Should Gig Work Pay A Minimum Wage? $21?

[Max_S]

I find that my opinion hasn’t changed since 2020:

@Max_S

I don’t consider “gig economy workers” to be employees, therefore I’m with UltraVires in saying it would be unfair to hold employers accountable. Contrast with the part-time employees I described before, where it’s totally on me if they aren’t making a minimum wage.

Let’s say I want to hire a cleaning service. I give them square footage, location, etc. They give me a quote. I take the cheapest reasonable quote. It’s not my fault if these contractors are selling themselves short. If they take home less than the minimum wage, guess what? I’m not the employer, and I’m not on the hook.

I do have a moral obligation to pay a minimum, but not every business will agree with me on that. And there’s nothing I can do if it never comes to my attention that a contractor can’t make ends meet.

Sure, you could try and implement a “minimum wage” for gig workers. But good luck designing a law that applies to the people who contract for their services. There are just too many different kinds of jobs to legislate for. What are you going to do, try and write a law based on the assumption that it takes someone one hour to clean five hundred square feet? Different people take different amounts of time to do their jobs. There’s a quality difference, too. What about the cost of supplies? You know, some things are harder to clean than others. You can’t make hard and fast rules with all of these variables.

My point is that if the worker is self-employed, as is the case with gig workers (unless I’m wrong here), there’s no use in trying to protect them with a minimum wage law.

~Max

@Max_S

Oh, so you’re only talking about those on-demand apps, not classifieds or eg: Angie’s List. Good that you pointed this out to me, because I had always considered the latter to be part of the “gig economy”.

Look, even with the apps like Uber, nobody is forcing you to take the sucky routes. If you can’t make it doing that sort of work, all I can say is that maybe you shouldn’t be doing that sort of work. If the gig worker isn’t able to negotiate, if it’s some sort of “here’s the job, take it or leave it” sort of thing, that means there’s a middleman between the person paying and the person providing the service. I’m willing to regulate the middleman - you have to have an estimated number of hours and material costs (route time + gasoline + etc), and you are on the hook for paying at least the minimum wage plus cost. Or, if someone spends more than X hours doing jobs through you, that makes them an employee and you have to provide health insurance.

~Max

~Max