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Comment by aikinai | Hacker News Reader

I’m not GP, but I think you’re missing their point. They described the Canadian job as “gig” but it’s actually structured more like more traditional part time work. It sounds like you’d prefer to outlaw all part time work?

The point is true gig work allows you the flexibility to fit it around whatever else you have going on, be that part time work, starting a startup, taking care of a family, etc. of course it’s downsides and probably needs some more rules to protect the workers. But banning eliminates the opportunity entirely.

It sucks to be a freelance writer and it’s easy to get screwed; should we ban that too?

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Personally, I think part time jobs should have to come with the same benefits as full time, by law.

That would encourage companies to offer full time positions. Current law (in the US) financially penalizes full time employers, which is why most part time workers end up working multiple part time jobs.

My dad (and loads of other gig workers) don’t want full time Uber jobs. They like gig work because it gives their lives flexibility. The employer-employee relationship is about more than money & benefits, it’s about power.

A full time job gives your employer the power to dictate your life schedule to you. Your boss wants you at your desk at 8am but you have to take your kid to school at 8:30? Too bad! You’re there at 8 or you’re fired.

It’s even worse in retail and food service, as I alluded to in my original post. These workers get their schedules a week ahead, with shifts all over the place. One day you’re opening at 6am. Next day you’re closing at 9pm. Good luck having any kind of life outside of work with a schedule like that!

> "part time jobs should have to come with the same benefits as full time, by law."

All this does is eliminate more jobs.

In your hypothetical scenario, a company that hires 2 or 3 people part-time would need to do health insurance for each of them, benefits for each of them and the additional full-time equivalent paperwork for each of them...

In that scenario, the company would end up just hiring 1 person full-time for the hours, and have much less added overhead costs.

This would lead to higher unemployment, because now instead of 3 people being employed part-time, only 1 person is employed.

Where's the good in that? Maybe I'm just not seeing it from my perspective, if anyone else can chime in?

Do you know this is exactly how it works in most first world countries already? (except for the health insurance bit, because most first world countries have a public health system). Part-time workers get holiday pay, sick leave, and every entitlement of full-time workers, at a rate commensurate with their hours.

This has been tried.

It results in eliminating part-time jobs, overloading full-time employees, and increasing unemployment.

increasing unemployment

That is irrelevant, because of how it's measured: 1 person working 40 hours/week and 9 people not working gives an unemployment of 90%, but 10 persons working 4 hours/week gives an unemployment of 0% -- yet both scenarios have the same amount of work. Of course using part-time jobs reduces the unemployment figures. It says nothing, however, about the availability of work.

It doesn't sound like Skip pays hourly though, so it's not very similar to part time work at all.

Nope, I said none of those things like banning part time work that you are saying.

Your only comment here is to try to pivot into other arguments that you are inventing. Not gonna work here.

It sucks to be seven years old and work in a textile factory, and they totally get screwed. So we chose to ban that. Slavery is another labor practice we've banned. Not sure what your point is about freelance writers.

Freelance writer are essentially gig workers and therefore slaves or underage factory workers according to you bizarrely nonsensical analogy

That's not what I wrote at all.

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