'The Gig Economy' Is the New Term for Serfdom

#209

Post by emodendroket »

reading-at-work wrote: post #204
emodendroket wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's an opinion piece in a left-wing publication.

You can still formulate opinions based on facts instead of on sensationalist fear-mongering.

The article offers facts and editorializing. I don't see much issue.

Re: 'The Gig Economy' Is the New Term for Serfdom

#210

Post by thawkins »

jumbopapa wrote: post #80
reading-at-work wrote: post #67

"The reign of the all-powerful capitalist class has returned with a vengeance. The job conditions of working men and women, thrust backward, will not improve until they regain the militancy and rebuild the popular organizations that seized power from the capitalists." ... "The ruling capitalists will be as vicious as they were in the past. Nothing enrages the rich more than having to part with a fraction of their obs…

I agree. The whole article is basically saying that it's unfair that they have competition now. Sure, cab drivers may not be making as good of a living as before, but in general everyone else has gained a lot in regards to lower fares.

That's not what the article is saying, it's saying that the gig economy is all about transferring all the power from Labour to capital, about making the balance even more skewed in the wrong direction. You can't operate a meritocracy if there is no opertunnity to improve, if you are just an interchangeable unit. You can't improve if the system forces you beyond what is humanly possible to be above average, and where average is pined at the upper limit of performance
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