I can see both sides of the argument saying gig workers should (or shouldn’t) be guaranteed a certain amount of money. Including pricing, fairness and a personal preference for smaller government. But I’m certainly no expert on the topic. Wondering what Dopers make of this?
I see a lot of practical issues that would need to be worked out. First off, how do you even define when a gig worker is “working”? If I go out to my car and turn on the app and sit there for three hours, but nothing comes up, was I “working” for those three hours? What if some jobs did come up, but I didn’t take them for one reason or another (some other driver beat me to it, too far away, poorly-rated passenger, just didn’t feel like it)? Does time spent driving out to the pickup location count, or time spent returning from the dropoff location? What if I picked the customer because their destination was close to an errand I needed to run anyway?
And then, who pays? The customer, I imagine… but what if the prediction of how long the trip will take is off? Maybe you pick up someone for what should be a 20-minute trip, and they pay for a third of an hour’s wage, but then there’s an accident on the freeway and it takes 40 minutes? Did the customer’s cost just double? If the time estimate is off the other way, and we just hit every single light green and my 20-minute trip only takes 15, do I get a discount? And if runs between passengers (from one passenger’s drop-off to the next pick-up, or to or from home at the start and end of the shift) do count, are they on the first customer’s tab, or the last one’s?
According to the article:
Starting Sept. 3, the province says that anyone who accepts work through these and other gig-based apps, such as ride-hailing and delivery services, must receive $20.88 an hour from the time they accept an assignment to the time it is completed.
So time spend waiting for an order doesn’t count.
Another issue is the trade off with scheduling flexibility. Now, a driver can log on and off whenever they please. If the gig companies have to treat drivers like employees who are guaranteed a certain amount per hour, then can the companies require drivers to be available on a set schedule ?
Has anyone seen how much this would it change the average driver’s income?
I think this would end up making delivery fees higher and make delivery times longer, but I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. I already think the delivery fees are way too high anyway. Make them higher and fewer people will use the services. They’ll go back to the old fashioned way of cooking their own meals and going to restaurants. And I’d like it if the people doing deliveries could make a reasonable living. But I think it would also mean fewer people able to make a living doing deliveries because there would be fewer delivery drivers. I’m not sure that consumers would keep their usage constant if the prices went up.
Note that works out to ~US$15/h.
This is one of the reasons why the gig economy, or hustle culture as the youths sometimes called it, is toxic. In your typical employer/employee relationship, waiting in your car for three hours with nothing coming up is working. It’s working because that time isn’t your own as you have to be available at any moment to help customers. But of course gig workers are independent contractors not employees.
Yes. That should all count. I don’t think the new rules mandate that the time counts but it really should. The gig economy is just outright exploitative and we really shouldn’t accept it as normal. At least not in its present form.
Gig work is completely optional. Thus settling for low pay is completely optional. Don’t like it, then get a real job.
That’s the same argument people use against minimum wage. “You want to make enough money to feed and clothe yourself? Get a real job instead of that McJob.”
My understanding is that current delivery fees are still too low to make these companies solvent, so yes, people are paying much less than what the market rate actually would demand if companies expected a profit.
[thought better of my post]
By definition Gig Work is what WONT sustain a human being in this economy.
If there was a sustainable living wage attached to any steady employment it wouldn’t be a Gig.
I hadn’t heard that definition even if it is often true.
Me neither. I would have defined Gig Work as work which is accepted and paid by the job (gig), as opposed to work where one is paid a salary or hourly wages by an employer.
As such, gig work lends itself well to being a side hustle or way to make some extra money. There’s nothing in the nature of gig work per se that can’t sustain a human being, just that in practice most gig work is not lucrative enough.
The whole premise of “gig economy” is about predatory “tech” platforms that do not add value nearly commensurate with what they are charging.
I strongly believe workers need heavy duty protection in this scenario. Ideally they will organize themselves into strong unions, but given the fleeting nature of the work I think governments should step in. Those people need reasonable wages, health insurance, pensions.
If the “gig economy” is not capable of providing for its workers it should be taken out back and put to rest. We don’t need new ways to fuck employees.
I’m apt to agree with you, but it seems to me that the value the tech platform gives is access to customers.
I can become a delivery person, “taxi” driver, or rent my home at any time I want and have access to just about every person looking for that service in my area. Isn’t that worth something? Maybe even a lot?
The phonebook did that without charging for every time you called a cab.
Listing myself in the phone book if I’m only interested in taking people from NW DC to the Pentagon, DCA, or S Arlington on random weekday mornings when I don’t have an 8:30 meeting does me little good. Lowering transaction costs for a cut of the delta is a good deal for some. Maybe not for others.
Not really - there was always something other than the phone book. I couldn’t look up the person who drove a taxi on the midnight to noon shift and call him directly for a number of reasons. Not in a city , anyway. Maybe I could in a town with only one taxi. I had to either hail one on the street ( which meant the driver wasn’t being paid for time without a passenger) or I had to call a car service which did not actually employ the drivers and worked very much the same as Uber etc, except that it was a person receiving calls and dispatching. And while the phone book didn’t charge every time I called a car service, the Yellow Pages charged the car service for being listed and for ads - after all, if I’m a visitor, I most likely don’t know the name of a car service to look it up in the white pages. I could try to rent my apartment for short stays without using Airbnb or VBRO - but I’m probably going to use a real estate agent ( who I will have to pay). I can hire myself out to do deliveries or odd jobs - but I’m going to have to either advertise somehow or get connected to a store that offer s delivery services but doesn’t hire truck drivers , where you pay Big Box for delivery and they hire me for that one delivery.
Now whether these platforms are charging more than they are worth is another story - but I will say it’s not uncommon for a car service vehicle or green taxi* to show up when someone orders an Uber so the car services and cab drivers must believe Uber offers something.
* Long story but green taxis can either do pre-arranged trips or take street hails except in Manhattan and the airports.
Yeah, but no one’s asking about minimum wage, but gig work.
Gig work is about signing on to an app when you want, and not signing on when you don’t want. That’s not a real job. If you want a real job, get a real job.
And there’s no fundamental reason why an app where you sign on when you want and don’t sign on when you don’t want absolutely must be low-paying. It usually is, but it could be otherwise.
One of the older examples of a job that works that way, from before it was called “gig work”, was substitute teaching. When I was a day-to-day sub, every morning, I’d log in and see what was available, and might not see anything, or might see something that I wasn’t interested in for one reason or another, or might see something and click to accept it. Pay ranged from about $90/day to $200/day, depending on the district, which even at the low end of the scale worked out to more than Ohio’s minimum wage.