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Interview with Deliveroo couriers appealing bargaining-rights decision

theguardian.com

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Re: Interview with Deliveroo couriers appealing bargaining-rights decision

#71

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

menacingly wrote: post #10
roel_v wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true to a certain extent, but experience (19th century beginning-of-industrialization) has taught us that the floor (i.e., the equilibrium) is bad enough that we don't want that sort of circumstances. In other words, it turns out that people want to work to eat so badly that they'll put up with working 14-hour days and letting their 10 year old children work in factories that literally kill 10's of them per ye…

This is a reasonable position and well-stated, but my concern is the implication that you will be vilified if you start a business that can't maintain a full time workforce with benefits. So, let's say you're an investor. You've got the choice of: 1) invest in a business with traditional happy lifer employees 2) invest in a business that treats its workforce like disposable contractors and may eventually become an En…

4) invest in a business that employs slaves

I think it is generally agreed that #4 is preferable to #3. Because local jobs!111

I mean, seriously? That is your argument?

Re: Interview with Deliveroo couriers appealing bargaining-rights decision

#72

Post by dgellow »

moe98ntuin34 wrote: post #39

To me, the real takeaway is this: > unlike, say, immigration law, there is weak enforcement of employment law. For me in the US, this is the crux of the current wave of anti-immigrant sentiment. The problem isn't "immigrants stealing our jobs." It's shitty jobs that don't cover basic costs and have inhumane working conditions. But the people in power have done a great job of misdirecting people's attention to immigra…

Two things can be true at once. It’s unlikely that there is only one cause to a problem in something as complex as the economy of a country.

Both immigration (both legal and illegal) and employment regulation should be considered and evaluated accordingly. Dismissing one or the other won’t give us a good understanding of reality.

Re: Interview with Deliveroo couriers appealing bargaining-rights decision

#73

Post by philwelch »

eropple wrote: post #66
jstanley wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there's nothing wrong with that! If people find that "far preferable", that's up to them, not you.

There's a lot wrong with that when society-- us --have the duty and obligation, which we do , to help when that Deliveroo driver gets doored and can't pay a medical bill because the job is comedically penurious. Employers have a duty to their employees and to the society and community that grants them the right to the fiction of their existence, and that is being shirked.

> There's a lot wrong with that when society--us--have the duty and obligation, which we do, to help when that Deliveroo driver gets doored and can't pay a medical bill because the job is comedically penurious.

Which is why Britain has the NHS.

To me, the entire point of a robust welfare state is that you don't need to regulate employment nearly as strictly, because then you aren't as reliant on employers for life necessities. And that's a net positive, because regulation is far less effective than entitlements.

Re: Interview with Deliveroo couriers appealing bargaining-rights decision

#74

Post by dang »

kome wrote: post #17
kop316 wrote: post #2

Serious question: If the conditions are just that bad, why even bother to work for them? There seems to be some sort of equilibrium to me where if it gets bad enough, no one will simply want to do this job, and choose to take some other low paying job (e.g. retail, fast food, etc.).

> why even bother to work for them? Do you really need an answer? Sorry if I seem too aggressive, but I am quite frustrated by your (fake? real?) cluelessness.

Please assume good faith, as the site guidelines ask.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Interview with Deliveroo couriers appealing bargaining-rights decision

#75

Post by conductr »

pfortuny wrote: post #16
kop316 wrote: post #2

Serious question: If the conditions are just that bad, why even bother to work for them? There seems to be some sort of equilibrium to me where if it gets bad enough, no one will simply want to do this job, and choose to take some other low paying job (e.g. retail, fast food, etc.).

Read Dickens to get an idea of what human beings can “accept” to make a “living” for their families.

I think optionality is a key difference. In Dickens' day, every job was a factory job and they all sucked. I'm pretty sure Deliveroo riders have other min wage options if they disagree with how Deliveroo wants to run it's business. Not to say that I fully agree with Deliveroo's choices if they are represented correctly, but I do agree with their ability to make those choices

Re: Interview with Deliveroo couriers appealing bargaining-rights decision

#76

Post by dang »

moe98ntuin34 wrote: post #39

To me, the real takeaway is this: > unlike, say, immigration law, there is weak enforcement of employment law. For me in the US, this is the crux of the current wave of anti-immigrant sentiment. The problem isn't "immigrants stealing our jobs." It's shitty jobs that don't cover basic costs and have inhumane working conditions. But the people in power have done a great job of misdirecting people's attention to immigra…

This breaks the HN guidelines by taking the thread on a generic flamebait tangent (anti-immigration politics in the US). Such paths lead reliably to generic flamewars, the thing we need most to avoid on this site, so please don't take them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Interview with Deliveroo couriers appealing bargaining-rights decision

#77

Post by philwelch »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #22
darkerside wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I posit that, in that case, a new "normal" baseline would be established by social consensus (perhaps, owning a home, smart phone, access to media, high quality medical care, and organic food) that is above what is afforded by the UBI. Falling below that threshold would then be deemed just as unacceptable as the poverty line today. And people won't solve it by taking on these undesirable jobs, they'll rail against an…

If we imagine that "life goodness" can be measured by a single real number, and we model it with a normal distribution with a mean somewhere on the positive axis, then one way to say what you describe is that we create a threshold somewhere along the left-hand tail of that distribution, and we declare anything below the threshold as morally unacceptable, in need of social constraints that prevent the permissibility o…

Here's the thing, though. On a global level, poverty is measured by a threshold of whether or not you can sleep through the night without getting bitten by malaria-infested mosqitoes. Gig workers in Western countries aren't anywhere near the left-hand side of the tail. Most of these distributive justice arguments have a nationalistic bent where the global poor don't matter at all.

Re: Interview with Deliveroo couriers appealing bargaining-rights decision

#78

Post by klipt »

moe98ntuin34 wrote: post #39

To me, the real takeaway is this: > unlike, say, immigration law, there is weak enforcement of employment law. For me in the US, this is the crux of the current wave of anti-immigrant sentiment. The problem isn't "immigrants stealing our jobs." It's shitty jobs that don't cover basic costs and have inhumane working conditions. But the people in power have done a great job of misdirecting people's attention to immigra…

> Boy are they going to be disappointed when all the immigrants are gone and they still can't make a living.

The people in power who use immigrants as a distraction have no intention of actually getting rid of the immigrants. They know they need them around for blaming.

Re: Interview with Deliveroo couriers appealing bargaining-rights decision

#79

Post by chimeracoder »

amelius wrote: post #36
crankylinuxuser wrote: post #15

On a different reading and assessment: Many jobs, no, most jobs are combinations of small individual parts of a whole action. And this shows that piecemeal work by dozens of different people not only works, but bypasses the whole level of employee/employer level controls. Take a lawyer's job for example.. The research can be farmed off crowdsourced style. Nobody has to know what the case is about, only the search par…

Except lawyers and doctors are highly protective of their employment and status. There's often a numerus clausus in universities, limiting the number of doctors that enter the field. And there's the FDA which controls medical practices, and since they consist of medically trained people, they are probably also highly protective of the status quo.

> There's often a numerus clausus in universities, limiting the number of doctors that enter the field.

The number of doctors that enter the field is limited not by the number of people who graduate with medical degrees, but by the number of residency positions available for training. Every year, we graduate more medical students than we have residency slots available, and that's not including foreign graduates who do their medical studies abroad but want to practice in the US. There is no artificial limit for residency slots; the limit is the amount of funding available.

Most of these are heavily subsidized by the government. Hospitals are free to create their own positions in addition, if they can fund them themselves. Very few do, because residency programs actually lose money on margin.

Re: Interview with Deliveroo couriers appealing bargaining-rights decision

#80

Post by philwelch »

grasshopperpurp wrote: post #61
turc1656 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Essentially the wealthy would be deciding at which threshold upward human progress gets to stop..." No, that's not what that would mean. It means the producers of society get to determine at what point they wish to stop providing government mandated subsidies through either taxation or deficit spending to the non-producers or those who produce far less value. There should be absolutely nothing wrong with people deci…

>There should be absolutely nothing wrong with people deciding that they do not wish to handover any more of their wealth. If your opinion is that the "system" is the culprit and these people are being squashed by bad laws, policies, etc., the proper recourse is not to legally rob others to help those people - the solution is to fix the bad laws and policies that may benefit the rich unfairly. How do we fix bad laws…

> Every piece of the pie picked up by the 0.1 percent, in relative terms, had to come from the people below.

Economics is not a zero-sum game.

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