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Comment by beat | Hacker News Reader

I strongly agree with Fred Wilson that Hillary Clinton's remarks were spot-on (or close enough), and that we should welcome this discussion in the political arena rather than bristling at it. The gig economy offers some very tangible and valuable benefits to both consumers and "employees", but there are a lot of unanswered questions regarding what this means for worker rights and quality of life. If we just handwave it away, we could wind up with decades or more of bad policy that keeps people poor and victimized, rather than better off and empowered.

I was very glad that Hillary Clinton took a sophisticated view of the situation and didn't just bash on a fashionable subject. I hope other candidates follow her lead and we have an actual interesting discussion.

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Those of us who "bristle" think that it's absolute nonsense that free adults should be prevented from engaging in a mutually beneficial transaction because the government is concerned with protecting one of them. Treating Uber drivers or AirBnB property owners as if they are the characters in an Upton Sinclair novel is a tough sell. Let me rephrase the argument from the left: "we mandated all of these great things for employees, but it increased the cost of employment, and workers and employers started voluntarily opting out. This is a problem because it threatens our original premise, that everyone will be better off if we regulate employment." Finally, Hillary's hedged, "sophisticated" view is basically that she wants credit for protecting workers but none of the blame when the citizens of progressive-leaning cities get Uber taken away. Even if you're a likely supporter, you shouldn't let her get away with it until she tells us what sort of proposals she imagines would avoid the trade-off and magically allow these markets to flourish while also "protecting workers."

You're completely insane if you think workers are "voluntarily" opting out of worker protection laws.

"workers and employers started voluntarily opting out"

Erm, many workers drive for Uber because they lost their jobs, don't have other choices or are between jobs etc.

Many of these people are NOT opting out of full time jobs, they would take a full time job with benefits if it were offered to them.

Employers opt out of regulation whenever they can (see: the environment). The claim that employers opting out of regulation undercuts the original premise is completely false. They are doing so to cut costs which is entirely to the benefit of their shareholders who are a much smaller slice of society than workers.

In summary: Workers aren't necessarily entering the gig economy voluntarily and employers opting out of regulation doesn't threaten the original premise.

In my view though, the gig economy is just not sustainable. Look at sites like 99 Designs... You have an incredibly large workforce with an incredibly large spread of skills doing a lot of work for marginal payout. As these populous-run services become more common, it will only dilute the value pool for those in it... If you have thousands of people saying they can do something for a fair or cheap price, it only reduces the ability of the next worker to charge more, despite the fact they might have better skills. Price wins over quality 99% of the time, in my experience.

It's crazy because the competition is pretty much 100% internal and at some point, internal competition of anything will lead to systemic destruction of something critical if there is no authority figure demanding internal combat needs to stop.

And let's face it, a company like Uber or Airbnb will never tell its participants that they can't drive more often or share more rooms because that will limit their product offering. Also, the government won't, can't, and shouldn't interfere either.

It will solely rely for the workers of these sites to form unions agreeing upon their own quality standards and reflective pricing and will act as a group against the interests of the corporation they are inherently the product for... But pardon me for my cynicism, we're not at the point yet were self-preservation supersedes the desire for just a fractionally larger income.

I don't think it can be generalized to the entire gig economy. In particular, things that require physical interaction (like Uber and AirBnB) do well, compared to remote-computer jobs like 99 Designs where everyone is competing with third world contractors who have much lower cost of living.

I think we'll see some follow the Uber model as it evolves - subject to some reasonable regulation in the long run but still basically wiping out previous industries. And as much as I like Uber the product, I sure as hell do not want Uber the business setting labor standards that will govern the lives of millions in the 21st century. The business is great, the management is borderline evil. Which is better than the taxi industry where the business is awful and the management is totally evil but local only...

Once we have self-driving cars, Uber can and will replace their current fleet of drivers with robots.

Absolutely. But the general idea of the gig economy will (probably) stay around, even if specific examples die out in the face of new technologies.

The gig economy will only die when humans price-gouge each other so immensely that robots are the only viable option - even though they can carry a higher entry cost.

Ok, but then Uber will have to bear the full purchase, financing, depreciation, maintenance, garaging, inventory, theft, and insurance cost for potentially millions of vehicles.

No because the cars will be the electrical storage for most of the non baseline load in a city. So cars will be part private property and part public transport - fleets of mini vans driving around and nipping off to the charging station at peak demand times.

No, all of that could still be outsourced to a 3rd party.

If it's not Uber, someone else offering a similar service will eventually allow people to submit their own self-driving car to a driving pool when they're not personally using it.

Or people will buy a car and submit it to Uber's pool for some return, as an investment. Minimises Uber's costs which will mean they can expand aggressively.

That seems unlikely considering Uber's entire business model is based around offloading as much of the liability and risk as possible onto their "contractors".

It's the degree of market saturation, so we're both right... 99 Designs is on the extreme saturation end whereas physical ones like Uber are not. But ideologically, the problems they share stem from "more providers = dilution of profits".

And it's terrible because they only way to compete as a business against Uber, is by "forcing" the participants to offer more services at an equal or slightly higher price, or do the same services for cheaper. And that is inherently not good for either a business or it's product (which happens to be us humans, in this argument) - and that is why you don't see identical services popping up.

Price only wins over quality when there's zero relationship with the customer (as with 99 design).

You don't have to win solely on the innovation/creative front; clients want to feel safe in hiring you, they want to feel heard. You can project authority by blogging, speaking at conferences, open source work. Sometimes you can win a gig simply because you project the attitude that you can get shit done.

There are so many other ways to win besides quality of work (with much larger payouts!) and it always starts with building relationships.

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