The difference with a lot of those kinds of examples is that the middle man service is not setting a price. The service is just connecting buyers and sellers and charging a fee or taking a cut. It’s up to the buyer and seller to negotiate a price. For instance, there are sites like TaskRabbit where you can go to find people to do home repair tasks for you. But the site is not setting the prices for those tasks. The site is just showing you a list of people who can do the task. It’s up to you to contact the providers, get estimates, decide which provider you want to use and what price to pay. The providers set their own prices. There will be some sort of price leveling due to the market. If Pat is charging $50 for a 10-hour task and Sam is charging $500, Pat will likely get hired a lot more than Sam. But here it’s Pat making the choice to charge $50, not TaskRabbit.
Right, and I was responding to @Max_S’s comment “I don’t support any law that stands in the way of a local band getting paid with a meal and a handful of free tickets to their own gig.” That’s a perfectly apt comparison, because it’s what was traditionally considered gig work. Much of the movie industry relies on gig work to this day too. Adam Savage from Mythbusters has been a gig worker/contractor basically his whole life except for Mythbusters itself. He’s explained how very very few people were employees at Industrial Light and Magic, they were almost entirely contracted per job. Once a movie ended, they had to try to get a contract for the next one, or go elsewhere. Only a couple of people were “on staff” there.
Employment laws are very explicit about the differences between employees and contractors, and some of the important distinctions are setting prices, schedules, and ability to subcontract. Employees are paid a fixed wage, save overtime, they are generally required to work a fixed number of hours, and they cannot subcontract some or all of their work out to another party. Contractors set the price per the job or per hour or some combination thereof at their own discretion. They don’t have to get permission to not work for a period of time, or to work odd hours, and they can subcontract out their work to someone else if they want. Apps like Uber and DoorDash look much more on the employer/employee side than @filmore’s TaskRabbit description, because the former are setting prices and the drivers/delivery persons either accept or not, they don’t negotiate with the customers or get payment directly from them, and they have to provide the service themselves.
But there are other differences between gig work and traditional employment in addition to who sets the prices. Let’s say we’re talking about hiring someone to assemble a bike - I can hire someone through a TaskRabbit-like service or someone who advertises as a handyman and that person will set their own price , decide whether they want to take that job, when they are available etc. Or maybe I decide to have the store where I bought the bike assemble it - my son did that for a while. Yes, the store set the price someone paid and how much my son was paid - but they also scheduled him to work at particular times and paid him by the hour. Some people who deliver food and groceries are employees ( of the restaurant or store) who are scheduled to work certain hours and get paid for those hours while others work through Doordash or UberEats or Instacart and decide which hours to work and which orders to accept although they don’t negotiate their own price. I think that’s also some of the blurriness , not just who sets the prices. After all, if I pay Home Depot for installation, they set the price I pay but the people who do the work are not Home Depot employees - they might be employees of the “local service provider” which in turn decides whether or not to accept the job for what HD is paying (which is less than I paid HD) . Or the local service provider might be a single , self-employed person - who still is not an employee of Home Depot.
Longshoremen are one of the strongest unionized trades in the world (compare, taxi drivers and teamsters), but I can see how that might not happen with delivery and ride hailing gig workers if left to fend for themselves. They don’t stand around together, most do not make gigs their sole or even primary income, let alone a career choice, and turnover is super high.
~Max
cite?
From the horse’s mouth,
https://www.lyft.com/blog/posts/driver-net-earnings
February 6, 2024
Driving on the Lyft platform allows drivers to monetize two assets: their effort and their car. Most drive on Lyft to supplement their income from another job, bridge between full-time jobs, or generate income between other responsibilities such as providing child- or eldercare. For this reason, 94% of drivers drive fewer than 20 hours per week. And the median U.S. driver drove 1,647 engaged miles and spent only 75 engaged hours on the platform in 2023, about 3.75% of the average full-time work year. This data reflects that for most drivers, driving on Lyft is a short-term or supplemental way to use both their time and automobile.
2022
The Minnesota report also shed light on who earns a living as an Uber and Lyft driver. The companies say driving is a side hustle for most of their users. Uber says 85% of drivers average fewer than 40 hours online every week, and Lyft says 91% of Minnesota drivers work another job or are students in addition to driving for the platform.
That may be true, but the state analysis found that a committed group of drivers provides the majority of rides and are more likely to rely on the platforms for their primary source of income: A third of drivers provided 69% of all rides on the platforms.
The state also conducted a survey of 1,827 Minnesota Uber and Lyft drivers. Most are male immigrants, predominantly Black and disproportionately reliant on public assistance.
~Max
How many of those 85% of Uber drivers and 91% of Lyft drivers are driving for both services, among others?
Since I don’t like the minimum wage in general, I’m going to have say no to this specific. People should be free to negotiate what their time and effort or worth.
Good luck negotiating a salary when you are competing with undocumented immigrants.
If you are in a race to the bottom where people are already on poverty wages society (the government) should step in to protect their own interests. Having people “working” a job that doesn’t allow them to provide a living does nothing for society, in fact those jobs are a net loss for us all. The inevitable costs of emergency room visits, sub-par education, uninsured cars etc. will be born by all of us.
So it is not in our interest (as a society) to have people cheat others from an honest pay for a day’s work. In most situations the relationship between employees and employers is not a level playing field. To pretend like it is seems disingenuous.
Hell, good luck negotiating a salary when you need a job to buy food, and the other guy is filling a position as part of a business plan to increase his EBITDA by 5% year over year.
There’s nothing better than negotiating with someone who is desperate to make a deal.
Yeah, every time I’ve asked my driver, they say they do both.
I admit, I looked and couldn’t find an answer. But for one data point, the Minnesota report I cited said a third of drivers provided 69% of all rides on the platforms. Without further data I would extrapolate that to the general case, that is, I’m guessing (and this is a generous guess) about a third of drivers rely on the platforms for their primary source of income. As is implied by the newsroom.
~Max