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Comment by ShrinkingWild | Hacker News Reader

No one would, uber would be forced to either pay higher or go out of business due to a lack of supply in drivers. As it stands though, supply of drivers way outweighs demand for drivers, so they get paid less.

A "liveable wage", whatever that is, isn't a workable solution for a lot of businesses, simply because the actual value of their work may be lower than the liveable wage. Now instead of getting some money for food to eat or a place to stay, they now get nothing because it just isn't viable to pay the liveable wage for the value they supply.

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Everybody knows how offer and demand works if left unchecked. That's why it's almost never left unchecked... I mean this is what the whole discussion about gigging is: why should we allow such crappy working conditions?

"simply because the actual value of their work may be lower than the liveable wage."

That is not a job then and the entity assigning such tasks is not a company. A company has a responsibility to offer its workers certain benefits in return for having access to the legal and social frames that are allowing it to operate.

I am in agreeance that if they can't sustain their business without VC or underpaid workers then it isn't a viable business model and the market should let them go bankrupt. I kind of hope they do so that a more reasonable business can fill the void.

I argument that if a business can't provide a livable wage to its full time employees, then the business isn't viable.

for these sorts of low-value jobs, something has to give - either employees don't get a livable wage and the business survives, or the business doesn't survive due to too high wage cost. The option where the business survives, but also pays a livable wage, can't exist. If it could, then a competitor could also out-compete them by just not paying a livable wage!

Only if you're enforcing the "livable" wage. Those people who would be working for under your "livable" wage would still be out of that money though.

What does that say about all of the money losing startups that are living on VC funding?

I don't agree with you, but let's assume I do. What next? All of those business fail and... Low skill workers now make zero instead of something >= minimum wage. How is that better?

A healthy society will offer a safety net to people without jobs and also the ability to retrain, find another job, etc.

You're assuming an unhealthy society, which unfortunately matches the US, but also many other so-called well-off countries: social protection diminished or outright removed combined with job uncertainty and social inequality.

Having one or two Ubers allows you merely to pretend longer that the situation's not dire. The political turn to the right in Europe right now and the election results in the US can be at least partly explained by the fact that people are sick of it.

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