[HN Gopher] Algorithmic Wage Discrimination (2023)
___________________________________________________________________
Algorithmic Wage Discrimination (2023)
Author : tacon
Score : 128 points
Date : 2024-09-11 17:20 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (columbialawreview.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (columbialawreview.org)
| WalterBright wrote:
| I.e. workers who produce more get paid more, those who produce
| less get paid less. It's always been that way, though it is
| usually difficult to measure accurately.
| uoaei wrote:
| Technically true, while ignoring all details of how
| "productivity" is defined. Claiming it's an issue of
| measurement and not definition implies you believe there's some
| ironclad and universally applicable definition of productivity,
| i.e., once again imposing your own ideology without any good
| faith efforts to include other perspectives.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Technically true, while ignoring all details of how
| "productivity" is defined.
|
| There's a specialty profession called "cost accounting" whose
| sole purpose is to accurately define it. Just like insurance
| companies do risk assessments.
|
| > implies you believe
|
| You're just making things up.
|
| > without any good faith efforts
|
| Give the rudeness a rest.
| myhf wrote:
| It's dishonest to say in one comment that certain workers
| "produce more" and in the next that you are speaking in
| terms of "cost accounting" productivity (that is,
| identifying which workers are likely to accept less pay for
| the same task).
| uoaei wrote:
| There's a specialty profession which merely adopts as fact
| definitions of productivity and optimizes costs against
| that. Give the denseness a rest.
| vundercind wrote:
| This introduction appears to describe a lot more going on than
| that.
| Etheryte wrote:
| This isn't even remotely what the article is about, please try
| and have at least a cursory read of the content you're
| commenting on.
| DeliriousDog wrote:
| There was a (now deleted comment) about how there is no proof of
| wage discrimination for Uber/Lyft drivers, which was posted with
| no evidence.
|
| This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEXJmNj6SPk) was
| recently published which shows drivers being offered the same
| gigs, but different payment amounts. Note that I could not find a
| published version of the data they collected in this video.
|
| That is not explicitly proof of wrongdoing, but clearly
| algorithmic price setting can be demonstrated as not always
| offering the same payment to the same drivers for the same work.
| There may be a valid reason to why this is the case, but as the
| calculation method is closed source, the individuals being
| offered the wage are unaware of why they would be paid less than
| their peers.
|
| This is work that is often considered "low skill" - which should
| actually make it extremely cut and dry as to why an individual
| would be paid more or less. Are they making their pickups faster?
| Are their customers more satisfied? If that's the case, why would
| they sometimes be offered more money than their peers and
| sometimes less money?
|
| Almost all workers here are price takers, and suffer greatly from
| the information asymmetry present. Companies hiding behind "oh
| but the algorithm says..." is a poor excuse for inequality.
|
| Edit: Because discrimination is in the title of the OP, I feel
| the need to clarify: in no way is the above saying that the video
| posted is proof of discrimination. Inequality need not be
| discrimination. When there is inequality without any measurable
| source, we need to be skeptical of the reason. Maybe one driver
| has better customer feedback, therefore they get offered a higher
| wage. There are many logical explanations for the result, but
| Uber/Lyft do not seem to engage with the discussion. This should
| raise red flags. That does not conclude that they are
| discriminating against anyone, and that would be a poor
| conclusion to draw without a true investigation.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Not deleted, just (formerly?) flagged to death by other users:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41513943. (The HN software
| seems to kill newer users' comments more readily, is my
| impression.) You can enable "showdead" on your profile page if
| you want to see such comments.
| madars wrote:
| showdead is essential for Orange Reddit but it will show
| downvoted comments in unreadable light grey on light grey. So
| you probably want a user CSS (e.g., with Stylus) like this
| (italic and the particular color are to taste, of course):
| .c5a, .c73, .c82, .c88, .c9c, .cae, .cbe, .cce, .cdd { color:
| #222; font-style: italic; }
| DeliriousDog wrote:
| Thank you! Reading that comment was actually what prompted me
| to make an account just to reply that, and then when I did it
| was gone.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| I could see an AI trying to hunt out a person's bottom line. I
| could offer this job for $10 to everyone, but maybe I'll
| subtract 0 to 4 dollars when I offer it and see who does or
| doesn't bite. If someone bites on lower pay, I then record that
| information and offer them further lower pay in the future.
|
| This isn't really abnormal. Every job does this by setting a
| wage they are willing to pay and seeing who signs up, knowing
| that person will now need to only be paid that wage. What is
| different is the scale and the frequency this is being done.
| Instead of doing this in a way that impacts a person once every
| job change, it now impacts them multiple times a day, and the
| data recorded is more detailed and can be acted on more
| directly.
|
| None of this is discrimination against a protected class, but
| if there are any reasons one demographic might, on average,
| accept lower pay than another, it will lead to large scale
| discrimination.
|
| The problem is that our common discussion on these topics is
| lacking the rigor, nuance, or depth to handle questions about
| this, and thus ends up with two large camps. One that looks at
| the methods, sees no obvious discrimination in the methods, and
| say it doesn't count as inequality. The other that looks at the
| outcomes, notices the clear difference in outcome this leads
| to, and calls it inequality. Both are, by their own metrics,
| correct.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| "Price discrimination" (or in this case "wage
| discrimination") as described in microeconomics is exactly
| this--the same seller/buyer demanding/offering different
| prices for the same goods depending on their idea of how much
| the buyer/seller will bear. The term has nothing to do except
| etymology with what sociologists, lawyers, or politicians
| mean by the word "discrimination" (not that those three
| groups mean the same thing by it).
| SkyBelow wrote:
| The issue is that many small scale price discriminations on
| individually reasonable criteria might present itself as a
| large scale discrimination of the type that lawmakers and
| others do care about. The way terms are overloaded does no
| favors, but even if we updated the terminology to resolve
| this, I think the underlying issue will remain.
|
| Pink tax is an example of this happening, though on a scale
| needing far invasive technology than is currently
| available. It is presented as (big) discrimination even
| though it happens as price discrimination.
| vundercind wrote:
| It's more than that, I think: if this paper holds up (or
| if it doesn't, _but_ the ideas it covers are valid and
| the practices it's concerned with _later_ come into
| being) then it's describing a mechanism for pushing down
| worker wages _at the individual level, and within
| potentially any or all bands of the economy_ toward the
| market-clearing rate _per worker_. A market of many
| workers becomes many markets of one worker.
|
| This is, um, potentially _really bad_. It's several
| effects that already happen in, if you will, _chunkier_
| ways in our economy (especially in the US, with weak or
| absent unions and poor labor protection laws, compared to
| many other developed states) becoming applied at a much
| finer level of resolution (so to speak).
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| Stay tuned for my new app: Wildcatr
|
| It is installed on gig worker phones and monitors the offered
| rates. When one worker is offered abusive rates, all other
| workers have their future offers filtered from view for some
| period of time unless it exceeds the typical offer by more
| than the amount the abused worker missed out on.
| DeliriousDog wrote:
| The issue isn't the "hunt for the bottom line" but the fact
| that simultaneously multiple parties are offered different
| price points for an unknown reason (to the workers).
|
| You say it's not discrimination, but you cannot definitively
| make that claim. That's the issue. Red lining isn't
| immediately discrimination against a protected class, but
| silently is it. This is not to say that Uber/Lyft are
| discriminating against a protected class - it's just that
| because of the lack of transparency we don't know that they
| are not.
|
| This is a hard thing for people to accept, but we need to
| take a deep look at how we implement ML to classify things
| tied to individuals. It's very easy to de-humanize the humans
| affected by the systems we build, because "it's just an
| algorithm."
| Aloisius wrote:
| _> it 's just that because of the lack of transparency we
| don't know that they are not._
|
| Is this not the case regardless of whether an algorithm is
| used or not?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Setting labor price by exchange-like auction is an abusive
| practice in any context.
|
| Companies get a pass on job interviews because it's basically
| impossible to prove. But this doesn't make it ok, it just
| makes it less damaging than the remedy. (Or at least
| arguably, a lot of people do argue otherwise, and lots of
| people are looking for better remedies.)
| TJSomething wrote:
| My immediate thought is that it would probably get better
| results of they intentionally set pay based on social media
| predictors of wage sensitivity. I expect that you could that
| there are fingerprints of wage sensitivity. And that could
| amount to what's basically predictive union breaking via wage
| increase.
| itake wrote:
| Typically, workers are paid a flat rate, businesses buffer the
| worker's income generating activities, such that the business
| owners pocket high income activities (like serving drinks and
| being tipped) with low income activities (like washing the dishes
| at the end of the night). Any money left over after wages, is
| pocketed by the business owner, to be used on a day with low
| income day (think Friday night vs Sunday night at a restaurant).
|
| Dynamic pricing allows workers more exposure to the value they
| generate, thus enabling them to capture higher pay.
| vundercind wrote:
| That might be what dynamic labor pricing implemented by a
| disinterested third party would do. An interested party can use
| it to do other things.
| itake wrote:
| What other things?
|
| For decades, restaurants have paid their labor with dynamic
| "algorithmic" wages: work during peak shifts, get more tips.
|
| Why haven't people been up in arms about how bar tenders
| working a Friday night near more than bartenders working a
| Monday afternoon?
| vundercind wrote:
| The article is about subjecting workers to discriminated
| pay rates for reasons: that _are not_ clear to the workers;
| that may not be within the power of the workers to control;
| that cannot be predicted in advance; and that may vary _per
| worker_ rather than being offered the same to all workers
| at once; with that last _also_ based on factors unknown to
| the workers--including, potentially, personal information
| about the worker or about their compensation history.
|
| The paper is explicitly not (as in: the intro outright
| states this is not what it's about) traditional forms of
| variable pay.
| itake wrote:
| > that are not clear to the workers; that may not be
| within the power of the workers to control; that cannot
| be predicted in advance; and that may vary per worker
| rather than being offered the same to all workers at
| once;
|
| You're literally describing tipping. When a worker starts
| their shift, they do not know how much they will earn.
| Tips vary per worker for sexism, racism, ageism reasons,
| or just plain luck.
| vundercind wrote:
| That is similar! But this is the employer doing it, not a
| bunch of uncoordinated people.
| itake wrote:
| If 5 "employers" per day opaquely compensate an employee,
| then that's ok.
|
| But if 1 employer, chooses their wage opaquely, then
| that's bad.
|
| I don't get it.
| vundercind wrote:
| The paper explains this (and isn't about quite what
| you're suggesting). Tens of pages of explanation, it
| covers it better than I will.
| yulker wrote:
| Most restaurants in the world operate without tips.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| But usually these things come down to patterns that
| people will learn. E.g. they will learn certain location
| at certain hours will pay more, because there's more
| demand vs supply, so they will adapt. It allows them the
| power to decide when and for what money it is worth it
| for them to work those hours or this location.
| vundercind wrote:
| Those parts, maybe.
|
| Will you know they're offing you and Bill the exact same
| job at the same time, and are willing to pay whichever of
| you takes it first, but Bill's offer is 20% higher? Or
| when they've made you a lower-than-usual offer to test if
| they can start offering you lower rates in the future
| (but you did just get a past-due notice on your kid's
| hospital bill...)?
| itake wrote:
| > Will you know they're offing you and Bill the exact
| same job at the same time, and are willing to pay
| whichever of you takes it first, but Bill's offer is 20%
| higher?
|
| Is this any different from than any job ever? More
| experience airline pilots are paid more than the less
| experienced for the exact same route.
|
| Two new grads from the same school may get different
| offers depending on how well they interviewed for the
| same role.
|
| Where is the problem?
| DylanDmitri wrote:
| Wait staff paid directly by customers is different from
| payments processed opaquely by the employer. Consider if a
| server got paid tips based only on the number of customer
| smiles detected by the restaurant security cameras.
| itake wrote:
| Tip amounts have always been about how much the customer
| enjoyed the service, hence the 10-25% tip ranges.
|
| Customers have opaque expectations for service and pay
| their server based on the server's gender, race, and age
| as well as quality of service that the server doesn't
| even have control over (like if the kitchen was backed
| up).
|
| A system counting smiles is basically what we currently
| have: instead of signaling with a smile, they signal with
| a tip amount.
| freejazz wrote:
| Why are you obtusely re-contextualizing everyone's
| responses?
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| Not anymore.
|
| Now there is pre-tipping, tipping for no discernible
| service, fake tip jars in places that aren't licensed for
| it, etc.
|
| More people are becoming aware that, in the US anyway,
| the wage is reduced commensurate with expected tips, and
| so customers are more or less obligated to supplement
| wages, and avoid offending servers, unless we don't want
| to be served at all.
| darby_nine wrote:
| > Dynamic pricing allows workers more exposure to the value
| they generate
|
| Now we just need to get this to work with respect to investors
| generating real value and not just profit and capitalism might
| actually be cooking something
| financetechbro wrote:
| Your perspective of dynamic pricing is true, _if_ the workers
| owned the platform(s). But they don't. So your assumption that
| dynamic pricing allows workers more exposure to the value they
| generate falls flat on its face when there are uber drivers
| making less than they've ever made while uber itself is turning
| into a profitable company
| itake wrote:
| i'm still confused what people are proposing is the solution.
|
| Uber pays a flat hourly rate no matter when the driver works?
| Drivers working after a football match earned the same pay as
| drivers working at 4am?
|
| I think this would mean that the drivers that work during
| peak hours Less than they do now and drivers working during
| low traffic hours would earn more?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| But corporations have access to way more power and data. You
| aren't going to get to see into the wage algorithm. Quitting
| because you are unhappy with the wage algorithm means time
| without pay and potentially having to move in order to get a
| new job. A corporation, meanwhile, suffers very little when one
| of its employees quits.
|
| I can't possibly imagine how this ends up producing increased
| average or median wages for workers.
| itake wrote:
| N passengers need rides after a concert, but there Y drivers.
|
| How do you fairly compensate the drivers without dynamic
| compensation, while keeping the price low for the passengers?
| vundercind wrote:
| The reaction here has been interesting. As someone with a heavier
| social-science and politics background than most HNers, I started
| reading the introduction before there were any comments here and
| went "oh my god, of course this is a thing, why did it never
| occur to me both that this would/is happen/happening, and to put
| it in these terms", and my mind started chasing down the
| mechanisms by which it must work. _Bombshell_ is a word that came
| to mind as soon as it dawned on me what the paper's getting at.
|
| Then I came back to this thread and had a similar experience to
| when I checked on the Internet's reaction to The Last Jedi after
| I got out of the theater, and was surprised to find that my
| experience of it as the only almost-actually-good SW film since
| the original trilogy was, um, _not what most others_ had taken
| away.
| Etheryte wrote:
| It's always useful to keep in mind the wide variety of HN
| users. For certain cohorts, the likes of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk
| and such are considered the pinnacle of their aspirations, and
| abusing workers is viewed as business smarts.
| szundi wrote:
| Who goes to work for Elon cannot really be so-called abused -
| already knew what is coming when applied
| vundercind wrote:
| I think one thing going on is that the form of argument is
| unfamiliar to a lot of readers. Many seem to have taken away
| that the paper's about the concerns the "Blueprint" it
| mentions sets out to address, or about traditional bonus
| structures or variable or productivity-based pay, because the
| intro covers both of those things in some detail--rather, the
| paper is laying those out as background. The paper is _not
| about those_.
|
| This is a common form for papers and arguments in the social
| sciences, but maybe a lot of HNers aren't used to it.
|
| [edit] to be clear, the paper lays out plainly that this is
| the case, and a person unfamiliar with this way of writing
| could figure it out from the text _per se_ , but if one is
| not looking out for this kind of structure I can see how one
| might overlook the parts where it straight-up says "that's
| not what this is about: _here_ is what this is about"
| tbrownaw wrote:
| So, what _is_ it getting at that 's not obvious until it's
| pointed out and you haven't run across before (and how is that
| related to having a social-sciences background)?
|
| Before app work, unpredictable schedules were a problem for
| people juggling multiple part-time jobs. Presumably they still
| are and the news just has a new shiny to play with.
|
| Paying people more to cover undesirable shifts means that
| people with more flexibility or who choose to make more
| personal sacrifices will get paid more. I remember something
| about... pharmacists I think it was? and how these factors
| lined up with some of the traditional "group X gets paid more
| than group Y" groupings.
|
| A job that doesn't artificially limit available positions will
| tend to pay just slightly more than whatever job ranks next for
| having a wider pool of eligible workers. Something where the
| next thing in that ranking is panhandling or unemployment is
| never going to pay well unless prospective workers are turned
| away.
| vundercind wrote:
| > Paying people more to cover undesirable shifts means that
| people with more flexibility or who choose to make more
| personal sacrifices will get paid more. I remember something
| about... pharmacists I think it was? and how these factors
| lined up with some of the traditional "group X gets paid more
| than group Y" groupings.
|
| This is key because it's close to the thing that made me go
| "ah ha" reading the intro: modern surveillance and
| algorithmically-managed pricing (so, cheaply modified at
| arbitrarily-fine resolution based on arbitrarily-many
| quantifiable factors) open up the possibility of pushing this
| exact effect from groups of workers to _individual_ workers.
|
| You can avoid (at least to some degree not previously
| achievable) addressing a _pool_ of workers and instead only
| clear the rate for _a particular_ worker. No human management
| input needed per-decision or in any part of the broader
| offer-decision process and surrounding data gathering and
| measuring, which is what makes it possible.
| sweeter wrote:
| In dumb people terms, corporate gig economy players are
| using algorithms to artificially depress wages of random
| workers for work that is very similar in scope, if not the
| exact same (they work similar hours, in a similar area,
| with similar vehicles and in some cases they are even
| getting offers for the exact same job with wildly varying
| wages)
| vundercind wrote:
| It's like how a normal person who's worked with a couple
| of solo independent contractors (say, for some work on
| their house) and has a sense of how they both price
| things from past bids, might offer a job they need done
| by a certain time to both of them--exact same job--at
| different rates, all else being equal (the homeowner
| rates their work as comparable), just because they know
| one of them historically bids lower. They'd prefer the
| cheaper one, _but are willing to pay either rate_ , and
| need the job done by time X, so offer it to both, first
| to accept gets it.
|
| Now throw in a bunch more factors than just prior bid
| history, thousands of workers in the dataset instead of
| two, _and_ such high volume and pace of work that you can
| afford to periodically experiment by setting, say, a
| random 10% of each set of offer-receivers lower than your
| formula would usually suggest, to see if anything's
| changed and maybe they're more-desperate for some reason
| (you don't even need to know why... though, imagine if
| you _could_ spot reasons some workers might be more
| desperate! Hm...)
|
| Now (maybe) extrapolate to similar, slower-paced efforts
| in less-marginal areas of work. Interesting (yikes)
| possibilities.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| This is a topic my friends and I have been talking about
| since at least 2018, and much of this review just feels
| affirming. It's good to know 4 bozos in Wisconsin aren't
| the only ones realizing life sucks for Uber drivers. All I
| can really do about it is vote.
|
| The thing that stood out to me the most is the transparency
| argument. When you get paid hourly, you're told upfront how
| much extra you get paid for overtime, for odd hours, etc.
| But with rideshare apps, a number just shows up on your
| screen. You have no knowledge of _why_ that number is what
| it is.
|
| There's also the social side of the transparency issue.
| Back when I worked foodservice, I could just ask my
| coworker what they got paid per hour. As a rideshare
| driver, you never see your coworkers. Even if you did, you
| have nothing to compare. There's no "per hour," and "per
| mile" is rife with caveats, assuming the app even shows you
| that. With no way to compare to each other, how do
| rideshare drivers collectively discern what is or isn't
| fair pay?
| crdrost wrote:
| No, like, this is fucking different. Read the damn article.
| Like, get down to pages 42-46. I know it's a lot to read,
| it's a law review article, it's fine if you don't read it,
| but like "oh what is it getting at?" is something that you
| have to read the article to see.
|
| So like, before the gig economy, yes, you might be juggling a
| job at McDonald's with another at Jo-Ann with a hardware
| store, and Jo-Ann called up at 7 and said you have to come in
| Or Else, and then you came in by 7:45 and they said "eh too
| many people showed up, nevermind" and you're up shit creek,
| so now you're poking by your McD's which could always use
| some extra help with the breakfast rush but wants you to
| clock out between 10:30 and 11:30 so you're having to call up
| the hardware store to see if you can get paid there.
|
| That is bad, to be sure. You have to be playing all the
| angles, checking in with everybody, you have to hustle _hard_
| to make ends meet.
|
| But according to this, your job at GigBurger is one where
| they say "hey if you can work for at least 6 hours today,
| we'll give you a big bonus," with the caveat that you are
| auto-clocked-out not just at 10:30 but whenever there's
| nobody in the checkout line or drive-thru, so that "6 hours
| minimum wage" has to be accumulated over 10 actual hours at
| work -- which is fine _if you can get that bonus_. But the
| shitty algorithmic part is that when you get the GigBurger
| App to rack up 5 hours of work, suddenly it says "oh shoot
| we're overbooked for your current GigBurger Restaurant, but
| you know there's a big surge in customer demand over on the
| other side of the city, go there and get 2x wages and you'll
| also make your last 1h for sure" and they are _fuckin ' lying
| to you_ and leading you to other overbooked GigBurgers in the
| hopes that they can run you back and forth across the city
| without paying you until they exhaust your desire for that
| last hour's work that would get you the bonus. And you have
| to be able to discern between actual surges and algorithmic
| lying to determine whether to attempt the journey across the
| city or just stay put and see if the GigBurger next door has
| someone clock out early.
|
| The article clearly lays out why this is a difference in
| quality, not just quantity: it says that the default American
| story of "hard work and hustle will be rewarded", which you
| absolutely had in the "unpredictable schedules" world that
| you are talking about, shifts to one where the psychological
| story is that "GigBurger is a casino, roll the dice and hope
| to God that you get lucky today." Any individual
| unpredictable job might have been a casino, but you knew that
| your employers weren't all _in cahoots to deprive you of a
| promised lucky payoff_ that was the only thing that made the
| job sorta worth it.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| That sounds more like a poorly optimized, buggy and
| unbalanced algorithm.
|
| Would it be fine if there's an algorithm that was able to
| more accurately predict that if you go to this location at
| those hours you would be able to make 1.5x more for the
| several few hours?
|
| There's no reason an algorithm shouldn't be able to do
| that.
|
| Or an algorithm where you can specify how many hours you
| plan to work and then it will provide what it calculates
| the most optimal path for you to take, where perhaps you
| can even use a slider to quickly test.
| crdrost wrote:
| We could only know whether the algorithm is competent or
| incompetent, if we can see what it is and what it is
| optimizing for and how is it doing at that. Without
| transparency into GigBurger, you can't tell.
|
| This was the nice thing about working for an MEP*
| subcontractor, I got to see the unions and the company
| teaming up, "look the margins are razor thin, we want to
| get home safe and make ends meet but not if it starves
| the company and we're all out of a job in 5-10 years."
| And in that environment, every pipefitter could know that
| the algorithm isn't specifically screwing them over. The
| unions needed our explicit sign-off that our tech to help
| them track the status of their projects wasn't gonna be
| able to be used to track how much time their folks spent
| in the bathroom on a given day. But try telling Uber that
| they need a driver's union, see how far you get.
|
| *Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing. I don't fully
| understand the contracts side but basically the general
| contractor will take a big construction job and the
| biggest margin, then subcontractors will design and do
| parts of the actual fabrication and installation.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Would it be fine if this algorithm had to be open source?
| advael wrote:
| As with price discrimination, I think there are only two possible
| ways this can go:
|
| Either we pass some laws that deeply upset some oligarchs and
| future eras see this one as a "wild west" of data-driven
| exploitative practices, or we permanently destroy the bargaining
| power of everyone not big enough to be doing mass-surveillance,
| which is effectively the end of markets and the rise of a sort of
| advanced feudalism (which some would argue is quite far along
| already)
|
| One obviously seems better to me, but to be fair I am biased,
| being in the class of people who don't own an enormous
| corporation
| Spivak wrote:
| If history is any teacher here it's going to be latter with the
| loudest voices of support coming from people are convinced that
| these systems couldn't and aren't possibly harming them, that
| they are above-average and therefore benefiting, and only those
| slack-jawed lazy nonspecific others who aren't (but absolutely
| are) working hard will be the target.
| advael wrote:
| That's definitely the recent history, and the current
| propaganda strategy of modern oligarchs, but looking even a
| little beyond living memory there are many other solutions
| history can offer us, including labor solidarity, trust-
| busting, and of course more extreme measures that most would
| likely prefer to avoid, but which history shows us do happen
| sometimes
| scarmig wrote:
| The third way is that companies find hiring workers, with all
| their complaints and needs and desire for dignity, too
| inconvenient, so they replace them with things that have none
| of those.
|
| Particularly relevant since this paper is primarily about ride
| hailing and delivery services.
| advael wrote:
| Despite all the hand-wringing most claims to be able to do
| this seem pretty implausible at this stage. But for the sake
| of argument, assuming this happens, this is not different
| from the second scenario I've described. Of course, if there
| are no workers, one wonders how companies might find
| "consumers" against whom to price-discriminate, but with
| companies unilaterally and individually controlling both what
| people pay and are paid, the whole system of labor and
| consumption as a market is a fiction anyway. It's crazy that
| so many people seem to think that transformative technologies
| will both somehow replace all human labor and keep all
| present economic relations intact except for the ability of
| anyone to get a job, given how many economic choices have
| been made to center labor as the primary means by which
| people are supported. To reiterate, the options are prevent
| this nonsense through collective action (either in the form
| of a government or through other forms of coordination) or
| move to a more oppressive relationship between a tiny
| population of oligarchs and everyone else than the "labor
| market" that is ostensibly the way this economic relationship
| is currently arranged
| scarmig wrote:
| For the ride hailing side of things, it's already happened;
| there is no question of plausibility. I've probably done 50
| rides in 2024, and only two had human drivers.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| It's not hard to see where this is going. Rideshare drivers
| have already become essentially their own underclass in
| America. They seldom own the equipment of their job, yet
| they're responsible for all the maintenance costs, costs for
| their (mandatory) insurance are horrendous, and they're left
| with hardly anything before they've even paid for medical
| insurance or an apartment.
|
| It's not really sharecropping, since Uber doesn't write car
| loans. Feudalism? In a society so utterly dependent on cars,
| that doesn't seem terribly far off.
| advael wrote:
| Yea, feudalism is probably the best description, and it
| applies to cars as well as anything with a computer in it, as
| well as the more traditional land and food supply. This is
| not that surprising given that the safeguards that have been
| systematically dismantled over the last 50 years were by and
| large created to prevent feudalism, as was most of the
| apparatus of what we currently call "government"
| ryukoposting wrote:
| It does now raise the question - are other countries,
| particularly those with well-developed public transit
| infrastructure, more insulated from this _particular_ form
| of techno-feudalism? It seems to me like the essential-ness
| of a resource is what enabled feudal structures around it.
| advael wrote:
| I think so, but the pushes to integrate privately-
| controlled computers into every facet of required
| infrastructure means the feudalism in other domains has
| come and will continue to tighten for any country that
| doesn't adequately rebuff it
| ryukoposting wrote:
| Good point.
|
| I suppose the "good" news is that none of the rideshare
| companies have managed to prove that their business model
| is even profitable. So, even in this stupid postmodern
| techno-feaudalist hellscape, maybe we won't have people
| effectively indentured by their cars.
| advael wrote:
| The entire history of the tech industry is one of
| profitability being a trifling concern compared to buy-in
| from the investor class and sometimes government
| subsidies. Feudalism doesn't require profits, only power
| over resources
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Mega-rich people aren't investing in Uber in order to
| acquire power over serfs. They're doing it in order to
| make more money. So far, they seem to be mistaken in the
| potential profitability, but that doesn't make "feudal
| power over others" their _goal_.
|
| Profitability may be a trifling concern for the
| _companies_ , but it's not for the _investors_.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| If this outcome is a surprise to you, you have not been paying
| attention. Managers and Owners dream of reducing wages every
| single night. Every penny they aren't paying you is a penny they
| keep, and they, for some reason, think they are rightfully
| entitled to every penny, while you are a brat for feeling
| entitled to even a few pennies.
|
| More importantly, if your boss doesn't think like that, you can
| expect his boss to replace him with a manager that DOES.
|
| This downward force on labor prices is basically the entire point
| of the gig economy, and even youtubers whose only formal training
| is in how to write a high school essay figured this out.
|
| For this reason, there is institutional pressure to turn anything
| they can into gig economies. If you don't have empathy for the
| uber drivers who sleep in their car to be able to make as many
| rides as they can and still somehow end up below minimum wage,
| don't worry, they'll come for you soon. And when they've made the
| gig economy literally the only gig in town, it doesn't matter how
| savvy you think you are at "negotiation", you will get fucked
| too.
|
| Go read up on your labor rights history. None of what we have is
| a default, and the "haves" HATE it.
| foolofat00k wrote:
| The thing that people consistently miss with these types of
| conversations is that any increase in the sophistication of the
| tech that exists to measure the world gives a relative benefit to
| corporations over individuals.
|
| This is because those organizations almost always have more
| resources to dedicate towards making effective use of that
| information than do individuals.
|
| Very often you as an individual are up against a team of PhDs and
| engineers whose job it is to enable the corporation to beat you,
| and the more data they have, the more likely they are to win.
|
| In this respect, there is basically no tech that does not benefit
| corporations more strongly than it benefits individuals. This is
| one of the reasons that regulation is important.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| They don't "miss" this fact. It's inconvenient to libertarian
| la-la land dreams so it's ignored with prejudice, especially
| here. So many temporarily embarrassed millionaires on HN.
| _gmax0 wrote:
| Off-topic, does anyone know whether the source code for this UI
| is open source?
| josefritzishere wrote:
| This is very apropos after seeing the Pave post.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| "Wage discrimination" as described in the article is not an
| unfair or illegal practice:
|
| > "Algorithmic wage discrimination" refers to a practice in which
| individual workers are paid different hourly wages--calculated
| with ever-changing formulas using granular data on location,
| individual behavior, demand, supply, or other factors--for
| broadly similar work.
|
| Surge pricing is a form of "algorithmic wage discrimination".
| Driving for Uber on a Friday night will net you more than a
| Monday at noon. Likewise, the fact that wages are higher in
| expensive metros is another form of "algorithmic wage
| discrimination." People hired during periods of a labor shortage
| may have a higher wage than a co-worker hired during an economic
| downturn. I am skeptical many would point at these scenarios as
| unfair - but all of these fall under the category of "wage
| discrimination" as discussed in the article.
|
| I also think this article unnecessarily injects racial messaging
| and leads readers to think that the algorithms are discriminating
| on the basis of protected class. That is not alleged in this
| article.
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