Interview with Deliveroo couriers appealing bargaining-rights decision • Hacker News Board

Re: Interview with Deliveroo couriers appealing bargaining-rights decision

#81

Post by Shoue » Thu, May 24, 2018, 5:32 PM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #50

labourcurious wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very well put and the way you describe the intra-company blue-collar / white-collar divide is on the money. You are right, this sucks. I'm more skeptical about not being in a free labor market. I know many people in London who get by on the minimum wage (~16K). I doubt the cost of living in a small-town factory in the Midwest is comparable to the cost of living in London. It's a shitty situation, sure, but it…

I know many people in London who get by on the minimum wage (~16K). What sort of rent are they paying?

It's not ideal but you can share a house with a bunch of people through rent-sharing websites for £200-400 depending on the zone. I personally used that for a short stay while searching for something decent closer to zone 1 to share with my friends, and saved some money at the same time. It definitely wasn't as awful as I was expecting.

Re: Interview with Deliveroo couriers appealing bargaining-rights decision

#82

Post by menacingly » Thu, May 24, 2018, 5:32 PM UTC

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #71

menacingly wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's unfortunate that a frequent response is "so what? who wants those jobs? I sure don't, so I'll decide for these other people who I assume need me to"

This is the thinking that leads to the shuttering of harsh garment factories in the developing world so the employees can go back to child sex work.

Re: Interview with Deliveroo couriers appealing bargaining-rights decision

#83

Post by turc1656 » Thu, May 24, 2018, 5:39 PM UTC

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…

"How do we fix bad laws when the wealthy are paying good money for those bad laws?"

The wealthy only account for a small percentage of the overall population. It is very easy to change the law if and only if people care enough to do so. But they don't. Because that involves work like protesting, writing to representatives, organizing community events, and maybe recalling mayors of congressional reps with votes of no confidence. They'd rather pretend to be outraged on Twitter, so that they don't have to actually do anything and instead watch Dance Moms or binge watch Netflix.

The fix is simple conceptually, but it is society's collective refusal to demand that laws be changed or for existing laws that are being broken to be enforced. If society really, truly wanted to fix the whole "paying good money for those bad laws" issue, it could do so relatively easily. But it's much easier for people to pretend it's not that big of a problem since things are relatively stable and people have what they need for the most part. Why rock the boat, right?

The problem isn't just the wealthy - it's all of us in our refusal to demand the law be enforced, as-written, without exceptions given based on wealth or size of the company/organization. Why was Wells Fargo, for example, allowed to just pay a fine for millions of fake accounts that were created which ripped people off? Those are clear cut felonies. If I opened a small, local bank and did that I'd be rotting in Federal prison right now, guaranteed. The only reason the employees that engaged in this and/or the Wells Fargo executives are not in jail is because society didn't demand the DoJ do it's damn job and indict them at the individual level. Hell, society at large didn't even withdraw their funds in bulk. Why would any retail customer hold deposits with an institution like that when this is a proven, admitted fraud, and was well-publicized? That's the real question. And it's the heart of the matter. And that's just one outrageous scam upon the people that comes to mind. There are many more.

Re: Interview with Deliveroo couriers appealing bargaining-rights decision

#84

Post by jMyles » Thu, May 24, 2018, 5:40 PM UTC

finebalance wrote: post #27

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…

You don't need to go back to the 19th century for that. Any modern sweatshop, of which there are many, will do.

> You don't need to go back to the 19th century for that.

If you're white, you do.

It's easy to forget that today's industry is (still) built on slavery or near-slavery in the third world.

Re: Interview with Deliveroo couriers appealing bargaining-rights decision

#85

Post by menacingly » Thu, May 24, 2018, 5:40 PM UTC

shabble wrote: post #57

menacingly wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I can swallow these "the company owes us something" arguments for businesses so large they make up the entire employment for a city, but not cases like this. It's unsettling that now every business has a big moral obligation to make sure employees make the best choices for themselves.

Alternatively, every business (or rather, the people who operate and control that business) have a moral obligation not to unreasonably exploit their employees. I would expect that to be a fairly common sentiment/belief (though I might be wrong). It comes down to the particular definition of 'unreasonably' that is being used, which different groups can and do disagree about.

That's fair. For instance, company stores in mining towns were clearly designed to trap employees into a lifetime of debt with almost no personal choice in the matter.

It's the choice aspect I focus on. No one is forcing them, and it's borderline elitist of someone with a nice job to say "that's gross work and I think it should go away so things are less gross", along the lines of thinking families straddling the poverty line should simply "eat more quality food"

Re: Interview with Deliveroo couriers appealing bargaining-rights decision

#86

Post by mlthoughts2018 » Thu, May 24, 2018, 5:43 PM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #77

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree with you completely, and spent a lot of time in the past decade reading around 80000 Hours, Giving What We Can, Peter Singer, etc. But I do think there are other forms of suffering, for example severe mental suffering that co-occurs with extreme addiction-related problems, combined with poverty conditions that are surprisingly quite bad, even on a world scale, in parts of the US. In general, I think far too little attention is paid to the way overall quality of life degrades in the presence of psychological trauma. You can have plenty of first world resources and still be living one of the worst lives on the planet, in terms of experienced suffering.

My comment was couched in terms of creature comforts that we have in most parts of the first world, but that's not necessarily the specific standard I'm advocating for, and the more general idea is just that people towards the left of the distribution should never be made to feel like they "shouldn't have" the comforts further to the right -- basically that we all should see progress as somewhat tied to both driving the mean to the right, and reducing the variance so that people at least in the far left tail are continuously brought closer to the far right tail.

Re: Interview with Deliveroo couriers appealing bargaining-rights decision

#87

Post by turc1656 » Thu, May 24, 2018, 5:45 PM UTC

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #60

turc1656 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. I definitely don't mean that. The vast majority of producers (myself included, and most likely you as well) create value for society. I know that I don't disingenuously accumulate wealth or exploit anyone. But I am a producer. This is the case for most people. There's only a small minority of very wealthy people who exploit the labor of others. And as I mentioned in my prior comment, the appropriate solution is t…

As a first-world software developer, I definitely do disingenuously accumulate wealth as a side effect of all sorts of world-wide labor exploits, particularly if I work at a large US corp with far-reaching political influence. For example, the value of that equity bonus I think I "earned" might only have been as high as it was because my company found some loophole to avoid taxes that it sincerely should have been pa…

Luck is a factor, but usually a small one. I certainly do not agree that it's a major component. But let's say for the sake of discussion, that it is. Just because life isn't fair doesn't mean someone else should be able to vote themselves money from your wallet or command a portion of your labor.

Re: Interview with Deliveroo couriers appealing bargaining-rights decision

#88

Post by eropple » Thu, May 24, 2018, 5:46 PM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #73

eropple wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ne…

> Which is why Britain has the NHS.

Sure! But the NHS is effectively becoming "care for the old and everyone else can shift for themselves" in a lot of ways. And there are plenty of other ways that the social safety net in the UK (to say nothing of other places Deliveroo et al. operate, like the United States) is being sabotaged--council housing is shrinking, when it's not catching on fire, etc.

> And that's a net positive, because regulation is far less effective than entitlements.

Completely agreed. But political forces exist to trash them, so...welp.

Re: Interview with Deliveroo couriers appealing bargaining-rights decision

#89

Post by mlthoughts2018 » Thu, May 24, 2018, 5:48 PM UTC

Shoue wrote: post #81

michaelt wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know many people in London who get by on the minimum wage (~16K). What sort of rent are they paying?

It's not ideal but you can share a house with a bunch of people through rent-sharing websites for £200-400 depending on the zone. I personally used that for a short stay while searching for something decent closer to zone 1 to share with my friends, and saved some money at the same time. It definitely wasn't as awful as I was expecting.

In some ways, this type of solution assumes one to be a young person, without obligations like e.g. a newborn to take care of, or types of mental illness that might make it untenable to like in a dorm-like environment further into adulthood.

For people who can sustain this situation, it does offer ways to have a higher quality of life even on a low salary. But a lot of people have families to raise and personal situations to manage that are fundamentally incompatible with it, requiring them to afford other living arrangements, creating a bigger stress factor upon on their budget.

Re: Interview with Deliveroo couriers appealing bargaining-rights decision

#90

Post by lhorie » Thu, May 24, 2018, 5:59 PM UTC

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #65

lhorie wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdata, but I have seen it happen many times. My cousin came to Toronto for a few months and wanted some under the table income. I was buying some pastries in a bakery I liked around that time, and noticed they had a hiring sign. I told her about it and she was working there a couple days later. A former coworker had a similar story. He got into a fight with his wife because she was spending all day in facebook ins…

Opposing anecdata, my SO's sister had an ivy league degree and spent 3 months looking for jobs until she got the only job she could, front of house work at a bakery. Every other job, service jobs included, turned her down. Another friend with a strong public school degree who floated around for months interviewing until she moved back with her parents, then finally got a job at the local library.

I wonder if over-qualification in resumes plays a role. In the book Nickel and Dimed[1], the author explicitly hid the fact she had higher education even from colleagues. And whereas she complained a lot about working conditions, finding a job per se wasn't a challenge at all (to the point she could even decide between two options at one point), even being restricted to non-intensive labor jobs due to health reasons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_and_Dimed