Comment by aeternum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aeternum | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a step in the wrong direction.

Uber/Lyft and the rest of the gig economy have helped to improve the 'liquidity' of jobs. This is generally a positive for society as it allows for more rapid wage price discovery.

Government policies have continually eroded this liquidity. For example a tax subsidy for employer-provided health insurance may sound like a benefit, but for many it raises the barrier to switching jobs. The new company may not offer the same insurance thereby not allowing you to keep your doctor. Companies know that these barriers exist and it allows them to underpay employees.

The other problem is by tying all of these benefits to gainful employment, we make losing a job an unrecoverable event for too many. Not only does someone now have the stress of finding a new job, but they also lose health insurance, disability, retirement benefits, etc. We should be adopting policies that make it easier for people to switch jobs, not harder.

Modern policymaking is about optics, and the simple fact is being employed looks better on paper for the people, so that's what politicians will push for. Doesn't matter that overall it's worse for everyone.

I think this is actually a step in the wrong direction that is likely to result in us going in the right direction faster. The core of the problem we have is that there are a bunch of new jobs known as "gig economy" jobs and they don't neatly fit into the traditional idea of a 9-5 job.

The result is that currently you basically fall either into "Yes 9-5 job, employee protections, healthcare, regulation etc" or "Not an employee, no protections, no unemployment insurance etc.". The thing is, when these jobs were considered like the latter case, they worked great for gig economy companies since it makes their workforce weak, and gives the companies as much leverage as they could possibly want and shifts liabilities off their balance sheets. The problem is that it's very difficult to get that regulatory scheme changed by workers, because that's not who has power in this system.

Now that workers are in the "employee" camp we've now got a bunch of highly motivated companies that are going to lobby for reform, and if we're careful to do it right, we could actually see the reforms that should have been made earlier anyway where there's no longer this massive chasm around the term "employee".

The reason that these kind of jobs exists in the first place is not some inherent sudden demand for them by modern society. It's because this form was required to create the plausible deniability that the drivers were not employees and thus much cheaper labour. This is the entire USP of the gig-economy, lower labour costs. Don't get fooled by a shiny app.

I deliver for Doordash and Grubhub. I don’t accept every offer that comes to me, I keep both apps open and I wait for an offer that I know I can profit from. If I were an employee, I’d likely be obligated to take every job offer and get my guaranteed minimum of say, $12 an hour. But as independent contractor, I can make $20 an hour. Isn’t the best, but I make more than McDonalds and I don’t want to chain myself down somewhere while I look for an actual internship/job in my field (halfway through a computer engineering degree). It gets me through college and I take more ownership in the job than if I was just some employee at chumbawumba cheap labor Corp. Only benefit I would wish for in my case is some sort of car insurance offer given a minimum delivery quota and discounted maintenance plan (oil changes, etc.) as it’s directly relevant to the type of work.

wtf, a propaganda post from a brand new account?

It sounds like nationalized healthcare is the real issue here.

More along the lines of a lack therof of universal healthcare.

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