Comment by gorpomon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gorpomon | Hacker News Reader

It's easy to get cynical about the gig economy. But I try and remember that the original spirit of it has been largely successful. The promise of the app economy was that you could take an idea like "I wish I could drive people around for extra money" and make it real, and now it's only real, but for people like my driving-averse mom it's revolutionary.

But distortions to the dream have come from all sides. Customers demand the low cost, high quality service that independent contracts inherently don't provide. Customers also fail to recognize that your driver is an independent contractor, but they treat them like any service industry employee. Rideshare companies actively decide to offload employment costs to drivers while treating them just like employees. Drivers too violate the spirit of this idea, many immediately turn it into a full-time gig without organizing larger efforts to improve it. The spirit is that these gigs augment income, not become a sole source of it.

But almost across the board, these are messaging problems, and we as a society are really good at fixing messaging, despite how it feels at time. We are living in a time of massive message correction, and millions of previously marginalized people benefit.

Is the gig economy ideal? No. Eminently fixable? Yes.

That's completely revisionist history. No one was going around thinking, "I wish I could drive people around for extra money." No one. You literally just made that up. If you wanted to drive people around for money you became a taxi driver or got a passenger carrier permit and became a private limo driver. Back in 2008 no one was thinking about how great it would be to drive random strangers around for minimum wage while assuming massive amounts of personal liability and destroying their car in the process.

Uber started as a way to fill the downtime that professional drivers had between clients and jobs. They said, "Hey, there is a workforce with 50% of it s hours idle. I bet we can turn the into cash." It was a brilliant idea. Airbnb started with a similar proposition. It was a derivative of couch surfing—find some excess supply and monetize it. People are doing this for free, I bet we can do it better and make a few bucks. And then in morphed into the abomination we have today.

It wasn't until Lyft and the competitive market saw what was happening and people thought, "What if we just ignore safety regulations and licensing by declaring that we are in a new industry? There's money to be made there." That's what the gig economy ended up being. It wasn't intentional. It was a way to avoid COSTS by ignoring safety, training, benefits, licensing, insurance, zoning and minimum wage laws. And that's where 90% of the value comes from. If these companies had to play by the same rules as everyone else they wouldn't exist because there wouldn't be enough money to be made.

> Uber started as a way to fill the downtime that professional drivers had between clients and jobs. They said, "Hey, there is a workforce with 50% of it's hours idle. I bet we can turn the into cash."

Yeah, black cars with chauffeur licenses only. I remember thinking "a cab to the airport would be cheaper, but I'll pay a bit more to pamper myself -- I've never been in a black car!" just before I ordered my first ever Uber in 2012.

UberX, with "normal people" picking you up in their personal cars, wasn't until April 2013.

UberX actually didn't start with normal unlicensed, uninsured drivers. UberX started as a "green" initiative. When UberX first started drivers still had to have a passenger carrier permit (TCP sticker) and commercial driving insurance. They just also had to have a Prius instead of a black car, and the cost was a little bit less. I think it was $10 or $12 minimum instead of $15. It wasn't until Lyft started by allowing any random person to drive at a much lower cost that Uber pivoted and turned UberX into what it is today.

It never even occurred to Uber that it would be possible to let random, uninsured people drivers others around for peanuts, or that people would be so desperate for cash that they'd even be willing to do that. It was purely a function of the financial collapse that made it possible.

No one was going around thinking, "I wish I could drive people around for extra money."

I'm pretty sure more than zero people have wanted part-time work with more flexible schedules than were commonly available. (See patio11: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/993186705850052610)

Your example is a tweet from a wealthy software developer in 2018?

When unlicensed, unisnured people started driving for Uber and Lyft it wasn't because they wanted part-time work with "flexibility". It was because it was right after 2009, the unemployment rate was 10%, and people were desperate.

Are software engineers no longer people? His example was perfectly fine, given what you asked for.

"The spirit is that these gigs augment income, not become a sole source of it."

Says who? If the jobs are moving to the gig economy, then what income is a person supposed to augment? I find this argument both false and harmful to understanding the situation at hand.

I agree that there are certain workers who benefit from the gig economy (those living in mom's basement, have a working partner, etc.). What I disagree about (and thus possess cynicism) is that the "majority" will benefit from the transition of many positions from traditional employment to contracting.

I think one of the main issues is that the current employment classification is too binary. There are independent contractors, who are really independent small businesses: set their own rates, do their own advertising, choose their own customers, and keep all of the profit. And employees, who work for their employer for set hours, and get a stable salary and benefits in return.

We need a new third category: dependent contractor. Once that exists, we can start a more meaningful debate on what freedoms vs stability guarantees are best for it, without trying to force people into one extreme or the other.

What would the characteristics of a "dependent contractor" be?

Probably a modification to the 14-point test the IRS uses to determine whether or not someone is an employee vs a contractor. You'd have to modify the questions to inquire about whether or not the person in question was either downgraded to contract status from a full job or was hired as a contractor even though the job posting implied full time W2 work.

For what possible reason do we need that third category? What benefit to workers would that bring?

Offloading all of the costs and risks on to your unorganized "independent contractors" is the whole point of the gig economy from the business side. You can't disrupt things if you behave responsibly.

"But I try and remember that the original spirit of it has been largely successful."

The spirit of pushing all responsibilities and costs off onto workers?

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