I was particularly impressed by her insight about the “dedicated” giggers who walk miles to work and so forth, always presented as the Hardy New American Soul… and not just so poor and bound to slave labor that they can’t afford their own commute. Etc.
So explain to me why someone who works in the shithole that is Walmart and needs maximum healthcare subsidy and possibly even direct assistance to survive is any different from a completely unprotected gig worker making something close to minimum wage while managing all aspects of their own “career,” with little or no help from Uber or Fiverr or the other [del]evil management overlord/parasites[/del] new world enablers?
Not sure what you are asking. A part-time employee at WalMart who receives no benefits at all may be no different than a ‘gigger’. Even the part-timers probably can receive unemployment benefits of various types, they’ll have Social Security taxes paid into the system by the company, I don’t know how it works for Uber drivers and the like. There are still plenty of day laborers and others working for cash who have no benefits at all. There isn’t much point distinguishing between the different groups of people who are only making enough to survive, if that, and only as long as no health problems or other life emergencies don’t afflict them. They are all treading water and liable to drown at any time.
Back before the war slave owners used to claim that slavery was a more humane system than free labor because slave owners had a reason to keep their slaves in reasonably good condition. Employers on the other hand had no such incentive; their economic self-interest was best served by hiring workers, working them as hard as possible until they collapsed, and then replacing them with new workers. This was an obvious exaggeration of conditions on both sides but there is some element of truth in it.
We shouldn’t pretend that most people live in a free marketplace when it comes to employment. Negotiations between employers and employees do not occur in a balance of power; the reality is once side usually holds almost all of the power and can therefore dictate the terms of the agreement. It’s like trying to negotiate a mugging; the guy with the gun generally ends up deciding how much money will be exchanged.
I think my biggest beef with the hypla over gigging is that it’s something new in the world, and because it involves smartphones and apps and millennial thinking it’s really cool and automatically better than workin’ for da man.
People have been scratching for income outside rigid employment guidelines for a while (like millennia) and having an app for it doesn’t change the basic equation that most such work is underpaid (both directly and in the longer time, for things like healthcare and retirement) and often grueling, difficult, dangerous or all three.
Which is why I found the article cited in the OP so on target. It’s a big “bullshit!” call on the gig cheerleaders.
Although my passport is American, I’ve not lived there for a while. Much of what I know about contemporary America I get, directly or indirectly, from reading SDMB!
So thank you, Amateur Barbarian. Your thread and link informed me about a trend I was only vaguely aware of. (Although the problem was staring me in the face in the 1990’s when a bank officer turned down my request for routine tasks — she was understaffed because most of the bank’s employees could only work 29 hours, or whatever the limit was to deny benefits.)
Today’s America recalls the apocryphal frog who didn’t react to the hot water because it had warmed so gradually. But an outsider can see that the water is boiling!
A large plurality of the scalded frogs, apparently deluded into thinking that the very rich are not yet rich enough, have voted to repeal Obamacare. (Many of those who hate Obamacare would be happy with the “Affordable Care Act” instead — that would be hilarious if it weren’t so tragic.)
Just in case there is one person left who doesn’t lnow it:
I’m old.
Boomer
In my youth, the Great American Dream (middle class and aspiring to middle class) was:
Get a good job with a big company (that used to mean “stability”) and stay until you retire, then live on your (of course generous) pension.
You can all stop laughing now.
From that view, the new “gig economy” is little different than sharecropping or taking “student summer” type jobs for life.
In that time, the kid who quit High School because he could make $0.75/hour - for EVERY HOUR ALL DAY was the ultimate fool.
Now, the kid who drops out of college to found the newest Billion Dollar eCompany is the latest hero.
I wonder what she pays for sweeping floors*?
Gotcha! That is done by a robot. Robots also build all the cars, run all machining tools, generate sales calls… Which leaves exactly what jobs for people?
Food prep, [del]taxi[/del] Uber driving, acting (except for “reality TV” where all you need to “pay” is the expression “Sign this and you’ll be ON TV!”) and (some) medical care.
Yes, even medical care is getting into the robot scene. It is one thing to replace a room full of technicians peering into microscopes; another to be doing original Dx
If the slave owner looks like, blathers like, and stinks like a liberal, he or she gets a free pass. Uber and Fiver are all run by liberals. Look at Tim Cook CEO of Apple who has thousands of employees working in deplorable conditions. He never gets criticized because he’s a liberal. They’re all liberals until it comes to their own money.
Very good article. Fortunately for the owners, people and farm animals have always walked responsibly up the ramps.
For forty or fifty years past, Mr. H. G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons, leaving the ants or some other gregarious species to take over. Anyone who has seen the ruined cities of Germany will find this notion at least thinkable. Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham’s theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications–that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once UNCONQUERABLE and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbors.
George Orwell in 1945.
The article doesn’t really address the dark side of the “gig economy”. First of all, the gig economy is really an extension of “temping” or contract work that goes back decades. And it includes any short term contingency worker from an Uber driver up to programmers, project managers, graphic designers, lawyers and strategy consultants making six and seven figures a year. The positive aspect of the gig economy is that it allows people to quickly make money on short term gigs and assignments and makes for a very flexible and adaptable national economy.
The dark side is not about some idiot who doesn’t know when to pull over and go to the hospital. The problem with being a contingency worker is, as any consultant knows, that your income is capped by a formula (your bill rate x the total number of hours you can actually work). And people who perform that sort of work quickly become a commodity.
Contrast that to the owner of a corporation, their executives, and others who may have an equity stake in the company. Their wealth is tied to the overall value of the company.
So what you end up with is a class society where the corporate ownership and management class have relatively cushy long-term careers running the business while a contingent of temporary workers do all the work with no real hope of ever receiving training, a promotion, or even a change in the sort of work they’ve done at a dozen other companies. Do Uber drivers ever get promoted to jobs at corporate?
When I was looking for a job, I don’t know how many companies wanted to hire me as a contractor, with the tease of “possibly going permanent”. Yeah right. 90% of the time, any contractor I’ve worked with finds themselves out of a gig after a few years. Why would a company make them permanent? They are hiring them to complete a “project”. Not stay on and contribute to an ongoing operation.
The dark side of the gig economy is it can create a class of serfs permanently locked into working variations of the same gig forever.
Well, yes, you can go look for a new job anytime you want. It’s just that you tend to feel the loss of your job a lot harder than a billion dollar company feels the loss of you.
“Liberal” meaning what exactly? That they’re closeted homosexuals who do a lot of cocaine? Why do Conservatives think that when they slap the “Liberal” label on anyone or anything they disagree with, normal people know what the heck they are talking about?
A person chooses a job/gig/source of income because they prefer it to all other opportunities offered by everyone else in the world. Irrelevant people decide that this decision should not have been made and in many cases make it impossible to make these decisions by passing laws outlawing voluntary transactions.
Yes Little Nemo, the slavers have much in common with modern statists.
Or it could just be snobbery. Checks source in OP, yep that’s about right.
The employer can quit his job. The employee can quit his job. That’s equal power.
The employer can fire the employee. The employee cannot fire the employer. That’s unequal power.
I’m not suggesting employees should have the ability to fire employers. But I do think we need to acknowledge reality. The employer has more power than the employee. Claiming they can negotiate on an equal footing is not true. And claiming that we can ignore any problems because all problems can be resolved by negotiations between equals is a pretense when those negotiations don’t exist.
I think there’s another problem here besides the ones you mentioned and that’s the long term stability of a gig economy.
Gigging can be great in the short term. But gigs are not part of a sound lifetime career. What happens to the people who gig for thirty or forty or fifty years and then want to stop? What happens to these people when they can’t gig any more?
Ideally, they were planning on this during those decades of gigging and now have enough assets put aside to support them for the rest of their life. Now, everyone who believes that’s happening raise your hand. Let’s face reality; a lot of these people are not making adequate plans for their future.
Some might say “Sucks to be them. Let them live with the consequences.” And you can do that to a few thousand people. But when it becomes something that affects a few million people, it becomes a problem the rest of us can’t ignore.
Yes. For example, serfs in medieval Europe chose the gig of working the Lord’s land for pittance because it was superior to other opportunities, which included rape and starvation.
One alternative which might have been more lucrative for the serf was to steal a sword and become a highwayman, earning from transactions with travelers who voluntarily preferred to give their coins instead of their lives. Unfortunately for the serf, irrelevant people — the precursors of modern-day statists — passed laws making highway robbery illegal.
This exact same question applies to the overwhelming majority of the workforce. Only a small percent have this “sound lifetime career” and a huge number of people are living paycheck to paycheck.
Of course when they retire they have the same Medicare and Social Security benefits as employees.