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Comment by ccffpphh | Hacker News Reader

What were these people doing before Uber and Lyft came around?

Taking similar gig in other industries, such as gardening, constructions, telemarketing and support, pet care, beauty industry, etc.

The gig economy did not start with Uber or AirBnB.

Except now with AB5, those populations are at risk too.

I don't disagree, the current politicians need to find a solution to provide people with meaningful opportunities to protect them from the fallout of these changes. I think the danger of allowing this exploitation to continue, if we examine the precedent of the previous decades, is too large though and we need to act before the erosion continues.

I’m not familiar with the proposition, but lets say that you are right for the sake of argument:

Now we have two possibilities:

a) We could fight against it and try to get it revoked. Go back to the status quo where those workers keep working—potentially underpaid—without getting any of the benefits full-time workers rely on.

b) We could ask for a new proposal that would give gig workers these benefits and guarantee them a minimum wage.

Nah, they're not. In the undocumented economy, there are lots of things you do that don't show up. It's not like you're filing taxes when you drive up to Lowe's and ask the guys waiting in the parking lot to help you with some construction. That shit is going straight cash-to-cash.

Those jobs are shittier (that's why people drive instead of doing them) but they will still exist.

Just go to upwork or similar sites and see how people are refusing to hire workers (including programmers) in CA because of AB5. This affected way more people than just drivers.

Let me rephrase that:

So they are refusing to hire workers because they are not allowed to misuse contractors to circumvent giving fair wages and benefits?

The funny thing is that he's replying to me, one of the people who has stopped using California contractors except among trusted relationships (which is non-Upwork).

I don't know what your experience is with contractors (I use Upwork - which is an awesome platform - extensively) but that's not it. The savings come from the fact that you don't need 100% of their time, you don't need to recruit, and you can slide easily along the performance vs. price on the scale.

One is when you want an expert: for instance, we don't retain in-house counsel. We don't need it 100% of the time, but for the short periods we need it, we need the 99th percentile guy. And we can't afford the 99th percentile guy 100% of the time.

And then it's when you want drudge work but it's spiky: like you need things labelled or whatever. Upwork is like AWS for people and it's really, really good for all the reasons AWS is good.

If I suddenly have to work out payroll and benefits and all that shit, that's instantly non-viable. It's all right, the world is a big place, and things I can contract out I can just as well contract out outside of California and eventually outside the US. 90% of the time I'm doing Anglophone-adjacent nations anyway. Americans are too expensive for this work and they're equivalent performance anyway.

And for the stuff like law? Well, there I'll go with the 99th percentile guy. I know he's powerful enough to get his carve-out (as he has).

Hahaha, that's a really funny reply considering this comment I made a couple of hours ago¹. I guess you're right. I didn't think other people were also doing this.

> Upwork sent around a "Don't worry about AB5" email but I'm not taking chances. Just ended everything with Cali contractors.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24228083

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