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Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

nytimes.com

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Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#51

Post by mindcrime »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #8

The reduction in jobs in the gig economy has to be a direct result of the overall recovery of the economy. We are at a point where there are more jobs than workers to fill the jobs. Why would anyone take a crap gig job if they can get a steady paycheck? There are people that like the flexibility but the pay sux and no benefits for most of those jobs. The gig economy job is the new temp job. Just like temp jobs, they…

Why would anyone take a crap gig job if they can get a steady paycheck? There are people that like the flexibility

I think you're underestimating how important that flexibility is to a large contingent of people. I have talked a lot of Uber/Lyft drivers and have heard a ton of stories about how valuable that flexibility is. It's huge for students who are in school, for people who already work another job but want supplemental income, people who are mostly retired (or never worked) but have some new expense come up (one lady I spoke to recently started driving for Uber just to help pay for her daughter's upcoming wedding), people who are pursuing careers in music or other artistic endeavors, entrepreneurs who need a way to pay the rent while getting their business bootstrapped, etc.

For a lot of people in those situations, the control over their time really is a crucial aspect of what makes Uber/Lyft desirable.

Granted, that's just one aspect of the gig economy, but it seems to be a big one.

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#52

Post by [deleted] »

kbenson wrote: post #45
lalos wrote: post #5

It did reshape it. Turns out you can offload your costs to your 'employees' that hardly will organize and project costs and earnings to the future (like a competent business). I've talked with bunch of car sharing drivers who were bamboozled with car loans, get hit by traffic infractions, costs of maintenance and the list goes on and on. I feel that the gig economy preys on people who have not developed that risk man…

> I've talked with bunch of car sharing drivers who were bamboozled with car loans, get hit by traffic infractions, costs of maintenance and the list goes on and on. I've seen a lot of the people that some cases of people that do it that are future minded and care about running the numbers just rent a car for the day. All of a sudden, you've abstracted away a lot of those variable costs to a third party. Unfortunatel…

[deleted]

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#53

Post by kbenson »

nerdponx wrote: post #14
lalos wrote: post #5

It did reshape it. Turns out you can offload your costs to your 'employees' that hardly will organize and project costs and earnings to the future (like a competent business). I've talked with bunch of car sharing drivers who were bamboozled with car loans, get hit by traffic infractions, costs of maintenance and the list goes on and on. I feel that the gig economy preys on people who have not developed that risk man…

Interesting that this thread and the "chatbots aren't so great after all" thread hit the front page on the same day. Anyone who actually thought people gave a shit about chatbots was either deluded, a chatbot API salesman, or a manager/owner trying to cut costs by downsizing their call/chat support center. Anyone who actually thought the gig economy was helping anyone but business owners was either deluded or a shill…

> Anyone who actually thought people gave a shit about chatbots was either deluded

People don't need to give a shit about chatbots. A large amount of people deal with them all the time. Every time you decide to use chat to get help from some site that provides s service for you, what do you think the odds are you're first connected to a human? By having chatbots do the initial contact and information gathering, you can streamline the actual process and seamlessly connect and hand off to a real support rep after the rote info gathering is done, and provide them with the account number, a generalized idea of what the problem is, etc. Some requests can probably be handled entirely by the bot (need to change your password? That's easy to script).

Chatbots are all around us, supplementing formal interactions.

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#54

Post by __s »

anyfoo wrote: post #9
danschumann wrote: post #3

People(most people) like to do the same thing every day. Even me, I'm a programmer and have different tasks, but I get most of my work through one client. I would hate to be chasing down new clients all the time.

Is that true, do most people like doing the same thing every day? It certainly is not true for me. EDIT: A few repliers clarified that it's probably about the stable and reliable income, and not about the nature of the work that's done every day. I can agree with that!

I wish I could drop my development job for a data entry job. Inventory counting was a really fun job

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#55

Post by mentat »

kbenson wrote: post #45
lalos wrote: post #5

It did reshape it. Turns out you can offload your costs to your 'employees' that hardly will organize and project costs and earnings to the future (like a competent business). I've talked with bunch of car sharing drivers who were bamboozled with car loans, get hit by traffic infractions, costs of maintenance and the list goes on and on. I feel that the gig economy preys on people who have not developed that risk man…

> I've talked with bunch of car sharing drivers who were bamboozled with car loans, get hit by traffic infractions, costs of maintenance and the list goes on and on. I've seen a lot of the people that some cases of people that do it that are future minded and care about running the numbers just rent a car for the day. All of a sudden, you've abstracted away a lot of those variable costs to a third party. Unfortunatel…

Rental car companies as the new taxi fleet companies would be an interesting turn. They're probably missing an opportunity here.

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#56

Post by CNJ7654 »

cfadvan wrote: post #21
nerdponx wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that this thread and the "chatbots aren't so great after all" thread hit the front page on the same day. Anyone who actually thought people gave a shit about chatbots was either deluded, a chatbot API salesman, or a manager/owner trying to cut costs by downsizing their call/chat support center. Anyone who actually thought the gig economy was helping anyone but business owners was either deluded or a shill…

The problem is that “deluded” and “personally invested in” form a venom diagram that looks a lot like a big circle, especially on business and tech sites.

brb stealing the term "venom diagram" for future use

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#57

Post by agumonkey »

lalos wrote: post #5

It did reshape it. Turns out you can offload your costs to your 'employees' that hardly will organize and project costs and earnings to the future (like a competent business). I've talked with bunch of car sharing drivers who were bamboozled with car loans, get hit by traffic infractions, costs of maintenance and the list goes on and on. I feel that the gig economy preys on people who have not developed that risk man…

let's hope it will create a separate organ to let people work at lower pressure and yet not push up cost of service back to the old ways

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#58

Post by [deleted] »

briandear wrote: post #50
nerdponx wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that this thread and the "chatbots aren't so great after all" thread hit the front page on the same day. Anyone who actually thought people gave a shit about chatbots was either deluded, a chatbot API salesman, or a manager/owner trying to cut costs by downsizing their call/chat support center. Anyone who actually thought the gig economy was helping anyone but business owners was either deluded or a shill…

It helps the business owner and the consumer. Let’s not forget the consumer here. It also helps those willing to engage in gig activities. If Uber wasn’t marginally beneficial to drivers, why do they do it? Acting like Uber drivers are all idiots and need “protecting” is idiotic. If the economics don’t work, they quit.

[deleted]

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#59

Post by megaman22 »

kbenson wrote: post #53
nerdponx wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that this thread and the "chatbots aren't so great after all" thread hit the front page on the same day. Anyone who actually thought people gave a shit about chatbots was either deluded, a chatbot API salesman, or a manager/owner trying to cut costs by downsizing their call/chat support center. Anyone who actually thought the gig economy was helping anyone but business owners was either deluded or a shill…

> Anyone who actually thought people gave a shit about chatbots was either deluded People don't need to give a shit about chatbots. A large amount of people deal with them all the time. Every time you decide to use chat to get help from some site that provides s service for you, what do you think the odds are you're first connected to a human? By having chatbots do the initial contact and information gathering, you c…

Except everyone just spams 0 or "Representative" until they hit a real person, so the actual effect of the chatbot is a lot of money and hype wasted, and irritation on the end-user side.

Re: Maybe the Gig Economy Isn’t Reshaping Work After All

#60

Post by gthtjtkt »

ourmandave wrote: post #6

NPR covered this yesterday. https://www.npr.org/2018/06/07/617863204/one-in-10-workers-a... One note from that story was they missed 25M low-income workers. Jennifer Curry, a senior director at Samaschool, a San Francisco training program for low-income contract workers, estimates the government left out 25 million to 30 million freelance or contract workers who do some part-time work.

> estimates the government left out 25 million to 30 million freelance or contract workers who do some part-time work.

Aren't those exactly the type of workers that the NY Times article is talking about? 25 million is about 16% of the total workforce.

So in reality the number of gig workers might have doubled to something around 20% (or higher)?

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