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Europe inches closer to insisting gig workers are treated as employees

theregister.com

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Re: Europe inches closer to insisting gig workers are treated as employees

#41

Post by Barrin92 »

hunglee2 wrote: post #2

This is probably bad news on aggregate The positive intent to give citizens greater protections is laudable but gig working is not always a straight forward 'capitalism bad' exploitation as it is often characterised. For many, it is the only type of job / income they can secure (i.e recent immigrant) and otherwise would be locked out of the legal economy altogether and will transition into the _illegal_ economy for w…

> gig working is not always a straight forward 'capitalism bad' exploitation

It's not even about exploitation. Gig work is terrible from a capital formation standpoint. Gig workers are permanently low productivity workers with no breathing room or incentive for anyone to upskill them.

It's bad from a capitalist standpoint. Underdeveloped economies are basically all gig work because there's low levels of corporate organization. One explicit goal of the Nordic welfare model wasn't just alleviating poverty, but literally driving low productivity work out of the economy. Gig working is literally reverting to a sort of pre-capitalist mode of production. Varoufakis comes to mind, who correctly points this out in his recent book on digital platforms.

Re: Europe inches closer to insisting gig workers are treated as employees

#42

Post by cung »

gruez wrote: post #18
janrito wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should we as a society, or even worse, poor immigrats, subsidise a company's bad business model. If you want to compete for labour and customers in a society, you should follow the rules. If you cannot provide food deliveries whilst paying your employees fairly, then you should not be in business. Even worse if you are skimming minimum-wage worker's pay to produce a 10X VC return.

>If you cannot provide food deliveries whilst paying your employees fairly, then you should not be in business. This doesn't address the parent poster's point: >For many, it is the only type of job / income they can secure (i.e recent immigrant) and otherwise would be locked out of the legal economy altogether and will transition into the _illegal_ economy for want of options. Changes like these aren't a free lunch.…

If slavery was legal and about to be made illegal, would you argue the same point?

Re: Europe inches closer to insisting gig workers are treated as employees

#43

Post by InCityDreams »

gruez wrote: post #8
lm28469 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the subtitle summarises it pretty good: "If it looks like a job, and is supervised like a job, it'll be classified as a job". The bullet points down the article make it even clearer. Freelancing implies some independence/freedom which most uber or deliveroo drivers don't have in practice. For example in France you can't declare yourself as a freelancer if you have a single client which dictates your working h…

>Freelancing implies some independence/freedom which most uber or deliveroo drivers don't have in practice. >For example in France you can't declare yourself as a freelancer if you have a single client which dictates your working hours and employs you for very loosely defined missions, because for all intent and purpose you'd be an employee. Is this some European thing I'm no aware of? Gig workers can accept jobs fro…

>Is this some European thing I'm no aware of? Gig workers can accept jobs from multiple apps and log on anytime they want.

Don't know about it only being a euro-thang, but what you describe is almost the very definition of gig-working. Except, they often can't do 'anytime they want'.

Re: Europe inches closer to insisting gig workers are treated as employees

#44

Post by mewpmewp2 »

lm28469 wrote: post #34
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also all of those rules are so vague, it could be argued in any case someone is doing some of that in any sort of deal. 1. Company A has a max budget for contractor B or project B. 2. In most cases performance is supervised at least to some extent? 3. Not sure what that exactly means. What are tasks? What is control of distribution or allocation? 4. What does control mean? What if they have a dynamic pricing rate whi…

> Also all of those rules are so vague, Still less vague than the current regulation, and it'll allow thousands of people to get social benefits/vacations/retirement/&c.

Aren't they just trading their income for those benefits though?

Re: Europe inches closer to insisting gig workers are treated as employees

#45

Post by gruez »

cung wrote: post #42
gruez wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you cannot provide food deliveries whilst paying your employees fairly, then you should not be in business. This doesn't address the parent poster's point: >For many, it is the only type of job / income they can secure (i.e recent immigrant) and otherwise would be locked out of the legal economy altogether and will transition into the _illegal_ economy for want of options. Changes like these aren't a free lunch.…

If slavery was legal and about to be made illegal, would you argue the same point?

Except slavery is non-consensual whereas working in a shitty job isn't.

Re: Europe inches closer to insisting gig workers are treated as employees

#46

Post by janrito »

gruez wrote: post #18
janrito wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should we as a society, or even worse, poor immigrats, subsidise a company's bad business model. If you want to compete for labour and customers in a society, you should follow the rules. If you cannot provide food deliveries whilst paying your employees fairly, then you should not be in business. Even worse if you are skimming minimum-wage worker's pay to produce a 10X VC return.

>If you cannot provide food deliveries whilst paying your employees fairly, then you should not be in business. This doesn't address the parent poster's point: >For many, it is the only type of job / income they can secure (i.e recent immigrant) and otherwise would be locked out of the legal economy altogether and will transition into the _illegal_ economy for want of options. Changes like these aren't a free lunch.…

I don't think you can make the argument — in good faith — that the current requirements are too onerous.

Facilitating the exploitation of vulnerable people in order to provide cheap services for customers with much more price flexibility and increase the profit margin of VCs is a political decision. One that I will not support, and I'm glad our collective government is acting against it. It does not go far enough.

Re: Europe inches closer to insisting gig workers are treated as employees

#47

Post by CamperBob2 »

cung wrote: post #42
gruez wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you cannot provide food deliveries whilst paying your employees fairly, then you should not be in business. This doesn't address the parent poster's point: >For many, it is the only type of job / income they can secure (i.e recent immigrant) and otherwise would be locked out of the legal economy altogether and will transition into the _illegal_ economy for want of options. Changes like these aren't a free lunch.…

If slavery was legal and about to be made illegal, would you argue the same point?

Slavery is still a thing. Some authorities warn that there are more slaves today than at any time in history (e.g., https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/25/modern-slavery-... ).

This isn't slavery. But good job dismissing the reality of slavery by comparing it to a voluntary paid job.

Re: Europe inches closer to insisting gig workers are treated as employees

#48

Post by impossiblefork »

rightbyte wrote: post #40
impossiblefork wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to understand though, that most of this work is not sufficient to sustain society. There's a report from the Centraal Planbureau in the Netherlands 'Immigration and the Dutch Economy' ( https://www.cpb.nl/sites/default/files/publicaties/download/... ). Take a look at page 61 and the graph 'age profile of net contributions'. As you see, even the average non-Western immigrant, which of course includes hi…

I guess that assumes wage is proportional to added value to society?

For people other than teachers, physicians and some other things of that sort, I think that's a true assumption.
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