[HN Gopher] FTC to crack down on companies taking advantage of g...
___________________________________________________________________
FTC to crack down on companies taking advantage of gig workers
Author : rntn
Score : 251 points
Date : 2022-09-17 15:59 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ftc.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ftc.gov)
| [deleted]
| morelandjs wrote:
| For starters, they are not accurately advertising the
| compensation for the gig. By every sane measure, the money earned
| is wages less the cost of owning and using the vehicle. They are
| not so subtlety convincing people to sign on to a terrible deal,
| because a lot of workers don't realize how expensive vehicles
| are.
| kryogen1c wrote:
| I have yet to see a convincing argument, here on HN or elsewhere,
| about how these companies are taking advantage of workers.
|
| Most of us are old enough to have seen these companies spring
| into existence, so here are the steps:
|
| 1) 100% of people are employed or unemployed. Uber (for example)
| doesn't exist
|
| 2) uber starts existing, some previously unemployed people and
| some previously employed people start working for uber
|
| 3) those people that willingly took those jobs are being taken
| advantage of
|
| What is the principal that justifies 3? People are not agents of
| free will, and any sub-utopic framework they have to participate
| in is immoral? Even if that's the case, I'd like to see the
| argument that those people who chose and choose to work at uber
| have worse outcomes than they otherwise would.
| [deleted]
| code_duck wrote:
| The fallacy is the idea that people desperate for money choose
| gig work out of "free will". They accept the terms dictated to
| them due to lack of options. True that they could choose to
| lose their homes and vehicles and live in a tent by the
| freeway.
| abigail95 wrote:
| Who among us doesn't face that choice?
|
| I work or I starve. If I don't work, and I don't starve -
| someone else must be working.
|
| If someones _sole and only option_ was to work for Uber: Is
| Uber the one at fault here?
|
| If Uber didn't exist and person had _zero options_ , would
| this be neutral, worse, or better compared to the former
| scenario?
|
| It's not a fallacy because people have different moral
| standards about whether you should be employed at $7.25 or
| unemployed at $15.
|
| Personally I consider it my absolute right to mow lawns at
| $5/day if I choose to do it. If you think I'm not making
| enough money, _you_ can give me more! Don 't force the people
| _alreaday paying me_ to pay more.
|
| The EITC gives more benefits than any minimum wage will and
| more than any 1099 law reform.
| code_duck wrote:
| There are so many easily addressable fallacies in this that
| I am not sure if I need to bother.
|
| > If someones sole and only option was to work for Uber: Is
| Uber the one at fault here?
|
| Nobody really cares who's fault it is. Of course Uber is
| going to attempt to pay as little as they can for labor
| under existing laws.
|
| > If Uber didn't exist and person had zero options, would
| this be neutral, worse, or better compared to the former
| scenario?
|
| So, you mean if there was unfulfilled demand for
| transportation and a duopoly who abused labor didn't exist?
|
| > It's not a fallacy because people have different moral
| standards about whether you should be employed at $7.25 or
| unemployed at $15.
|
| However, the real economy does actually exist and it is not
| possible to sustain any sort of lifestyle at $7.25 an hour.
| $15 is not even sustainable currently. So, to rephrase the
| question, should people working full-time be able to afford
| living in a house without government assistance, or should
| they be able to afford an apartment?
|
| > Personally I consider it my absolute right to mow lawns
| at $5/day if I choose to do it.
|
| I don't think that grocery stores or landlords care about
| your beliefs. If you're satisfied living in a tent by the
| interstate or outside and abandoned building, or at your
| parents house, or have a family or partner who can support
| you, that's great. Otherwise, I suppose you can afford
| Steel Reserve, eat at a homeless shelter and sleep in a
| tent by the sidewalk at $5 an hour. However, such
| lifestyles incur significant expense to taxpayers.
|
| > I work or I starve. If I don't work, and I don't starve -
| someone else must be working.
|
| I have had jobs where I hardly worked at all, yet I
| received about 10 times minimum wage. Who is supporting the
| people in such positions?
| grumple wrote:
| An agreement between a worker and a company does not absolve
| either of their legal responsibilities. Structures made to
| evade or abuse the letter of the law while violating the spirit
| are what we're seeing cracked down on here. So that's what's
| happening legally.
|
| Morally, there are a few issues:
|
| 1) Workers are coerced into working because they need money to
| live. When it's between a life of despair and working for a
| shitty employer, workers will choose the latter. Laws are meant
| to prevent abuse in this situation.
|
| 2) The information disparity between the two parties means
| workers cannot make informed decisions, making them abuse their
| cars and insurance for less profit than expected.
|
| 3) The company can still abuse employees, for example by
| unfairly controlling rideshare rates, refusing to give them
| things they are supposed to get as employees (the nature of
| that relationship being defined by the state for the protection
| of the people).
| sandworm101 wrote:
| So we should also give up on minimum wages? Heath codes? Safety
| rules? Just let the market sort it out? Last time we tried that
| it did not end well. Regulation is necessary for a practical
| (not-highschool-textbook) economy.
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| We read Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" in our high school
| economics class as an aside. Then again, I went to a high
| school where the government civics class started with reading
| the Mayflower Compact, The Social Contract, Wealth of
| Nations, and several excerpts from other sources which
| inspired the American Founding Fathers before spending the
| second half of the semester reading and discussing the
| Constitution line by line.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle
| [deleted]
| theonemind wrote:
| We have a middle-class levy in the form of tax medallions. So
| they have found a way to undermine that levy in a gray area of
| the rules society has set up.
|
| They exploit the worker by underpaying them and treating them
| badly by the standards of the old levy, the taxi medallion.
| They exploit society by hollowing out the middle class.
|
| We actually need a middle class for the benefit of the masses,
| and even the ultra-wealthy, though only a few of them seem
| aware of it, like Henry Ford paying his workers enough to buy
| his cars. H. Ford seemed to lack any goodness of heart--he just
| had the brains to recognize that no one could buy his cars if
| they didn't make enough money to buy them.
|
| I think we should intervene in markets to sustain a middle
| class, which makes society better and richer on the whole.
| Unchecked free markets eventually seem to end up with a power-
| law winner-take-all type wealth distribution. Even the ultra-
| wealthy suffer compared to the ideal in societies with large
| wealth inequality. They don't live as long. They will have less
| things like the iphone, which the ultra-wealthy can't really
| even get a better core version of; they can, perhaps, buy one
| encased in gold. No middle class, no iphone and things like it.
| clcaev wrote:
| > think we should intervene in markets to sustain a middle
| class
|
| Should interventions be limited to supporting a middle class?
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Interventions should be focused on dampening the spring
| action - less rich "rich people" and less poor "poor
| people". I think there is an argument that could be made to
| consider these policies from an overall "growing of the
| pie" perspective. IE, do these policies inhibit total
| growth and make everyone worse off? However, my limited
| understanding is this is essentially trickle down economics
| and the evidence this occurs (versus rich people hoarding
| wealth) is limited. So I'm open to the argument but it
| would need quite a bit of rigor.
| wpietri wrote:
| What you're missing is the centuries of detail we have about
| how companies screw over vulnerable workers. I'd suggest you
| start reading some labor history. E.g.:
| https://www.amazon.com/History-America-Ten-Strikes-ebook/dp/...
| rconti wrote:
| In order for your framework to, well, work, you have to make a
| lot of assumptions. Things like:
|
| * Jobs are not sticky (eg, there are 0 switching costs once you
| are 'stuck' at an employer)
|
| * Employers cannot change their character or terms (eg, it was
| a good place to work yesterday, now it has become a bad place
| to work)
|
| * Employers cannot drag an entire industry or employment
| segment down (eg, race to the bottom)
|
| * Employers cannot do anti-competitive/restrictive things (eg,
| you must drive this kind of car, you must work these hours, you
| cannot work for a competitor, you cannot negotiate on the terms
| of your pay structure)
|
| I'm generally (and historically; eg, younger me) very
| sympathetic to the idea of freedom to contract for any terms.
|
| However, it is not a zero-sum game. A previously-unemployed
| person does not become employed and then be magically better
| for life. That would assume they would have been unemployed
| forever had this business not come along, and it would also
| assume that this business cannot become worse to work for over
| time or limit one's prospects.
|
| I used to be very opposed to the concept of wage floors,
| however what's changed my mind has been the impact of
| unemployment to drag down wages. As long as there is >0
| unemployment, there can and will be a race to the bottom in
| terms of the wages and conditions of marginal employment. This
| wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if the employment market
| was a fixed pie (again, zero sum game), but that's not the way
| the real world works.
| abigail95 wrote:
| Be very careful talking about competition or switching costs
| with gig work.
|
| It is very easy to get and quit a gig job.
|
| None that I know of restrict you via noncompetes.
|
| > it is not a zero-sum game
|
| > does not become employed and then be magically better for
| life
|
| > would have been unemployed forever had this business not
| come along
|
| That's what makes it non zero sum. The marginal worker is
| better off, because this new marginal employer exists. Any
| down-the-line employer which isn't this one will be worse by
| definition.
|
| > This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if the employment
| market was a fixed pie
|
| Doesn't make sense. Either error in logic or I can't parse
| your final point.
| wpietri wrote:
| Excellent list. Another thing I'd add is size asymmetry.
| Markets and negotiations work best when deal participants are
| of roughly equal power. That's rare with labor; people tend
| to have 1, maybe 2 jobs, while companies tend to have a lot
| more employees. Bad-actor companies can devote a lot more
| attention and effort to screwing people over than workers can
| to figuring out the situation.
|
| That means if we want optimal outcomes, we need things like
| labor regulation and unions to balance the asymmetries.
| kukx wrote:
| I think you brought up some interesting points. You increased
| the complexity of the model by adding new dimensions. But you
| did not explain how including these would change the
| conclusion. Does assuming the switching cost makes a gig work
| opportunity a net negative for those seeking a job? The pros
| and cons should be quantified somehow, but that is probably
| almost impossible to do. In that case I am inclined to make
| sure as many people as possible have the opportunity to work,
| since I believe that not being able to be a productive member
| of a society is very bad for a man.
| feet wrote:
| People actually do not have free will, we are all part of a
| deterministic system
| tshaddox wrote:
| This isn't an answer, but another question. Is there anything
| that you _would_ consider to be "a company taking advantage of
| workers" short of direct physical coercion?
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| The argument I'd make is that Uber game-ifies payouts, so it
| can be hard to actually know how much you're making and it
| could take a while to realize if you're profiting. Throw in
| some wishful thinking and gambling tendencies and you can quite
| easily take advantage of human psychology.
|
| Separately - companies in the US take advantage of most
| employees. So I'd say any large employer could do with an FTC
| shakedown.
| kansface wrote:
| So you'd be OK with requirements that eg Uber provides those
| numbers in plain English?
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I think the system needs to change. You have no idea if the
| ride in that zone will take you 30 minutes away so you
| actually need to drive back unpaid to get higher fares. I
| think with enough transparency it can be fair to the
| drivers - but to the detriment of the customer experience.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| I think the first misnomer is calling it employment, calling
| Uber driving a job. It is self-employment at the moment, it is
| running a business. People starting their own business should
| be doing the math ahead of time, understanding costs and
| income. Uber attempts to obscure information around pay where
| you do not always know what you are being paid, and makes it
| hard to tell when you are running at a loss. By controlling
| pricing and access Uber takes business decisions away from
| drivers while at the same time calling them independent.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| In game theory, sometimes giving people extra options can make
| their situation worse.
|
| I am not saying that this is necessarily the case of e.g. Uber
| drivers. I am just arguing in general around the argument
| structure of "the old options are still there, a new one was
| added, people have free will, therefore they cannot possibly be
| harmed by this".
| intrasight wrote:
| Labor laws exist for reasons which, apparently, your education
| did not impart upon you.
| fabianhjr wrote:
| > 3) those people that _willingly_ took those jobs are being
| taken advantage of
|
| There is of course no threat of homelessness or starvation and
| those that were unemployed could have "chosen" to remain
| unemployed rather than taking those gig employment offers.
|
| Also as per your example, clearly everyone that started working
| at Uber knew they had to take into account costs such as the
| replacement cost of their vehicle, higher maintenance cost due
| to a huge increase on average kilometers driven per month,
| higher insurance costs, cleaning and repair cost to seats due
| to higher usage, etc.
|
| If people could choose to not work and not starve/lose their
| home I would somewhat agree most of those picking up employment
| as pauperized gig workers would do so willingly.
| carom wrote:
| >There is of course no threat of homelessness or starvation
| and those that were unemployed could have "chosen" to remain
| unemployed rather than taking those gig employment offers.
|
| This is not really the company's fault that the system is set
| up so people must work. Address that at the societal level.
| We can start with building enough housing so people can
| afford rent making $3 per hour.
|
| I have a bunch of keywords watchers for a site I am building
| (AI). They also hit some gig worker subreddits due to data
| labeling. There is so much demand for click work it is
| insane. The sad thing about it all is that, at least for
| remote work, US workers are competing against cheaper
| overseas labor.
|
| I could hire some labelers, pay them per label a rate that
| comes to ~$10 per hour, and get completely undercut by
| someone who clones the business model but hires people from
| (e.g.) Brazil. It is a tough situation but the demand for
| work is there.
|
| I'd be interested in any policies that create good jobs for
| American workers.
| solarmist wrote:
| > This is not really the company's fault that the system is
| set up so people must work.
|
| The problem is companies like this take advantage of this
| as a feature of the system, not a bug.
|
| > Address that at the societal level.
|
| And how's that working? It's needs to be addressed at
| multiple levels simultaneously for any progress to be made.
|
| >We can start with building enough housing so people can
| afford rent making $3 per hour.
|
| This is a ridiculous statement. Yes, there needs to be more
| housing, but resources aren't infinite so there will always
| be a floor that steadily increases and systems based in
| reality must take that into account.
| majormajor wrote:
| _Scale_ is a meaningful thing to think about here.
|
| Many _pro-Uber_ arguments point out how rigged against everyday
| drivers the medallion system in some cities was. Precarious
| contract labor with all the power in the medallion owner 's
| court.
|
| In theory, "optional light second job or side work while a
| student" things sound great.
|
| In practice, if you find that that's not the case for the
| majority of these workers, and that in many cases you've just
| enlarged an existing problem that was there, but largely
| ignored, in the case of taxi drivers and some other niches...
| then it's time to consider regulating this new system. (The
| taxi system also wasn't much in the news, but this newcomer
| was, well, news... so that's also gonna play a role.)
|
| (You could also make full-time-employment less of a requirement
| for things like affordable health care - the market rates for
| individuals are still very different than what my employer pays
| for my coverage - but that's an even bigger political non-
| starter in the US...)
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| Unironically, hating on gig labor is just a proxy for hating on
| wage labor and capitalism. It has basically shown an even more
| effective way to exploit people than wage labor (because now
| you don't even have to guarantee them hours, a minimum wage, or
| even that their job will still be accessible to them tomorrow)
|
| People who get super pissed at Uber without materialism just
| have a narrow perspective (Uber's still evil tho)
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Just to be clear, your argument is basically that no employer
| can ever take advantage of any employee/worker, by definition?
| uoaei wrote:
| The argument is basically "Ayn Rand was right", for which
| there are an almost innumerable amount of rebuttals already
| in the literature and regular discourse.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| barrysteve wrote:
| As a series of propositional arguments frozen in time, it's a
| little difficult. As a story it's a little easier.
|
| Licenses to drive taxicabs, called Taxi Medallions used to
| limit the number of taxicab drivers below demand. Buying the
| license to operate was a valid investment choice, for hundreds
| of thousands of dollars. This ensured secure work, wages and
| support admin for taxis. It wasn't perfect, it just was what it
| was.
|
| Gig economy apps disrupted this process heavily by soaking up
| the demand for extra taxi cab services and providing a
| plug'n'play model for contractors to drive for their taxi
| service. This was a good deal in the beginning as wages were
| favourable and lower overheads gave individual drivers a chance
| to compete with taxicab co's. Medallion prices cratered,
| meaning a 600k+ medallion had to be bought out by the gov years
| later a one-sixth the price.
|
| Prices and wages dropped on Apps. Apps never stopped signing up
| drivers, leading to a glut of taxi drivers that exceeded
| demand. App surge-pricing models meant the best times to drive
| were the most expensive for the customer and the highest-
| competition for the glut of drivers. Drivers could not
| guarantee consistent customers and therefore wages, or growth
| in wages so they had varying degrees of economic pressure. Some
| with car rental payments and personal expenses can not break
| even.
|
| Apps do not enforce normal working conditions, so if someone
| cannot meet financial requirements with an 8hr shift, they are
| incentivized to hit 12hrs driving, for an average wage. When do
| you get a new job when you're trapped in a 12hr shift, dead end
| job with no growth or exit strategy? It's lose-lose. Or maybe
| lose-break even.
| lhorie wrote:
| From what I've seen, the majority of arguments against gig work
| is a combination of information asymmetry (usually that a
| worker does not know the "true" payout of such work because
| they haven't accounted for things like depreciation and car
| maintenance costs) and the idea that you can't "overcharge" for
| unskilled labor. E.g. one could make the same argument that a
| general contractor also "does not know the true payout" of
| their contracts since they also have various difficult-to-
| calculate cost-of-of-doing-business costs, but the rebuttal is
| that these costs can be built into the cost of the service.
|
| Something that I think a lot of these discussions fail to
| account for (and was, incidentally, an underlying theme for
| California's Prop 22) is that gig companies artificially create
| a type of market that would otherwise cannibalize itself into a
| different type of market. If one were to follow the ideals of
| increasing payouts to [whatever arbitrary point is deemed
| acceptable], the logical conclusion is that either demand has
| to increase proportionally to create upward price pressure -
| and there's no reason to believe the market would simply
| increase demand just because one wishes for it - or service
| volume has to decrease (the service becomes less affordable,
| meaning less demand from price-sensitive customers, which in
| turn means less drivers on the road, longer wait times, etc).
|
| But once we get into these terms, we run into the classic "I
| got mine" mentality. Then it's complaints that taxis aren't
| reliable, or smugness about how one doesn't even use these
| services in the first place. Well, which is it, does one
| supposedly "care" or is it really insofar as it doesn't become
| an inconvenience to themselves? Easier to just blame the
| companies for everything, right?
|
| The one group that does truly care about the payouts is drivers
| themselves. From what I see in driver youtube channels, they
| can in fact become quite savvy about how much they can expect
| to take home, and come to their own data-based conclusions
| about whether new features or bonus structures are good or not.
| Common themes: two [gig companies] are better than one, long
| term is worse than short term, weekends are better than
| tuesdays.
|
| And to tie back to supply and demand, gig worker supply base is
| highly elastic, aggressively more so than any other type of
| business. Uber's CEO even said inflation helps business because
| with rising cost of living, more people look to gig work to
| make a few extra bucks. So, in a way, sure, gig companies
| promote an environment where more workers can freely come in a
| take a piece of a pie (which is not infinite). The thing is
| everyone wants more of it and there's only so much to go
| around. Is setting up such a system akin to taking advantage of
| these people? In a way yes because it's playing to their
| desires to earn more in a world that is largely structured to
| think payouts should always go up over time, whereas the
| reality is that they're exposed to these raw supply-and-demand
| market forces more directly. But also no, because they wouldn't
| have that opportunity to make extra cash at all otherwise.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >I have yet to see a convincing argument, here on HN or
| elsewhere, about how these companies are taking advantage of
| workers.
|
| I'll try :).
|
| A right, by definition, is a moral or legal entitlement to have
| or obtain something or to act in a certain way. (Legal) Rights
| cannot be taken away from you.
|
| Make sure you understand that before the next step.
|
| Now read -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_rights and make
| sure you spend ample time becoming acquainted with the kind of
| rights that are bestowed to workers in countries like the US.
|
| Now make a judgment on whether you think some of these
| companies are infringing some of these rights. If you also have
| trouble with that, let me know and I'll help as well!
| abigail95 wrote:
| It is downright obsecene to say Uber is _breaking the law_
| how it currently operates. By _violating labor rights_.
|
| Governments may, at their discretion change the rules about
| how Uber might deal with its workers. California recently did
| this.
|
| > Now make a judgment on whether you think some of these
| companies are infringing some of these rights
|
| Maybe you could post your own analysis instead of having a
| sparse wikipedia page do the heavy lifting?
|
| For legal: What law are they breaking by paying drivers as
| contractors?
|
| For moral: Given that 1099 status is legal, why don't drivers
| have a right to be classified as such?
|
| The law provides me the opportunity to work as a self
| employed contractor. I drive for Uber, Lyft, any whoever
| else. I end up making less than minimum wage. Who has
| violated my moral entitlement? Was it Uber? Did I violate my
| own rights? Why don't I have the right _not_ to make minimum
| wage?
| PubliusMI wrote:
| This comment is all over the place.
|
| If a right is a moral entitlement, then it's not bestowed
| upon you and it can't be taken from you.
|
| If a right is a legal entitlement, then it certainly can!
| unity1001 wrote:
| It does not matter how you reach a bad outcome. Be it through
| legal and moral means, be everything legitimate, a bad outcome
| is a bad outcome.
|
| And if that is bad for the society, that must be addressed.
| Because, 'Oh, its just happened so' cannot fix things.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Uber originally hired licensed drivers and paid them handsomly.
| As Uber continued to become Uber, the deals the drivers had
| kept changing. That by itself is being taken advantage of from
| the driver's perspective. It only got worse from there.
| pkrotich wrote:
| We can all agree that no one is forcing anyone to work for
| these companies... as I see it, the main issues are; 1) how
| said workers are classified (1099 vs. W-2) 2) Benefits and lack
| thereof based on the classification 3) Hidden cost of using
| your own equipment. 4) Real pay once you factor in 1-3.
|
| That said, it's not any different than say Walmarts of the
| world - where most of their full time W-2 employees are in
| public assistance simply because of the pay.
|
| Reality, in the capitalism anyhow, is - if you're working for
| someone they're not going to pay you more than what they can
| get out of you or the next sucker willing to work for less -
| the question is how much?! And what's fair.
| sschueller wrote:
| I assume you are located in a country with poor to no worker
| protection laws or you would not be asking such a question.
|
| In most European countries workers have protections which
| include paid sick leave, worker comp, social security payments,
| pension payments, maternity leave, etc. etc. All these are
| required by law to be provided partially or fully by the
| employers.
|
| Uber does not pay any of those. They expect you to be self-
| employed and pay for all these things yourself yet dictate the
| price which makes it impossible to live. If you were truly
| self-employed you would not take the project at that price.
| lolinder wrote:
| This doesn't answer the question of why people choose to work
| at Uber if there are jobs available that provide all of these
| things. People in Europe have the opportunity to work in a
| job that covers for all of these benefits. Driving for Uber
| isn't mandatory. Is the implication that the adults working
| for Uber just aren't smart enough to know they're being
| exploited?
| LinkLink wrote:
| Would you be upset if somebody shot you? Why! It's perfectly
| reasonable that given enough time and proximity to the inherent
| risk of life that among the billions of people on earth that
| you would be in a situation where it resulted in you being
| shot? Seems logical to me?
|
| Sometimes people want the world to be better than the bare
| minimum. And sometimes but clearly not in your case they feel
| sympathy and empathy.
| jrajav wrote:
| The elephant in the room is that the US labor market is, as a
| whole, already taking advantage of lowest earners across the
| board. They are getting paid less than the lowest earners from
| any prior time historically, while cost of living is only
| getting higher, and working conditions have been on a steady
| decline too - all this while the productivity they generate is
| at an all time high. For many workers, there is a total absence
| of a 'good' choice.
|
| This is why when one company manages to lower the bar just a
| bit further and find new loopholes to exploit to pay workers
| less, give them even worse working conditions and benefits, or
| give them even less power and autonomy, it sticks out more than
| it normally would in a healthy labor economy.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| Yeah, true. I guess the un-intuitive part is that minimum
| wage is _supposed_ to act as a national / state labor union.
| It's just that, when working as intended, the effects feel
| wrong.
|
| In this "minimum wage makes the government a union" metaphor,
| if you find a way to work for less than minimum wage, even if
| it's your only option, you're crossing the picket line and
| you're wrong. You're supposed to make a worse decision for
| yourself, so that everyone together avoids a race to the
| bottom.
|
| So it is working as intended. But I don't like the intention,
| because it means, if the market can't price your labor above
| minimum wage, you just can't work. You have to find some
| other way to work for less than minimum wage, maybe working
| under the table, or getting qualified as disabled, or making
| YouTube videos.
|
| Are we really asking poor people below that labor price floor
| to be on strike forever, to protect the jobs of other poor
| people who are barely above that price floor? It seems like a
| bad solution.
|
| The alternatives are things like UBI or NIT or wage
| subsidies, which are not politically popular.
|
| And maybe I'm committing the Golden Mean Fallacy, but I think
| if we had some combo of UBI and wage subsidies and then just
| let the market work itself out (and keep stuff like OSHA, of
| course), it would be better than setting price floors on
| labor.
|
| Disclaimer: I became interested in UBI a few years ago after
| seeing SSC (Yeah, I know...) rail against basic jobs programs
| in this piece: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/16/basic-
| income-not-basic...
| jrajav wrote:
| You're assuming that raising the minimum wage will
| automatically result in more unemployment, but that is
| empirically not the case. Higher minimum wages implemented
| in Europe and in the US have usually translated to local
| economic boosts and lower unemployment, especially when the
| prior minimum wage was especially below indexes of
| productivity and total GDP.
|
| There is probably a line where the gains of increasing
| minimum wage even out and start to negatively impact some
| industries, but the data points to us being far below that
| line right now. We could easily pay lowest earners more and
| see only positive effects from it for everyone. And since
| that's the case, it seems less defensible that someone can
| work 40 hours a week and not even come close to providing
| the most basic necessities for themselves.
| mjevans wrote:
| A minimum wage IS a good idea. It says that any work that
| is worth less than this is not economically desired by
| society and should not be done.
|
| The issue is quality of life vs all wages, as reflected in
| buying power and the ability to have a good life. Rather
| than an inflationary focus on raising the minimum (a hidden
| tax on the non-ownership classes, as the land / property /
| business owners will just raise their rates to keep up);
| quality of life should be raised by raising Buying Power,
| not by raising the minimum.
|
| Raising Buying Power is tough though, since it requires
| market regulation and leadership. It means the price of
| food, of services, and of housing must go down to make
| quality better. However we'd all be better off under such a
| model (owners and rent/profit seekers less so, but still
| better other than the profits).
| itake wrote:
| I've very curious why productivity is considered higher,
| especially for gig work.
|
| How are people delivering food faster/cheaper than 30 years
| ago? There is more road traffic and cities are bigger
| (further to drive).
| kmod wrote:
| > all this while the productivity they generate is at an all
| time high
|
| I see this claim repeated a lot but you didn't say where it
| comes from so it's a bit hard to discuss. In particular, you
| are making a claim about the productivity of low earners but
| I don't think this is something that is measured in the US?
| My understanding is the BLS computes industry-wide
| productivity measures, ie mean productivity (as opposed to
| say median productivity), and one would expect this
| distribution to be significantly right-tailed and the mean to
| be mostly influenced by the right tail.
|
| I haven't seen any data that breaks down productivity growth
| by income, so if you have a source for your claim I'd love to
| update myself. When I search for "productivity growth by
| income" I see versions of your claim but again they are all
| about population _means_.
| uoaei wrote:
| PubliusMI wrote:
| jrajav wrote:
| There are several sources that measure with this in mind,
| focusing on production and non-supervisory workers, or by
| breaking it down by sector. Here's one such:
| https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
|
| I haven't yet seen a source, whether it's a total average
| measure or bucketed, that doesn't at least show that
| productivity has always continued increasing year-over-year
| - not always at pace with GDP growth, but "productivity at
| an all-time high" still holds true. I think this tracks
| intuitively too, given that we continue to add
| infrastructure and technology to support production and
| services.
|
| The key point is that lowest earner's share of income has
| consistently decreased at the same time. That discrepancy
| alone, and the fact that the discrepancy has been allowed
| to widen for many decades now, is what gets us to the
| situation we're in today.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > 1) 100% of people are employed or unemployed. Uber (for
| example) doesn't exist
|
| Contract work (1099) existed for a long time before Uber.
| tlogan wrote:
| Full time drivers are taken advantage of because full time
| drivers are not really free contrators: they can drive only for
| Uber and nothing else. Before UBer, these people had full time
| jobs as limo drivers, personal drivers, or something like that.
|
| Of course, there are also people who have other jobs
| (firefighters, nurses, teachers, etc), students, between jobs
| and they love it. And regulations like this will hurt them.
|
| I hope my argument make sense.
| [deleted]
| hintymad wrote:
| I think the title is kinda vague. What FTC really tries to do
| is "Commission outlined a number of issues facing gig workers,
| including deception about pay and hours, unfair contract terms,
| and anticompetitive wage fixing and coordination between gig
| economy companies." That sounds legitimate to me.
|
| If "take advantage of" is not well defined as you said, then it
| reminds me how intellectuals and young people loved Soviet
| Union in the 30s and 40s, and how European countries and Japan
| had so many communist parties and political assassinations
| after WWII. The word "taking advantage of" and "exploit" have
| such a great appealing to people's righteousness that even the
| US government can use them freely to gain support from a large
| number of people.
|
| edit: read the actual announcement and added a paragraph
| accordingly.
| ep103 wrote:
| Its comments like this that have caused me to really lose faith
| in the quality of conversation on Hacker News.
|
| By your logic above, an indentured servitude would count as a
| "not being taken advantage of" and by implication, reasonable
| moral form of employment.
|
| Each of the following questions in your final paragraph are
| similarly shallow.
|
| > People are not agents of free will, and any sub-utopic
| framework they have to participate in is immoral?
|
| This is a straw man argument to its core. No one is, or has
| suggested that all labor should be abolished unless it meets a
| utopian ideal.
|
| > Even if that's the case
|
| It is not the case
|
| > I'd like to see the argument that those people who chose and
| choose to work at uber have worse outcomes than they otherwise
| would
|
| Interestingly, this is the same argument that was used in favor
| of slavery.
| andai wrote:
| I don't understand the parallel between working for uber and
| indentured servitude?
| giaour wrote:
| Both GGP and indentured servitude's defenders argue that an
| economic relationship is, by virtue of having been agreed
| to by both parties, ipso facto non-exploitative. GP was not
| saying that gig work and indentured servitude are the same
| or morally equivalent, just pointing out that both use the
| same argument.
|
| The logical fallacy is that just because one option is
| better than the alternatives, it does not follow that the
| option in question is good. The villain from Saw may let
| you choose how you will be murdered, but your having chosen
| to be stabbed instead of drowned doesn't absolve the killer
| of their culpability in your death.
| gruez wrote:
| >The logical fallacy is that just because one option is
| better than the alternatives, it does not follow that the
| option in question is good. The villain from Saw may let
| you choose how you will be murdered, but your having
| chosen to be stabbed instead of drowned doesn't absolve
| the killer of their culpability in your death.
|
| Except that the victims in saw were unwittingly put in
| those situations. What's happening with gig workers is
| closer to something like the squid game, where the
| participants gave informed consent, and even had an
| opportunity to bail out later.
| giaour wrote:
| Economic circumstances limit choices, too (though not as
| explicitly or as definitively as Jigsaw). Most viewers
| did not see people choosing to participate in the squid
| game as a victory for economic free choice, but instead
| as a commentary on how dire someone's circumstances had
| become that they would choose to play and later even
| reaffirm that choice. Someone's least bad option can
| still be pretty terrible!
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| In both instances workers are being taken advantage of by
| an employer because of asymmetric power in the system.
| echelon wrote:
| But there are thousands of other jobs to choose from.
|
| The government itself has a bunch of jobs that require
| similar skills.
| rnk wrote:
| Hard for immigrants to get those jobs. They might not in
| the locations where those jobs are, or can't pass a
| background check, or might have been arrested for dui 10
| years ago, or maybe once wrote a hot check (which must
| happen way more for poor people). A lot of uber drivers
| are immigrants without much access to the working world,
| nothing like I have as a us citizen with a college degree
| and history of working as a dev. If I just immigrated
| from Ghana, and I also was maybe driving some times on my
| buddies car and id because I wasn't allowed to for some
| reason. This is the underclass world a lot of people are
| living in.
| gruez wrote:
| >Hard for immigrants to get those jobs. They might not in
| the locations where those jobs are, or can't pass a
| background check, or might have been arrested for dui 10
| years ago, or maybe once wrote a hot check (which must
| happen way more for poor people).
|
| Are you sure you're not talking about gig workers as
| well? For instance, uber says[1] that they need a valid
| drivers license and conducts background checks (which
| apparent check for previous driving infractions as well
| as criminal history).
|
| [1] https://www.uber.com/us/en/drive/requirements/
| iszomer wrote:
| You meant *illegal immigrants right?
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| Your wording sounds like you're posting this as a
| "gotcha". Would you like to elaborate further?
|
| And as a response to your perceived "gotcha", no, they do
| not need to be illegal. Even a refugee with a medical
| degree in their home can arrive here and can fall through
| the cracks in our system just because they aren't able to
| master a second language fast enough. Not every immigrant
| is illegal, no matter the pearl clutching.
| iszomer wrote:
| Gotcha? No.
|
| I'm referring to people whom are given the same legal
| benefits of being able to work besides me when they
| haven't gone through the proper channels of legalities
| nor sought to do so. I remember my parents immigrating to
| the US and not have to cross a river at night with just
| the clothes on their back or pay off a "coyote" to do so.
| kelnos wrote:
| I doubt it. Do you really think Uber could get away with
| employing undocumented people as drivers without getting
| found out?
| iszomer wrote:
| In California it might but I was thinking more in
| generalities of all the other startups we have had when
| Uber came to be.
|
| For example, GigWalk.
| iszomer wrote:
| Maybe it's better to think on it in terms of the
| flexibility of Uber's services when they were a mere
| startup and their evolution over time (business strategy,
| finances, app development and deployment, etc) and the
| myriad of ways so-called consumers, according to the
| article, took advantage of them and now, more government
| regulation.
|
| I knew of someone who made it his full time occupation to
| drive for Uber (and still does today) despite the hurdles
| of being involved in that structure. I also know of
| another who drove to supplement his existing income
| stream (during covid19) to make his ends meet.
| hammock wrote:
| Asymmetric power is the engine that turns the world.
|
| Everyone on earth has asymmetric power in one context or
| another. Men and women, kings and peons alike. There is
| no universality, despite some of the narratives out there
|
| Edit: seeing this comment have wide swings from upvotes
| and downvotes, wish the "most controversial" sorting was
| a thing
| novantadue wrote:
| The context is the battle between capital and labor. Its
| (historically) very important and this is just one tiny
| instance of it. Another instance was on NPR today about
| the proposed railroad workers strike, apparently they
| don't get any paid sick days which is outrageous
| especially considering how lauded Warren Buffet is when
| he yaks about paying less tax than his secretary; well
| she doesn't spend $10m a year on tax lawyers and maybe
| Buffet could spare some sick days for the BNSF workers?
| Tech examples could include workers in China suffering
| under 9-9-6, or Google-Apple wage suppression collusion,
| or a common topic around here, how early startup
| employees lose their equity comp through some kind of
| legal slight-of-hand.
| hammock wrote:
| You are right and we have allowed capital to outpace
| labor in power by supporting globalization and loose
| central bank policy since the closing of the gold window
| in 1971
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| There are places where asymmetric power is fine, and
| there are places where it's too much and laws need to
| step in.
| hammock wrote:
| Are laws not a form of asymmetric power?
|
| I'm not making a normative statement. It's objective.
|
| As easily as what you said, one could say (and US allies
| like Saudi do say) "women's rights are mostly fine, but
| there are places where they go too far and a husband must
| step in"
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Sure?
|
| I don't really know what relevance this has to the
| previous conversation. But I would say that laws are
| _much more likely_ to get things right than to let every
| powered individual make their own rules.
| delusional wrote:
| Classes in society necessitate a qualitative
| differentiator. If you want to argue that it's fair that
| some people are rich while some people are poor, there has
| to be some natural inherent difference between the rich and
| the poor. Canonically in the western world it's usually
| "gumption" or "intelligence". You'll rarely find that
| argument made explicitly, but it's implicit in all
| discussions that presuppose economical classes.
|
| Once that observation is made, it becomes clear that the
| argument is actually: This class of people is unfit for
| better work, and without our poverty wages they would die.
| In my opinion that's very similar to the idea that the
| "negro" was inferior to the white man and therefore it was
| by his grace that the "negro" was allowed to exist.
| JoshuaDavid wrote:
| > If you want to argue that it's fair that some people
| are rich while some people are poor, there has to be some
| natural inherent difference between the rich and the
| poor.
|
| Would you consider it immoral if a thousand people of
| equal economic status chose to participate in a lottery
| where they each paid in 1% of their money, and then one
| person, selected at random, won all of it?
|
| Does your answer change if it's a chess tournament
| instead of a lottery?
| patrick451 wrote:
| > If you want to argue that it's fair that some people
| are rich while some people are poor, there has to be some
| natural inherent difference between the rich and the
| poor.
|
| I don't buy this at all. There can be no difference
| between me and a billionaire who inherited their wealth,
| but I feel under no obligation to call that unfair. They
| were just lucky, and that's fine.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _there has to be some natural inherent difference
| between the rich and the poor_
|
| No? They can all be the same. But without individual
| incentives to take risks and innovate, the whole doesn't
| progress. The meritocratic model works fine among equals.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| > Canonically in the western world it's usually
| "gumption" or "intelligence".
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Canonically in the western world it 's usually
| "gumption" or "intelligence". reply_
|
| Emphasis on natural inherence. Meritocracies work if
| everyone is statistically identical. They even work when
| everyone is perfectly identical. They don't if every
| action is independent and identically distributed, but
| it's not; being lucky in the past can make one more
| capable in the present even in an unbiased system.
|
| We should keep that randomness in mind to avoid being
| cruel. But systems that ignore this path dependence, or
| worse, try to stamp it out, underperform those that
| acknowledge it.
| delusional wrote:
| You're just making the same argument you tried to
| disagree with. If there's some quality that means luck
| today implies luck tomorrow and it isn't just the
| compounding effect of capital that's exactly the western
| notion I'm talking about. Instead of calling it
| "gumption" you've just called it "luck".
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| In all seriousness, I look forward to you writing a book
| on socioeconomics. Happy to chip into the kickstarter.
| rnk wrote:
| They control your ability to work there. For some people
| these are the only kinds of jobs they can get, they are
| stuck there, trying to pay off the vehicle they got a loan
| for purchasing that they use in the job. They are kind of
| prisoners. Many of those people can't get other jobs that
| pay much. Uber can decide you are violating the rules
| somehow and cut you off (working too much or too little).
|
| "People get into these agreements on their own choice" some
| will say, but these are often people without other good
| choices.
| [deleted]
| delusional wrote:
| > Its comments like this that have caused me to really lose
| faith in the quality of conversation on Hacker News.
|
| I get what you're saying but isn't it a little rash to
| discard all discussion on hacker news because of a
| splattering of naive shallow comments? I rather agree with
| your response, but I also understand how many people who have
| yet to consider the matter deeply, or maybe have never been
| poor, think of reality as "a group of rational equal
| individual actors".
|
| I very much agree that the argument responded too here share
| a lot of similarity to arguments for slavery, although the
| veneer is certainly much more palatable, but we have to
| remember that even slavery was pretty popular, and hacker
| news will never be a progressive socialist platform.
|
| Personally, I think accepting these types of discussions is a
| small price to pay for the informed and nuanced discussions i
| get to have and watch on hacker news.
| qeternity wrote:
| > share a lot of similarity to arguments for slavery
|
| Ok, go on. Please enumerate the similarities.
| theonemind wrote:
| I disagree with the grandparent comment, but upvoted it as a
| topic of discussion. We might as well have someone say the
| quiet part out loud so that we can pick it apart. No doubt
| Uber C-levels sleep soundly telling themselves these kinds of
| things and their lobbyists use these kinds of arguments.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| > "By your logic above, an indentured servitude would count
| as a "not being taken advantage of" and by implication,
| reasonable moral form of employment."
|
| No it wouldn't. Indentured servitude requires someone to be
| indentured, which is immediately in conflict with OP's
| correct observation that no one is being forced to work. They
| directly hinged their question on the premise that the
| workers are free to make choices.
|
| OP's question regarding the free choices of previously
| unemployed workers is valid. Questioning why 1099 employment
| isn't "moral" as you put it is also valid.
|
| > > People are not agents of free will, and any sub-utopic
| framework they have to participate in is immoral?
|
| > This is a straw man argument to its core. No one is, or has
| suggested that all labor should be abolished unless it meets
| a utopian ideal.
|
| Actually your response is the straw man here, because you
| have introduced and attacked an absolute (all labor) where
| one did not previously exist.
|
| You're projecting the errors you yourself are making onto OP.
| giaour wrote:
| > No it wouldn't. Indentured servitude requires someone to
| be indentured, which is immediately in conflict with OP's
| correct observation that no one is being forced to work.
|
| You're thinking of slaves. Indentured servants chose to
| enter into binding contracts. No one forced them to sign
| away years of their life; they did so of their own
| volition. US case law would no longer recognize such
| contracts as valid.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| No, I'm thinking of indentured servitude. Which requires
| them to be indentured, via said contracts. You are
| agreeing with me.
|
| Uber is the antithesis of being tied to a job. You have
| complete freedom to engage whenever you wish. In fact it
| is precisely this freedom that "they should be employees"
| proponents are attacking.
| [deleted]
| jjoonathan wrote:
| > no one is being forced to work
|
| Given that people need to work to live, replacing
| more/better jobs with fewer/worse jobs is absolutely a
| moral imposition on the working population.
|
| Rationalizing this on the grounds that people are "free" to
| choose among the fewer/worse jobs is diabolical.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| That is not the scenario described. There wasn't an
| industry of employee Uber drivers prior to Uber coming on
| the scene.
|
| In fact, taxi drivers in California were all typically
| self employed already.
|
| These positions fall apart under even the most cursory
| examination.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| > industry of employee Uber drivers prior to Uber
|
| Wow, you really did a good job of accounting for the
| aggregate labor supply/demand dynamics right there. There
| was no Uber before Uber therefore Uber is great! You
| heard it here first, people!
|
| > These positions fall apart under even the most cursory
| examination.
|
| Right back atcha.
| remote_phone wrote:
| Your rebuttal is wrong. The number of drivers exploded by
| 100x or more after Uber showed up. Before Uber, the taxi
| industry had a monopoly on rides. Uber destroyed that and
| orders of magnitude more drivers showed up and then more
| customers showed up.
|
| So the supply increased, there are less jobs there are
| orders of magnitude more.
|
| Educate yourself.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| We can talk about it, provided you can be civil.
|
| As I said, this was a new growth industry. Taxis do not
| have a supply/demand dynamic because (for example in SF)
| the industry is artificially constricted by the medallion
| system or other controls. There have never been
| unallocated taxi medallions in SF.
|
| As I also previously pointed out, taxi drivers were
| already independent contractors prior to Uber -- so if
| non-employee work is inherently immoral then this doesn't
| represent a change from the status quo.
|
| It's difficult to see how Uber's system of allowing
| people to work if and when they feel like it is worse
| than the city's system where people would have to finance
| up to $1 million to buy a ticket allowing them to work
| within the regulatory system.
|
| > Right back atcha.
|
| No, as I've shown you simply did not read carefully.
| Please be civil in your response and please take some
| time to consider what's already been said.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| You can't really rebut the idea that in our society
| people are forced to work to live with "that is not the
| scenario described"
|
| Parent was making an observation about the mandate of
| working in our society, and you replied that you weren't
| talking about people who have to work... :/
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| You absolutely can, because the question is specifically
| regarding people who are already not working, and who
| would not otherwise be working.
|
| I think you should re-read OP's original comment more
| carefully.
| remote_phone wrote:
| It's comments like yours actually that make me lose faith in
| HN. It's a lazy argument parroted by activist with no actual
| contact with people who drive for Uber.
|
| Most Uber drivers are happy because they can select their
| hours and the more they work the more money they make. It's
| pretty simple. They aren't poor, stupid uneducated masses
| that need saving by the likes of you. Your elitist views
| looking down on their ability to discern what is good for
| them is exactly why Trump disastrously won and we all
| suffered. And unfortunately why the Republicans will probably
| win again in 2024.
| kelnos wrote:
| I think you're putting words in people's mouths. I don't
| think anyone is claiming that people are too stupid to know
| that a particular job is exploitative. The claim is that
| they know full well that these kinds of jobs are
| exploitative, but don't have much choice in the labor
| market, and so take them anyway.
|
| Just because someone sees that they have little choice, and
| then chooses exploitation over poverty, homelessness, or
| starvation, it doesn't mean that it's ok that we have jobs
| that exploit workers. It's the role of labor regulators to
| try to reduce the exploitative nature of these jobs. And if
| a job can't exist without exploiting workers, then it must
| be shut down. This isn't new or particularly controversial;
| it's been the goal of labor movements for centuries.
|
| I mean this in general terms; I have heard both good and
| bad stories about what it's like to drive for Uber, so I'm
| not quite ready to raise up the pitchforks against them,
| but I do believe they are worthy of more scrutiny.
| JaceLightning wrote:
| /\ Its comments like this that have caused me to really lose
| faith in the quality of conversation on Hacker News.
|
| People can quit Uber/Lyft whenever. Indentured servitude
| cannot be quit.
|
| There's a difference in "creating an opportunity for people"
| and "forcing them to work for you"
|
| > this is the same argument that was used in favor of
| slavery.
|
| Nope. There's a difference in creating a new choice for
| people and taking all choice away from them.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Many of the people here are becoming sociopathic in their
| desire to control the world around them through technology
| and have completely lost empathy for the average person who
| is a victim of these industries. The gig economy is clearly
| arbitraging labor in a manner most would consider somewhere
| between exploitative and unfair. And the broader economy puts
| pressures on them to exist in that.
|
| As inequality mostly driven by technology grows more and more
| people will be required to accept less and less fair
| employment so the gig economy is essentially betting on a
| worse tomorrow. I dont like that, i dont support it, and if
| the ceos of these companies are your neighbors like they are
| mine -- you see how completely nihilistic they are about
| this. They know it, they don't care. But they pretend a story
| that this is a better world for you, the naive tech worker.
| folkhack wrote:
| > Many of the people here are becoming sociopathic
|
| Tons of people here are well monied professionals who
| struggle to put themselves into another person's shoes.
| They grew up privileged, got to go to school/college, and
| ended up on a good career path. They're people who will
| unironically say people should "pull themselves up by the
| bootstraps," and claim that we're in a meritocracy where
| hard work guarantees financial stability + success.
|
| They have no idea what it's like for a person struggling to
| get by, and they've been sold a lifetime of "poor person =
| bad," or "poor person = lazy" propaganda.
|
| There are lots of people here that struggle with basic
| empathy.
| newfriend wrote:
| And lots of people use "empathy" as an excuse to forcibly
| extract money from productive people in order to give it
| away to leeches. Suckers who believe that every poor
| person is just a hard-working, well-intentioned person
| who wasn't given enough opportunities.
|
| There are, of course, many poor people who are not lazy.
| But there are likely more who are lazy, dull, and sucking
| up resources that could better be used to improve
| society.
| folkhack wrote:
| I understand where you're coming from. We likely have
| very different views on welfare and the compassion of
| society.
|
| > But there are likely more who are lazy, dull, and
| sucking up resources that could better be used to improve
| society.
|
| So should we should allocate resources away from the
| undesirables and let them and their children starve off?
|
| I think that sorta thinking is inhumane, and not becoming
| of a civil society.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| This comment genuinely makes no sense to me. If you are going
| to leverage extremely strong analogies, like indentured
| servitude, then you need to justify that. It seems like you
| are disappointed by any conversation that doesn't mix up
| idealism with what's realistic, and what is going on.
|
| A request for explanation almost by definition cannot be a
| strawman. Just because you disagree with the context of that
| question does not justify such a shallow, emotional response.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| > A request for explanation almost by definition cannot be
| a strawman.
|
| It can when the request isn't really a request but an
| assertion taken to an absurd extreme that merely resembles
| a question. cf Tucker Carlson "just asking questions".
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| You're the one asserting extremes. I simply see no other
| way of interpreting this discussion. Have a good one.
| whywhywhydude wrote:
| What a low effort rebuttal. Why are you comparing gig work to
| indentured servitude? Is Uber forcing people to drive cars?
| If your argument is people don't have any other options, is
| that really uber's fault or is that fault of the society?
| jonfw wrote:
| > Interestingly, this is the same argument that was used in
| favor of slavery.
|
| That's really not very interesting, this same argument can be
| applied to many things that were good and many things that
| were bad.
|
| Let's try and focus on the topic at hand vs arguing semantics
| adolph wrote:
| Be the change you'd like to see.
|
| What are the lines a person may not cross for crossing is an
| indication that the person is lacking information or decision
| making competence and thus decision making power is taken
| from them?
|
| Some might argue for one extreme or another, the rest of us
| see it at some point between total and no decision making
| power with the line drawn at different points in different
| contexts. Besides drawing the line, there is the matter of
| who can draw it. Why would one think that on the main the FTC
| is better at making the decision in this context than the
| person making the decision?
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| The grandparent deserves a good rebuttal, and I don't think
| this is very good. This comment is effectively saying that
| the gig worker is in fact _not_ a free agent by using
| analogies like slavery and indentured servitude, but these
| analogies don 't map well to the gig worker's economic
| position.
|
| I'm going to second the GP's request for a convincing
| argument, as I've also yet to see one.
| frereubu wrote:
| I didn't read this as a rebuttal, it's pointing out the
| logical fallacies in the structure of the GP's argument, so
| criticising it for not offering a rebuttal is slightly
| missing the point. They certainly aren't saying that Uber
| drivers are in an identical situation to slaves.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| But there aren't any fallacies in the GP's argument. And
| it is quite directly making an absurd and unsupportable
| statement regarding indentured servitude for a job
| opportunity that is undeniably no strings attached.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > People are not agents of free will, and any sub-utopic
| framework they have to participate in is immoral?
|
| This is so fallacious that it almost doesn't parse as
| English (largely imo because it's been fluffed up to hide
| the utterly commonplace "so you're saying everything is
| wrong unless it's perfect?" strawman.)
| kryogen1c wrote:
| It's intended to be a steelman and is a rephrasing of an
| argument said to me in the past; you could dig it up in
| my comment history from a previous uber discussion should
| you be so inclined.
|
| Regardless, feel free to ignore my strawman and tell me
| the real argument.
| thfuran wrote:
| >It's intended to be a steelman
|
| I think maybe you've misunderstood steelmanning. It's not
| about taking an argument to the absolute extreme, it's
| about constructing the most convincing and effective form
| of the argument.
| [deleted]
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| The real argument is that gig employers have found a way
| to skirt regulations protecting "real" employees. And
| that the people who suffer from this are primarily in an
| economic position such that they don't have much of a
| choice but to accept those conditions.
|
| That doesn't mean "any sub-utopic framework they have to
| participate in is immoral", it just means this particular
| one is.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| "Real employees" have not historically done these jobs.
| Your assertion is simply not true.
| ada1981 wrote:
| Uber replaced taxi cabs, which had some of the most
| historic Union protections in American history.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| Sorry, no. These exact same complaints have been swirling
| around for decades before Uber came on the scene:
| https://hrdailyadvisor.blr.com/2017/12/12/taxi-drivers-
| emplo...
|
| The _only_ change is that Uber grew the market and
| popularized hiring cars, and the state of California
| decided to start attacking its own tech industry.
|
| There's a lot of hypocrisy here. If the state truly had
| worker's interests at heart it would be looking at the
| farming industry, not ridesharing.
| pydry wrote:
| >these analogies don't map well to the gig worker's
| economic position.
|
| They do though. Gig workers are almost always in a _very_
| economically precarious position which Uber takes advantage
| of in precisely the same way that employers of indentured
| servitude do.
|
| If the US had full employment and decent unemployment
| benefits (like it used to) jobs like these wouldnt exist.
| actionablefiber wrote:
| > If the US had full employment and decent unemployment
| benefits (like it used to) jobs like these wouldnt exist.
|
| We don't, though, and that has much deeper causes than
| the existence of gig companies. A large swath of the
| American voting public supports political candidates who
| oppose providing an adequate backstop for people
| balancing on a knife edge.
|
| I think there's a legitimate market for people who want
| to earn cash in their spare time on their own schedule
| and gig companies seem like a good fit for those people,
| such as people who already have stable employment or
| cannot work regular hours for one reason or other. Very
| few industries/companies offer that level of flexibility
| to their workers.
|
| The issue is that gig companies are also gutting already-
| existing labor markets by burning investor cash to
| undercut established competitors, so people who have
| stable employment find themselves forced into precarity
| and turn to gig work due to the lack of full time
| employment in the industry combined with the lack of
| adequate support in the American social safety net.
| ghufran_syed wrote:
| " If the US had full employment and decent unemployment
| benefits (like it used to) jobs like these wouldn't
| exist." I think that's the "utopia" gp is referring to.
|
| All this will do is force people to spend time and money
| forming corporations so that the uber corporation (for
| example) can contract directly with another corporation
| (most likely a one-employee s-corp) which will "employ"
| the driver. Same economic effect, but just with extra
| friction and cost for people who in general don't have a
| lot of money to spare
| thfuran wrote:
| >which will "employ" the driver. Same economic effect,
| but just with extra friction and cost for people who in
| general don't have a lot of money to spare
|
| ...and all the rights that come with being an employee,
| for all that they're not so great in the US.
| kareemsabri wrote:
| I don't think the GP does deserve a good rebuttal tbh, it's
| a pretty weak argument that I have a hard time believing
| someone could really think. The argument is, because these
| people "willingly" took the job, they cannot be being taken
| advantage of? I don't understand why people think "free
| will" means you cannot be taken advantage of. People can
| have both free will, and real economic / physical / legal
| constraints in my life that people could take advantage of
| if they are in a position to do so. It happens every single
| day all over the world.
|
| I'll take a stab at a strong argument for gig workers being
| taken advantage of. I don't think it describes _every
| single_ gig worker, but I'm sure there are some for whom
| it's true.
|
| There are individuals in precarious economic positions.
| They need income to survive, they are living one week to
| the next (meaning they pay rent weekly, and have no excess
| money at the end of the week). They need to provide for
| their families, maybe send money home to their families in
| another country because they are immigrants. Stuff like
| that. You can talk to them yourself, ride a cab in New York
| and ask the driver about his life, these stories are pretty
| common.
|
| Let's say they have limited skills. But they have a body.
| They can move around, drive a car, or maybe just ride an
| e-Bike. They could maybe drive a cab, but driving a cab
| costs you a a flat fee per month to rent the medallion, no
| matter what you make. I believe you need some upfront
| capital to get started. So they sign up for Uber Eats /
| DoorDash / Grubhub / pick your delivery app.
|
| The pay on DoorDash is very low, because consumers won't
| pay that much for food delivery. Out of that, the
| restaurant has to get paid, DoorDash has to get paid, and
| the gig worker has to get paid. Who has the least amount of
| bargaining power in this situation? The restaurant has
| other sources of income, so they can leave if they aren't
| happy with the cut. The platform obviously sets the terms,
| and there's a lot of people in precarious economic
| positions who need money. So the gig worker has the least
| amount of bargaining power. So he gets a pretty low pay. He
| lives in a one-room apartment with like, 8 other gig
| workers who all do delivery for Doordash, Grubhub, Uber
| Eats etc. (I'm not making this up, it's pretty common) and
| works 7 days a week. No time for learning some new skill,
| and since the wages are subsistence level, no ability to
| save and eventually move on to better work.
|
| So essentially, they need money to survive, the money they
| get from delivery apps gives them that, but no more. They
| would certainly prefer to do something else, but have no
| other skills. So these apps run on the labor of people in
| precarious economic positions with no better options. Of
| course he has "free will", but I'm curios what economic
| alternatives you think are on offer that make that free
| will a meaningful, and not simply philosophical, concept.
|
| Perhaps the phrase "taken advantage of" triggers some
| people. But it doesn't seem that controversial to me. The
| business works because there are people who need to work a
| job for very low pay. I don't think they love riding around
| picking up bags of food for $3-$5 each.
|
| Here's a thread on the DoorDash Reddit, I found it by
| scrolling down the front page, it's not old.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/doordash/comments/xeyvrg/the_soul_
| c...
|
| Here's the top comment with 119 upvotes
|
| > I couldn't agree more. The only reason I'm doing doordash
| currently is out of desperation. Plus, it allows me some
| much needed flexibility which is crucial given some
| difficulties in my personal life.
|
| I dunno what you consider that. But it's not like, an
| arrangement in which the worker seems to opting into this
| because they think it's a good deal out of their plethora
| of options. They do it because they are, in their words,
| desperate.
|
| Edit: I'm not saying gig companies are evil or something,
| or even predatory. It's unclear to me if they have sound
| unit economics, but that doesn't make them evil. The
| business just doesn't work without low delivery wages.
| propernoun wrote:
| > There are individuals in precarious economic positions.
|
| This is true across all income classes, because the
| classes are a distribution. While I agree that those in
| "precarious" positions may be concentrated in the gig
| economy for the reasons you suggested, this argument is
| an insufficient rebuttal.
|
| > The pay on DoorDash is very low, because consumers
| won't pay that much for food delivery.
|
| OK, so costs go up, consumers don't participate in the
| market, and the gig economy collapses. Are we in a better
| or worse position now?
|
| > Here's a thread on the DoorDash Reddit
|
| Do these individuals think the picture would be more
| rosey if they didn't even have this work for income?
| viscanti wrote:
| If working for DoorDash is their best available option,
| I'm inclined to point the finger at every other company
| first. Why is it that DoorDash and the other Gig economy
| companies are offering the best available work option for
| so many? Where are the rest of the companies and the
| government? I've never really understood blaming the best
| available option for the lack of alternatives. There are
| also enough gig economy companies that if one of them was
| especially bad then workers could easily switch to the
| competitor.
| kareemsabri wrote:
| You're correct that blaming the delivery apps is looking
| in the wrong place. If the government doesn't want people
| in precarious employment they should provide a social
| safety net. Then if the gig jobs were so bad, they would
| have no workers and would cease to exist. Otherwise, they
| must be ok.
|
| > There are also enough gig economy companies that if one
| of them was especially bad then workers could easily
| switch to the competitor.
|
| And if they're all the same since they all run the exact
| same business in the exact same markets?
| viscanti wrote:
| > And if they're all the same since they all run the
| exact same business in the exact same markets?
|
| The FTC says they're going to take a look to see if there
| is any collusion. There's a reason those laws are on the
| books and real harm to workers could happen if they were
| colluding. It seems like these gig economy companies are
| spending a lot of time and effort to entice workers from
| other gig economy companies to join them, so maybe it's
| actually working correctly already.
| ada1981 wrote:
| This makes a good point.
|
| Every person "above" these people in the economic
| hierarchy benefit from their dire situation, and there is
| very little incentive to change that structure.
|
| "I'll do whatever I can to help you from suffering from
| me being on your back, except getting off your back."
| kareemsabri wrote:
| > This is true across all income classes, because the
| classes are a distribution. While I agree that those in
| "precarious" positions may be concentrated in the gig
| economy for the reasons you suggested, this argument is
| an insufficient rebuttal.
|
| That wasn't the entire rebuttal. But people in other
| income classes don't have anything to do with DoorDash.
| People in other income classes can be taken advantage of
| too (I believe there's a thread about SBF buying crypto
| companies on the cheap as they are on the brink of
| collapse). Another example might be loan sharking.
|
| > OK, so costs go up, consumers don't participate in the
| market, and the gig economy collapses. Are we in a better
| or worse position now?
|
| I believe this is what's called a false dichotomy. But I
| agree with you it's better to work on DoorDash than have
| no work and no money at all, if that's what you're
| offering up as an alternative. The fact that you
| acknowledge that is the only other alternative is
| actually a point in favor of it being "taking advantage".
|
| > Do these individuals think the picture would be more
| rosey if they didn't even have this work for income?
|
| Surely not. But what's your point?
| leeoniya wrote:
| > I believe this is what's called a false dichotomy.
|
| i'm interested in how this is false. if the person could
| have worked for higher wages before the gig economy, then
| surely they would not need to rely on the this economy to
| exist. but those who are unemployed or underemployed
| clearly see the flexibility as an acceptable compromise
| for either lack of better skills (and time/money needed
| to acquire them) or no work at all.
|
| i think the people who can be taken advantage of are
| those who cannot improve their situation (health issues,
| mentally or physically impaired, undocumented immigrants,
| elderly who cannot easily learn new skills or commute to
| a farther work location), but this is not gig workers as
| a whole.
|
| people have a habit of complaining that the skills they
| refuse to advance dont pay much (fast food workers, coal
| miners). it's always the employer not paying enough, not
| the fact that someone treats a cashier position as a
| career rather than a temp job. my parents delivered pizza
| when we moved to the US in 1991 with $500 to their name.
| needless to say, they didnt deliver pizza for long
| despite living in a motel with two kids to raise and
| nearly non-existent english.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > i'm interested in how this is false. if the person
| could have worked for higher wages before the gig
| economy, then surely they would not need to rely on the
| this economy to exist
|
| Companies like Uber, Doordash etc. are price dumping
| because they have unlimited investor money. Their
| competitors cannot compete, and go out of business. As a
| result you have a choice of either starving to death or
| working for these companies.
|
| > it's always the employer not paying enough, not the
| fact that someone treats a cashier position as a career
|
| A person working as a cashier has a right to a decent
| living. This has nothing to do with "career".
| kareemsabri wrote:
| I meant it's false in that it implies there are no other
| possible solutions that could alleviate this problem.
|
| But if it's not false, and it truly is their least bad
| option they are choosing over destitution, I would think
| that's a strong argument for it being "taking advantage".
| I guess I don't follow the logic of, essentially, "yes I
| admit this is a terrible job, but your alternative is
| nothing / starvation, so I'm not taking advantage!"
| jorvi wrote:
| Gig work normalizes the loss of the overall labor
| protections / amenities that were wrought so hard during
| the 19th and 20th century.
|
| Here in The Netherlands flexible labor and temporary rental
| contracts were introduced last decade, they were meant to
| increase the fluidity of both markets and take up a small
| amount of overall contracts, but have started to dominate
| both of them. Being on either basically erodes any
| certainty you could have had as a foundation to build your
| life on.
|
| Gig work is even worse than flexible contracts. Not only
| can you be ditched at any moment, in many ways you are
| considered self-employed which strips you of so many
| protections normally afforded to you. And whereas self-
| employed software developers (read: freelancers) are in an
| extremely powerful economic position, the usual gig worker
| has almost zero leverage. 'Nuff said.
| zugi wrote:
| > Its comments like this that have caused me to really lose
| faith in the quality of conversation on Hacker News.
|
| Interestingly, it's comments like yours that cause me to lose
| faith in the quality of conversation at Hacker News.
|
| Basically Godwin'ing to "slavery" when the prior poster
| clearly talked about free will and choice is intellectual
| laziness.
| [deleted]
| mylons wrote:
| mylons wrote:
| cat_plus_plus wrote:
| > By your logic above, an indentured servitude would count as
| a "not being taken advantage of" and by implication,
| reasonable moral form of employment.
|
| Sure? https://www.usa.gov/join-military
| qeternity wrote:
| > Its comments like this that have caused me to really lose
| faith in the quality of conversation on Hacker News.
|
| Wow, quite tone deaf for a response that doesn't actually
| address any single topical point, but just offers a very poor
| strawman.
|
| Nobody is arguing that slavery is bad. People are asking how
| driving for Uber is remotely like slavery. And so far, nobody
| has answered.
|
| Instead of mud slinging, how about being the change you want
| to see on HN.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Society made a bunch of rules about the employee/employer
| relationship. Society allowed business to use contractors
| to fill positions that didn't fall under that
| relationships, for example, to fill short term needs with
| contractors, or to bring in specialists that companies did
| need and couldn't afford to have full time.
|
| Uber decided fuck Society's contract/norms for the
| business/employee relationship, we are going to abuse the
| definition of 'contractor'.
| amelius wrote:
| Let me explain it in a way that you might understand:
|
| 1) there are kids in the schoolyard.
|
| 2) all the kids are free to move around; they can talk to
| anybody else and do things to have fun.
|
| 3) a kid can decide to punch another kid; but the unwritten
| laws of the schoolyard prevent that, because the other kid
| might throw a punch back.
|
| But now ...
|
| 4) a group of 5 kids decide to bully a kid that is standing
| alone.
|
| How is this possible? Why don't the unwritten laws of the free
| schoolyard protect the kid?
|
| Good thing there are teachers around to regulate the
| schoolyard!
| mouzogu wrote:
| from the article
|
| > deception about pay and hours
|
| > unfair contract terms
|
| > anticompetitive wage fixing
|
| https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/amazon-ftc-pay-f...
|
| https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/11/25/bay-areas-doordash-to...
|
| i guess you also would have had no problem when steve jobs and
| other SV companies colluded to wage fix?
| https://www.theregister.com/2015/09/03/apple_wagefixing_clos...
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| Yes, but those problems are ubiquitous. I have the same types
| of problems with employers for my absurdly lucrative software
| engineering positions.
|
| Looking at these issues in context, this industry seems no
| worse than any other.
| erdos4d wrote:
| I think this completely glosses over the uncomfortable fact
| that uber is a billion dollar VC backed company that operates
| by:
|
| 1) Targeting a market with established taxi companies offering
| a legally regulated service requiring background checks,
| insurance, and driving/car safety standards. 2) Illegally
| setting up an unregulated competing taxi service which relies
| on the local police/elite being unable/unwilling(bribed) to
| enforce the existing taxi regulations in light of the size and
| effort uber puts into its racket. In the process it hires up
| anyone willing to do it, regardless of if their car is safe,
| they are actually a good driver or not, meet the insurance
| requirements of a taxi driver, and so on. 3) Pushing taxi
| drivers out of work because they can't compete with the
| obviously cheaper illegal competitor. 4) Hiring many of these
| now unemployed taxi drivers up as gig workers and paying them
| far less than they got before for doing a legal job.
|
| This is their model and it is outright exploitative. It is
| literally just using money to wantonly break the law and rig a
| market. It is also pretty much what Airbnb and a lot of other
| silicon valley firms have been up to in recent years, since
| they obviously ran out of actual innovation to sell.
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| Imagine a world where all software developers are converted to
| contractors and have to work through a platform like Toptal,
| Upwork, etc. because it's easier for employers since the
| platforms do all of the background check and technical
| assessment for them. All the companies have to do is pick their
| technical resources and go.
|
| As a developer, you have to compete against everyone else in
| the world on the platform, regardless of your COL and previous
| salary expectations. The only power you have as a developer is
| to walk away from the platform and do something else for work
| (like drive Uber). Your work has been completely commoditized
| and you have few rights since you're a contractor. You're
| working for yourself and thus you're expected to be responsible
| for your own benefits. You willingly took a job and in that
| scenario, you wouldn't feel taken advantage of at all?
|
| Uber completely destroyed the taxi industry, for better or
| worse. Contracting engagements are on the rise and it's not
| that farfetched to see a future where software developers are
| treated this way too. Why would any of us assume that we're
| immune from this commoditization, and if we can all agree that
| we wouldn't want to be subjected to it ourselves, why do we
| accept it for others?
| guywithahat wrote:
| Except talented developers on those platforms make ~$120 and
| hour and up, the people who make smaller salaries are usually
| either just starting out or don't have unique skills. I
| wouldn't want to live in this world because I don't like
| remote work, however from a salary perspective I don't think
| it would be that bad
| naet wrote:
| Some companies have basically skirted many existing regulations
| and worker protections by using the gig worker tax
| classification, to avoid being on the hook for certain basics
| like healthcare coverage even though they are acting as the
| primary employer for a large amount of people.
| themitigating wrote:
| "Slaves are better off because they are housed and fed"
| giaour wrote:
| It doesn't follow from your second point that Uber is non-
| exploitative. US law recognizes limits to the right to contract
| (e.g., one cannot agree to sell one's labor for less than
| minimum wage[0]), so the fact that some have chosen to work for
| Uber doesn't in and of itself demonstrate that Uber's
| employment terms are legal.
|
| [0]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Coast_Hotel_Co._v._Parris...
| abigail95 wrote:
| I'm not going to hear any more nonsense about how what Uber
| is doing is illegal until I see some a serious legal
| analysis.
|
| 1099 is legal. It is explicitly legal to work as a self
| employed contractor and not make minimum wage. That is
| legally true.
|
| Whether you link a case that was decided for political
| reasons does not affect this.
| giaour wrote:
| I never said anything Uber was doing was illegal. OP said
| that the fact that people choose to work for Uber means
| that Uber's employment practices are therefore legal,
| because it was the employee's free choice. I don't think
| that's a sound argument.
|
| I suspect based on the original article that you may have
| the opportunity to read the legal analysis you ask for soon
| if the FTC determines any specific company violated labor
| law wrt gig work.
| lolinder wrote:
| OP isn't saying that #2 implies non-exploitation, OP is
| saying that they can't see how #2 implies exploitation. Non-
| exploitation is the null hypothesis, we assume it to be the
| case until proven otherwise.
| giaour wrote:
| No one is arguing that #2 implies exploitation. That would
| mean that everyone who has a job or has signed a contract
| is being exploited.
| throwaboo100 wrote:
| > Even if that's the case, I'd like to see the argument that
| those people who chose and choose to work at uber have worse
| outcomes than they otherwise would.
|
| It only takes one common situation, right?
|
| They go into debt on the vehicles they lease from the company
| or from an agent. They were given deliberately incomplete
| information about how much money they would make, so taking
| into account all the circumstances, they wind off worse than
| they would be at a standard, legal job. In other words, "by
| some process" of deception, they wind up below minimum wage.
| creamynebula wrote:
| The fact that they willingly took those jobs does not mean they
| are being treated fairly, it means they had no better option
| and need to survive.
| ivalm wrote:
| (3) doesn't come from (2), but (2) doesn't negate (3) either.
| There are people in (1) who are desperate, when (2) occurs
| those desperate people freely choose this opportunity. Whether
| this opportunity is exploitative needs to be argued outside of
| (2) or (3).
|
| Here are two example of how society doesn't allow certain
| freely chosen compensations schemes. (A) suppose one could
| offer money for organ donation, we would see increase in
| donations. As a society we do not allow it because it is
| exploitative. (B) More extreme, suppose someone could offer
| money for the right to kill a volunteer, with enough money I'm
| sure there would be volunteers, but we don't allow that because
| it is also exploitative.
|
| The OPs (2) is less extreme than my (A) or (B), but I hope my
| examples show that (2) and (3) can be both true.
| reillyse wrote:
| Well I guess the companies have nothing to worry about so.
| syntaxing wrote:
| The government should regulate gig workers the same reason why we
| don't have child labor. At some point, society needs to agree
| that protecting a certain group of people is important morally
| instead of spewing economic religious thoughts like "buTS iTs
| ThEir cHoice". I'm pro capitalism but in some cases, laissez
| faire means we want the privileged to remain privileged and the
| poor to remain poor.
| t-writescode wrote:
| Universal Healthcare would be the most useful thing that could
| happen to help gig workers.
| stetrain wrote:
| Also labor competition in general, and self-employment, and
| small businesses...
| treeman79 wrote:
| Everyone can have care like the VA!
| dehrmann wrote:
| Realistically, yes. Best case, it looks like Kiaser. They're
| private, but they're both the insurer and provider, and they
| compete in the market. Realistically, it looks more like the
| post office or the DMV.
| shakezula wrote:
| Having received healthcare services in countries with
| socialized healthcare, no it doesn't look like that at all.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Have you ever going through airport customs in Europe and
| compared it to the US? Sure, other places can do these
| things well, but the US doesn't have a track record of
| competent government services.
| d4mi3n wrote:
| I hear USPS worked phenomenally well until it became a
| political target. I think the issue is less that we can't
| and more that we won't support or improve these systems
| for ideological reasons.
| abigail95 wrote:
| USPS is a sanctioned monopoly with a USO.
|
| It's illegal to compete with it.
|
| It's like saying AT&T "worked". Sure you could buy a
| phone service and pay $$$$ for it, but if I had a better
| way of running it, they would put me in jail for trying.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The monopoly is only over mail and is scarcely enforced
| nowadays. And yet USPS is still cheaper and better on
| parcels where it doesn't have a monopoly, so much so that
| private parcel delivery will often just use USPS.
| shakezula wrote:
| This is a false dichotomy, do not perpetuate this myth when
| dozens of other countries provide socialized healthcare that
| beats American healthcare across practically every metric. We
| can have a objective discussion about the merits of
| socialized healthcare without you injecting logical fallacies
| to be inflammatory.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _when dozens of other countries provide socialized
| healthcare that beats American healthcare across
| practically every metric_
|
| Plenty of counties also provide market healthcare with
| private insurance without the American issues, _e.g._
| Switzerland [1]. If we want to keep a market-based model,
| there are reforms that point the way forward.
|
| [1]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Switzerland
| awofford wrote:
| Lots of countries in South America also have socialized
| healthcare and it's terrible. The question is, "Is
| America's competency with government programs more similar
| to South America or Europe?"
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Lots of countries in South America also have socialized
| healthcare and it's terrible.
|
| Lots of countries in South America have a lot more
| problems than healthcare. Maybe consider their per capita
| GDP or something to offset that fact.
|
| Even with that, Costa Ricans, Chileans, Cubans,
| Panamanians, Uruguayans and Colombians have longer life
| expectancies than the US, which manages to be 54th in the
| world while spending about as much tax money per capita
| as any other country does on healthcare.
| [deleted]
| abigail95 wrote:
| It's not _easier_ make it work on a bigger scale.
|
| If you can't make the VA model work _in America_ , that's
| good evidence that a bigger model would suffer the same,
| but bigger problems.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > It's not easier make it work on a bigger scale.
|
| Ah, so that's why wholesale prices are so much higher
| than retail. Diseconomies of scale.
|
| And if you can't make it work in _America_ , the country
| with the most screwed up and corrupt healthcare in the
| world[*], how could you expect to make it work anywhere?
|
| -----
|
| [*] It's a big claim, but I don't know how else you refer
| to a country that spends twice as much on healthcare per
| capita than any other country, but comes in 54th for life
| expectancy, while being the main cause of bankruptcies.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| Universal healthcare will render the VA healthcare
| redundant. A soldier will have access to healthcare
| before deployment and after deployment, whether they got
| fucked up in a horrible situation or came back safe.
|
| I'll add: it feels like the veterans are begging the VA
| when they should have that basic human right by default.
| it_citizen wrote:
| Definitely the first and biggest step in the right direction.
| But it would mostly be, well, catching up on most western
| countries. However those countries are also complaining about
| gig workers being taken advantage of.
| jnwatson wrote:
| It would help startups too.
| dehrmann wrote:
| There is something weird about government telling business a
| benefit is so important they have to provide it, but it's
| apparently not important enough for government to provide it.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| The real answer is for government to make employer sponsored
| health insurance "optional". As in, employers no longer need
| to provide health insurance and for health insurance
| enrollment to be open 24/7, much like car insurance. This
| will cause a large population in America to shop around all
| the time, reducing prices pressures.
|
| Simultaneously, they need to reduce the regulatory burden on
| health insurance companies (but always accept pre-existing
| conditions). This way more health insurance startups can
| compete with the large legal entities that are health
| insurance companies.
|
| With these two in place, no employer will ever control
| healthcare for employees, insurance companies will need to
| learn to live in thin margins and medical providers don't
| need to bear the administrative burden of insurance, this,
| reduce cost or pay more to the providers and nurses. In this
| way, insurance companies that cannot compete on price will
| fail and that is healthy capitalism.
| cortesoft wrote:
| The problem is that heath insurance has widely different
| risk profiles, way more than something like car insurance.
| The most risky car driver is going to cost the insurance
| company a lot less than the most expensive medical
| insurance user.
|
| Because of this, an individual buyer of health insurance is
| going to have a hugely variable cost of insurance, based on
| their risk profile. Currently, this risk is spread out by
| grouping employees of a company together, spreading the
| cost. That is why larger companies get much cheaper rates.
|
| Health insurance risk is so varied, and so often not
| something the individual can control, that the only fair
| and efficient way to insure everyone is to create a single,
| large, cohort... spread the risk to every citizen via
| universal coverage.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| > The problem is that heath insurance has widely
| different risk profiles, way more than something like car
| insurance. The most risky car driver is going to cost the
| insurance company a lot less than the most expensive
| medical insurance user.
|
| That's the point. The insurance business can only exist
| if it can pay for healthcare of an "average pool". They
| cannot just go seek the healthiest people for group
| coverage any more. They must maintain their business and
| profits for the "average pool".
|
| There are a large number of ways to provide such an
| insurance. They can negotiate with providers, drug
| distributors, invest in securities, improve productivity
| with technology and even cut CEO pay so that their intake
| of premiums <= outlay for insurance. That's it. If
| insurance companies can't manage costs, they will have to
| raise premiums. Because of 24/7 open enrollment, people
| will exit any insurance provider that raises premiums too
| much. If the insurance company can't compete, they _will_
| have to file for bankruptcy and customers can just go to
| another insurance provider.
|
| The risk-based business model that exists today is
| predatory. It does not have to be this way. Most other
| countries with private insurance don't have the American
| predatory system either.
| abofh wrote:
| What would be the point of a health insurance startup? It's
| just a risk pool. You get cancer, it costs (let's say) 3
| million. He doesn't, risk, 1.5 million.
|
| Insurance companies exist to hedge risk - the federal
| government doesn't need to hedge, it can literally inflate
| the risk out of the market.
|
| Pay my doctor's well, they deserve it. I don't even
| remember who I bought insurance from - don't care if they
| get paid.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| > What would be the point of a health insurance startup?
| It's just a risk pool. You get cancer, it costs (let's
| say) 3 million. He doesn't, risk, 1.5 million.
|
| To start with, they would have lower costs of executive
| pay than entrenched players. A startup can disrupt with
| operational costs.
|
| Later they can negotiate better prices with providers,
| source cheaper drugs from around the world, use
| technology more efficiently. There is so much room to do
| something here, if the regulatory burden were low.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > The real answer is for government to make employer
| sponsored health insurance "optional."
|
| The real answer is not to acknowledge employer sponsored
| health insurance at all, and to treat it (tax it) just like
| every other form of compensation. Its current treatment is
| a nearly 100 year old remnant of attacks against unions. If
| you stop the giveaway to employers, employee-provided
| health insurance would evaporate, and the government would
| be forced to take rational action on healthcare provision
| and costs.
|
| Health insurance is as much of a scam as casino gambling,
| and should be regulated out of existence.
| programmarchy wrote:
| There's something more weird about tying healthcare to
| employment. In fact, it's largely an accident of history:
|
| > In 1943 the War Labor Board, which had one year earlier
| introduced wage and price controls, ruled that contributions
| to insurance and pension funds did not count as wages. In a
| war economy with labor shortages, employer contributions for
| employee health benefits became a means of maneuvering around
| wage controls.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK235989/
| peyton wrote:
| Didn't the government create a marketplace where people can
| buy health insurance? If people don't want to use it, why
| force it?
| stickfigure wrote:
| Two problems - one is adverse selection, the other is that
| uninsured people still get care anyway (showing up at the
| ER) and somebody has to pay for it. Right now we do it by
| bankrupting every 20th person that walks through the door,
| which seems rather unfair.
| clcaev wrote:
| > uninsured people still get care anyway (showing up at
| the ER)
|
| This is somewhat of a myth; at least it is nuanced. The
| care in the ER is to stabilize the patient, not fix them.
| They provide acute care only.
|
| Even acute care can be quite limited. People are triaged
| based on how acute their case is. Many languish in an
| uncomfortable waiting room for hours till they crash or
| leave.
|
| This rationing is done by limiting the beds so that the
| ER is almost always over capacity. This is by design.
| Since ER are cost centers, when a hospital asks for a
| building permit from the municipality, the number of
| emergency room beds open to the public is the primary
| negotiation. It's the bottleneck that limits costs.
|
| Emergency beds equipped to handle trauma, e.g, gunshot
| wounds or car accidents, is even more limited. To avoid
| costs, many hospitals simply do not have a trauma center,
| unless the municipality agrees to have significant
| subsidy. People die in ambulances while they search for a
| hospital with an open trauma bed.
|
| This is a complex and heartbreaking topic.
| t-writescode wrote:
| The uninsured people hold off on getting care for so long
| that by the time they can finally get care, it's ER time,
| converting a $20 visit and some antibiotics to a $100k
| case of amputation, or whatever.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| It's not complex, it's a great example of poor resource
| allocation. For how much we collectively spend on
| healthcare, there should be no perform finding it. The
| resources are going to the wrong place (profit,
| insurance, admin).
| a-user-you-like wrote:
| It used to be, and should be again, that the hospital
| owner or physician would foot the bill if you couldn't
| pay. Much more direct charity, a beautiful thing.
|
| Taxing everyone to hell to cover every health expense is
| immoral.
| abofh wrote:
| Where do you think those dollars go? Hospitals aren't
| that great of an investment, but insurance companies are
| dividefuel wrote:
| How is it more moral to force someone to provide care for
| free than it is to tax the populace to provide universal
| care?
| a-user-you-like wrote:
| I wish those advocating universal taxing for crappy care
| would take the moral high road and not rob his fellow
| citizen to pay for his bills. Instead, let his fellow
| citizen give freely in love.
|
| Universal healthcare is such a moral sham, and what we
| have now in the US is also pretty bad. There is a better
| way.
| mixedCase wrote:
| Not going to defend universal healthcare or healthcare
| taxes, seeing I'm currently getting fucked by that at
| this moment, but given the way you wrote that I feel that
| you need to be pointed out that this results in either:
|
| 1) More expensive healthcare, to cover for these cases
| directly in a fund or via third party insurance.
|
| 2) Healthcare scarcity.
|
| You can't draw blood from a stone. Healthcare
| investors/workers at large don't get in to become a
| charity so your "solution" comes with explicit downsides
| you should mention.
| a-user-you-like wrote:
| It only results in those if you keep the regulation
| levels high, which we have now. We need a multi-faceted
| approach which lets the market lower prices. Local
| control, local solutions. More efficiency, human touch,
| love.
|
| No solution is perfect, but that's a world that's more
| personal for those helping and being helped. It also is
| more economically efficient. I'm not saying this is the
| only solution, but one that starts with robbing your
| neighbor is the moral low route and we should and can do
| better.
| Spoom wrote:
| Force hospital to provide care for indigents -> hospital
| raises prices for everyone to cover -> same effect as a
| tax. I'd much rather just be up front about it.
| a-user-you-like wrote:
| Not forcing, the universal crap care option is forcing
| through robbing his neighbor.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| In any other developed country there are some cost controls
| on health care. Without that universal health care will
| never work.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Adverse selection and thus unaffordably expensive.
| t-writescode wrote:
| Is that the same marketplace where health insurance starts
| at $500 / mo, when my job subsidizes my insurance down to
| $0 / mo (HSA) and like $10 to $100 a month for PPO?
|
| When you're already working the gig economy, I imagine $500
| / mo is a lot more of your relative income than $100 or
| whatever for me.
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| Many people living in the gig economy have a lower income
| [1], and less stable income than the average. Add to that
| the US has the highest cost healthcare in the developed
| world [2], more than twice the cost per person compared to
| where I live, Sweden. With four years lower life expectancy
| [3]. There are clearly better ways to get healthcare for
| everyone.
|
| [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/28/about-half-of-
| californias-gi...
|
| [2] The U.S. spent $8,233 on health per person in 2010.
| Norway, the Netherlands and Switzerland are the next
| highest spenders, but in the same year, they all spent at
| least $3,000 less per person. The average spending on
| health care among the other 33 developed OECD countries was
| $3,268 per person.
| https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/health-costs-how-the-
| us-...
|
| [3] https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy
| emkoemko wrote:
| that's how you end up with 45,000 people in the US of A
| dying each year from lack of health care...COVID killed
| 380,000 Americans because they lacked health care, not sure
| why its such a bad idea to give everyone healthcare
| gruez wrote:
| >that's how you end up with 45,000 people in the US of A
| dying each year from lack of health care...COVID killed
| 380,000 Americans because they lacked health care
|
| What's the methodology for calculating the amount of
| people dying from "lack of health care"?
| t-writescode wrote:
| if I had to guess, easily treatable illnesses where the
| early warning signs were not taken care of - or even the
| medium warning signs weren't taken care of, when it was
| treatable, correlated with "why didn't you go to the
| hospital?" and "couldn't afford it"
|
| If I had to guess. I haven't looked, though, of course.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Because when they do need it, they will demand the
| government provide it anyway.
|
| It is like employment insurance. Self employed love to opt
| out, but come a major economic crisis, they demand they be
| allowed to participate.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Wages for a huge swath of the country have not kept up with
| inflation over the last half a century, pressuring the
| 'lower class'.
|
| Many people have to choose between paying for something
| that primarily only matters in case of a bad event (health
| insurance), versus paying for things that if they don't pay
| for them, bad things happen with certainty, fairly quickly
| - loss of power, going hungry, not having gas for the car
| that they require because our public transit systems have
| been systematically disassembled (again over the last half
| a century), astronomical interest/late fees on loans and a
| credit score drop that can mean credit gets even more
| expensive, or is automatically revoked, or impacts one's
| ability to find employment in a kafka-esque hell where
| having too bad a credit rating means a fair number of
| companies won't employ you.
|
| When Wallyworld has staff who train employees in how to
| file for government benefits, maybe it's time to look at
| corporate tax share (in the 50's it used to be about 50%,
| now it's a few percent) and minimum wages.
| jnwatson wrote:
| It is a classic instance of "unfunded mandate".
| abofh wrote:
| So surely you've asked your employer to stop providing
| insurance so that you can obtain it on the open market?
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| That doesn't make sense. For example, the government can tell
| construction companies that they have to provide their
| workers hard hats and proper safety equipment. This does not
| mean that the government should necessarily have to provide
| this safety equipment themselves (although it might be a good
| idea for other reasons).
|
| Governments regulate indirectly like this all the time,
| there's nothing "weird" about it.
| jononomo wrote:
| Maybe companies should be required to provide all their
| workers with three square meals a day, as well as housing,
| childcare, an automobile, clothing, and furniture.
| t-writescode wrote:
| I believe that's defined as a "living wage" and I think
| companies should be required to provide that, too.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| This doesnt make sense because hard hats and high vis vests
| are not health insurance and youre talking like theyre the
| same thing.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| Except that healthcare is needed outside of work, by the
| worker, their spouse and children. It's needed for the
| person with the job and the one without. For the rich and
| the poor. Bad analogy, healthcare is a human right that
| shouldn't be tied to a job.
| [deleted]
| Spooky23 wrote:
| You need to convince regular people who vote conservative
| to stop doing so. The socialist boogeyman scares people
| more than lack of healthcare.
| pessimizer wrote:
| You say this as if Democrats didn't attack socialized
| healthcare in every underhanded way they possibly could
| when Bernie was running in 2016 and 2020. Before 2016,
| socialized healthcare was overwhelmingly supported by
| Democratic voters, and even carried a small majority of
| Republican voters for a short time.
|
| The Democrats fixed that good. Will providing healthcare
| to everyone end racism?
| rnk wrote:
| I don't think that's accurate. Many, maybe most democrats
| wanted national health care. Everyone I know wants it
| except my boomer parents and in-laws who of course have
| national healthcare via medicare. Some people used scare
| tactics against Bernie. People used scare tactics against
| HRC, Biden, and Trump. None of them were some "official
| national democratic party" - the dems have many factions.
|
| "Democrats" were not against health care. Some dems
| wanted a different candidate to win, and they argued
| against Bernie. Some dems were against Biden and argued
| against him too.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| If I am not mistaken, there were still 70+ percent of all
| Americans that supported universal healthcare as of 2020.
| uoaei wrote:
| If you've received any texts from "Pelosi" or "Obama"
| asking for donations recently, you will notice that the
| tactics that Dem consultants have settled on for their
| rhetoric is essentially scare tactics. The short circuits
| toward amygdala activation preclude the prefrontal cortex
| from being engaged.
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| American votes are fickle, and talking about running a
| universal healthcare system is easier than actually
| running one, especially for a country that has a
| perception of "government bad, companies good" created
| over the years by conservative propaganda.
|
| I think the Democrats correctly recognize that there is
| not a deep belief in the idea that of socialized
| universal healthcare in America. In the survey you
| quoted, I would bet that about 20-30 out of that 70%
| support the effects of it (i.e. universal free or cheap
| healthcare), but would not support a tax increase to pay
| for it if needed.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| The US already spends more per Capita for healthcare. I
| truly believe a tax increase won't be necessary, it's a
| matter of creating a sound plan that offers coverage to
| everyone using what we already spend on Healthcare.
|
| Regulate pharma pricing, cut the insurance companies as
| middlemen (they make $10's of billion in profit and their
| CEOs get paid millions), and make medical school
| affordable, even subsidize it if necessary.
|
| All of these issues we can sit here and discuss for hours
| have solutions, change will only happen when we all agree
| that healthcare is a human right, and shouldn't be tied
| to a job.
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| > it's a matter of creating a sound plan that offers
| coverage to everyone using what we already spend on
| Healthcare
|
| "It's a matter of creating a sound plan" is not the
| trivial thing you make it out to be without having a
| broad mandate about healthcare. You sound like the
| typical person who has never run for political office,
| but somehow thinks that they would totally fix the system
| if they were in charge.
|
| Governments are an efficient market of sorts. Affecting
| the market needs either broad changes in society's point
| of view, or catastrophic events. It's indicative of the
| magnitude of conservative thought in American society
| that even the worst pandemic in US history did not result
| in a bipartisan push towards socialized healthcare.
|
| For what it's worth - _I_ agree with you about healthcare
| being a human right, but I 'm not the person you need to
| convince. It's the people in your nearest conservative-
| leaning district who tend to treat healthcare more like
| going to the car dealership.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| > Governments are an efficient market of sorts.
|
| Is this a joke? You're wildly reaching with the
| definition of both 'efficient' and 'market' on this one.
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| The analogy I was trying to make is that if you think
| there is an obviously undervalued company on the market
| that is crazily under-priced, you're probably wrong, and
| the market is probably right.
|
| Similar, if OP thinks that there is an obvious case that
| Americans would back a completely socialized healthcare
| system, they are probably wrong, and the politicians that
| actually spend all their time talking to people and
| understanding the "market" of votes are probably right.
| One survey quoting a number of 70% does not mean anything
| particularly significant.
| gnopgnip wrote:
| The results of these polls really depend on how you
| define universal healthcare. For many the ACA counts as
| universal healthcare
| pessimizer wrote:
| Probably. But 1) far fewer Republicans, and 2) Democrats
| have been given verbiage to lie about their support for
| it i.e. "universal access" or "universal coverage" or
| "universally affordable coverage."
|
| If you ask a Democrat about whether they support
| socialized healthcare, they'll tell you that they of
| course support "universal access."
|
| What is "universal healthcare" anyway? It sounds like
| some the kind of intensely workshopped and whiteboarded
| meaningless marriage between socialized healthcare and
| "universal access" that "Medicare for All" was designed
| to head off.
| pueblito wrote:
| Factually incorrect. Obama was elected in 2008 with a
| supermajority in Congress and mandate to fix healthcare.
| He made it worse.
|
| Californias State Assembly has tried to get UHC, it was
| blocked by Newsom. If it cannot be done in California
| then it's clear the Democrats aren't going to fix it and
| have no political solution.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| Your first claim is an opinion rather than a fact. From
| my OPINION there are more people covered and are
| benefitting from medicare and medicaid because of those
| improvements.
|
| I don't have enough info to comment on your second point,
| but what I've heard was there were serious concerns in
| the bill and that's why gov. Newsom vetoed the bill.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Your first claim is an opinion rather than a fact.
|
| If you haven't looked it up, why would your claim that
| this is an opinion be anything other than noise? Find out
| whether its a fact or not (if you care) and come back and
| tell us.
|
| > From my OPINION there are more people covered and are
| benefiting from medicare and medicaid because of those
| improvements.
|
| This is not a matter for opinion. It's a claim fact that
| you can choose to verify or not.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| No, when someone posts something claiming it's a
| verifiable fact, it's their job to support it with
| citation. Until they do that, it remains an opinion.
| metadat wrote:
| Please choose to be part of the solution instead of part
| of the problem. Parent comment offers you a more
| reasonable way to think about it; the right thing for you
| to do is to provide verifiable evidence against bogus
| claims, otherwise it's just yelling at each other on the
| Internet, and nothing of any value happens. This isn't
| what HN is for, and it sucks for everyone else having to
| wade through such drivel.
|
| FWIW, I agree that the GP post you first responded to is
| trash.
|
| Take a moment, breathe deeply and try to relax ;)
| jrockway wrote:
| I don't think the Affordable Care Act made things worse
| overall. People without jobs can get health insurance
| (how they afford it, nobody knows), and people with
| preexisting conditions can get coverage, which is
| actually a really big deal. (As an aside, there is an
| interesting Vice documentary about how people in red
| states hate Obamacare but love the Affordable Care Act.
| Many people getting medical attention for the first time
| in their lives. That's a win. We just need to get over
| the "us vs them" mentality around healthcare.)
|
| Being extremely selfish for a moment, I can see the
| argument for how it got worse. For ultra-rich software
| engineers like us, yup, it got worse. There are basically
| the same number of doctors as there was before the ACA,
| but now more people can see them. This means you have to
| wait for appointments. I also think that medicine got
| ultra-industrialized What insurance covers and how much
| also decreased for us ("Cadillac tax" or something). I
| don't have many medical needs but I can tell you my
| insurance company tends to deny everything and you have
| to file 300 appeals if you even walk past a medical
| complex. It didn't used to be like that. But in the end,
| it doesn't really matter. You get paid a shit ton of
| money, sometimes you spend it on medical treatment.
| rnk wrote:
| It's not a helpful description of the situation when
| obama was elected with all that, because similar to today
| there were needed democrats who were against those
| policies. Just like today Manchin or Sinema can block
| anything they want even thought they are "democrats".
| Remember one of the required senators for obamacare was
| from Nebraska and he personally blocked a national health
| insurance plan, and he still lost office in the next
| election - he was using the fact he killed it as a
| "reason to vote for him".
|
| So saying dems had a supermajority and they could do
| anything they want is wrong, just like the dems have 50 +
| 1 and they can do things with majority votes - no they
| can't.
|
| I don't think healthcare is worse now than then. My mom
| was very ill when obama was president, and she couldn't
| get health care. She got free healthcare from the
| hospital. She died of cancer a few year later. Yeah, I
| was helping her, but she would have been better off if
| obama care had been available for her.
|
| The dems cannot fix it because they don't have a
| sufficient number of votes in congress. Even if they got
| to 60 in the senate to vote over the filibuster, they'd
| still need a few more because of Sinema and Manchin.
|
| The dems have a majority now, and they are going to
| having trouble passing a budget funding gap fix in
| december. Let me repeat that - they have a majority and
| they will struggle to avoid a govt shutdown.
| https://rollcall.com/2022/09/16/conservatives-ire-over-
| stopg...
|
| Let
| mikeyouse wrote:
| You do realize the reason the Democrats can't fix it is
| that the Republicans block all attempts right? Like when
| 59 Democrat Senators, the President and a majority of the
| house (100% Democratic support) are attempting to pass
| something like Medicare for All as happened in 2009 --
| the fact that it was blocked because they couldn't get a
| single Republican vote to break the filibuster reflects
| badly on the Republicans, not the Democrats.
|
| The Franken recount and Kennedy death meant they couldn't
| negotiate further and had to pass the reconciled bill for
| Obamacare without a Medicare buy-in option, _unless_ they
| had literally any Republican cross the aisle - which they
| refused to do. It's just such ignorant bad faith to claim
| otherwise.
|
| And since primary taxation happens at the Federal level,
| the state-options are essentially impossible without the
| Feds giving states that provide universal healthcare the
| ability to not pay Medicare/Medicaid payroll taxes --
| again which is impossible without Republicans support.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| At least they could try instead of impeaching Trump and
| investigating Jan 6. They should push some version of
| Medicare for all.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Again - ~95% of the D caucus supports it but it can't
| pass without ~10% of the Republican caucus crossing the
| aisle. Which 9 Republican senators do you think would
| vote for Medicare for all? Go ahead and name them and
| then be as mad as you want about the Ds investigating an
| attempted insurrection.
|
| Here's the latest M4A bill with dozens of D sponsors:
|
| https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-
| bill/1976...
| lokar wrote:
| The ACA has made a big difference in my family. The rule
| on pre-existing conditions is huge.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Obama pushed the republican plan because it would get
| votes.
|
| I didn't say "vote democratic". I said, don't vote
| conservative. Two different things.
| robcohen wrote:
| Technically correct, the democrats were in power a few
| weeks before Sen. Kennedy, the vote that gave dems a
| supermajority, got brain cancer and thus dems no longer
| had a supermajority. I believe they were in power a total
| of 11 legislative days.
|
| So technically yes, I guess we can blame the Dems for not
| fixing healthcare in 11 days.
|
| Note: Republicans later won that seat -
| https://www.cp24.com/democrats-scramble-after-republican-
| tak...
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| Virtually all opinion polls I have seen in the past few
| years indicate that not only an overwhelming majority of
| the general population of US Americans support a variant
| of Univeral Healthcare/Public Option/Single Payer but so
| do a majority of Republican voters, albeit by a slimmer
| margin.
|
| The limiting political factor is no longer the demand
| side of the scale--the voters and their fear of
| "socialism"--but rather on the supply side--the electable
| candidates and their unwillingness to do anything about
| it.
| newfriend wrote:
| Polls are easy to manipulate and not a good indicator of
| what people actually want.
|
| > Do you support universal healthcare?
|
| > Do you support raising your taxes by $X per year?
|
| > Do you support universal healthcare if it means raising
| your taxes by $X per year?
|
| Which question do you think they asked?
| staticman2 wrote:
| "Do you support raising your taxes by $X per year?"
|
| This would be a biased question to ask, since the
| economic effect on a U.S. citizen couldn't be measured by
| the tax rate alone.
| shostack wrote:
| Because that requires enough votes for Democrats. There's a
| good chance we'd have this if we did.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| The bitter truth is that not every Democrat supports
| universal healthcare.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| We saw this over a decade ago when blue dog Democrats did
| their best to prevent universal healthcare from being
| implemented, and we instead got the ACA.
| mc32 wrote:
| They could also make it harder to off-shore work and off-shore
| production to cut costs which in turn would make the lower
| skilled workforce "more desirable" and needed.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Ideally, yes. Unfortunately, it would also shift the balance of
| power from employers to workers. And even the Dems are hardly
| pro-labor at this point, to say nothing of all the powers that
| don't want empowered workers (and will do - and can do - what's
| necessary to prevent that).
| cal5k wrote:
| A lot of Americans seem to not understand what exactly this
| would entail. Like, the details _really_ matter.
|
| Would it be federal, or state-wide? How would it be funded?
| Would it be public "option", or would private pay be banned
| like in Canada? How would compensation rates be updated, and
| how often? Ask any hospital administrator what they think of
| Medicare/Medicaid rates, and they'll probably answer that
| they're set too low and that they lose money on
| Medicare/Medicaid patients.
|
| The details on "universal healthcare" can range from heavily-
| regulated private insurance - Germany for example - to outright
| bans on private pay for items insured by the government
| (Canada). A lot of Americans seem to want some sort of federal
| system that provides insurance for everything, which seems like
| the best way to get the most expensive, least capable system
| imaginable. Imagine having yet another insanely expensive,
| totally underfunded entitlement program that politicians can
| continuously pad with new promises every 2-4 years when they
| need to get re-elected.
|
| The Canadian experience (source: Canadian currently living in
| the US) is one you do not want to replicate, so be wary -
| Canadians have little confidence in their system at this point,
| even though it's quite expensive relative to European peers -
| and we have shockingly low numbers of imaging machines,
| hospital beds, urgent care clinics, etc. per capita, all well
| having administrative bloat that makes university
| administration look positively lean by comparison.
|
| People love to fret about this politician or that politician,
| but the reality is that Canada got the incentives totally wrong
| because they sounded nice. No out-of-pocket expenses? No evil
| private medicine? No profit from healthcare!
|
| As it turns out, central planning fails in healthcare just like
| it fails everywhere else. So "ensuring everyone has access to
| reasonably good healthcare" is an excellent goal, but "giving
| any level of government a monopoly on healthcare insurance"
| will be the death knell of the generally excellent healthcare
| Americans have access to if you have insurance.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| What would you think about this implementation?
|
| -Private insurance is allowed to exist and compete with the
| public offering
|
| -Everyone is entitled by law to the public health system for
| any kind of injury or health need.
|
| -The hospitals used by the public health system are
| government-owned. They are run by government bureocrats and
| staffed with private employees (the doctors, nurses,
| janitorial staff, etc)
|
| -The hospitals are managed by the respective jurisdictions in
| which they are, but they have to follow the basic model that
| the federal government imposes through the national health
| ministry.
| cal5k wrote:
| Government-owned hospitals are a bad idea in my view,
| because there's no incentive to provide good customer
| (patient) service, innovate, or move elective procedures to
| specialized surgical centres outside of a hospital centre.
| Nor any incentives to provide convenient non-hospital
| urgent care clinics like you see all over America.
|
| The best hospital systems in the world, like Mayo Clinic
| and Cleveland Clinic, are generally non-profits operating
| in a mixed system where they take private insurance, out-
| of-pocket payments, and medicare/medicaid. They have to
| remain competitive otherwise they won't attract customers
| from out-of-state or out-of-country. If you basically force
| patients on the public system to only use certain
| government-run hospitals, you're dooming them to an
| inferior experience than what you could get by perhaps
| enhancing access to public pay for some services.
| rnk wrote:
| Your point is wrong. Pretty much every other western country
| has much better health care than the US, better outcomes,
| less disease, longer life. People say they don't want to be
| like Canada- yet in Canada people have better outcomes than
| america.
|
| It's just a lazy argument to say central planning fails in
| healthcare, because it generally works well in other
| countries.
| cal5k wrote:
| Oh, okay. Let's ignore social determinants of health then
| and just say yes, Canada's system is prima facie superior.
| Case closed! Let's all adopt Canada's system
|
| Outcomes aren't uniformly better, by the way. Canada
| routinely ranks near the bottom of the OECD and like one
| notch above America, but in America you can get the best
| healthcare in the world (Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic,
| etc.)
|
| Canada has no equivalent - the small Cleveland Clinic
| presence in Canada hasn't bothered trying to open a
| hospital because it would basically be impossible, unlike
| in the UK where private hospitals still exist.
|
| The healthcare professionals in Canada are very well-
| trained, but there are too few of them and they're
| smothered in useless bureaucracy.
| myko wrote:
| It's interesting to me, an American with a lot of family
| members who are Canadian, to hear my fellow Americans
| arguments against the clearly superior Canadian health care
| system.
|
| The biggest complaint I hear about the Canadian system are
| wait times, but those affect the expensive US system, too.
| My wife needed back surgery and couldn't get it scheduled
| until 6 months out in the US, after jumping through health
| insurance hoops (useless procedures to check boxes) for 6
| months prior to that.
|
| Ended up in the ER told "don't move or you might not walk
| again" while she had to wait 2 days, writhing in pain (but
| not allowed to move!) until a surgeon performed her surgery
| 4 months earlier than scheduled.
|
| And we paid 10s of thousands of dollars, which took years
| to pay off.
| petesergeant wrote:
| > As it turns out, central planning fails in healthcare just
| like it fails everywhere else
|
| Virtually every rich country except America manages to
| provide "free at point of use" healthcare because of
| government intervention. And of note, if you're not happy
| with what the government provides in most of these countries,
| you can usually top up to gold-plated health care at a
| fraction of the cost in the US. Last I checked, the US also
| managed to do this just fine where it has to: the VHA spends
| about as much as the NHS does and also gets excellent
| outcomes.
|
| Talking about "the Canadian experience" seems strange to me:
| don't each of the provinces/territories do it differently?
| The Manitobans in my family seem very happy with the
| provision they get. Regardless, 75% of Canadians are "proud"
| of Canadian health provision[0].
|
| Most rich countries (that aren't America) also have
| essentially instant and free transfers between bank accounts
| ... because either the government intervened or threatened to
| intervene.
|
| 0: https://biv.com/article/2020/08/covid-19-crisis-has-
| failed-e...
| cal5k wrote:
| Healthcare is a provincial jurisdiction, but the federal
| government provides a lot of the funding and attaches
| strings - the chief one being participation in the "Canada
| Health Act" which mandates a ban on private pay for
| publicly-insured services.
|
| It's a bad system and since that article was published
| public sentiment has been worsening:
| https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/first-reading-
| canadian-...
|
| Most people who have glowing things to say about it have
| had minimal interactions with the system. The overall data
| shows predictable results when government intervention
| completely skews market incentives: the patient experience
| blows, administration is bloated to hell, it lacks
| capacity, and it bleeds healthcare professionals across the
| border where pay and working conditions are generally
| better.
|
| The fact that anyone defends the system as it's currently
| designed is honestly baffling to me. If you took another
| essential industry - food - and applied similar incentives
| (any food paid for by government can't be purchased
| privately, government sets the rates, etc.) most people
| would correctly predict it would be disastrous.
| propogandist wrote:
| Make their VCs pay for health care, they subsidize everything
| else. Most of the companies in this space make no money, and
| should be shutdown anyway.
| Eleison23 wrote:
| This will not happen, and the reason is that Obamacare made a
| great effort to decouple health care insurance and benefits
| from the employer. Since insurance is now available for
| purchase on the open marketplace, there are whole classes of
| employers who don't need to worry about including it in their
| benefits packages which they offer. It would be a step
| backwards to require or force companies to include it,
| especially to gig workers or contract employees; they should
| simply compensate them enough that they can afford to
| purchase an appropriate plan on the marketplace.
|
| If you do not like this structure then you should have worked
| to block Obamacare from becoming law, because that was a
| primary objective of the legislation: to decouple health care
| plans from large companies and employers, and make that
| insurance more accessible, on the free market, to more
| workers than ever before.
| propogandist wrote:
| >they should simply compensate them enough that they can
| afford to purchase an appropriate plan on the marketplace.
|
| agreed, but they won't. Most of the "gig" companies are
| exploitative parasites.
| orangecat wrote:
| That was one of the good parts of the ACA, although it also
| inexplicably added employer insurance mandates that created
| predictable perverse incentives (e.g. employees being
| limited to less than 30 hours/week). The whole thing is
| ridiculous: your employer should have no more involvement
| with your health care or insurance than they do with your
| food or housing.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| From outside the US looking in health care being in any
| way related to employment just seems nuts.
| hgs3 wrote:
| > Since insurance is now available for purchase on the open
| marketplace, there are whole classes of employers who don't
| need to worry about including it in their benefits packages
| which they offer.
|
| I'm not sure what you mean by "decoupled." I could buy
| private health insurance prior to the ACA and it was
| cheaper (at least for me it was). Also, I wouldn't call the
| marketplace "open." Right now health insurance is like the
| internet in that you can only purchase it from local
| providers and you can only realistically use it at "in
| network providers" without the cost becoming astronomical.
| The lack of competition is what is artificially keeping
| prices high. Case in point: my dental and vision insurance
| can be used in all 50 states with a huge number of
| providers and costs a fraction of what my health insurance
| costs.
| jwolfe wrote:
| > Obamacare made a great effort to decouple health care
| insurance and benefits from the employer
|
| Did it? There was lots of talk at the time about how you
| get to keep your private plan. And the actual text of the
| ACA _mandated_ that large employers offer health insurance,
| which was not the case before the ACA.
|
| What provisions in the ACA made great efforts to decouple
| them? i.e., which provisions incentivized individuals to
| not be on employer plans, or employers not to offer them?
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Actually, the primary objective of the ACA is in the
| name...Affordable Care. And if that's the metric, it's not
| achieving its goal. We should also remember that the
| promise was to lower prices by legally forcing the younger
| (read: less likely to use services) to sign up. That didn't
| last long.
|
| Editorial: This is why everyone calls it Obamacare. The
| Reps love the knock. The Dems are not wanting to remind
| anyone Affordable is in the name.
|
| Note: I'm not knocking ACA per se. We should have health
| care. The issue is ACA is a fine example of: good idea,
| poor execution. And no one has the will to fix what is by
| most accounts not living up to its promise or need.
| enobrev wrote:
| It was fairly affordable the first couple years. And then
| the insurance companies started finding loopholes and
| increased prices drastically every annually.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| That being said, let's pray the Inflation Reduction Act
| fares better than ACA.
| propogandist wrote:
| the green new deal packaged up with a deceptive name? It
| won't do anything.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Uber, Lyft, and Doordash are public. VCs are just
| shareholders at this point.
| qeternity wrote:
| I find this all really bizarre that so many people are so quick
| to jump to this kind of thinking.
|
| Honest question: why does anyone think these people are being
| taken advantage of? Why would you work a gig job if it weren't a)
| desirable for whatever reason or b) if you had a better offer.
|
| Where do we draw the line of interfering with an agreement
| between two competent, free parties?
| FireSparrowWeld wrote:
| We think they're suffering because they're saying they're
| suffering.
|
| Zero people would care about this if there wasn't a huge outcry
| from the gig workers themselves! This isn't just paternalism,
| it's the gig workers themselves driving these changes.
| worried4future wrote:
| > This isn't just paternalism, it's the gig workers
| themselves driving these changes.
|
| This isn't universal though. If you go to places where gig
| workers discuss these issues (say /r/UberDrivers) every post
| complaining about pay has people saying "if you don't like
| the fare, don't accept it!" and to be fair there are also
| lots who are not complaining about it.
|
| In any event, I don't mean to defend uber. I don't favor
| their model. I would just say that it is NOT universal.
| FireSparrowWeld wrote:
| You're arguing tactics vs. strategy though, the tactic is
| to optimize the current system, but the strategy is to fix
| the broken system.
|
| A single Uber driver can and often does do both.
| worried4future wrote:
| Some people don't agree that the system is even broken.
| Kloversight2 wrote:
| "Some people" think all kinds of crazy shit, I'm not
| really seeing an argument here.
| qeternity wrote:
| > We think they're suffering because they're saying they're
| suffering.
|
| Calfornia's AB5 was massively protested by gig workers. This
| sort of generalization is absolutely paternalism.
| abigail95 wrote:
| To the extent the companies are colluding on rates, that hurts
| the sellers and the buyers on any marketplace.
|
| If the company is using some AI model to resolve disputes
| against statutory and contract requirements, same problem.
|
| Same thing again with deceptive conduct and misrepresentation,
| if you take a dollar from one million people that you wouldn't
| have without deceiving people, this is a good area for
| regulator (like FCC) to handle. Class actions as an alternative
| seem to end up with a worse result.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| In my opinion, the problem is that gig companies eventually
| "suck the air" out of the market and leave no room for those
| "better" jobs to exist.
|
| Let's take Uber as an example: if you wanted to open a rival
| company following the taxi laws that Uber ignores you'd have
| higher employee and maintenance costs. Eventually you'd go
| broke: your drivers may be happier, but yor clients are all
| taking Uber because it's cheaper. And once you go broke, your
| drivers have no choice but to work for Uber. It's a race to the
| bottom.
|
| > _Where do we draw the line of interfering with an agreement
| between two competent, free parties?_
|
| Typically, when the deal is too disproportionate and/or one-
| sided. Anti-usury laws and contracts void due to lack of
| consideration are two examples, but I'm sure there are others.
| fuzzzerd wrote:
| Uber has not been cheaper than a taxi for years now.
| Definitely not since the pandemic started.
|
| People take Uber now because it's about the same cost as a
| taxi, but the credit card machine is never broken, and they
| can be summoned on demand.
| warble wrote:
| Agreed, I use Uber because it's easier, not because it's
| less expensive.
| qeternity wrote:
| > In my opinion, the problem is that gig companies eventually
| "suck the air" out of the market and leave no room for those
| "better" jobs to exist.
|
| You call it sucking the air out of the market because you
| don't like it. It's not a better job, it's the same job, you
| just want it to pay more.
|
| Yes, if you cannot provide a service as cheaply as your
| competitor, you go broke. That's capitalism. If Uber is the
| cheapest taxi provider, then yes they will dominate...but
| that's because _consumers_ chose Uber over more expensive
| alternatives. If Uber can charge low prices because lots of
| people are willing to work for it, and consumers choose Uber
| because of its low prices...where is the problem? If Uber
| subsidizes rides and goes broke, they deserve that fate as
| well.
|
| > And once you go broke, your drivers have no choice but to
| work for Uber.
|
| Or they do something else. This is the natural balance of
| market forces. Driving an Uber is essentially unskilled
| labor. If the attractiveness of the job drops, people go and
| do something else. The labor pool shrinks, and Uber is then
| forced to raise wages to attract people back into their
| ranks. Your cut-and-dry extremes are just not how the real
| economy works.
|
| > Typically, when the deal is too disproportionate and/or
| one-sided.
|
| These contracts are not too one-sided. A gig worker can stop
| working at a moment's notice (which has historically been one
| of the perks).
| j245 wrote:
| > That's capitalism.
|
| Don't worry too much about capitalist ideals, we should be
| willing to bend the rules as needed to promote a system
| where there is healthy competition and innovation.
|
| If we can do un-capitalistic things like bail outs and PPP
| schemes to help businesses when their chips are down, we
| should be able to handicap them when things are in their
| favour, to help new businesses challenge them.
| diordiderot wrote:
| We shouldn't help them when the chips are down. Let the
| investors hang themselves (without letting anyone
| starve*) so the next generation know how to plan
| accordingly.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| I agree with you that this is capitalism, but I wouldn't
| take that as a positive. If anything, this is society (via
| the FTC) reigning in some of the worse aspects of
| capitalism.
|
| Every "obligation" that Uber and friends avoid with its gig
| workers policy (health insurance, accident insurance,
| unemployment, retirement) falls on the shoulders of the
| taxpayer. The companies are privatizing the profits and
| socializing the costs (which is something that capitalists
| like to do) and society is arguing that this is not what
| they want. It's the same reasoning for forcing construction
| companies to pay for the safety equipment of their workers
| even if market forces would prefer the workers to pay for
| it themselves.
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| Lots of arguments lacking any sort of nuance in this one,
| but since I am short on one I will respond to just once:
|
| > If Uber can charge low prices because lots of people are
| willing to work for it, and consumers choose Uber because
| of its low prices...where is the problem? If Uber
| subsidizes rides and goes broke, they deserve that fate as
| well.
|
| Except once Uber starves and destroys the taxi service in a
| city, and one day declare bankruptcy and close down their
| servers, that city is going to be left in a pinch with a
| void that can't immediately be filled, leaving society to
| foot the bill for their greedy destruction.
|
| It seems like this argument and some others constantly
| suffer from the libertarian wet dream where any business,
| no matter how complex, can be spun up in an instance _if
| only there was no government to interfere_. That has never
| been true, and every business has externalities towards
| society that may need to be managed and prodded back in
| line from time to time with very necessary regulations.
| warble wrote:
| In theory, but the market is always more complex than
| this. A market is not a single company ever, except for
| Government.
| qeternity wrote:
| Ad hominem attack aside, I agree with much of what you
| say. But your argument hinges on a hypothetical that
| hasn't happened.
|
| Forget about the libertarian wet dream, your bias is
| clear. What is the negative externality that you believe
| society is imminently facing and must be regulated? Do
| you believe Uber is on the verge of shutting down?
| CPLX wrote:
| > Where do we draw the line of interfering with an agreement
| between two competent, free parties?
|
| Constantly. Endlessly. Daily.
|
| We draw the line everywhere, all day, in every single aspect of
| lives. It's the core concept of government, in fact it's the
| basic premise of civilization.
|
| Two parties can't agree to enter into slavery. Or a Ponzi
| scheme. Or a restaurant meal where the cooks don't disinfect
| the kitchen. Or a bank where there's not enough reserves. Or an
| airplane that hasn't been maintained. Or a verbal agreement to
| buy a house.
|
| In all cases it's because we're not ok with the effect on
| society, like E. Coli outbreaks, plane crashes, bank failures,
| destitute old people, and lots of other stuff.
|
| It's not necessarily that the people themselves are being taken
| advantage of. Society is. The companies are externalizing costs
| and risks on everyone instead of absorbing them. We get to
| decide that's not OK.
| qeternity wrote:
| I asked _where_ we draw the line, not if we draw it.
|
| All of your examples are incredibly unlikely things for two
| _informed_ parties to enter into. In fact, the reasons those
| laws exist is because of the information asymmetry. That
| seems reasonable to me.
|
| But gig workers are not under the illusion that they are
| going to receive healthcare or other benefits. It's like if I
| took a job offer for $X and then demanded I was being
| exploited because I want $Y. I fully support gig workers in
| pushing for more, I absolutely do. These are natural market
| forces. Everyone should act in their own self interest...we
| know that Uber will.
|
| I just think that in this instance, this qualifies as
| government overreach.
| yourapostasy wrote:
| _> I just think that in this instance, this qualifies as
| government overreach._
|
| Considering the bought and paid for political legislatures
| with lobbying money and unusual whales funded by corporate
| interests, if you think this little blip by workers is
| "overreach" then you'd be flabbergasted by what corporate
| lobbyists get away with.
| CPLX wrote:
| I answered it. We draw the line where there are
| demonstrable harms to society and when information or power
| asymmetry is not avoidable, which externalizes costs onto
| society as a whole.
| qeternity wrote:
| Ok, and what is the unavoidable and unacceptable
| asymmetry at play here?
| [deleted]
| steve76 wrote:
| schroeding wrote:
| > or b) if you had a better offer.
|
| ... isn't the lack of a better offer one of the components
| _necessary_ to exploit a worker? You can only exploit a worker,
| without violence, if they are (financially) pressed against the
| wall and have no better options, right?
| qeternity wrote:
| Not necessarily, but let's take your example. People often
| point that the gig companies aren't making any money, and the
| response to that is often along the lines of "well a business
| model like this shouldn't exist then".
|
| So given that these companies aren't making money, what if
| these changes drive them out of existence? If gig workers
| truly don't have a better offer, well now they have no
| offers. What do this people do then?
| schroeding wrote:
| They will do an even shittier job or be without any income.
|
| You want to say "better this job than the worse one then",
| right? I understand that. But if you view the working
| conditions of gig workers as exploitive, this can't justify
| their existence, IMO. Otherwise you get a race to the
| bottom and can justify any work condition with the
| exception of the absolute bottom of the barrel.
|
| Whether or not you see the working conditions for gig
| workers as exploitive is up to you, of course.
| qeternity wrote:
| This is a fair argument (not one I agree with), but this
| is much larger than gig workers, and quickly jumps to
| minimum wage, UBI, etc.
|
| I have views on that, not appropriate for this thread,
| and I accept if someone wants to make this argument. But
| again, this is a social critique...nothing specific to
| the gig economy.
| seydor wrote:
| humanitarian reasons - the same reason why workers rights in
| general exist in the first place.
| [deleted]
| namdnay wrote:
| You could give that argument for pretty much any labour
| dispute. If those workers don't want to spend 70 hours a week
| in the factory, why don't they find another job instead? If the
| miners are not happy about the safety measures, why don't they
| go to another mine that's safer?
|
| To answer your question, yes it's probably a bit of a and a lot
| of b, but what does that change?
| qeternity wrote:
| Yes, and I think it's a fair argument, which then leads to
| some reasonable conclusion. In a modern country, most people
| don't believe that people should put their life at undue
| risk, even if that makes the system less efficient. I happen
| to agree with this.
|
| My open question again was not about whether to draw a line,
| like your mining example, but rather _where_ we draw it.
|
| I just happen to be of the opinion that gig workers, and
| miners working in dangerous conditions, happen to fall on
| opposite sides of that line.
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| I think I missed your explanation of why they fall on the
| opposite line. Care to explain?
| andrewflnr wrote:
| As a society, we have to decide that certain kinds of voluntary
| agreements are too exploitative, have too big of a power
| differential, to be compatible with liberty and therefore are
| not permissible. Selling yourself into literal slavery comes to
| mind, but the bar can be a lot higher than that. Part of making
| sure that "better offers" exist is banning intolerable offers.
| If this damages or bankrupts your business, it means you
| weren't producing enough value for the resources, including
| humans' finite lifetimes, that you were consuming.
|
| In this particular case, the important thing to me is the focus
| on honesty about the nature of the job. If they tell you, while
| you're voluntarily entering an agreement, that you'll have a
| certain degree of flexibility, and in practice they try not to
| let you have that, you've been lured into the deal on false
| premises. Usually we call that fraud, and in any case it should
| be uncontroversial that it's immoral.
|
| After reading the comments here I was prepared to be
| disappointed by the policy direction, but instead I'm only
| disappointed I didn't see any specific enforcement teeth
| mentioned. Demanding transparency and that companies treat
| their contractors as contractors is IMO the correct direction;
| it's certainly better than retroactively classifying as
| employees people who never wanted to be such, as we sometimes
| see.
| adolph wrote:
| > Selling yourself into literal slavery
|
| What are the working conditions that cause something to be
| literal slavery as opposed to contract labor?
|
| Would individual contracts with a nation's armed forces count
| as slavery? Why or why not?
| fairity wrote:
| > As a society, we have to decide that certain kinds of
| voluntary agreements are too exploitative, have too big of a
| power differential, to be compatible with liberty and
| therefore are not permissible.
|
| Do we though? If UBI and universal healthcare were a thing, I
| would be OK green-lighting ALL voluntary agreements. What am
| I missing?
| seer-zig wrote:
| UBI is not sustainable. For something that is sustainable
| (and proven), look into Islam's Zakat.
| carom wrote:
| >Selling yourself into literal slavery comes to mind
|
| You can still do this, it's called three hots and a cot. The
| police will direct you how to sign up.
|
| If there are people desperate enough to go to prison to eat
| and have shelter, we should probably find a solution for
| those people within society. That likely means there is some
| point between what we currently offer and what prison offers
| where those people would be better off. Without those
| (shitty) jobs, you have a binary choice between good job or
| the streets.
|
| Honestly, I think a lot of this comes back to housing policy
| and healthcare. You can't build boarding houses anymore.
| Zoning laws basically make it so you can be homeless or pay
| $1k / month (metro city). There's a lot of room in the middle
| there. The healthcare system is so bloated and broken that I
| do not think we will bring costs down, so the only solution
| there is state funded then using state leverage.
|
| Setting a floor for voluntary agreements sounds very humane,
| but it also means that anyone who can't reach that floor is
| open to abuse. The same goes for immigrant labor. We don't
| clamp down on it because doing so sounds racist, but it
| creates a system where people can be easily exploited.
| qeternity wrote:
| I think all of the hyperbole around slavery is massively
| disrespectful to actual slavery, which still exists in 2022.
| An Uber driver is not a slave.
|
| But I do agree with you on everything else. I think that
| companies who want to hire contractors, should treat them as
| such, and not as employees for which they can reap the
| rewards of a contractor classification.
| zhoujianfu wrote:
| I agree... and here's something weird (using DoorDash as an
| example):
|
| 1. Everybody says DoorDash doesn't pay their workers enough.
|
| 2. Everybody says DoorDash charges restaurants too much.
|
| 3. Everybody says DoorDash marks up the food too much.
|
| 4. Nobody is forced to use DoorDash, work for DoorDash, or sell
| on DoorDash.
|
| 5. DoorDash has never made a profit.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| That's not very weird to me. It just means DoorDash's
| business model is unsuitable and that DoorDash shouldn't
| exist.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Who are they targeting, who is this for?
| LinkLink wrote:
| Ubers real disruption is labor exploitation but not in the way
| you think. Uber is allowed to get away with the mistreatment of
| the Drivers because they define them as independent contractors,
| but how do they do this?
|
| An employee of a company is in traditional terms, somebody who
| acts for the benefit and interests of a larger entity which
| engages in business to business or customer interaction, in
| return for earning a reasonable wage and defined employment terms
| set by the company.
|
| An independent contractor is an individual entity, who by setting
| their own terms and prices, provides a service for other
| individual entities for the purpose of earning a reasonable
| income for themselves.
|
| What Uber has done, is see all the protections afforded to
| employees of a company both traditionally and federally, and
| sidestep them because they call their drivers independent
| contractors. It is implied that the Driver is setting their own
| pricing and terms of employment. They may legally technically be
| doing so, but what they're really doing is agreeing to the same
| terms set by Uber and defined by Uber as every other driver, as
| if they were employees. This allows Uber to really do whatever
| they want to an "independent contractor" which has agreed to
| their terms of not setting their own rates, having no
| transparency, and being totally subject to Ubers conditional
| compensation agreements.
| noahmbarr wrote:
| Is this a generically targeted release (initially) aimed a
| specific company/vertical?
| ocbyc wrote:
| Often these "gigs" are extremely flexible for students that can't
| work a full time job, and have random periods of idle time.
| Notwithstanding higher education should be more attainable by
| those same gig workers.
|
| It feels like they're trying to move the first rung of the ladder
| higher and higher. They would rather a young person take on
| mounds of debt, instead of say a low paid internship or
| apprenticeship. Current minimum wages ensure automation are going
| to win.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| Do we need automation more than affordable medicine?
|
| I'll explain.. if extremely expensive life-saving medicine did
| not improve things to the point those meds became cheap, then I
| won't expect "cheap labor" to bring me benefit, it'll only
| benefit the companies.
|
| If you really care about automation and want to see it happen
| quickly, then stand by workers, their rights and support the
| increase of minimum wage... Nothing makes companies rush into
| innovating more than a way to save a buck.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Current minimum wages ensure automation are going to win.
|
| The only problem is that there's no evidence of this.
| Automation still costs more than people, and when machines get
| sick, you have to hire mechanics that charge by the hour to fix
| them. When automation is cheaper than people, it's a good thing
| that all of society profits from when things are automated as
| long as you don't allow the automators to permanently
| lock/monopoly away their innovations i.e. you allow competition
| to reduce prices.
|
| All gigwork "tech" has succeeded in is manufacturing legal
| pretexts that allow companies not to pay for employee downtime.
| Bringing back piecework from the 19th century isn't automation,
| it's lobbying.
| worried4future wrote:
| > They would rather a young person take on mounds of debt,
| instead of say a low paid internship or apprenticeship. Current
| minimum wages ensure automation are going to win.
|
| Yes. Abolish the minimum wage. Higher minimum wage forces more
| people out of the workforce entirely and skews the labor market
| in favor of large corporations vs small businesses. Amazon can
| absorb any minimum wage hike you can conceive, they don't want
| to and they will fight tooth and nail against it, but they can
| afford it. Your neighborhood pizza shop will go out of business
| (and be replaced by a Pizza Hut -- paying twice as much but
| employing 25% as many people and working them 400% as hard) if
| they have to pay their drivers 15 or 20 or 25 (or more) dollars
| an hour. Both of these effects, lower labor participation rate
| and consolidation of the employment market in fewer large
| corporations, are much worse for society overall.
| jrajav wrote:
| If you're going to make claims that don't align with academic
| consensus and empirical evidence (that higher minimum wage is
| net bad for the lowest earners, or for the economy as a
| whole, or that it reduces employment), you'll need to back up
| your claims with substantial evidence of your own. As is,
| you're just spinning a hypothetical based on total
| assumptions, which don't really pass the sniff test.
| worried4future wrote:
| > academic consensus and empirical evidence
|
| I reject the "academic consensus" of people who are not a
| part of the real world.
| ocbyc wrote:
| A worker is worth what a business can pay for the value they
| bring. Arguably a low paid apprenticeship is more beneficial
| than mounds of college debt. Somehow taking debt is seen as
| better than simply breaking even. I know many jobs that would
| benefit from someone "sweeping the shop" while they learn the
| business.
| eropple wrote:
| And when they starve or go homeless in the process of
| "learning the business"?
|
| Spherical cows don't work in physics, let alone economics.
| Minimum wages are suboptimal but starving is worse.
| worried4future wrote:
| > And when they starve or go homeless in the process of
| "learning the business"?
|
| These are effects of the fact that costs of living are
| dramatically out of control, you can't just infinitely
| raise the minimum wage to compensate as this is only
| making the problem worse.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| Wouldn't you starve or go homeless even faster if you had
| no income but were paying for an education?
|
| vs getting paid (a little) to get education.
| worried4future wrote:
| No, because, when you're paying for an education you can
| also get loans (at usurious rates) to cover cost of
| living expenses too!
|
| You won't pay now for that 10k/year required meal plan
| for cafeteria food and 20k/year for hostel-level
| accommodation but you're sure going to pay for it later.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"Spherical cows"
|
| Thanks for the laugh. Makes for warm and fuzzy memories.
| My science days are some 30 years behind.
| worried4future wrote:
| > A worker is worth what a business can pay for the value
| they bring.
|
| I think this is a good point of view, but, it's important
| to remember that what the business can pay differs from
| what it's willing to pay and that larger employers are more
| able to drive rates lower. Not all businesses are equal and
| we should favor the ones which bring the most benefit to
| the most people.
|
| > Arguably a low paid apprenticeship is more beneficial
| than mounds of college debt.
|
| 100%. Remove "arguably" from your comment. Factor in the
| value of starting earlier and negative value of the debt
| you accumulate and very few professions truly benefit from
| a college education and most of the remaining ones only do
| so due to regulatory capture effects of requiring them and
| we would do well with reducing those in favor of far more
| trade-focused education (tl;dr more trade schools, less
| liberal arts colleges).
| guywithahat wrote:
| This is what I'm thinking; I've met a lot of uber drivers who
| work there because their kid entered high school and they want
| more flexibility in their schedule, or maybe they have a main
| job and like to do it to meet people/make some extra cash. The
| issue with Taxi's was that it was so regulated nobody was
| allowed to enter the market or otherwise innovate in it, and I
| feat that's what's going to happen to Uber and Lyft
| rdtwo wrote:
| I'll believe it when I see it. Probably huge fines for small and
| medium business and nothing for the big offenders
| justinzollars wrote:
| siliconc0w wrote:
| Any employer who pays less than the cost of living is effectively
| transitioning that cost to the state and should pay the
| difference to the state (or, easier, to the worker). Otherwise
| we're effectively subsidizing these companies and food delivery
| isn't something the state should subsidize.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| This style of argument is nonsense.
|
| As to earnings, if I have a company and I earn $20k/yr on the
| side for myself I am not "transitioning that cost to the state"
| and I should not be prevented by law from operating my
| business. The same is true if I employ someone to do the work
| rather than doing it myself.
|
| As to determining the cost of living: How would you propose
| this even be done? The cost of a student living at home is very
| different from a single person, and in turn is very different
| from a family with arbitrarily large numbers of dependents.
|
| There is no such thing as a universal cost of living.
| Prohibiting part-time work only hurts people who could
| otherwise benefit from it -- like students who do not have
| availability to work full time hours.
| fairity wrote:
| I'd like to discuss whose responsibility it should be to ensure
| citizens have access to basic income (to purchase food and
| shelter) and healthcare. Is it: 1) the government 2) corporations
| or 3) nobody?
|
| Currently, it's the government's responsibility if you're
| unemployed. And, it's the corporations' responsibility if you're
| employed. As a result, you have corporations that are trying to
| skirt the responsibility by claiming that their workers are not
| actually employees.
|
| But, why do we rely on corporations to provide basic income and
| healthcare to BEGIN with? Isn't it better if the government
| provides a social safety net to ANYONE (employed or unemployed)?
| d23 wrote:
| > But, why do we rely on corporations to provide basic income
| and healthcare to BEGIN with? Isn't it better if the government
| provides a social safety net to ANYONE (employed or
| unemployed)?
|
| Healthcare maybe. But the income argument taken to the extreme:
| if no one works, society will cease to function. When you work
| for a corporation you are trading your effort for wages. It
| seems reasonable to pay a living wage to someone working 40
| hours a week. They are contributing to society and shouldn't
| have to struggle.
| fairity wrote:
| > If no one works, society will cease to function.
|
| I assume you don't actually mean to suggest EVERYONE would
| stop working. Rather, I assume you're suggesting that UBI, at
| a level of ~$1500 per month, would result in anyone making
| minimum wage to quit. Is there data that supports this? I
| would think that ~$1500 per month provides such a sub-
| standard quality of life that most of these people would
| continue working to supplement their income OR invest in
| learning to further their career. And, corporations, would be
| forced to increase pay, which would take some readjustment,
| but wouldn't be the end of the world.
|
| > It seems reasonable to pay a living wage to someone working
| 40 hours a week.
|
| I'm saying that, if you remove the need for a social safety
| net, this statement doesn't ring true. That is, if you're not
| providing value to an employer, it's not reasonable for them
| to pay you ANYTHING.
| unity1001 wrote:
| All it took was the Eu telling those companies that those were
| employees, not contract workers and the companies had to give
| them full rights. ~6 months later, the US regulators 'just' see
| the light...
| mugivarra69 wrote:
| will update my posteriors when i see some evidance contradicting
| my a priories.
| theknocker wrote:
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| They should not just crack down but heavily fine the companies
| that abused the system and mislabeled employees. It is too little
| too late IMO.
| tempie_deleteme wrote:
| > _gig workers are consumers entitled to protection under the
| laws we enforce_
|
| consumers of the opportunity to labor?
| ravel-bar-foo wrote:
| This is because antitrust laws in the US have been
| reinterpreted by the courts to only apply where there is an
| adverse impact on consumers. In order to punish anticompetitive
| behavior that negatively affects workers in keeping with
| existing precedents, they get into redefining workers as
| consumers.
| gruez wrote:
| Is gig workers' poor treatment because of "anticompetitive
| behavior" or because they're low skill labor with plenty of
| other takers if one driver refuses the deal?
| bpodgursky wrote:
| The FTC is empowered by congress with the mandate of ensuring
| "consumer protection", so if they want to make a land-grab and
| expand their mandate, they have to twist the definition somehow
| to make their legal authority nominally cover it.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Neither employees nor customers. I guess the underhanded
| fiction that is being pushed on us is that every gigworker is
| an employer.
|
| If you get to be a small businessman due to your control over
| your own body, what is an employee again? Last I heard,
| employees also had control over their own bodies.
|
| What is an employee?
| smeej wrote:
| That very much seems to be the argument of the companies,
| doesn't it? Like, "Hey, we're just a tech company that has
| created a marketplace where people can request rides (for
| example) and people who want to provide rides can provide them.
| Both sides are 'consumers' of each others offers."
|
| It seems like normally we see the government agencies bending
| over backwards to prove that is _not_ the case, that these are
| actually employees working for the company providing the
| marketplace software, so this specific word choice in this
| instance surprised me.
|
| (FWIW, as commentary, I had to insist quite strenuously in my
| own case that I had NOT been an "employee" of Uber or Lyft,
| even though I had been providing rides in the evenings when I
| had nothing else to do when I was new to town and wanted to
| learn what was cool and meet people. When I got laid off from
| my tech job, my state government was insistent that Uber and
| Lyft had _also_ been "employers" of mine for the purposes of
| determining eligibility for unemployment benefits, until I
| eventually showed them I had my own LLC, corporate insurance
| policy, etc., because yeah, I was doing it as a hobby, but I
| was damn sure going to be running my own business as a hobby,
| not being employed by Uber or Lyft as a hobby. It's difficult
| for me to understand why people _want_ to be considered
| "employees." You're much more at the mercy of the company that
| way.)
| Plasmoid wrote:
| It's always about taxes. Most governments want Uber et al to
| write them a cheque for payroll taxes rather than hunt down
| tons of people individually.
|
| That is the entirety of the argument around it.
| euroderf wrote:
| If in practice this works out to be the Precariat[1], it's a win
| for the evolution of the modern economy.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precariat
| baby wrote:
| "protecting America's consumers". As a consumer I like Uber, but
| I don't understand why I have to pay hidden fees for everything,
| why I can't easily unsubscribe from something, why I receive spam
| constantly on my phone and email, why I can't easily cancel a
| flight if I realized that I made a mistake right after buying it,
| why my rent can dramatically increase arbitrarily, why medicine
| is so expensive, why AirBnB can display fake prices on their
| page, why I can become broke for receiving a paycheck, why
| healthcare is tied to my job, why...
| junon wrote:
| I hold no opinions, genuine question: how might this affect
| (sites like) Fiverr?
| bdcravens wrote:
| Fiverr (and similar sites like Upwork etc) are more of a
| contracting marketplace, where workers can set their own
| prices, etc. I believe the FTC guidance here is tackling more
| captive gig working environments.
| LinkLink wrote:
| Yeah relative to Uber especially markets like Fiverr are
| really just job boards for actual contractors to set their
| own fees and offer their own services through a facilitator.
| Fiver exercises no actual control over the people using their
| website other than choosing what types of content are allowed
| and ensuring order delivery. If anything Fiverr is an
| independent contractor for both of the other involved
| parties.
| shrubble wrote:
| If healthcare is so important then it shouldn't be taxed in any
| fashion. From bandaids and cough syrup at the pharmacy on up, if
| it's essential to human life it shouldn't be taxed.
| pensatoio wrote:
| I agree, but so is food. Good luck convincing the govt to draw
| that line.
| andai wrote:
| First 2000 calories, tax free! (Once everything is cashless
| they'll know exactly what you're eating anyway.)
| sudosysgen wrote:
| If it didn't imply giving the government so much
| information, that would actually be a great program.
| chockablock wrote:
| In the US most states (37/50) don't have sales tax on
| groceries. Also food bought with SNAP benefits (food stamps)
| is exempt from sales tax in all states.
| pensatoio wrote:
| Left that out for brevity, but good point. I suppose I'm
| trying to highlight that you could categorize a lot of
| things as essential (see the last two years.)
| MadSudaca wrote:
| We'd need to collect tons of taxes just to pay for the
| bureaucracy needed to not tax anything considered essential to
| human life.
| pessimizer wrote:
| If we'd just provide health care free at the point of
| service, we wouldn't have to worry about the taxes.
| dirtbag__dad wrote:
| Interesting how the FTC paints these companies as evil, yet the
| FTC owns the (lack of) rules they are operating in.
|
| People will always make what's best for themselves within in
| their environment. If the FTC wants certain behaviors, they need
| to address it. If they fail to do that, it's themselves they
| should blame.
| [deleted]
| tlogan wrote:
| All these problems are because gov do not offer health care and
| we have strange regulations that certain employees (not all) need
| to offer it.
|
| So if they do crack down on "taking advantage" then a new set
| companies will arise: Uber-driver subcontractors. Less than 50
| employees so they do not have all these rules and they offer
| services to Uber.
|
| Same like cooks, security guards, cleaning and other
| subcontractors which do not have any protection but Google,
| Facebook and others depends on them.
|
| In short, regardless what FTC does it will not help the actual
| workers.
| dustractor wrote:
| hilyen wrote:
| A lot of people talking about Uber, so I'll mention that with
| Uber, you use your own vehicle. That vehicle loses value the more
| you work for Uber with it. Uber is extracting that value from
| your vehicle and using it to profit from.
|
| Uber, Doordash, etc should be paying for the depreciation of
| every vehicle they use, as well as fuel usage.
| gruez wrote:
| Why should they be on the hook for it? Shouldn't the per
| mile/minute rate that they pay the driver already theoretically
| covers it.
| hilyen wrote:
| It doesn't.
| cat_plus_plus wrote:
| s/on companies taking advantage of //
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