Hacker News Reader

Comment by deanc | Hacker News Reader

73% [1] of couriers don't want to be employees (in Finland). They are quite happy with this arrangement as it means they are paid more. The survey that was conducted was quite thorough and interesting. It's worth a read.

(Just stating facts here, don't have an opinion myself on this)

[1] https://blog.wolt.com/fin/2021/06/23/taloustutkimus-majority...

View on HN

Classic short-term fallacy. Yes, you get more net payout as a "contractor" - but you don't get paid sick leave or pension contributions unless you care for these on your own.

This is why this model is very frowned upon by European societies as it inevitably leaves taxpayers to pick up the tab in the form of basic social security.

Maybe. But remember that the employees themselves voted on this. This was done by an independent auditor.

People are really bad with long term planning. Your average 20 year old doesn't know anything about pensions and considers themselves to be indestructible.

It would be ridiculously easy to just copy the US and do away with the social welfare system. See how many will actually save for their retirement lol.

You don't even get paid more. The apps have been circulating this myth in the press, but it's based on obfuscating of the numbers at best, and outright lies at worst.

There's a reason most of their couriers are immigrants: anyone else can get paid more stocking a supermarket or driving a cab.

After they freed the taxi market even that is somewhere on level of gig-work. Still, there is good amount better paid untrained work around.

> After they freed the taxi market even that is somewhere on level of gig-work.

Certainly the freeing could have been done better, but the system before wasn't exactly healthy either. There was a fixed number of taxi licenses, and taxi companies were of course heavily lobbying against increasing the number. Since there were so few of them, good luck getting a taxi on a weekend night. Then again, if you were lucky and got a taxi, it was a shiny clean Mercedes (which perhaps tells something about the profit margins they were running at).

On other hand good luck getting taxi now during weekday night, specially outside cities. Prices have gone up and from what I have heard quality of service has gone down.

I think licensing system we had made sense, prices were capped, service was at least controlled and availability during all times was guaranteed. Ofc, this lead to some issues when there was extreme demand...

I don't understand why the instant reaction of 99% of people is : non-employee = bad

There is a reason for having employment and not. If you're not employed you can stop working at 2.30pm if you feel like it, or work at 4am if you want to (maybe in the case of food delivery, not). Some people like and want this.

Well done for all the workers right obsessed people who seem to want controlled and restricted work times and pay for everyone, with no flexibility. Because no-one wants flexibility apparently in socialist paradise.

Being non-employee at these income levels is just horrible deal. Miss quite many things from pensions to possible unemployment benefits and possibly even paid vacation.

It only really starts to become reasonable if you can bill yourself as consultant in fields like IT.

There’s also no reason an employee couldn’t have fully flexible hours if the business model is suitable anyway. Well, in principle no reason, anyway, in practice current employment legislation and collective agreements in Finland place limits on working times because historically the risk of employers voluntelling employees to work less-than-pleasant hours has been deemed too high.

Employment does not have to mean fixed or restricted work times.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com