- A study led by the University of Bristol reveals that 52% of gig workers in the UK earn below the minimum wage.
- The average hourly earnings of gig workers were £8.97, approximately 15% lower than the current UK minimum wage.
- Work-related insecurity and anxiety were experienced by 76% of gig workers surveyed.
- Many gig workers (28%) felt their health and safety were at risk, and 25% experienced pain on the job.
- Gig workers expressed the need for basic rights such as minimum wage rates, holiday and sick pay, and protection against unfair dismissal, as well as the formation of unions and platform councils to represent their interests and influence working conditions.
Always wondered at the back of my mind how successive UK Governments have managed to get away with squaring age based minimum wages with Article 14 of the ECHR, which is supposed to prevent age based discrimination. Surely someone has tried to bring a case - virtually every other question of law in the UK regarding the ECHR/Human Rights Act has made its way to Strasbourg.
The ability to pay younger people below the standard minimum wage goes hurt older people (well, everyone over 23c but older people are included in that set of course), because they legally can’t compete on price for those jobs.
But of course, this only hurts the older folks without a lot of financial power.
True, they should have included that. I have the impression though that e.g. delivery jobs used to be considered student jobs instead of a full-time job to make a living from. While most gig workers seem rather young I'd think the age range has shifted upwards.
It shouldn't be "for students". We would all balk about providing the same service and being paid less because we were "too young" despite providing the same skill and ability.
It's not a matter of getting paid less for the same job, it's a matter of not having the same skills or experience. Employers need some incentive to take a chance on someone with no employment history.
The incentive for taking a chance on an employee should be "I need to hire someone to grow my business so I can make more money".
We should stop worshiping at the alter of "small businesses". We've done it for decades and I'm not convinced it has helped in the slightest. Small business owners have the worst victim complex I have ever seen.
So if there's two candidates, but one of them is a student with no history of employment, and the other is someone with at least a couple years of experience behind their belt, which do you think the business would hire for the same cost?
Let's go back to 2009. Am I hiring for a social media position? Does the experienced person have 2 years of experience in marketing or in social media?
We've all seen this flip before and I think its disingenuous to pretend it doesn't apply here because its "low skill". this leads to us being okay with someone making less than the minimum wage and pushes downward on labor's ability to attempt to make the playing field livable, not level, just livable in a way that we could be proud of as a nation rather than embarrassed of.
Every hire is a chance taken for both sides of the transaction. This argument is tired and can be spun another way: a new employee is a blank slate. The employer will define a working method that cannot be compared and judged based on experience (they have none). The employer may even benefit further from a fresh perspective on working methods.
Let's push it further: can we say the same for very experienced employees? Isn't the employer taking a chance on the employee being willing to learn and adopt a potentially different workflow? Maybe we deduct from the value of a highly experienced employee due to the likelihood of them being stuck in their ways. Oh wait that's ageist now isn't it.. Funny how that double standard works.
But then you're just arguing that we should lower the minimum wage for everyone, because the people with genuinely valuable experience can negotiate higher wages on their own and the people who need someone to take a chance on them for any reason need the ability to offer a discount.
The study was an internet survey with no verification and they mixed the data between a wide variety of types of remote gigs, including upwork and fiverr and the further mixed the idea of “waiting for work” which falsely decreased the average wage.
Because someone who’s under a contract at Apple will get paid during those times? Even a freelancer like me on a higher demand profession, I get paid by day and sometimes there’s only 4 hours of work.
The lack of empathy of some commenters here is truly shocking.
If you're on a contract that pays for your time, you can't leave and go hang out in the park or get a workout at the gym or go shopping at the mall.
If you're on a contract that pays by the job, you're back on your own time as soon as the work is done. You got paid to give someone a ride, they get out of your car and the contract is over. You can go do whatever you want. But you don't get paid any more until you do more work. That's the nature of it. There are people who voluntarily choose this when alternatives are available, because they value the flexibility etc.
Out of necessity to do gig work, or out of necessity to do some work?
I have to imagine Europe has food service workers and cashiers and cleaning staff and other jobs that nobody really likes to do and that don't pay particularly well, but that aren't hard jobs to get. So if the gig work is actually worse instead of better, why are they choosing it over any of those other things which are still available?
Because liquidity services demand to be compensated or otherwise liquidity won't be provided (= the ability to receive service without an appointment) If you don't compensate them, then you as a customer will have to get an appointment ahead of time so that the worker can plan whether he has work today or not.
I can’t tell how to interpret this. Doing gig work doesn’t pay well, but respondents are doing an average of 28 hours of work per week.
Something is missing from the picture. If the takeaway is that gig workers are struggling to pay living expenses, I would expect that to be reflected by working 50-60+ hours per week.
I wonder if this hours figure is calculated the same way the gig companies calculate minimum wage.
I.e. that 28 hours represents only time spent in performing the delivery task. Any waiting around beforehand when not assigned a task is not counted as working hours for the purposes of min wage calculation. If this is true (and that needs verifying) then this 28 might be a 40 hours where the person was unable to get on with their other life duties even if they weren’t technically working.
According to the study it includes hours spent logged on waiting for jobs, which I think is a correct and meaningful way to measure it. I guess this is mostly people trying to top up their primary income.
I'm not sure that I agree that it is. You can be logged into both Uber and Lyft awaiting rides. Good luck trying to be employed at both McDonald's and Burger King awaiting compatible schedules. What makes gig work so different is that your "employer" can't demand you to work when you don't want to.
You're not going to get fired from Uber for being unable to cover a Friday night shift since you're at working at Lyft Friday night. Can't say the same about McDonald's and Burger King.
It all depends on how risky you want to play the game. Do you log off from one while doing a ride for the other? Do you log on 5 minutes away from drop-off to start looking for your next ride? Do you actually accept rides while doing a ride for the other? From many anecdotes I've read, this one is apparently extremely common. I'm sure Uber has some heuristics to discourage this behavior, but ultimately, unless Uber doesn't want the driver's business entirely, then drivers who are driven will find a way to game the system as best they can. Like always, the sweet spot is somewhere in-between.
If you're only counting one set of hours, sure, but do you count your hours by looking at your clock or by looking at the summary view inside each app?
I agree on the spirit of your take but then you should count the commuting hours for the rest of workers as well. If you need 1 hour to get to work and 1 to get back, you are already working (or giving your time to your work place) 50 hours a week
I don't think this is quite the same, because a gig worker would also have commuting costs to populations that have enough of a customer base. It would more be like you have 4 30min meetings today all with 20 minutes apart (so not enough time to really switch tasks to anything useful) and somehow your workplace doesn't count those waiting periods as work and therefore only pay you for 2 hrs work, even though you had to also wait 1 hr collectively during the in-between meetings.
This. It’s kind of like how, for office workers, the IRS/your company will reimburse you for travel between offices and meeting places, but not from your home to your main office
Okay, you're at home and you want to be downtown. Open the app, wash the dishes from last night, take out the trash, by then someone near you wants a ride downtown. You get paid, and then you're downtown where you can get paid again right away.
But that doesn't make any sense. You're in some residential area, it's rush hour, you need to get into the downtown where the action is, and so does everybody else. There isn't one person who also wants to go where you're going? Unlikely.
Ironically, it's demands for minimum compensation that make efficiencies like that go away. Maybe there is some demand for that but not a ton, and only at low prices. Low is better than none when you're making the trip either way. But if you're prohibited from working for less than a threshold amount of money, then you get nothing.
There's a big difference between a salaried 40ish hours (plus or including commute), where the commute forms part of the decision to take the job, and you know you're getting paid vs hanging around, unable to commit to other tasks, in the hope that a gig appears for you.
If it doesn't, you not only don't get paid, but you've missed the opportunity to potentially earn elsewhere too.
I think the op here was pointing out that in some gig jobs, you only get paid whilst doing the task (eg delivering the food) rather than the time they are available to work, such as waiting for a food order. The worker can't do anything else whilst waiting, but still doesn't get paid.
Yes, but the same apply to a non-gig jobs with commuting. I understand perfectly that a gig-worker situation is worse and needs more protection, but commuting time, especially when long enough, cannot be just ignored. In fact in many jurisdictions if you get injured while commuting to work, it's a work accident.
Absurd. If you don't like the commute distance then find a different job so your (pay / (time spent commuting + time spent working) is something you agree with. Or move closer to the job.
All that is in reality is employers subsidising people's decision to live somewhere with an outrageous commute (ie generally far away from urban centres). People who chose to live in urban centres close to where they're likely to work with shorter travel times are now being effectively penalised for making a responsible decision.
Alternatively we could force employers to pay for commutes but allow them to factor that into hiring decisions. If I have to pay you as if you worked 60 hours because you have a ridiculous 2 hour each way commute I'm just going to hire someone who lives 30 minutes away instead.
"Just pay your employee to drive 3 hours" is equally absurd. Or what if I decide to take a greyhound or amtrak even longer, please pay me to sleep! You also have the choice of not taking the job, or not moving away from your job so its hardly a fair comparison.
You're thinking about this like an engineer instead of a human and not applying any sort of reasonableness test. You can take as long as you want to get to work but you'll be paid for a reasonable commute time and distance just like how mileage reimbursement and per diem works.
You think in the world of business travel someone hasn't already thought about this?
So then you don't actually get paid based on how long your commute is and the people stuck commuting 3 hours a day go uncompensated for the time because a 3 hour commute isn't reasonable -- which was the original point.
For simplicity we could just abstract that average commute and other factors(some days being busy or slow, some days having challenging/easy tasks, cost of living, etc.) and wrap that all up in a single compensation. Maybe call it a wage or salary, and then let workers choose the job with the best "wage" for their specific scenario.
But how are you supposed to set price controls on wages if some jobs are easy and right near where you live and others are hard and far away from affordable rents? Wouldn't the calculation have so many variables in it with such subjective valuation that only the person themselves could decide if it was worth it?
The moment you make commute a cost for the employer they're going to start discriminating based on your commute. You don't live within 5 minutes of the job? Go find another job.
Or better yet - employer offered housing! You don't want to live on the workplace-campus? Sorry! We need somebody to buy from all the businesses we contracted for our workplace campus.
Awesome. My commute time is now 5 hours each way. Please pay me.
Hyberbole aside, how would that even work? The further away from work someone lives, the more "commute time" they get paid? That has perverse incentives:
* I no longer take mass transit because driving myself is slower and I get paid more.
* I move further away, and take longer to get to work, and spend that time listening to audio books. My employer pays all that time, I'm doing a leisure activity, and I'm having a greater negative impact on the environment.
in the UK, commute in and out of work is not paid time. But any transport between places of work is paid time, so the argument is that "self-employed" gig workers miss out on paid transport time between gigs.
> I move further away, and take longer to get to work, and spend that time listening to audio books.
I like audiobooks and it would be nice to get paid to listen when I do. I would not trade even two hours of my day, every day I commute, by moving further away. You would have to be paid more than you value that time for it to make sense.
That's you wishing you got paid more, not you valuing your time at more than they pay. Needing the money is valuing the money more than you value the time.
Sure, sure, but that's why you might take a commute which is two hours each way instead of one which is eight hours each way. That doesn't remove the perverse incentive, it just attenuates it. Eventually. And generally not before you're doing something quite inefficient.
Notice that you're also e.g. screwing around on the internet on the train instead of screwing around on the internet at home. People regularly already do that for four, five, six hours a day. Who wouldn't choose to get paid for it?
Then everyone has to spend more of their income on housing because the supply constraint hasn't been lifted but if you don't outbid your coworkers on nearby housing you get fired.
I genuinely don't understand the downvotes. Y'all really be simping for your employers. Any time spent doing anything you wouldn't be doing if it weren't for your job should be paid and it's dumb that we pretend it shouldn't be.
This is how every salaried person's pay already works and it should apply to hourly workers too.
It sounds good. I understand your fire behind the idea.
But in reality, in just doesn't work.
If I don't value my time, and my employer has to pay for my commute, then why wouldn't I choose to move an hour away from work, or take a job an hour away, to make more money without actually working?
How would you solve employers discriminating against people that live an hour away or paying a lower hourly wage to someone that lives farther away?
Usually in this kind of scheme you would not be paid your normal hourly wage but a low rate. If you still think that sitting in a car for a small return is better than just being at your desk or job site making full pay for actual work, that's on the employer for creating such a shitty job->pay match that it's better to endure traffic for peanuts than work.
Also, right now plenty of companies put out voluntary overtime that people don't end up taking, despite higher pay and literally the same work. Plenty of people would rather not be under someone else's command for an extra hour just to make a few bucks, and in fact, when you pay people adequately they largely don't want to do that. You always have weird outliers that think life is an idle game and try to make the bank account go as high as possible, but building systems around dumb outliers is not good systems engineering.
On average, people don't want to spend extra hours in their car, even if you pay them full wage. This is why when Uber started out they basically had to push subsidized high pay, so people would be willing to drive around all day.
Right now you can, with little experience, go make like $80k or more a year driving around all day, by being a trucker, and yet the industry is constantly struggling to keep people working, because the job is awful. If you have an employee that decides to move five hours away and waste ten hours of their day to make an extra hundred bucks, there are probably other things that make them a mediocre employee that you can fire them for.
They’d obviously do it by total hours worked vs the amount Uber/etc pays out each paycheque, not going through thousands of Uber receipts, calculating the percentages paid out + time spent doing the delivery, and totalling them up. That’d be pretty hard/impossible at scale.
The missing number is how many of them are working another job.
I haven't taken Uber in last couple of years, but prior to Covid I took it ~weekly in Ottawa & Toronto. Not a single driver in years of travel for work, had it as their sole employment.
They're usually in a hurry, but delivery drivers I had a chance to chat with last few years also primarily use it to supplement their income.
So people may be doing 60 hours a week, just not solely via gig work.
Edit: I've Re-read the article, the 28 hours a week you quote is immediately followed by a clarifying "comprising 60% of their total earnings" -- so it looks like indeed they are working many more hours a week total.
I found that a high fraction of my mid-day trips (commuting to/from our downtown office or taking it to/from the airport morning, afternoon, or very early evening) were from essentially full-time drivers. Friday/Saturday night trips to/from restaurants were mostly from part-time drivers, which is probably not that surprising a result.
The previous solution to this for taxis was crippling the supply of taxi jobs (via medallions) so each taxi job paid more as well as setting a minimum fee for entering a car.
Uber drivers would likewise make more money if there was less of them, so they would always have new calls waiting. But that also still means there’s less people making money, as well as far longer wait times for consumers and higher costs.
The medallion system was designed around the ideas taxis = your career, not some side gig you can start/stop whenever you like.
You could also do it by setting price floors but gov messing with prices at that fine grained level is dangerous (as Venezuela learned with food).
Uber was only cheaper than taxis when they were artificially dumping the price. They're now far more expensive and they're still losing money hand over fist.
Taxi drivers were never working to pay the salaries of hundreds/thousands of SWEs, international sales teams etc.
The medallion system is specific to a few cities and has major issues in even fewer. People talk about taxis as if every city is New York.
Right, the vast majority of places where you can order a non-Uber taxi are no more regulated than any other job. There was no "Evil medallion cartel", that was always just propaganda that Uber explicitly paid for.
I only have experience in couple of cities (Toronto & Ottawa), and medallions are... just an insane thing. A positively insane thing. Nominal price of about $1k, their market price was up to $300k. For many people I spoke to, their one and only retirement financial planning was essentially a mortgage on their own medallion. When Uber came along and medallion prices fell, they were... devastated, angry, distraught, hopeless.
On one hand my heart completely goes out to them - they worked hard and invested in something they perceived or were assured had permanent value.
On the other hand, W.T.F. You are banking your family's entire life that... what, city will never change the model or expand number of licenses or revamp their code, basically that nothing will ever change?
So I don't know if there was an "evil medallion cartel", but there definitely was "extreme lobbying by people whose livelihood was intimately tied in shortage of transportation methods" and a little bit of "unspecified people going to uber office with bats and having a little smash-the-computers fun".
--------------
On the other topic you mention - if there indeed exist cities where "taxi is no more regulated than uber", then what IS the distinction between "Uber" and "Taxi" in such places? Can I just slap a sign on my car and pick up people?
A taxi medallion has been sold for $100,000, a record for the price of these taxi licenses, which once cost $10. The number of medallions has been frozen since 1937 so by law there are only 11,787 medallions, which license cabs to pick up street hails, in the city. But demand has been rising rapidly and so has the price.
...
The first medallion to hit the $100,000 mark was sold earlier this month to a 30-year-old Asian, Stanley Cheung, who lives on the Lower East Side. He is like so many of the city's cabdrivers over the years - energetic young immigrants able to borrow enough money to buy a medallion and a cab and take off in pursuit of the American dream.
However, according to Jay L. Turoff, chairman of the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, a medallion has been rising in value so much that it is producing a new kind of buyer - the doctor or lawyer or other professional who looks upon the medallion simply as an investment. ...
It reads like similar pieces I saw about high priced medallions in the 2010s. I don't remember seeing articles criticizing taxi medallions in cities where they weren't expensive.
Oh I agree. This was strictly & specifically in response to the OP in this thread, who asked, as I interpret it, "If people are presented as struggling, how come they are not working more hours", and I believe even in the article itself, the answer is - they are.
Nothing in my post should be construed as an endorsement of underpaying people and expecting them to work every waking moment of their lives (much as it may be the actual reality for a lot of people).
Other folks have already commented that most folks in this line of work will have 2nd and 3rd jobs. But, I want to explain a different perspective. One that explains how gig work affects one's living (and ultimately leads to people needing to take on multiple jobs to survive).
Gig workers cannot control how many hours of work they receive a week. It's similar to shift work. When your manager is making the schedule and ensures that no one works 40 hours or more a week so they don't have to pay you benefits.
A major problem of low-wage, non-salaried work and gig work is that is an unreliable source of income. This breeds anxiety and stress, not to mention a host of other problems.
Not only that, but the 28 hours they work are probably some of the worst.
Ex you’re driving uber. You’re going to be “incentivized” (read: forced due to logistics) to work rush hour and bar hours. So you’re maybe working 5-7 and 10-12 on weekends and a couple weekdays. The reason being is that everyone wants to cruise around in the afternoon so the ratio of drivers to passengers gets so bad you’ll never get a ride.
And ofc if you’re sitting in your car with the app on waiting… you’re not being paid. That doesn’t count as work. So if you don’t get a ride for 2 hours bc not enough passengers - tough shit you’ve just made $4 for your 2 hours minus the cost of running your car and losing hours of your life.
But America is corrupted. Politicians let’s corps simply say “no we’re not breaking the law” and they believe them.
Anyone who’s debating that this is harmful and should be illegal is uneducated or a simp for those corps.
We spesifically deaigned legislation to make sure workers get paid for all their time, a chef waiting for orders and not cooking is still working. A fire marshall on duty still gwts paid if there is no fire, etc.
its amazing how all the progress was undone by pretending workhours don't count when an app says so.
I am very disillusioned by our industry, it seems half the revenue was generating by techno-cheating laws.
In my experience, this is business. I'm working on a product right now that would not pass the scrutiny of AGs or the CFPB. We will release and run for years making tons of money until the regulators catch up and realize what we are doing. Then we will ask forgiveness and compromise a bit. This is how self-policing works in banking and other regulated industries.
Companies like Uber skate along until new legislation is created that regulates them. Good luck with that.
But if the restaurant still controls the chef's work during that time, that isn't gig work. If the "employer" is required to pay by time not work, then it is now the employer's time, not the workers flexible time:
- ability to assign tasks, not leaving the worker the option to say I don't want that task
- ability to control how many workers can log in at a time, forcing Uber to pay a 1000 drivers who all logged in from 2:00 AM to 5:00AM when there aren't enough rides to be taken, isn't right
If I sign onto the app to say that I'm available for delivery, does that count as "working hours", and the company is required to make sure that I make minimum wage, regardless of how many orders are paid out?
What if I sign onto the app, but then don't accept any of the deliveries I get offered? Then they'd be required to make sure I get minimum wage, without ever doing any actual work.
I do think there's a problem as things stand, but I don't think the solution is a simple one.
>What if I sign onto the app, but then don't accept any of the deliveries I get offered? Then they'd be required to make sure I get minimum wage, without ever doing any actual work.
That's like asking what if you don't do any work at a regular job.
If you're not doing any work, they can fire you. Once you've been fired, they don't need to pay you anything whether you're waiting around or not. But until you've been fired, they should be paying you.
>But you're not required, as I understand it, to take any of the jobs offered by the various gig work services.
There's no contradiction between not being required to take any particular job, and "if you refuse to take 40 jobs in a row, go away".
(If the jobs are so bad that most of the workforce will refuse 40 in a row, so the company can't fire them because they'd have no workers, that's the company's fault for having such a poor selection that the workers wait long times. In which case yes, pay them.)
> There's no contradiction between not being required to take any particular job, and "if you refuse to take 40 jobs in a row, go away".
Ok, so you take _some_ of the jobs, just enough to appear to be working reasonably. And then someone needs to figure out what "some" is. Plus half the point of a gig job is you decide when/what you are willing to work.
As noted, I don't believe there is NO solution... I just don't think it's as simple as "well, just require each person gets paid minimum wage". Because there's a lot of things to consider.
>And then someone needs to figure out what "some" is.
Just let the company decide it.
It doesn't cause a problem because if the company sets an unreasonably high standard for how many jobs you need to take to not be fired, they'll run out of workers.
Like it works for any other work: you get a roster of when you're expected to work and get paid for that time, and perform tasks during this time. This problem has been solved decades if not centuries ago, e.g. factory shifts or supermarket employees.
Or more cynically, an SV company backed by foreign blood money muscling their way into an established market while ignoring regulations and just trying to stamp out the established market through basically price manipulation before the courts can catch up.
Except they are. They are standing next to their company branded bike, in uniform waiting for an order. They are not on their way to work from home or vise-versa. For all intents and purposes they are on the clock, except the computer says no.
Service industry jobs often make you clock out and have rules against leaving the premises when off the clock. This is seen as normal and workers always comply.
> and have rules against leaving the premises when off the clock
It might be illegal across the USA, but I do know at least that in Oregon, this is illegal. I know someone that got several hours of backpay for unpaid lunch breaks because someone reported the business for not allowing them to leave during unpaid lunch breaks.
Requiring people to stay on premises during lunch wasn't illegal, but if the requirement was there, they have to be paid during the lunch break. If you are clocking out, then you MUST be allowed to leave.
The problem is that the law isn't proactively enforced and reporting puts you at risk of retaliation, something few people in that situation can afford.
When I was younger one manager was notorious for clocking us out while we were still cleaning at the end of the night. It went on because reporting it risked having your shifts cut or being quietly let go.
It's the same in the rental market. Where I am, viewing and application fees have been illegal for years but estate agents will still try to charge them. If you bring it up or refuse to pay they'll just find someone else who will.
I'm not sure this is 'seen as normal' (by whom?) but I very much doubt it is legal under minimum wage legislation.
Besides which, this is not the equivalent of making a bartender clock out during his break. It's the equivalent of making him clock out while he stands at the bar waiting for the next customer.
The attitude is that over $50 billion a year is stolen as wage theft and nobody does anything about it so businesses feel emboldened to be worse, as well as a general culture of "only doers matter"
I would expect that to be reflected by working 50-60+ hours per week.
That does not follow. Suppose the gig workers are doing food deliveries. Each day, the market places X food orders at a total of $Y including fees and tips. If the market clears (no one who places a food order has it left unfulfilled), a reasonable assumption, then the food delivery gig is a zero-sum game. If all the drivers work more hours that just means they’ll be waiting longer, on average, for orders to come in. No amount of extra hours worked will create additional food orders.
The UK has an hourly legal minimum wage rate. The number of hours worked does not affect the fact that, according to the study, most gig workers are earning less than that per hour.
Respondents doing an average of 28 hours gig work per week will in some cases be using that to top up insufficient hours in a low wage conventional job.
- statutory hourly pay = some constant set by gov't.
Therefore:
- given revenue less than some X, we'll name it `living expenses`
- it's possible that true hourly pay < statutory hourly pay
Reading your comment, you may have also meant that you're trying to pick between that interpretation, and another one, that looks like:
Given:
- revenue = true hourly pay * hours.
- statutory hourly pay = some constant set by gov't.
- true hourly pay < statutory hourly pay
Proposition:
- Given hours worked < Y, where Y is some range, and revenue = Z, and workers continue being alive, then perhaps the statutory hourly pay is too high?
From there, to help me choose an interpretation, I'd look for more evidence of that. I'd want something damning, enough to overrule the statute / legal social contract of the population.
Wanting more work isn't going to make a lunch rush happen again. These folks make no money at all waiting around, and can only make a nearly worthwhile sum when there is demand.
Most of the people I know who do gig work do it because it is so flexible. They often have other things like childcare or schooling that take a large part of their time.
Wages, i.e. payment per hour worked, is independent of the number of hours worked. One of the takeaways is that they aren't being paid the legal minimum wage.
The overarching takeaway is that gig work doesn't offer the protections that is extended to other workers. More to your point, understand that one of the issues that Starbucks unions are fighting for is more control over scheduling.
How lmuch big does an Uber driver “work” for Uber? How long does a “dasher” work? If folks aren’t paid for the 15 minute gap between orders, or the 10 minute commute to pickup ___location - then a 60 hour work week can easily turn into 30 hours of paid time.
Why would you spend 60 hours a week in something that gives so little returns? It’s not like you can meaningfully get ahead doing this if these are the numbers. Better to spend the other hours looking for other options or just enjoying yourself.
Because they have to, to make ends meet. When you are struggling to feed yourself and maybe a family it leaves little room for learning or enjoying yourself.
Sure, under pain of starvation people will do this if gig work is the only possible work, but we try not to let people die in the west this way and as a result people have a little breathing room to try to choose better options. Even just being your own childcare is an activity with much higher returns in your example than 60 hours of gig work. I would not expect 50-60 hours to be the norm when it pays so little per hour.
Big difference between struggling to feed yourself and starvation. Still I’m not to sure we make a huge effort in this area regardless of the term, without charities that is.
Who is this we? The local church, the local food bank ran by volunteers and donations? The collective west doesn't give a f about people dying and counts on individuals choosing to donate to prevent it.
$4 is better than 0 dollars and perhaps some people have looked but couldn't find other work. Maybe they have a criminal record, businesses definitely discriminate even though it's illegal
> Doing gig work doesn’t pay well, but respondents are doing an average of 28 hours of work per week.
Curious use of “but”. Has it occurred to you that perhaps below-minimum-wage pay isn’t the best use of one’s time? Besides, an hour is an hour. If I’m not paid for that hour, it doesn’t matter if I worked 1 hour or 100 hours, but you can bet that gig companies do everything they can to avoid “full time” employment of workers in markets that require benefits for such employees, so that may also factor in to the number of hours worked.
Plus they say minimum wage rose just this month. I'd expect to see at least a little lag between wages that are legislated directly and those only influenced by that legislation through market pressures.
Gig employees are not paid an hourly wage. They're paid per-delivery/ride. You know that, right?
Because of this, it's possible to either not have enough deliveries/rides or to have the deliveries/rides pay too little to achieve enough money in an hour to make minimum wage.
My friends - the level of naivete on this board is beyond pale: the 'gig' economy companies are absolutely founded on the principle of having extra leverage over workers so they can be de facto considerably lower than standard net packages.
This is the business plan.
Large companies have power over individuals, which is why we have regulations, min. wage and sometimes unions (and laws for unions). Even thinks like 'weekends' are effectively legislated.
So, by adjusting the terms of contracts, putting in fine print, especially leveraging things like lack of understanding of 'hidden costs' (aka wear and tear on vehicles), etc. they can eke out a profit where there might be none otherwise.
In a magical world where we could talk exclusively about 'excess labour' aka 'everyone had a full time job and wanted to make a few bucks on the side' - this might work out in some ways, but generally speaking, it doesn't.
'Gig economy' is toxic for the working class and mostly is just a giant wealth transfer.
The people creating and investing in these companies absolutely know this, this is their 'secret sauce' or 'IP' or 'special insight' etc. that makes it work.
I think much of it would survive if min. wage were required, but not all of it.
I suggest it's not actually efficient for middle class people to have 'gig servants' in most cases, the efficiency just is not there - again 'slack labour' notwithstanding.
Finally, we may be a couple of steps away from it working - notably, there are a lot of 'hiccups' that happen with delivery, such as people not present, addressing problems, bad food selection, etc. and working through a lot of that may bring efficiency across the threshold to where the 'grocery bill' is just a 'little bit more' because the delivery guy is able to do it very efficiently, and so the economics add up.
I think we might be there with Uber but I don't think we're there with Instacart.
What is this atittude to law, ehy do you think it's as optional guidelines when it comes to companies?
If something was outlawed yesterday, and you committed thay crime today, do yoy think you would get away by claiming you need time to adjust? Why is law not optional for 'little people'?
I believe you misinterpreted me. I was not making a judgement about how things should or should not be, just stating how things currently work out. The minimum wage laws don't affect gig workers diectly AFAIK. They should, but they dont. Because of this, absent other economic factors, people who are currently gig workers choosing hourly jobs instead of continuing as a gig worker. This will reduce the supply of gig workers to the companies employinh them. In order to maintain the number of workers they need in this situation, the companies will have to raise compensation to be in line with minimum wage, but this process will take weeks or months to happen.
If you are only making around £7 an hour it's not going to matter if you work 28 hours or 84 hours. The takeaway is that people doing jobs that wouldn't otherwise exist.
I suspect most gig workers do it as a side hobby or side project before having the necessary experience to start scaling a business of their own. Or to supplement other income.
My god man, use your logic: 'pay workers illegally under wage, then can just work 60 hours a week to make up for it!' at least before we make it an issue.
If there was no minimum wage, wages in some sectors wages would drop to where they are in the undeveloped world aka $2/hour. Little communities with favela-like structures with limited heating/electricity would pop up, and if you think the 'dollar store' is cheap, then wait for the '25 cent store' where they sell stuff as they do parts of India and Brazil.
It's funny how people don't think this could happen in the 'modern world', I suggest they don't know what makes the modern world modern. For a hint, go to where the illegal workers in Cali or Texas live and exist. Those communities resemble pretty much the standard of living of Central American countries, aka 'down the economic ladder'. Because they are.
Moreover, having secondary low-wage markets will put downward wage pressure on other jobs. Extra surpluses will mostly be yielded by financial asset holders.
The solution here is simple, require people pay minimum wage. If you look at corporate profits in the US for example, there are plenty of surpluses available to pay people.
Some jobs will go away, that's fine.
I can't believe what I'm reading on this thread, the only other time I've been suspicious of 'ideological paid bots' is when I see a ton of people defending the CCP.
To whom is that fine? To the people going from $2/hour to zero it certainly isn't.
I honestly cannot grasp how some people can _forcibly_ remove other people's _options_ then pat themselves on the back as some sort of armchair savior.
Yes, for some people a bad option could still be their best option. What sort of moral superpower is that that enables you to forbid a contract between two consenting adults A and B such that A wants to work for X and B that's willing to pay X, but you as a C that just won't let it happen and is willing to use force to stop it from happening
Ideally minimum wage should be coupled with higher taxes on the wealthy, a generous social safety net, a job guarantee fronted by the state, and a sovereign wealth fund which pays out a minimum basic income. This would eliminate shitty jobs no one wants to do and get rid of business models which depend on them, which is a net win for everyone.
No, as you can see by my posts, I'm a strong supporter of min wage, but there is no need for 'job guaranteed by the state' or 'UBI' - in fact, doing so would lead to economic collapse.
All of the UBI supporters need to do the math on it, it's 'extremely expensive'.
The 'economic collapse' part happens when 'not working' becomes normative, and socially acceptable - and be assured that it will.
The idea of 'working for a living' when you can just 'do whatever you want' is a bit glib. I suggest the only reason people would work, is to pay for that 'special thing' they want aka 'trip' or 'iphone'.
The ideological problem with UBI is the same as any broad social welfare program and that it doesn't reward material output. That is 'extremely bad'.
Finally - I do suggest that it may be possible to 'very simplistically means tested welfare' for people (to get rid of overhead) - and - to allow some of those people to have jobs so they don't get caught in that trap.
In fact, I suggest for people 65+ we'll need a program like this because they can still work, and frankly, working may be very good for their health, and they can do things that are 'extremely needed' right now, such as help to take care of the very elderly.
No one ever said anything about infinite money. The basic idea of socialism is that democracy should control some of the allocation of labor and that, because the functions of the nation state are necessary to the health of enterprises and because the fundamental purpose of society is the common good, the state has a right to some of the profits, which go beyond merely taking money from the wealthy.
Plenty of nation-states make different trade offs between productivity or growth or whatever and mitigating poverty. To act as if the particular style we have in America is the only possible thing that works is asinine.
When it comes to employees making a contract with an employer in the field of minimum wage jobs, the employees have no bargaining power. There will always be someone willing to work for less.
Ideologically, yes, your argument is sound. But I'm begging you to think through what would actually happen with no minimum wage. In reality, it would absolutely destroy the standard of living for unskilled work as there's a race to the bottom on wages.
Businesses only hire enough employees to satisfy the demand for products and services. Eliminating minimum wage won't create nearly as many jobs as you think, and instead, would merely result minimum wage earners losing their homes while they are forced to agree to work for $2 instead of losing the job entirely to someone who will.
This is a very interesting discussion, one way to think about the issue is: "what should be the minimum wage" and "who defines it".
If you set a minimum wage too high, you are taking jobs from lot of people, and if its too low you risk people getting paid less.
Whatever number you come up with is going to be arbitrary. A country wide minimum wage is stupid because the cost of living in New York is very different from Lousiana, a state wide makes more sense, but even so, it varies greatly from city to city within the same sate, so a city wide makes even more sense, if you keep adding granularity you'll reach the individual level, because the cost of living within cities changes fast, and there's a plethora of other factors to consider.
I have worked for really low wages in the past, even the lowest of unskilled worker still provides a value. Senior programmers on NYC are worth at least $60/h, now, how much a really low skilled worker is worth? At the time I was an unskilled worker it was was around $10, and thats how much I got paid despite the minimum wage being $8, anyone could get a job for $10, so thats the value a worker with essentially no skills was able to provide.
The $8 minimum wage didn't make a difference on wages, because unskilled workers were already providing more value than the minimum wage, so policy makers were behind in raising it, which they did.
Raising the minimum wage and matching it to the market price at $10 wouldn't make any difference either, however, raising it to $15 would wreak havoc, you are basically saying that any worker whose job isn't worth at least 15$ should not be working.
A Minimum wage value written on a piece of paper can't magically increase the true value of a worker, wages won't drop to $1 if you set it as $1, and also won't raise to $50 if you set it to $50.
Your argument falls apart when you consider that the people who would be working those jobs overwhelmingly approve of the minimum wage. It's a coordination problem caused by the power imbalance between labor producers and consumers. Without the minimum wage, there would be a race to the bottom, but labor producers wouldn't end up better off. The minimum wage is effectively a national labor union.
Also this question seems a bit ridiculous: "I can decide the time I start and be reasonably confident of having work to undertake"
If you're driving a cab, you work when people need cabs. If you're delivering food, you work during times of the day people are ordering food. This is the nature of these jobs. Does an icecream truck owner get to decide to work during colder or rainy weather because that's what he prefers? Of course not; he has to work at times and places where people are likely to purchase ice cream.
It hardly seems reasonable to blame deliveroo for the fact that people tend to cluster food ordering during one or two periods of the day.
Self-employed gig workers aren't protected against illness or unemployment. No paid time off, no sick days, no pension, no maternity leave. And on top of that the majority earn below minimum wage.
Gig work is understandable for students or people who want extra income but it shouldn't be someones main source of income.
> I like how we carve out acceptable targets for exploitation, and it's always young people.
Working is a two-way agreement, not exploitation. The job market "discriminates against" people with little or no experience. Gaining experience is valuable, that's why young people choose to take jobs with low monetary pay.
This would be true if the worker could fall back on a minimum basic income or some other humane way of surviving without the work. If the worker has only the choice between penury and working for the conditions demanded by the employer, then employment amounts to coercion.
I mean you could argue that literal slavery is a two wagy agreement because the slave always has the option of committing suicide. For most low income workers, employment can't be a market because they need it to survive and the companies have a major structural advantage.
> This would be true if the worker could fall back on a minimum basic income or some other humane way of surviving without the work.
We do, it's their family. Young people are (typically) still living at home, so most of their large expenses are already taken care of or greatly reduced.
There are exceptions, of course, but we can't fashion a society around exceptions.
> but we can't fashion a society around exceptions.
I genuinely don't see why not. And there are many people who are at or near poverty whose families are also at or near poverty. Or their families don't like them because they are gay or married someone of a different race or any number of things. I can sort of see this for young people, but lots of very poor people aren't young.
> The job market "discriminates against" people with little or no experience.
Just because a category X is being shafted in the market, does not mean that decision was made By the market.
I have personally witnessed a lot of discrimination ( Not neccesarily against me) - too young to promote, someone this young should not ne earning so much.
Or treating years of experience as if it was an objective performance metric, like tou can 9nly advance after X years.
What will you do with your $7 an hour toilet paper delivery experience ?
Of course it's exploitation, it's just that when it doesn't happen to you it's fine, and even more fine when you benefit from cheap deliveries and cheap uber rides
Interesting, because as companies continue to find ways to pay less for their labor by moving folks from W-2 to 1099s, gig work will become a larger portion of the only kind of work available for people's main source of income.
If you feel like our economy should not force folks to have gig work be their main source of income, have you ever thought about how to shape society to ensure that people have jobs with stable sources of income?
I have to admit that I lack political knowledge for a good solution.
In my opinion, if your main source of income is from one company, you should be employed and have paid sick days, paid time off, disability, unemployment and all other employee protections.
It is easy. Tax the wealthy more, make sure workers and the state own stock and receive dividends from publicly traded companies, establish a generous social welfare program, and create a job guarantee from the state at the minimum wage.
We already lose tax revenue when companies profits go do. I don't see what the problem is. In this scenario the government would hold a wide portfolio of stock (every publicly traded company) and so should be insulated from individual variations except in the case of a major downturn, which effects government revenue already.
As long as we're shaping society, we might as well go all the way: Shape it so people don't have to perform this work ritual and earn their right to merely exist and survive.
These aren't real contractors, with complex tasks, negotiations for 3-5x salary of a normal employee. Ive done that. No benefits , but paid EXTRAORDINARILY well, like on the range of $300/hr
But "gig work companies" are about bypassing and subverting normal employment by calling it "contract work", and having NONE of the meeting of the minds of a proper contractor.
And it's blatantly obvious why - it lowers cost and transfers liability to people who don't have a clue what those externalized liabilities really are.
It's a study of the extent to which people are being screwed over, not sure why you're acting like the fact that, depressingly, it's not surprising is a gotcha.
That it is happening means we need the government (or courts, or whatever) to take action to fix it, the fact that this hasn't yet happened means that studies like this are extremely useful.
The "gotcha" isn't aimed at the people doing the study or advocating for change, it's aimed at the apologists who were running around with "everyone is winning" rhetoric. There were plenty of them around here. They were very wrong about something that should have been obvious.
This is all going to play out again with AI, but moreso, so it's important to keep score.
They are not wrong. They are lying, and we know they are lying, and they know that we know they are lying, but they have to speak to the pretense of societal good in order to get business and money.
Look at SBF's 'effective altruism' schtick to see this in action. Everyone involved knew it was bullshit, but it had to be said to keep the money flowing in.
The government can only make this work disappear, illegal, and you know it. They cannot fix it.
Fact of the matter is that even with labor conditions like this Uber and Food Delivery and other gig economy marketplaces are delivering services that are too expensive. More expensive than the threshold where average people would say "I'll just (go there/use public transport/get my food/fix it) myself".
A lot of companies like Uber are effectively transferring wealth from investors to poor people ... If the government touches this, whoever does that it will be skinned alive, because governments have failed since the 80s to provide an economy where jobs are plentiful and easy enough.
This whole topic seems to be unnecessary and stupid.
Gig workers should all be sole Proprietors of their own businesses. The only reason they aren't is because governments make it difficult to run your own business.
This would solve basically all of the legal and moral problems.
Gig workers would be responsible for all of their own benefits, but be able to deduct all of their business costs. They would be responsible for if their own business turns a profit or loss and if they want to continue it.
Besides business cost deductions how does this solve the problems?
How would having it be a business make it different than the cost benefit they could do right now? I feel like "just make a business" doesn't actually help that much, especially not morally - I'm unsure what that means in this context, or how being a business solves it.
I think rather it highlights the hypocrisy and double think people have when they see the word employee.
They have completely different expectations for two cab drivers doing the same exact job if one is an employee and one is incorporated.
The employee is morally entitled to a minimum income and all sorts of benefits while the Incorporated one is responsible for taking care of themselves. This is understood and expected and the only difference is a piece of paper filed with the state
Under US law, a 1099 worker(contractor) is essentially its own business. You can deduct mileage and other expenses (including insurance premiums) that would generally fall under 'business costs'.
Under us law 1099 contractors are still employees. However, if you set up a sole proprietorship, you can engage in business to business contracts. In that scenario the counterparty is not responsible for any employee obligations.
It's a practice of basically praying on the vulnerable social groups, and that should make it a problem of the whole society - and even if one doesn't care of ethical issues of such exploitation of fellow human beings, and lacks any empathy for them at all, at least they should care about the burden that its side-effects put on the budget. Our tax money then has to be used to fix problems created by such evil business practices instead of using it on something else, so these companies are really ripping us all off in the process.
The hallmark of contract employees is not a massive increase in hourly pay, it is the ability to choose when you work and what jobs you take. Minimum wage makes sense for traditional employment because it's all or nothing, it doesn't matter how much you don't want to come into work today, either you work or you're fired. With gig economy work, you can say "eh this isn't worth it for me" when the compensation would be low or if you had something better to do, but still get paid when it would be more advantageous for you.
If people aren't being compensated enough to justify the time spent, they can just stop with no penalties. That for many people a menial gig that pays less than minimum wage is better than any alternative they have access to is the real issue. People should have access to rewarding work and hobbies that they'd prefer to gig work, but you don't fix that by making gig work pay more.
From the small interactions i've had with deliveroo/uber, most of the workers there LOVE the flexibility. It's the main reason they do it and they sacrafice some financial rewards for that flexibility.
So I believe workers should get paid the minimum, but im sure that gig work fills a niche that no other work does. They don't want to negotiate, they want simplicity and flexibility or else they could work as temp staffing or short term work such as call center or gigs, that are paid well but often bad work.
Generally people put on an appearance of cheerfulness while working, especially if they are incentivized to make you happy (good review, tips). So I’d take this sort of measurement with a grain of salt.
> Bluntly, we should listen to the people working the jobs.
We should do this in a study, not by asking people at work.
Have you ever worked in retail, customer service, or other emotional labor positions? You are literally not allowed to look or be sad for most of the day, or you will be fired. Looking happy is part of the work.
> They can all do basic math.
Sadly, this isn't true. Financial literacy is super low, and no, people driving for uber do not understand the math behind deferred risk. If they did, none of them would take the job.
Do you know any uber drivers? Anyone in low paid positions at all?
Yes, I worked retail for 3 years and several of my friends have driven for lyft.
And given that some of those lyft driver friends are software engineers, I'd say their basic math skills are pretty solid.
Even in retail, my coworkers could balance their accounts. They may not be calculating out Roth IRA rollovers but it's extremely insulting to assume someone can't do math because they work in an industry you don't care for.
Nor amongst my friend group, some of who still work in retail, have I ever heard of someone being fired for not being weirdly chipper. "Don't be a dick to customers" is about the most anyone of us have been told.
Have you worked in retail? How many lyft drivers do you know outside of your rides?
I worked in retail for years, and have also worked in call centers, gas stations, things like that. I will say the quality of employees varies widely, there's a lot of really smart folks in these jobs (sounds like yourself included).
I think it's easy for smart people to get trapped in these bad jobs due to individual circumstances or mental issues (speaking for myself).
I'm sure there's a big variety of ways people get treated, but in general, no you don't get fired for not being chipper that's an exxaggeration (except at some places I'm sure, maybe Disney or Hooters?) I don't take lyft but I do know one driver, they ended up having car issues, having to quit driving, and it was basically a big waste of money for them.
IMO it is a stronger line of argument to just assume the gig workers have the same amount of financial literacy as the rest of us (I mean have worked in retail jobs, and I’ve worked with engineers, and the retail workers seem to have a pretty good gut feel for financial problems that engineers never bump into!). Whether or not it is technically true, assuming we’re all equally educated circumvents the bad-faith “how dare you assume these people aren’t able to evaluate their own financial positions” attacks.
Minimum wage solves a collective action problem. You don’t have to be financially illiterate to have been fucked over by a collective action problem.
I believe the financial literacy problem is more widespread than retail workers, it actually affects a huge portion of all workers (and non-workers).
Just look at the average credit card debt, etc. The average person has terrible credit because they do not pay their bills, they are not reliable or trustworthy financially, not because they are bad people, but because they are incapable of managing risk appropriately. Of course, there are legit reasons to have bad credit (medical bills etc) but most americans are not that.
If most people you know are financially literate, I think you may be in a bubble. I was too, until I had my first few bad jobs.
> Minimum wage solves a collective action problem. You don’t have to be financially illiterate to have been fucked over by a collective action problem.
Also true and kinda obviates the need for this discussion at all. This crap should not be legal, full stop.
> Just look at the average credit card debt, etc. The average person has terrible credit because they do not pay their bills, they are not reliable or trustworthy financially...because they are incapable of managing risk appropriately
I agree with you that most financial mistakes come from not understanding risk.
I don't think it is necessary for every end consumer to deeply understand risk and at no point in human history have we asked them to. Risk is really, really hard and even very intelligent and capable people whose jobs are to professionally analyze risk fuck it up.
Historically finances have been simple enough that small rules (eg save 10% of your paycheck) were sufficient to help a consumer offset risk. These rules no longer are. Why?
There's a lot of small factors for one. A big one being subscriptions/payment plans/other unescapable recurring costs. Another one is relatively complex financial instruments (payday loans) being available to consumers and marketed in confusing and predatory ways. (This isn't an exhaustive list at all)
> This crap should not be legal, full stop.
We are taking an extremely desired and powerful tool away from the average consumer. A tool they like and use! We have to at least understand the value prop and ideally replace it if we are to ban it.
I have a good friend who I met when she was cashiering at a noodle shop chain. She left it years ago but she took an interest in a conversation I was having about a theater in town. She left the noodle shop many years ago but we still catch up and get a beer occasionally.
She at one point was really into coffee and almost went into B2B coffee sales of green and roasted coffee products. Like had a mentor and hourly wage close.
And she didn't. She ended up going back into the retail restauarant space because she liked how much socializing and small talk there was.
Don't assume, from a stereotype, that you know better than someone else.
One of my most memorable Uber rides was with a younger mother that had a tough child custody schedule that prevented her from working a regular job.
In a perfect world this wouldn't even be a concern, but as she explained it to me, Uber was one of the very few options that let her work when she could.
They probably understand the idea of externalized liabilities. Or, at least, we have no reason to suspect they have any less understand of the idea than us. Probably they have more understanding of it, given that they are living the experience of having liabilities externalized onto them. (Although maybe some of us here work for these gig app platform companies and have a heightened understanding of the phenomenon their company is abusing).
I think it is more likely that these folks just don’t have better employment opportunities. The race to the bottom on quality of life is a big collective action problem, right? We know the solution, minimum wage laws, it is just that we prefer cheap services to making sure everybody gets a humane living standard.
That's a false dichotomy. I have been a contractor for most software engineering jobs I have done for many years and all of them were very complex. None of them were for a particularly high rate like $300/hour.
The rate actually has generally been fairly unrelated to the complexity. Possibly the biggest determining factor in my rate has been how much savings I had (usually close to zero) when I needed to find another contract. That determined how selective I could be and how long I could spend looking. If your option is to take the next contract or miss rent, you take what you can get, often for a discounted rate.
I find this sanctimonious _I know better than you_ attitude shocking and inappropriately condescending.
Just because these people are earning less than minimum wage, what makes you think you know better than them what's good for them, and that they "don't have a clue"? Why is this "blatantly obvious"? Why are they not rational actors but you are?
Given that so many people are making this choice for themselves, it feels like it's possible that there's demand for below-minimum-wage labor (otherwise, why wouldn't they go and get minimum-wage jobs?).
I think you might be mistaking making a choice with having a choice. These people don't have another choice.
Many gig workers do gig work around other work and pressures (eg childcare). The work they do isn't what they would choose all other things being equal but the soaring cost of living, the lack of affordable and convenient childcare means people have to do sums that end in them doing a few hours a day in a shitty extra job.
I think many would rather choose a better paid job compatible with modern life. They just don't exist.
That seems like a problem with the alternatives - no one else is giving them the flexibility or the additional hours they need. Make their day jobs pay better and offer more flexibility so they don't need gig work, don't make the gig work they need harder to get.
When you race to the bottom, there aren't alternatives.
Companies cut their costs by pushing more and more jobs to this cheaper (low rights, no progression, no holiday, no health, no benefits) gig work. They quickly out-competed. Everyone is forced to hire on the same terms to stay competitive. Very quickly it's not that "the alternatives" aren't good enough, they just don't exist any more.
Shitty gig work conditions exist because we permit it. If we didn't, employers would hire part time staff like they used to, instead of forcing everybody to be a zero-hours "contractor".
Can you name a company that used to hire part time staff and has since gone to only zero-hours contractors? I find the idea that non-gig jobs don't exist anymore extremely hard to believe.
Whole industries have switched over. Logistics, taxies, food delivery used to be done by employees and they're gig work now.
In the broader "zero-hours" employment contract sense —which has very significant commonalities with gig working— a great many major employers shed their part-time workforces because they can. Employers are dictating employment terms in such a way that people are working full-time hours and are still unable to make ends meet; have no job security, no expectation of progression, no recourse if they're suddenly let go.
In the UK, the companies doing this are countless and the scope if everything from major multinationals down to local shops and services. Part time work used to come with an expectation of hours. Over a year it built to a right to those hours (or pro-rata redundancy), just like any other employee. But now they're just worms.
That's just blatantly false. Truck drivers, taxi drivers, and pizza delivery guys are all still hourly employees. The gig work in those industries are things that hourly employees never did.
Zero-hours employment contracts and gig work both fall outside of the traditional employment paradigm, but in very different ways. The major aspect of gig work which is being discussed here, ie that the time spent waiting around for gigs brings the average hourly rate below minimum wage, is not present. Zero-hour contract employees are still required to be paid at least minimum wage for all time that they are required to be present, even if there is no work to do. Further, zero-hour contract employees are required to be on call despite not being scheduled and with few restrictions on when they might be called in, putting them totally at the mercy of the employer scheduling them; conversely the gig worker is never on call and has total freedom over what hours they're willing to work. The whole appeal of gig work is that people don't want to be committed to working some standard block of time regularly, so they can maintain their personal flexibility.
All to say that gig-style work has made stable, convenient work harder to get. It ate shift work.
There is work that needs doing. That hasn't changed. What's been changing is companies are working skirting worker rights rules to get the same work without paying as much.
There have been multiple times where I've forgotten to change the dollar amount on a Doordash tip (I try to tip generously) for something purchased locally... usually it ends up being a $25 order with a $3-4 tip. I don't know if drivers get any part of any of the fees, but I know that I've always gotten the thing I ordered. It's crazy, but people still do it.
I doubt that guests in restaurants will start flipping their own burgers, or folks will stop ordering home deliveries, so I don't think the demand is a problem here. Real problem is on the other side, the vast supply of that segment of the workforce. These are easily replacable employees, so employer has unfair "if you don't like it, leave it" leverage over them - plus most of them can't really afford to be picky about jobs as they need that money badly. And employers exploit it.
People absolutely might order fewer burgers or order fewer home deliveries if the price of those things were to rise. In some cases employers also have the option of automating tasks that are currently done by people.
Very important distinction here, and that is self volition. To be clear I'm not saying it's good or bad. I think it's a genuine question. What if there are simply not enough jobs available at the rates that people want to be paid?
> What if there are simply not enough jobs available at the rates that people want to be paid?
Or what if there are, but it turns out there are aspects of employment other than money?
Suppose you can get a job at minimum wage, but then you have to own and maintain a car to get there, and sit in it for three hours a day uncompensated, and have an inflexible schedule that rarely lets you see your kids.
Or you can spend 8 hours a day driving, but all of them are compensated, so you have 8 hours of work time instead of de facto 11 hours, and you set your own schedule. But you get paid 20% less for 28% less of your time. Or consume 10 hours of time for the same amount of money as 11 but are now paid "20% less per hour" because 3 hours of driving time weren't being accounted for as work time.
Are we so sure the people taking this deal are victims who need to be prohibited from doing this?
It's not like this is a new debate. The US introduced a federal minimum wage in 1933 after a long push to end non-living wages in sweatshops. From the Wikipedia article [1]:
"Minimum wage legislation emerged at the end of the nineteenth century from the desire to end sweated labor which had developed in the wake of industrialization. Sweatshops employed large numbers of women and young workers, paying them what were considered nonliving wages that did not allow workers to afford the necessaries of life. Besides substandard wages, sweating was also associated with long work hours and unsanitary and unsafe work conditions."
Some other countries have universally binding collective agreements [2] that have the same outcome of establishing a salary floor.
> What if there are simply not enough jobs available at the rates that people want to be paid?
Decisions are made by others that put people in a position where there is practically no self volition, only struggle.
There is no shortage of resources or capital that requires us to put these people in that position, as evidenced by the, ever growing, vast sums of wealth controlled by a tiny minority.
We could choose to restructure things in such a way that people are paid more fairly, and everyone works less.
Suppose there is some work which has a maximum value to the employer of $9/hour, e.g. because that's how many more sales they make if they have an employee stocking shelves in addition to checking out customers instead of having one employee do both, because then there is less time when a product isn't on the shelf. So they might offer to pay $8/hour, if someone is willing to work for that. If you set the minimum wage at $10/hour, they aren't going to pay that for this, even if they have a billion dollars, because paying $10/hour would cause them to have $1/hour less.
If what you want to do is tax the rich and give it to the poor to make sure everyone has a minimum amount, that's a UBI, not a minimum wage.
I was pointing out that GP's claim of people taking these jobs out of "self-volition" is directly at odds with their supposition that we might just not have enough well paying jobs for everyone. Minimum wage/UBI has no bearing on that.
> Suppose there is some work which has a maximum value to the employer of $9/hour...If you set the minimum wage at $10/hour
Then the employer should raise their prices or the job shouldn't exist. The present situation of forcing people into, or exploiting people who are in a precarious situation is disgusting. It's bad enough when applied domestically, look only to US states stripping back child labour regulations[0], not long after children were found to be working night-sifts cleaning slaughterhouses[1]. The same reasoning is exhibited by western companies who are all too happy to turn a blind eye to foreign child and slave labour if it keeps manufacturing costs low.
> I was pointing out that GP's claim of people taking these jobs out of "self-volition" is directly at odds with their supposition that we might just not have enough well paying jobs for everyone. Minimum wage/UBI has no bearing on that.
But now you're using a different meaning of volition. They're not required to take a job at $6/hour instead of one at $10/hour. They might still choose to take it anyway if the higher paying job has a heinous commute or is third shift or dirty or dangerous etc. That's a choice, and removing it makes things worse for them.
If there is no $10/hour job at all, they still have a "choice" between the $6/hour job and not making rent, but that choice is between two bad options, and now you want to say that it isn't really a choice because a low-paying job is nothing compared to homelessness. But then you say this:
> Then the employer should raise their prices or the job shouldn't exist.
"Companies should raise prices so people can get paid more" is not how you cause people to have more. They just lose the higher nominal wages to higher prices. And in general if customers would pay more, they'd already be charging more.
So how are you squaring "the job shouldn't exist" with the job being their only alternative to something so unreasonable that you regard it as a lack of volition?
> But now you're using a different meaning of volition. They're not required to take a job at $6/hour instead of one at $10/hour. They might still choose to take it anyway if the higher paying job has a heinous commute or is third shift or dirty or dangerous etc. That's a choice, and removing it makes things worse for them.
I've used the same meaning of volition throughout. GP posited that there may exist X well-paying jobs but Y people, where Y > X. In that situation there is no self volition once the well-paying jobs have been filled; even if some people willingly choose not to take them. Once again it's about agency not UBI or minimum wage.
> "Companies should raise prices so people can get paid more" is not how you cause people to have more. They just lose the higher nominal wages to higher prices.
That's pure conjecture, not fact. Productivity and wages decoupled 50 years ago.
> So how are you squaring "the job shouldn't exist" with the job being their only alternative to something so unreasonable that you regard it as a lack of volition?
The answer to a desperate child isn't paying them a pittance to clean a slaughterhouse. That we've decided to do so is a choice, not a necessity, and is an indictment of who we are as a society.
> GP posited that there may exist X well-paying jobs but Y people, where Y > X. In that situation there is no self volition once the well-paying jobs have been filled; even if some people willingly choose not to take them.
By definition, people choosing not to take them is self-volition. They'd rather have the low-paying job because it's easier or closer, and they have a choice. There are also a large number of people for whom not working is a viable option, e.g. if your spouse makes at least twice minimum wage, your household has as much income as some couples who both work. Then a choice between a low-paying job or doing household labor is actually a choice.
But here is what I mean by two definitions. If you have to choose between low pay and homelessness, is that a choice? If it is, all of those jobs are volitional. If it isn't, "the job shouldn't exist" is the opposite of a solution.
> That's pure conjecture, not fact. Productivity and wages decoupled 50 years ago.
Average productivity and wages decoupled, highly asymmetrically. Someone who makes a computer that can do the work of a thousand bookkeepers or stenographers is extremely productive, even if they "only" get paid 10 times more than the bookkeepers did. But the productivity for cashiers and dishwashers is not much changed. Businesses are not going to opt to pay someone more than the value they produce for the business and the value produced by unskilled labor is commonly quite low.
> The answer to a desperate child isn't paying them a pittance to clean a slaughterhouse.
But then:
> Once again it's about agency not UBI or minimum wage
A UBI would provide agency by allowing someone to turn down a low-paying job without being in a state of desperation. The job might then have to pay more or offer some countervailing benefit to get anyone to take it, and the people who choose to or not would then actually be making a choice.
If not that then what are you proposing as a way to achieve agency? Expecting businesses to choose to pay people more than their labor is worth isn't going to do it.
> If not that then what are you proposing as a way to achieve agency? Expecting businesses to choose to pay people more than their labor is worth isn't going to do it.
I'm not dismissing either solution, they're just not relevant to the original point of the discussion. My response to GP was in regards to the lack of agency in a situation where there were fewer "quality" jobs than those who desire them. How agency should be introduced to that scenario is irrelevant to the scenario itself.
> By definition, people choosing not to take them is self-volition. They'd rather have the low-paying job because it's easier or closer, and they have a choice. There are also a large number of people for whom not working is a viable option, e.g. if your spouse makes at least twice minimum wage, your household has as much income as some couples who both work. Then a choice between a low-paying job or doing household labor is actually a choice.
You've latched on to "some people choosing", ignoring that once the desirable jobs are chosen, they are no longer an option. If there are 5 high quality jobs, 5 low quality jobs, 12 people, and 2 people choose a low quality job; then 3 people have no choice of job, and 2 have no job at all.
> If not that then what are you proposing as a way to achieve agency? Expecting businesses to choose to pay people more than their labor is worth isn't going to do it.
Again, it's not the discussion I was looking to have.
> You've latched on to "some people choosing", ignoring that once the desirable jobs are chosen, they are no longer an option. If there are 5 high quality jobs, 5 low quality jobs, 12 people, and 2 people choose a low quality job; then 3 people have no choice of job, and 2 have no job at all.
But none of those numbers were in the original scenario, and you've switched to low quality jobs from low paying jobs.
If there are 6 high paying jobs, 6 low paying jobs and 10 people, not all 10 people can have high paying jobs, but 4 or more of them might choose low paying jobs because of some countervailing advantage over the higher paying jobs.
The problem comes if you try to prohibit people from taking low paying jobs, because then you have 10 people and only 6 available jobs.
And even in your scenario, if you remove the option to take low paying jobs, what it does is cause 7 people to have no job instead of 2.
We've seen this name come up in different ways in different time periods. Recently, it's 'late stage capitalism'. Or it's a failure of neolibetalism as a monetary policy.
And these failures are old enough that even Marx and Engels saw it in the 1800s, with their critique of capitalism.
Exploiters will exploit in a capitalist economy. It'll always be easier to exploit than to make laws to prevent exploitation. Or in this case, yet to make laws to prevent it.
The billionaires didn't get rich on hard work. They got rich on your hard work, and by keeping the surplus on every transaction. And with "gig work", they take their cut from both sides, due to information asymmetry. But you do the work, and you keep the pennies.
And anyone smart enough can put together that scams like Uber count on no commercial insurance coverage, not being paid for wear/tear/gas/time, not getting essentials like workers comp if injured.
Remember, 'gig work' a Shrodingers Job: it's a job until it isn't.
And you also have to remember what money is: it's a crystallization of goods+services+time. What if there's not enough good jobs, due to mass automation? If it's a socialist country that planned for it? It's a good thing. It frees people up to do their interests. There's 12 Earth's of food made per year. Why are there hungry people.
And that answer: neolibetalist capitalism. Having hungry, homeless, poor people is the 'stick' in this system.
Taking slavery out of the question since that is obvious removal of rights of free will..
If someone had the choice between being homeless, of working full time for a small business that in exchange let them sleep in the warehouse and brought them breakfast and dinner each day, but offered zero pay, would that be ok? Because on one end that seems like charity to me, but also others would view it as exploitation.
When I was a child I had the same idea. I imagined myself a rich man, living in a large mansion. I would invite the homeless to live in the mansion in exchange for their labour, providing days off and a stipend.
I grew up.
To exploit someone's desperation for personal gain is an idea that has no place in a civilised society. More so when that society is fully capable of ensuring no-one ends up in that position.
Society can. But the person that employed me part time in highschool wasn't able to. So yes, he had someone living in those conditions in his warehouse (not me). I think it was better for the person than being homeless.
Is that really any different than a young adult moving back in with the parents and helping around the house?
> Society can. But the person that employed me part time in highschool wasn't able to. So yes, he had someone living in those conditions in his warehouse (not me). I think it was better for the person than being homeless.
The existence of a worse alternative does not justify a situation in isolation. I don't doubt that it was a better alternative to homelessness but it was not the only alternative. We would never attempt to justify slavery with the suggestion that it was better than being murdered.
That's not to say that the people involved were moustache twirlingly evil but it also doesn't make the situation moral/desirable.
> Is that really any different than a young adult moving back in with the parents and helping around the house?
Generally, yes. There's a decades long filial relationship, the child's time is free to pursue paid employment, and the parents are unlikely to kick the child out because business is slow or the dishes haven't been washed. A homeless person living and working in a warehouse has been put in a position where they're obliged to comply with the employer's demands. If they're working full time for the employer for free/very little then they also have very little ability to save enough to have the agency to move themselves on, or push back against unreasonable behaviour.
If you've ever had a bad boss, imagine that person deciding whether or not they want to make you homeless at any given moment.
One, young adults do get kicked out of their home on the whim of their parents all the time.
Two, a HUGE percentage of low income earners could be made homeless by losing a job at any time, which they do, combined with maybe an unlucky event or two.
And it's blatantly obvious why - it lowers cost and transfers liability to people who don't have a clue what those externalized liabilities really are.
That’s one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that it’s serving the previously untapped market for below-minimum-wage work. If this gig work did not exist, some of the workers would find regular minimum wage jobs but many would be left unemployed.
Many of the Uber drivers I’ve met are educated immigrants to my country (Canada). They are underemployed because of various barriers put in place to protect the jobs of locals. Usually, the issue is that their credentials aren’t recognized because they were earned in another country.
So the question is: what are the gig work companies supposed to do about this? They didn’t make the laws/regulations preventing these workers from getting better jobs. If they went away, these workers might have no other opportunities.
If anyone is to blame, it should be the citizens who simultaneously support an increase in immigration and at the same time erect regulatory/professional credential roadblocks preventing those skilled immigrants from working in their field of expertise.
Of course, another portion of gig workers are people like my father: semi-retired, not professionally credentialed, and doing gig work part time to make ends meet (his pension is not even close to livable). Taking gig work away from him would put him on the street.
Edit: one more thing I’d like to add. Based on reports from my dad, the number of food delivery drivers in our city is increasing so the availability of orders (and hence productive hours of work) is decreasing. At the same time, restaurants all over the city have posted signs advertising the availability of kitchen jobs. If gig work is so undesirable (because it ostensibly pays less than minimum wage), why are there so many vacancies at restaurants (which do pay minimum wage) but none in gig work?
> So the question is: what are the gig work companies supposed to do about this?
The article isn't asking this question, it's posing answers to another question: "What should society do about gig work companies?" The solutions proposed in this article are:
"Respondents strongly felt the creation of co-determination mechanisms would allow workers, and their representatives, to influence platform provider decisions which could instantly improve their working lives.
"These policies include elected bodies of worker representatives approving all major platform changes that impact jobs and working conditions. Our findings emphasise the potential for trade union growth in this sector, with majorities being willing to join and even organise such bodies."
> If gig work is so undesirable (because it ostensibly pays less than minimum wage), why are there so many vacancies at restaurants (which do pay minimum wage) but none in gig work?
Respondents strongly felt the creation of co-determination mechanisms would allow workers, and their representatives, to influence platform provider decisions which could instantly improve their working lives.
Sure, some of these might be really nice. But I think one of the biggest changes we’d see, if gig workers organized well enough, is some system to block new entrants in order to artificially restrict the supply of gig workers. We already have an example of such a system that predates the internet-driven gig economy: taxi medallions. But of course, we all know how that turned out!
If gig workers are going to organize, why don’t they just take matters into their own hands and develop their own apps where they control the platform and the algorithms and pay schedules? Why does the rest of society (read: the government) need to get involved?
Good question.
I’ll give my father’s answer: because gig work is better than regular jobs for people who value their own independence. If you work at a restaurant then you don’t have a choice about when you work, the manager sets your shifts. You also don’t have any control over the nature of the work. If the manager wants you peeling and dicing onions all day, that’s what you’re doing.
Gig work (such as food delivery or driving passengers around) does not treat you like that. You set your own hours and you can accept/reject offers at your own discretion. I’ve met several Uber drivers who preferred to work late at night. At a restaurant you can generally only work when it’s open, apart from a few “shoulder hours” for open/close duties.
With gig work you can also generally stop working and go home when you want. I mean obviously you need to drop off your passenger/food order first, but after that you’re free to end your shift and go home. Try doing that at a busy restaurant. You’ll get fired instantly if you walk out during peak hours.
> Sure, some of these might be really nice. But I think one of the biggest changes we’d see, if gig workers organized well enough, is some system to block new entrants in order to artificially restrict the supply of gig workers. We already have an example of such a system that predates the internet-driven gig economy: taxi medallions. But of course, we all know how that turned out!
Lets apply the same system to your job then?
Anyone can decide that they're now working your job. You can compete with them for tasks and whoever completes them will be the one to get paid.
Artificially restricting the supply of your job is obviously limiting the economic capabilities of the business. Just think how many more hours could be worked!
> taxi medallions. But of course, we all know how that turned out!
People who could make a living for their family and fund retirement off of taxi driving alone? :P
Sure, there were problems in medallion-heavy cities.
> > Good question.
> I’ll give my father’s answer: because gig work is better than regular jobs for people who value their own independence. If you work at a restaurant then you don’t have a choice about when you work, the manager sets your shifts. You also don’t have any control over the nature of the work. If the manager wants you peeling and dicing onions all day, that’s what you’re doing.
Another possible answer is that at the precariate level people may have multiple jobs. If your main job doesn't give you much control over hours, then at least your second gig job does. How many uber drivers are also dishwashers at restaurants?
> You’ll get fired instantly if you walk out during peak hours.
You don't get paid more for peak hour work, whereas some of the apps do pay more for peak hour work. And if these peak hours overlap, then you may get a better paycheck by doing gig work instead of restaurant work.
How much time is spent going to and from work when you have a normal job, maybe 10%? (actually, more, the average is 59 minutes: https://uk.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/commute-to...). That cuts the gap to almost nothing right there. They cite that logging on and looking for work as factors in the calculation, this seems like a one-sided manipulation to make the numbers look bad to me if you don't include commute time on the other side. The study (shockingly!) seems to have an agenda based on the conclusions it came to:
"The self-employed who are dependent on platforms to make a living are urgently in need of labour protections to shield them against the huge power asymmetries that exist in the sector. This clearly warrants the expansion of the current ‘worker’ status to protect them."
I do not think they need shields. There are plenty of reasons on both sides. We can educate them on the plusses and minuses, but let them make a choice.
More than just side hustles to earn extra cash, respondents spent on average 28 hours a week undertaking gig work, comprising 60% of their total earnings.
This makes me wonder what the other 40 percent of their earnings is from, how much time it takes and how well it pays.
My friend is an Uber driver, he’s an immigrant from Africa and has been running a small accounting business for years. He doesn’t always have a lot of work and it can be seasonal so he uses Uber to fill the gap (allowing him to completely stop doing Uber for a month or two and come back to it).
He also has small kids at home so helps with them during the day and does Uber at nights.
Gig work is very flexible that way, unlike almost any other side job accessible to most people.
I've done gig work under circumstances where a normal job was simply not possible. I often earned well under minimum wage because I was sick and struggling to get anything done.
I was thrilled to have the ability to earn anything and I have long voiced criticisms of this assumption that earning less than minimum wage is inherently some kind of employer abuse that must be aggressively stamped out.
It's not like people are throwing money at me out of pity for my incurable condition and sad sack life story. Denying me the opportunity to choose to work part-time for sometimes less than minimum wage winds up being just a means to cut my income, not improve my life any.
The problem with that thinking is that by allowing it at all you open the door to employers taking advantage of both people like you, and everyone else.
Wouldn't it be better if, for people whose health/disabilities/etc make it so that nobody would hire them for minimum wage but would hire them for x% of minimum wage, that the government has a program to subsidise the cost to the employer so you still get minimum wage without becoming unemployable due to your conditions? Why do you deserve less because of health problems?
I haven't done gig work in recent months. I blog and do freelance writing.
As a freelance writer, I charge by the page and say something like "I typically get it back to you within a week." In reality, I usually get it back a lot quicker than that but saying that gives me latitude for being too sick to work unexpectedly sometimes for a few days.
Charging by the page means it's my problem, not yours, if I can't focus and have to read it three times and it takes me longer than usual. Sometimes, I can do it efficiently and sometimes I can't.
I have zero desire to have any kind of "job" ever again. My life works vastly better as a freelancer who can do the work whenever the hell I manage to get my act together for the day without punching a clock.
This is literally worth millions of dollars in medical care not being required that normally would be for someone like me.
I'm dirt poor. I hate it so fucking much and wish it weren't true.
It's also the version of my reality where unicorns fart rainbows compared to what I'm supposed to be enduring.
Hi Doreen, hope this doesn't come across as creepy as I'm neurodiverse and have a hard time understanding sometimes.
But, I've read your comments over the years, and have a lot of respect for you. I'm also sick, and also struggle with employment sometimes (unemployed currently) and it's a really tough lot. Your consistent positivity is something I've noticed and really appreciate. Your realistic takes are a wonderful balance to the ivory tower bs coming from "academics".
And If they’re earning so little that taxes do not apply, chances are OUR tax money is instead funding things to help them get by so that gig companies can skirt labor laws.
One thing I didn't take away from this is the extent to which gig workers they surveyed would prefer full-time employment but aren't able to find it.
If someone has the opportunity to work full-time but is choosing the flexibility of gig work, then I see this as less of an issue.
On the other hand, if someone is doing gig work because that is what is available to them, and they aren't able to make enough to get by despite their best effort, then something needs to change.
So the median wage is the minimum wage, which sort of makes sense in terms of what would incentivize people to take a gig job over a minimum wage job. It does come with some more flexibility or course which some might be happy to trade off against absolute earnings. Takeaway to me is gig jobs are a viable alternative to minimum wage, but nothing more.
I would hazard to guess many don’t have a choice due to the flexibility compared to a minimum wage job. Are they doing it out of “happiness” if a 9-5 is impossible to fit in their day?
The question I wish the authors of this paper had asked, which seems like a key question to me is: "Why do keep working on this platform if it pays so little? Why not get another job?"
If it's because they cannot find any other employment and this is the only work they can find (sometimes the case for newcomers to the country etc.), then removing gig jobs would appear to result in them having no employment at all.
In many cases (I might even guess "most cases") people do work through these apps because they allow a level of flexibility people cannot typically get from other jobs. If you work at Nandos you can't decide to take the morning off or work a couple extra hours during some downtime, you can't stay home a few days if your child is sick or childcare falls through and pick up working again once the disruption abates or unilaterally decide to switch from morning to evening hours for a few days.
Some people just don't like dealing with coworkers and a boss. In any event, I think the "why" behind peoples' decisions to do these jobs is highly relevant, and I think that the flexibility these gigs provide should be factored in when comparing them to a job at a grocery store or something, as it seems like an apples to oranges comparison.
Its because A) its hard to find a good job in general, B) its very hard to find a good job in a hurry, C) most people don't have much savings when they lose their job, so they need to find another one quickly), D) these jobs are VASTLY easier to get quickly than most jobs, E) these jobs don't allow for much savings or breathing room, so stopping to spend a significant amount of time looking for a different job can be at risk of not being able to pay expenses.
When you are stuck in survival mode, you take what you can get. You're not picky. And they are not bad jobs in some ways.
They are considered to be self-employed. If they're earning more than £1000 a year, then they need to file a self-assessment tax return with HMRC, and if they're earning more than a certain amount, perhaps £12500 a year, they will need to pay income tax on those earnings (plus national insurance).
Do most gig workers actually do these things? I have no idea.
How can we be surprised by this? Isn't this, from the companies' view, exactly what gig work is _for_.
If you're offering a food delivery service, and you thought that end users + restaurants were willing to pay more than minimum wage for delivery services, you'd hire an army of minimum-wage workers and pocket the difference. If it's likely that people are willing to pay less than minimum wage for delivery services, then you've gotta design a way to pay people less than that by inventing something other than normal "employment".
Is gig work intended to be a substitute for employment, or a career?
My impression was these jobs are for folks who need an extra income or are in a temporary rough spot in life.
Does the math allow for gig workers to be paid more AND for the venture to remain profitable to a degree that reasonably satisfies investors AND consumers to pay a minimal additional amount?
It may or may not still be feasible for these companies if they were paying minimum wage, but that's irrelevant to the fact that minimum wage is a requirement. Doesn't matter if the worker is already earning £100k in their main job, and 5 hours of "gig economy" work, those 5 hours are still legally required to hit the minimum wage.
minimum wage legislation does not have an exception for those in a 'temporary rough spot'
there are lots of businesses which would be profitable if they didn't have to worry about laws or regulations, but which are unviable in the real world. for example, selling methamphetamine to middle school kids in tony neighbourhoods.
My experience with ride sharing is that you have the people that you just mentioned, + people doing it professionally, people doing it for fun / get out of the house make a little
Extra money, and people in a short term bind that need to make some extra money
Yes true. I over-simplified. There are people who earn well from these types of gig markets. But it provides the flexibility to also allow those who really can't or won't find ordinary jobs - due to reasons ranging from their skill level, to their scheduling requirements - a way to earn.
An unpopular take. I think you may be onto something though. This is what I see in latam: countries with very strict labor laws end up with a huge portion of the population working informally (40% BR -70% PE).
Given the ongoing UK truck driver shortages, why is uber driver a more attractive option for driving a vehicle?
Then the question is "why is the uber driver not able to command as much as a truck driver?" and "why is the uber driver not switching to being a truck driver?"
The corresponding part is "if you can't work 8h today but only have 2 hours in the morning and 2h in the afternoon, that flexibility comes at a cost of reduced pay."
So this is an example of Uber employing some people who are otherwise unemployable or do not wish to be employed in that sector of the workforce.
Is it reasonable to say that anyone who is currently a gig worker with Uber and wanted to could get a job as a HCV driver could do so by getting the license or taking an apprenticeship program? ( https://www.gov.uk/training-hgv/apprenticeships )
On the other hand, if people would rather work for Uber than a trucking company, is it fair to blame Uber for the labor shortage for truck drivers? Additionally, if people would rather work for Uber than a trucking company, is it unfair for Uber to pay less than the trucking company?
(Note: I categorically against the 'disrupt the industry by ignoring regulations and miscategorize workers' that many gig based companies seek to exploit and while this does cause problems it isn't necessarily the root cause of the problems that exist from inefficiencies in current regulations and employment options)
As an aside on the licensing in this situation https://www.gov.uk/guidance/use-a-driver-cpc-national-vocati... : Drive an HGV or bus professionally while you're training - Apply to drive an HGV, bus or coach professionally for up to 12 months before taking all the qualifying tests if you’re doing certain training courses.
There's no labour shortage -- or rather there is, but it's not the relevant causal factor. There's a lack of housing supply in places with good jobs. People have to dump so much of their hard earned cash into rent that it discourages people from moving there in the first place. Talented people are stuck in shit jobs in the north because the higher wages in the south aren't enough to offset the insane rents.
Autobiographical anecdote: due to combinations of good and bad luck I've had three different jobs in three different cities over the past 18 months. My income went from (rounded) ~30k to ~60k to ~90k, up by more than a factor of three. Yet, the rent I was paying remained about the same fraction of my post-tax income in each case, while the objective standard of housing that rent paid for went down:
Sheffield: £500/month for a 2br flat in a nice neighbourhood
Cardiff: £900/month for a not-as-good 2br flat in an okay neighbourhood
Cambridge: £1300/month for a one bedroom flat in an okay neighbourhood. There are almost no <£1200/mo 2br flats on the market at all.
Now think how hopeless it is for the other 95% of the country who are not as fortunate as me.
A huge chunk of the wage premium for living in a more economically productive city is being slurped up by boomer rentiers because of the inelasticity of the housing supply curve, i.e. the "nimby tax". The price mechanism is just completely broken. Rising prices don't spur anywhere near enough construction. People just learn to make do with less: smaller houses, shittier houses, sharing rooms, or foregoing career opportunities that involve relocation. A whole generation has grown up not knowing what a functioning housing market looks like ... this is all just seen as normal.
(PS: once you factor this in, the North is even more economically weak than it appears on paper, because the high house prices in the South partially counteract the brain drain. Few graduates stay there by choice. I have no trouble believing it's de facto poorer than Poland now. Still waiting for the "levelling up" to happen.)
Though there's also a labor shortage, something like 300k over the whole national economy.
That said:
> Cambridge: £1300/month for a one bedroom flat in an okay neighbourhood. There are almost no <£1200/mo 2br flats on the market at all.
Try Cottenham and other similar-distance villages. Writing as a landlord of a one-bed flat in that village… well, when I saw the "cost of living crisis" headlines I told the agency not to increase the rent, but what they were suggesting as the new high was £800/mo.
I used to live in that flat, and the cycle commute to the science park was fine.
Now I'm living a long cycle ride or moderate train ride from the Polish border, and I can say from having lived in Sheffield (Heeley) and having briefly visited Słubice as part of a day trip, that I share your belief about the relative economic situations of the two.
A labor shortage can coincide with pools of unemployable workers, due to a mismatch between the skills and qualifications required for open positions and those possessed by a subset of workers.
No - the 'gig economy' provides a way to pay people substantially lower than they would have to otherwise, often lower than minimum wage, provide no benefits or long term viability, shift social spending to government, and to create an underclass of voiceless powerless serfs.
The naivte here in these comments is deeply disturbing.
Social spending should be the responsibility of government. Minimum wage, like price controls, is another form of stealth welfare, with the responsibility imposed on unaccountable third parties. It would make more sense for governments to redistribute wealth directly. Minimum wage is effectively a tax on low value labor, which is obviously inefficient.
Minimum wage is a price control, and the result is the same as all price controls: it affects the demand. That is, it doesn't make employers spend more, it makes them hire less. Companies deal with rising minimum wage laws by hiring fewer more experienced people, automating, or going out of business.
This is basically a 'partial truth' that is ultimately misleading.
Min wage. changes the supply, not demand. It may or may not yield less employment depending on elasticity.
A business is a balance of power between investors, execs, labour, customers and suppliers. More money to labour means less for the others at least nominally.
If businesses are flush with profits, then they'll eat the higher labour input and that's it - and the 'cost' will be to investors.
Otherwise, prices may rise - this may or may not cause a material reduction in sales, it depends.
Or reduced payments to suppliers.
Corporate entities are often very inefficient and will not get off of their buts to seek out better efficiencies unless they have to.
There is a F100 retailer that I know of that is flush with profits, they pay crap wages, and their distribution is a mess, people handing of XLS files all around. They don't care. If they had a 'union' they might have to seek efficiencies there (which may imply cuts to labour somewhere, or less money to vendors).
Most importantly, it's an issue of power. 'Skills and Abiblity' for example, give people power in an equation, some have very little power, which is why there are market interventions for wages (and safety by the way).
You can see this more acutely in healthcare, where there are stronger regs, because the power asymmetry is bigger aka the supplier has the power of 'life or death' over the customer.
If you raise the price of something–anything–it lowers demand. That's why minimum wage laws create unemployment.
> It may or may not yield less employment depending on elasticity.
If you're earning your employer $10/h and the minimum wage rises to $11, you will not have a job. Either right away if the employer realizes it, or eventually when they go out of business if they don't.
Adding elasticity to the equation unnecessarily complicates this. Some things have elastic demand, others have inelastic demand. Why focus only on the relevant case for the point you're making? The overall effect of a price increase is decreased demand.
> If businesses are flush with profits, then they'll eat the higher labour input and that's it
Profits have nothing to do with it. If a business has employees at some wage and the minimum wage rises above that wage, they will, at least eventually, replace the low-wage employees with new ones (or with automation) that add at least as much value as they are paid (or cost). Profits don't magically make businesses waste money on inexperienced employees where they could otherwise be more efficient with more experienced employees at the same price or with automation.
> Otherwise, prices may rise
Not without an associated drop in demand.
> You can see this more acutely in healthcare, where there are stronger regs, because the power asymmetry is bigger aka the supplier has the power of 'life or death' over the customer.
Assuming you are talking about the US, there is no difference there. The supplier has power because they are able to limit the supply, e.g. the AMA limiting (with govt help) the number of doctors who graduate every year. https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2022/03/15/ama-scope...
======== "If you raise the price of something–anything–it lowers demand"
I hate to break it to you, but this is completely wrong, I was being polite before, I'm being more direct now.
I know what you are trying to say, but you're using the wrong language, which is maybe an indication of the lack of understanding of the the underlying micro econ in this statement.
Changing the price of a good does not 'decrease demand'. It changes the supply curve - and given an identical 'demand curve' (aka demand does not change), there may end up being less consumption of that good.
But it also depends entirely on other factors, which I explained.
======== "If you're earning your employer $10/h and the minimum wage rises to $11, you will not have a job. Either right away if the employer realizes it, or eventually when they go out of business if they don't."
No - again, this is even worse than wrong, I don't know what to say at this point.
To put it in simple terms, wage changes happen all of the time, and even minimum wage is increased without necessarily affecting jobs.
In short, if minimum wage at Subway sandwiches go up from $14 to $15 - more than likely we'll see prices go up a bit, profits go down a bit, and probably not a change of employment.
(And again, the price of wages does not affect demand, it affects supply)
========= "Profits have nothing to do with it. "
"If a business has employees at some wage and the minimum wage rises above that wage, they will, at least eventually, replace the low-wage employees with new ones"
Ok, now either you're trolling, or you really are having a hard time understanding the basics of finance, economics or business here.
Yes, if an input cost is raised, then a business will adjust. You are correct to suggest they will likely 'do something'.
But what are their options: 1) 'Replacement' - no, they can't replace with cheaper workers - because of minimum wage 2) 'Automation' - ok, but what 'automation'? And at what cost? Do you think there are magic robots waiting to replace workers at Subway? Now, there definitely are a lot of new technologies, but, Subway is looking at that new tech irrespective of what 'minimum wage' is.
And profits have everything to do with it. A wage increase means the money has to come from somewhere: higher prices, lower output to suppliers, or profits. Subway sandwiches, faced with this dilemma - has to make a choice. It may be more rational to simply have less profits.
Now, as you hint, there may be no room for manoeuvre - maybe there is 'no way out' and Subway sandwiches is going to go bankrupt. That could happen, but in most cases, not.
========= "Otherwise, prices may rise. Not without an associated drop in demand."
No - again - a change in the price of an item does not change demand - it may reduce the amount of units sold. And in the case of Subway, yes, you're right, probably they will sell a few less sandwiches. But how many fewer is the key question, and how does it impact their business. It depends.
========= "Assuming you are talking about the US, "
I'm talking about everywhere.
Everywhere in the world, healthcare is treated differently from most other business sectors. Everything - drugs, materials, pricing, publications, communications (what you can say in an ad), what you can advertise, how you are allowed to bill - even in some cases that you must provide service to some people even if they cannot pay (!) - this is due to the asymetry in the system where providers have the power of life and death over customers.
In many countries, including the US, Hospitals cannot turn away patients and must treat in some cases, no matter what. Think about it: imagine if the US Gov told Ford and GM that they have to 'give a car' to people if they camp outside the dealership.
FYI here is 'supply and demand' [1] to help you with your understanding of what happens when prices change (demand does not change, possibly the amount of goods purchased does)
> Changing the price of a good does not 'decrease demand'. It changes the supply curve - and given an identical 'demand curve' (aka demand does not change), there may end up being less consumption of that good.
Demand means the amount of a product or service that people want. Increasing the price of something does reduce the demand for it (and increases the supply).
> this is even worse than wrong, I don't know what to say at this point.
This is puzzling and I think you misread what I wrote. An employee bringing in less in revenue than they are paid is an unsustainable situation.
> no, they can't replace with cheaper workers - because of minimum wage
They can replace the workers with fewer more experienced ones who will be able to command the higher wage.
> A wage increase means the money has to come from somewhere
It does come from somewhere: fewer hired workers. If you raise the price of oranges, you will sell fewer. Setting a price floor on labor is no different.
> It depends.
No, it doesn't. Employers try to pay employees as little as they can and employees try to earn as much as they can. When an employer feels they're not getting enough for their money, they replace them. When an employee feels that they aren't compensated enough, they find another job. "Labor" is too generic to make claims about elasticity of demand–some types of labor may be elastic, others inelastic, but minimum wage laws do not discriminate. In addition, there is always a ceiling where supply and demand become irrelevant: the revenue added by hiring a worker must be higher than their wage. If a new price floor is higher than what an employee is able to bring in in revenue, that employee will not remain employed.
> I know what you are trying to say
[...]
> FYI here is 'supply and demand' [1]
It seems you have mostly grasped the concept of supply and demand, but are applying it very crudely without context.
First - your definition of 'demand' is 'completely wrong' and totally at odds with the entire field of economics - even the schools that traditionally disagree with one another.
'Demand' is a function of 'how much people are willing to pay for stuff, and at what price'.
The 'supply' of something is how much suppliers will sell, at what prices.
A change in the supply curve (the cost of something) does not change demand.
It does change much of the item will be sold for, aka the 'market clearing price' - which I think you are confusing with 'demand'.
Please have a closer look the 'Supply and Demand' Wiki entry I referenced.
As for the rest of your thesis:
You're trying to rigidly apply concepts of Supply and Demand in 1) theoretical contexts, which do not exist in reality and 2) you are ignoring the fact that Supply and Demand for goods (like labour) are balanced with other forces, which always alters the equation.
For example, in the case of higher minimum wage:
"They can replace the workers with fewer more experienced ones who will be able to command the higher wage."
It is a 'rigid assumption' that corporations would simply try keep their labour costs consistent.
While it's possible they could do this, 1) there are any number of other things the could do, and2) in reality, they probably won't do that at all, because this idea that an increase in labour cost will materially result in better workers is false.
'Paying 5% more will get workers who work 5% better so we can then reduce employment by 5%' is a fallacious equivocation. There's no real situation in which that equation holds, even theoretically that does not generally hold true.
In reality, any company that 'hires fewer people' (even with a bit of a wage increase) probably will have less output, therefore less revenues - which changes a lot of things.
A company could increase it's prices, while theoretically that might reduce unit sales, it may or may not yield a better situation depending on what the curve looks like.
'Profit' matters, because that's what sets the internal 'demand curve' for labour. In a highly profitable company, the most efficient solution to a wage hike may simply to do nothing, and just pay them more out of profits. That could very well be the 'rational self interest' response which maximizes profits after that wage adjustment.
But all of that is pedantic because nothing in the real world works that way, there are always other variables.
Subway is not selling 'widgets' that buyers have a perfect understanding of, and none of these markets operate efficiently.
They could reduce the size of their meat patties - and customers may be none the wiser and therefore consume just as much (which would result in suppliers getting paid less).
They could raise prices in conjunction with a smart marketing campaign that encouraged people to buy in the same quantities even at higher prices (result is customers paying more).
They could somehow have better morale and more enthused workers who just had better output.
They could do financing restructure and get better terms from the bank (again, supplier paying the price).
They could 'dock the overzealous executive pay programs' for performance failures (executives pay the price).
Finally there are big unknowns/risks and issues with time (aka upgrading tooling to increase efficiency maybe has a long time horizon). I hinted at that with marketing, but the same applies to product, process, market conditions and every other aspect of the business.
I don't care what you think demand means, you already said you know what I mean and you keep being obtuse about it. I'm not moving demand and supply curves, I'm saying if the price of oranges goes up, some people are gonna substitute them with apples. Yes, some people are gonna keep buying oranges anyway because they value them at more than what the price increase is at. But overall fewer people will buy oranges.
You keep giving specific examples of where employers might keep employees even if they have to pay them more, maybe to convince yourself that this is a complicated issue. I didn't say all minimum wage employees lose their job when the minimum wage rises. But there are fewer jobs. This isn't complex, there isn't a special nuance that requires a PhD in economics and an MBA to understand. Some employees are barely worth it at the current price to some employers and not worth it at a higher price. Minimum wage laws don't magically make employers value employees more.
The effects of minimum wage laws are visible. Increased unemployment, primarily for teenagers and young adults, automation, and outsourcing are commonplace everywhere with minimum wage laws.
That sounds like a conspiracy theory - which is often assumed to be wisdom as people believe it exhibits an ability to identify and see-through propaganda from the dominant powers - instead of an empirically grounded conclusion.
If these people could find jobs in the regulated job market, then they would already have such jobs. The fact that they resort to gigs is itself evidence that the regulated job market cannot offer them positions.
This is suppressing everyone's wages. Failure to address this is a government policy failure. How about we take all the existing laws designed to stop this and enforce them?
Can we please delete this post? The “study” is absolute garbage. It’s an internet survey with no verification. Reading through the “study” was a complete waste of time.
we should all take note of this, and where we can give a meaningful tip to the workers. Every time I use a service like this I tip on average twice the delivery cost ~£5. Very few of these services are essential, there here to make our lives easier, I tip them for that.
I thought those tips don't generally make it to the workers anyway. All you are doing is subsidizing the same corporation that is taking advantage of their workers.
Very likely before. Generally, in the US, I have seen averages for driving a car around .50-.60 cents a mile. This includes cost of gas, the cost of maintenance, insurance, and the cost of depreciation.
I don't think it's a safe assumption that gig workers are typically choosing gig work over full-time contracted employment, but rather choosing gig work over unemployment/benefits.
Agreed, there should be an exemption for part-time work. Why is there a gulf between "unpaid" and "minimum wage" - what if someone wants to just ride the bike for fun and make a couple of pounds as a bonus?
What if someone is obsessed with heavy machinery, wants to try operate them for fun and maybe make a couple of pounds as a bonus?
Minimum wage laws are there to prevent exactly this scenario. It is deemed better to let inefficient enterprises that cannot pay even minimum wage to implode and support unlucky people via government programs rather inefficient enterprises.
Some companies pay minimum wage because they cannot pay more. Some companies pay minimum wage because they can not pay more. Once you allow the latter to pay less - they will, in a heartbeat. And policymakers do not want that.
We don't have a general minimum wage in Norway, because we don't need them. We have strong unions that have given us good tariffs for various industries, that acts as a minimum pay for that sector.
But there are some sectors (building, cleaning etc.) that do have a government set minimum pay, because they often would exploit foreign workers.
Actually, our foodora bicyclists a while back formed a union, striked, and got a tariff deal. So got rid of some of the problems around their gig-work.
There’ll be a bunch of people here saying that capitalism is vicious and people should earn more. But actually what will happen is that they will get automated and then have no job. When automation is the alternative, collective bargaining is not a great option.
> But actually what will happen is that they will get automated and then have no job.
I find this to be a lazy argument because the conclusion is that you should never try to improve your situation ever. Also the easy counter to this is to establish a welfare state by taxing profits across the board (not that this could successfully be done in the US).
The counter to that argument is that capital will flee overseas. The counter to that argument is to do what China did and remind the tech oligarchs who is really in charge. The counter to that argument is that it's bad to do that because property rights are sacred.
At the end of the day though, we should really want for all citizens to have as high of a living standard as possible. I think their humanity is a better argument than any alternatives that economists can come up with.
>Gig workers, especially food delivery, do a very low productivity job that consumers don't want to pay a lot for
If you compare the prices on doordash or similar apps to the prices inside the restaurant, you'll find that what you said just isn't true. It seems some people are comfortable paying more for the delivery than the food itself.
"Some" people are comfortable paying 1million for a car...
But overall, the market is that people are not willing to pay a lot for delivery, or perhaps if they order very rarely. Here in the UK I think you'd hard pressed to find delivery beyond £4 on, say, Delivery and average is lower than that.
Since delivery is factually low productivity wages cannot be anything but very low and this is compounded by the use of a middleman (the platform).
How much does the delivery person get, and how much is rent seeking by the platform?
I think reasonable thing to always consider is how many deliveries does average person make in hour and then price of each of them. And after that remove taxes and expenses. Now could this be lived on or not is sensible question.
Though, I have to imagine, if there wasn't rent-seeking from the platform, and the driver got all of the fees charged to the user, the pay might not be as bad.
It sounds more like a"job that nobody wants to do" and a "service nobody wants to pay for" that Uber et. all are exploiting labour laws to profit from by providing it in an unsustainable way that governments are afraid to regulate because of the money being made.
This is classic late stage capitalism more than it is some "balancing act" imo.
Automation is great. I do it all the time. Sure I could spend my life manually configuring switch ports, copying and pasting information into 50 pointless repositories, but that would be tedious, so I automate it.
Same in a shop. It's far better for a machine to stack a shelf than for a person to do it, it leaves the person free to do something more useful with their life.
> it leaves the person free to do something more useful with their life.
And in this hypothetical, you'd be in favor of paying that person now, right? Surely the machine doesn't need the money in exchange for the value of its labor.
Automation isn't the same in each sector, but even if it was, it's unlikely to be linear going forward.
Likewise, fertility rates may be going down, but we also have people working on all kinds of things in that area, including but not limited to artificial wombs.
Never tax automation. The failure to distribute resources humanely or fairly is a failure of sympathy, conscience, and justice. Automation should make us all richer. Not having to work customer service is a blessing.
Tax everybody at the rate that allows us to provide for those who are put out of work by automation, and let those who automate reap the rewards of that.
It's not technology's fault that we require people to do bullshit jobs in return for bullshit pay. It's that our secular religion of protestant capitalism is severely flawed. One day, all production will be automated, and 99% of the population will still be digging holes and filling them all day in return for their rations.
We sort of agree? I suggest taxing automation heavily and distributing the resulting gains broadly because the marginal costs are so low, versus human labor, which should be scarce and highly valued.
You have to tax differently because different productivity mechanisms have different societal value (not economic, importantly). There is a short story or proposal I recall consuming a long time ago about different types of money, one for things with no or low marginal cost, and one for things produced by humans. The former money would be printed and distributed somewhat freely, the latter not. Similar idea. If someone recalls a link to this idea, please comment!
A non-automated McDonalds extracts money from a certain population(the target market of the McDonald's) and funnels it to the owner, but the owner has to employ people(typically from the same area/market) to give some of that money back to.
Without those jobs, money is being extracted from the target market without any being given back.
Minimum wage earners who are working 40 hours a week find out that they could work half as many hours and still earn that much. They also get flexible hours and the freedom to decide what gig to do. Card-carrying Socialists are teaching them how exploited they are, by The System, encouraging unionization.
If we are going to let this persist we should really just get rid of the minimum wage all together. Having a minimum wage for some jobs but not for others is just silly at this point.
Minimum wage is necessary where labor is at a severe disadvantage. The number of employers in a ___location is often pretty limited, and if an unskilled worker doesn't take the deal they're offered, and if they can't find a better deal in a timely manner they face poverty. A minimum wage means these small number of employers can't dragoon workers into the lowest possible wage above starvation. While it does mean some people will get payed nothing instead of something, it's often easier to deal with a small number of unemployed people who can easily be supported by a large population where everyone else is getting payed decently.
But there are plenty of other circumstances where employment isn't a race to the bottom. Most gig workers are in a position where they could easily do something else if the compensation was inadequate, including getting a minimum wage non-gig job, and most people in the society are not relying on gig jobs as their sole source of income. Further there is no social welfare where society at large supports people who can't get gig jobs. Under such circumstances, what is the argument for the person who would be rendered unemployed by a minimum wage to want a minimum wage?
When we can also get rid of 'minimum food' and 'minimum housing' and so on then we can get rid of minimum wage.
Actually there is a way to satisfy the 'everything is a market' camp at the same time as treating people as, well, people, and not just some resource that should disapear if it's not in demand.
Universal Equity. Not just Universal Basic Income, dispensed at the whim of government, but actual equity - everyone owns a share in the economy, whether or not they are employed by it.
The stock market is not 'the economy', just as a bookmaker is not a racecourse.
Universal equity shares would be more broadly based, and also would not be transferable, else you'd just get the same old concentration of wealth.
Economies sometimes shrink, eg GDP went down during covid, but in general they grow. But the 'capital value' is not important anyway, the dividend is. Even if an economy is shrinking, it is still producing.
People have the option to buy a share of the economy assuming they have enough spare cash lying around to do so. People in most places are not currently entitled to a share of the economy. Many places, however, have set up sovereign wealth funds which do allow the population at large to benefit from the economy.
While some years are slower than others and there's the occasional recession where groth does go negative, long term economic growth is very reliable. In the US, GDP has increased 52 out of the past 60 years, with GDP per capita increasing 2200% in that time period. If you invested in the S&P500 in 1960, you'd have made an inflation adjusted return of over 4000%. Wealth is constantly being created, infrastructure is built faster than it's destroyed, there are scientific and technological innovations, and people become more educated and better skilled, and quality of life generally improves.
It's really difficult for an economy to legitimately go down. That takes like North Korea levels of mismanagement. If your country collapses, the sovereign wealth fund is likely the least of your worries.
“A major factor contributing to low pay rates is that this work involves spending significant amounts of time waiting or looking for work while logged on to a platform.”
Well sure, if you include time not working in the denominator, the pay rate is going to be low!
Seems like the title should read that gig workers would make more nominal dollars if they spent their time waiting for gig work working a minimum wage job…
If they were working in retail, they'd be getting paid to stand around waiting for customers to arrive. Most employees are paid for downtime resulting from slack in demand for their services.
They'ed be paid if they were on the premises and doing things their employer permitted. Generally they'ed be required to clock out if they wanted to say take a smoke break, or run some personal errands, or take a nap. Hell they won't even generally get paid for the time they spend commuting to work and similar activities that are in practice necessary for the job but during which they are not at the employer's command.
There are jobs where you need warm bodies and you are paying for availability. If you hire a security guard, you're hoping you never need them to do their job, but you're paying them to be there in case they are needed. If a gig employer demanded your time regardless of whether or not you were doing a gig, of course they should be paying for your time. But a big part of gig work is that when you're not in the middle of a gig, you have no obligations - you can sit around waiting for the next job, or you can do something else.
You mean if they took a job that paid by the hour?! Yeah they would be paid for their time, or they’d be put to work doing some other menial task.
But they didn’t sign up for an hourly wage - so either a) they value the flexibility to use their time in between assignments as they choose. Or b) they misjudged their economic earning ability in the gig economy
...and how do you imagine they do that (spend their time waiting for gig work by working minimum wage)?
Work at McDonalds, and then walk out to go do an uber run?
It's often claimed that the flexibility of gig work benefits workers to 'top up' their wages...but the reality is that companies push this work, and it just ends up with workers earning less than minimum wage, because rather than companies paying you for the 'between time', you now end up earning nothing. Much like other commenters say, should you get paid for the Jira ticket, or just the coding work? Gig work suggests just the actual coding.
Doing whatever they want that’s the point - you can either A) commit to a fixed wage rate per hour regardless of how much actual work you do (working at McDonald’s when it’s slow or busy) or B) effectively commit to knit rate pricing with variable volume (if volumes are low you make less then if you had worked at McDonald’s, if volumes are high you probability make more) and receive the added to benefit of choosing when you are working, and what to do in your down time.
> Usually, that's a full-time job, i.e not compensated hourly.
This is the subject being discussed. Appealing to current labor conventions doesn't make any sense when talking about the problems with current labor conventions. You might as well say that tipped employees shouldn't be paid minimum wage because the rules for tipped employment allow you to pay them less than minimum wage.
It’s only working to the extent you’ve contracted with your employer that you are trading your time and willingness to work for compensation e.g. salary or hourly wage.
There are plenty of jobs that have different labor arrangements: commission only (real estate agents), piecework (home cleaners), unit rate rate (truckers), to name a few… is a real estate agent who’s sitting in their backyard working because technically they’re available to go show a house if you call?
> Seems like the title should read that gig workers would make more nominal dollars if they spent their time waiting for gig work working a minimum wage job…
So... halfway through making a burger they drop what they're doing to go pick up their next Uber passenger?
Waiting for the next job is dead time if you have no idea how long you'll have to wait and limited or no choice about when it will start. Edit to clarify: the point is that in this case you're on the clock whether you are nominally 'working' or not - it's still work time.
Yes. Maybe not at your full rate, any maybe implicitly as a part of your work contract (you are paid XX for YY hours and ZZ hours on call) but 100 times yes.
Anything which an employer asks you to do is work. All work should be compensated for. This include travel required for work, training courses, time spent waiting for work where you are not completely free to engage in what you'd prefer to do.
- A study led by the University of Bristol reveals that 52% of gig workers in the UK earn below the minimum wage.
- The average hourly earnings of gig workers were £8.97, approximately 15% lower than the current UK minimum wage.
- Work-related insecurity and anxiety were experienced by 76% of gig workers surveyed.
- Many gig workers (28%) felt their health and safety were at risk, and 25% experienced pain on the job.
- Gig workers expressed the need for basic rights such as minimum wage rates, holiday and sick pay, and protection against unfair dismissal, as well as the formation of unions and platform councils to represent their interests and influence working conditions.