Is your answer going to be self-driving cars? What about alternatives that don't fundamentally replace the labor?
In my opinion, it is impossible to achieve venture capital goals and pay service labor commensurate to the value it delivers.
But this is exactly the point.
* Assume that hamburger ingredients cost $2. * Assume that hamburgers sell for $5 each.
==> Net added value per hamburger is $3.
* Assume that a worker can make 1 hamburger per hour manually. * Assume that the same worker can make 10 hamburgers per hour after the business owner has invested in a $300 hamburger machine. * Assume that the same worker can make 100 hamburgers per hour after the business owner has invested in a $1000 hamburger machine.
==> Is the "full value of the worker's labor" $3 / hour, $30 / hour, or $300 / hour?
The worker's value add is not solely dependent on the worker and the products being created, but also on the capital invested by the business owner (and other factors). Just because the worker is not paid the entire economic value added being produced by the business does not mean s/he is being exploited.
It seems like it should be possible to do this. I pay for raw, undirected labor. It's like raw iron. When I use my skills for planning (speaking as the management for the company), I can pay full price for labor, but get synergistic effect not possible without thought? To keep with the iron reference, in the end I produce steel or even better a car. Seems like the labor to extract the iron met a multiplier of my metallurgic enhancements.
Suppose in your raw iron example, instead of making steel or a car, you make an inferior product because either you or the people who work for you are incompetent. Suppose you make the 1960 Chevrolet Corvair, a car so horrible that it inspires the book "Unsafe at Any Speed" by Ralph Nader.
Even though nothing about the product or the labor used to produce it changes, your product loses value immediately because people don't want to buy a dangerous car. Your hypothetical multiplier turns negative overnight, even though your car is just as unsafe before the book as it was afterward. If the labor and your intelligence were the source of the labor, the value of the car should not change just because Ralph Nader says it's dangerous.
The people involved in customizing your car configuration prior to it being delivered to the dealership are not, to my knowledge, exploited. Most laundromats in my area do bag service, those workers don't seem to be exploited. I feel sure that the list goes on.
There are some common threads amongst companies that are exploiting their workers:
1. They are b2c companies. 2. Most seem to be venture backed. 3. The worker they employ are mostly unskilled. 4. The law doesn't seem view the current treatment of these employees as illegal in any way.
#1 seems most significant to me, the price that a critical mass of consumers are willing to pay for the value that unskilled workers can provide seems to be too low to build a large business on the back of.
Sure, but Instacart is demolishing a very worker-popular tipping feature. That suggests that actually, there is a critical mass of consumers willing to pay more.
The question is, why does it matter to Instacart so much that some consumers pay less than what they're willing to pay?
> Sure, but Instacart is demolishing a very worker-popular tipping feature. That suggests that actually, there is a critical mass of consumers willing to pay more.
Nothing about this article says that to me. Nothing.
At least one worker has given this information to someone who tweeted the information whose tweet was picked up by recode. We don't know if tipping is "very worker-popular" we know that some workers asked the company to change it back and they half capitulated.
I'm personally a fan of charging higher fees and paying all workers the same living wage. That's effectively what a static service charge does.
> The question is, why does it matter to Instacart so much that some consumers pay less than what they're willing to pay?
We also don't know that. Do you know what the average tip was on instacart before this change? So you know that a 10% static service fee is lower than the average tip before now? Do you know if brown workers were tipped less than white workers? Men more than women, the inverse?
We don't have the information required in order to make the judgements that you've decided to make.
For me, if I wouldn't be comfortable asking a neighbor who was less well off than me if they'd mind dropping off my laundry for $10 a month, I'm not going to do it via a shiny website.
But then, you'd be surprised at how many highly-compensated programmers never bother to exercise their options. The same ones who then go on Hacker News and complain about bad treatment of workers, and how if only they owned the companies.
Careful with them broad strokes Tex.
This reads like an oddly specific claim -- do you have examples?