Comment by beckman466 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beckman466 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> I do wonder why the author is still on Upwork, their rating & exposure on there must be worth more to them than working several weeks for free

why should they have to walk away? why even suggest such a strategy?

UpWork already has a 10% market share. so if there were 1000 employers, 100 of them would be the same company.

i'm not sure if you're aware of all the gigification and precaritization of digital labor going on? it's emerging as a frontal assault; a full-force attack on labor rights.

"For all of its forward-looking ‘innovation’, there’s something suspiciously feudal about Silicon Valley. Tech royalty compete for dominance in platform wars [...] They hoard resources while showering key personnel with lavish gifts to ensure loyalty and peddling a compelling story about their right to rule. Meanwhile, the remaining workers, dependent on ‘gigs’ for their livelihood, are made to battle with each other for scraps."

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley

I think looking at devs contracting as "gigifying" is abusing that word and cheapening it for actual gig jobs which is an actual issue. Devs have been doing independent contracting since it was viable to do so and we can make a lot of money doing so. Upwork provides a platform to get contracts but it's not quite the same as the auto priced marketplaces like Uber, Lyft, Doordash etc.

The last time I was looking at contracting I was negotiating $100+/hr contracts through Upwork. I had high leverage and negotiating power whereas gig jobs do not. I also had recourse for stuff like what happened here as long as I worked it into the contract I was signing, again not something you get in a gig job.

For 12.5 grand my next words to Upwork would have been, "My lawyer" and if that didn't make any headway I'd be going after "Robin" in court too. These are not avenues that a typical gig job have either because the amount of money doesn't make it worth it or their contracts which are created by the company don't give them the option.

12.5k seems like a difficult amount to recover. Would the time/legal costs involved really justify it, considering that Upwork presumably employs many lawyers who will make it as painful as possible?

I had a client stiff me for 6k once and it seemed like the only reasonable options were to go to small claims court and hope for a small portion of that or take the hit and move on, which is what I did :-/

They should file consecutive small claims cases (one for each charge). If they file concurrently, the lawyers will get them consolidated.

If my entire market was based on getting my freelancers good jobs, I wouldn’t be trying to screw them over.

This could have been an article about how Upwork is awesome and ate 12.5k for this dev. They could write about how they go to bat for their freelancers and are prosecuting the scammer.

That story would still be upvoted and the free advertising would far exceed the cost. Instead, they bought tons of the worst kind of publicity (hitting peoples wallets) and their best outcome is now an apology that nobody will actually believe and eating the cost anyway.

This is because the customer for Upwork is not the freelancer it’s the entity hiring the freelancer.

It may appear they’re on the side of the freelancer however that’s not the goal of the company. They make money off the other end and likely think that even if n percent of freelancers drop the platform there will be more in their place

That's the calculation they'd be doing too though. Paying an army of lawyers to defend against my 12.5k claim sounds more expensive than eating it for me.

If it was the same situation, Upwork would likely ask why you added so many hours manually. They warned the writer many times they had no chargeback protection if they billed manually.

It’s hard to reasonably blame a platform for capping its losses when confronted with a client who chooses the highest risk billing, despite knowing the risks well enough to write about them at length.

I don’t see where you or the writer would have a case. Heck, you can’t just ignore hundreds of warnings, discover they were good things to be cautious about and claim the company was wrong for enforcing the terms it told you about constantly.

I mean you can't just not validate the payment method when your sole purpose is to act as a payments facilitator so you can skim money off the top and then lump that onto the freelancer when you fail to catch fraud. I consider this a fraud issue between Upwork and Robin because they never validated Robin was the correct card holder. Whether manual hours or tracked through Upwork, Upwork has a duty to validate that the person paying isn't a fraudster and they failed to do that over a multi year period. That strikes me as strictly negligence by Upwork and the burden shouldn't be on the contractor.

And they skim 20% of the earnings which is a lot for doing almost nothing.

> I think looking at devs contracting as "gigifying" is abusing that word and cheapening it for actual gig jobs which is an actual issue.

author is not a dev.

> Upwork provides a platform to get contracts but it's not quite the same as the auto priced marketplaces like Uber, Lyft, Doordash etc.

yes this is a great point that makes me reflect on the term 'gig', thanks for sharing it.

if the author was a dev contractor who was contracting through UpWork, i would agree completely with your statement about 'gigifying'. since he's not, i'd argue that this non-dev work is still part of the gigification because 1.) it's part of the shift where more and more administrative and creative labor, which was formerly structured as full-time (and in Europe, unionized) jobs, is being atomized and increasingly mediated through faceless unaccountable corporate platforms (where labor rights are shit on, exactly like in author's story), and 2.) one's reputation is stuck/held hostage on a third party platform (where things like author's story happen often [1]) who can essentially ban you and erase you (and your reputation/testimonials/positive feedback) anytime.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=upwork+banned+site:www.reddi...

Forgive me, I read the article but I really didn't look at more than that. I checked it again and saw that their title is on the left on the menu. That does change my thoughts a bit.

Before places like Upwork you might have to found a consultancy and pay staff to manage the overhead and spend more time sourcing contracts where as Upwork handles that overhead and takes a cut, which is lower than having staff or doing it yourself. That's why people are driven to these platforms.

I'd argue that as anyone that is skilled labor, like the author, has the option of moving off of Upwork and doing things the old fashioned way even though it is more costly and laborious, whereas a gig worker, as I think of them, does not have the option at all. So while I don't think it's all the way there since a skilled worker has more leverage and optionality I admit that Upwork here still does have much too much power and is partly gigafying/commoditizing this work.

yeah no but i appreciated your take. no need for forgiveness. thanks for sharing your perspective.

> skilled labor

tangent: i'm curious what you think about this:

https://twitter.com/arne__ness/status/1478805922306744320

https://twitter.com/faithfxl_wyfe/status/1478998605935558657

> why should they have to walk away? why even suggest such a strategy?

Why would you want to continue doing business with someone who will unpredictability charge you large sums of money?

That’s right. It can happen again. And again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com