I suspect many giggers are getting paid off the book and aren’t paying into programs like Medicare and Social Security. At best, they might be reporting their income as independent contractors and paying Medicare and Social Security taxes. But they most likely aren’t getting things like health insurance, unemployment, or worker’s comp.
Or regulating them in basic, sensible ways that ensure that what we have is a healthy business economy, rather than the poor being taken advantage of by people who know damn well how desperate many of them are to have any job, and can therefore offer incredibly shitty conditions and wages… Not everyone pines for the days when you worked 12 hours for a pittance, then lost your job because the machine you were working on that hadn’t been maintained in forever malfunctioned and took your arm off, leading to you not being able to do your job because you’re one arm short.
Of course anyone with a cursory understanding of medieval serfdom would understand the difference between the rights of serfs and individuals in a society that recognizes property rights. But don’t let me get in the way of adolescent polemic.
You just cannot grapple with the fact that the person has decided that the offer is the best one anyone in the entire world has given them. You vilify the company or person who has made the best offer and pat yourself on the back for taking the option away.
Of course it’s not just “you”, it’s a lot of people who cannot grapple with this. They choose to not comprehend that they are irrelevant in this exchange. Fodder for psychologists, perhaps.
This misses the point of the article, though. In a society where you require X amount of resources (namely a certain amount of money) to survive, you don’t realistically have this perfectly rational, voluntary choice. What kind of choice is dying from not having enough resources to subsist, working at a close job that doesn’t get you enough resources to subsist, or walking miles upon miles to a job that barely gets you enough resources to subsist and will involve you working yourself to death, literally or metaphorically? That our economic system is flawed because it allows for such situations to exist is the point of the article as I read it.
Google “Hobson’s choice” and get back to us.
It depends how you twist the word “voluntary”. I never said individuals made perfectly rational choices. I said that they choose what they believe to be the best option for them. It would help the statist argument if they simply came out and said that they want to make decisions for people on how to live their life. That’s what it’s all about. The statist has come up with many excuses for doing just that. Behind it all is the need to control behavior that offends their sensibilities.
These options are ten times better than the options >90% of individuals had for >99% of human history. These are options that are open to people because of the reality of life. Scarcity is real. No matter how many think pieces on the subject are published by Slate, there is no post-scarcity economy. Humans have made great strides against scarcity since the introduction of capitalism, and it is evidenced by the great options even the poorest of the poor have in relation to their ancestors, but scarcity is still a fact of life.
If having what an modern elitist liberal deems “poor options” makes decisions involuntary, even the “well-off” people of 1000 years ago did not live voluntary lives. What kind of choice is it when the best option involves no air-conditioning, toilet paper, or affordable spices.
I don’t see how a system where a person can take the best available offer from anyone in the world is flawed. I see the flaw in a system where irrelevant people can take that option away from that person.
Do you vilify the person who makes the offer or the billions who offer worse or nothing?
I vilify the irrelevant people who take the offer away.
Excuse me, if this were Walmart, all we would hear is how Republicans exploit the working class and how they need food stamps to survive working there… Now that we see Uber and Fivver and Rover and Groupon run from Silicon Valley doing the exact same thing we don’t hear a peep. :rolleyes:
I wasn’t vilifying anyone, precisely, but if you make me choose a target, it’s one in which millions of workers have to scratch for a living income, with no “safety net” of any kind.
You’ve done a good job candy-coating the theoretical model of “people accepting the highest offer,” but not much else. Reality is a lot more shit-flavored for most people working job-to-job, whether it’s Uber, gig housecleaning or ‘temp’ IT professional.
You’re claiming people don’t condemn these companies in the middle of a thread in which people are condemning these companies.
And you are not grappling with the greater reality at work. Yes, people are taking the best offer they can get in the current system.
But this system didn’t just happen. People created this system so other people would have no better choices to make.
We want to change the system so those better choices exist and people can choose them.
I think what the article points out is just the gig economy manifestation of a bigger issue in our work culture/economy.
And that’s the lack of work/life balance that America celebrates and expects. There’s a real expectation from a lot of people that not being willing to put job ahead of EVERYTHING is some kind of moral defect and character flaw, and something regrettable. You see this in the article when it talks about gig economy people being sleep deprived, or interrupting their lovemaking to do their gigs, or whatever. And from Lyft or Fiverr’s perspective, these are GOOD things, not horrible, intrusive, fucked up things.
It’s not limited to gig economy people though; how many people are expected to put all their personal plans on hold (and often those of their family) because something went wrong at work? How many people are expected to put their jobs ahead of their families? How many companies have a path to the corner office that winds its way through a lot of overtime and workaholism?
The gig economy just sort of puts these issues out front, in that people are more inclined to NOT do that kind of thing if left to their own devices, and it’s not in the gig economy companies’ interest for them to do that. Hence the propaganda about “doers” and what-not. But make no mistake, it’s a symptom of something larger.
I don’t understand. All your side can do is describe crappy jobs. You do nothing to grapple with the very simple logic that the person is accepting the best job available. Is it as simple as statists are just ranting against a cold, cold world?
So in a way you are ranting against a cold, cold world. “It’s like… the systemman.” Are you talking about the system of recognizing property rights? The way you suggest this system was created is awkwardly simplified to say the least. Sounds like a conspiracy theory. The system wasn’t created by a group of people. It arose through voluntary interactions and judgements on those interactions by people who studied and discovered law. A very complex process, unlike democracy.
By seeking to sever these arrangements, elitist statists refuse to recognize they are irrelevant.
Instead of offering better options through a voluntary capitalist framework, which would require ingenuity and hard work, statists only seek to cobble together a majority of the electorate, gain control of the state apparatus, and destroy property rights in order to dictate behavior that pleases their sensibilities. Capitalists on the other hand strive to satisfy consumer desires through strictly voluntary means in the most efficient way possible. In a world of scarcity, this is the only thing that can be done to improve options.
I really don’t care to engage this on the “statist” vs Free Sovereign Individual Workers of the World level, or whatever line of sociopolitical bananas you’re trying to sell.
If we are going to require people to be self-supporting, we owe them a fair chance at a safe, stable job with a supporting wage. Leaving it to some kind of economic Darwinism results in… well, pretty much what we have now, with a few utterly obscenely wealthy controllers, far too many who can’t get out of rotating poverty, and a dulled center who are lucky enough to think they’re lucky.
That a sort of new entity has come into play allowing people to scratch out a day’s wages (with no promise of another’s) is not an improvement.
So am I “railing against the system”? Bet your fraggin’ ass I am.
Ok, then, what system is better? I put a premium on being able to make my own choices, I don’t want some bureaucrat making them for me. Should we make it a law to have all work be done by employees? That would further entrench the large corporations and make it near impossible for any competition without collusion.
And, I’m sorry that people who have commodity skills cannot find better opportunities. But that’s sort of the point, isn’t it? We should value marketable skills and this should be incenvtive for people to better their lives. At some point, they have to take control of their lives. My parents came to this country without speaking English. They retired literally millionaires and to this day my dad’s English would graciously be described as terrible or semi-illiterate. But, they started at the gig economy. My dad told me the other day that he would’ve loved to have Uber as taxi driving was his first job. My mom did baby-sitting for two years until she felt confident that her speaking English was good enough to apply for a job. They did this without welfare or unemployment checks. My dad kept his job at the warehouse simply by showing up 5 mins early to punch in and he punched out on time. Both my parents and all my subsequent relatives moving here all worked at large multi-national corporations. Depending on the market, one may be invaluable at their job and the company will bend backwards to keep them, I see it every day here for CISSP certifications, and some other Cisco and Oracle DBA certs. Even in my department, I had a hard ass time finding lawyers to do my work.
This comes pretty close to being self-cancelling gibberish.
In what system do “bureaucrats” define jobs or require any person to take a specific job… or any job?
That a gig economy works (and has always worked) for some subset of flexible workers with low security requirements and a “marketable skill” to sell does not mean it’s adaptable beyond that subset. I would guess my years as a freelance writer/publishing consultant could be called “gigging” except that there was no app and I didn’t find my clients in Home Depot parking lots.
That gigging is being promoted as some new thing, accessible to all and as a valid (and somehow ethically/morally better) than working a stable, secure job is ripe old horseshit, as even successful giggers find out soon enough.
No, the hippy dreamers who are out of touch with reality are the libertarians. And the ones talking about conspiracy theories are the objectivists.
The people who are living in and dealing with the real world are the rest of us. We don’t swallow ideologies just because somebody argues they should work better - in theory. We do what works.
And one thing that works is laws. Society gets together and the majority decides that individuals should not be allowed to do certain behaviors. And if those individuals do those behaviors after society told them not to, they get punished.
And we should be turning the cold harsh eye of the law towards some employment practices. Because despite your insistence that everything should be working, it isn’t. Facts trump theories.
So we’re bringing attention to the parts of the economy that aren’t working and calling for laws to stop the problems from occurring. We’re busy building and maintaining the kind of society that lets people get comfortable enough that they can afford to indulge in theoretical nonsense.
To the contrary, feudal Europe was organized around property rights. The serf wasn’t free to travel because anywhere he went he’d be trespassing on private property.
I picked feudal Europe because it seems closest to your ideal, as far as I can glean. Can you give us a better example of an historic society organized to your ideals, if it isn’t feudal Europe?
You want the bureaucrats to get off your back and give you the freedom to work eighty hours a week for a dollar an hour? Because that’s the choice most people made back before the government stepped in.
It’s great to have something like Uber driving or babysitting as your first job. But it shouldn’t be your only job. Do you think your father would be a millionaire if he had been an Uber driver all his life? The kind of economy that gave your father the opportunity to rise is what’s disappearing. Nowadays a lot of people start at the bottom and find they can’t leave the bottom.