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The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death (newyorker.com)
Writing for The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino documents stories of several people -- a nine-month pregnant Lyft driver, for instance -- who contribute to companies that work on the model of gig economy. Through these tales, Tolentino underscores an increasingly growing pattern in the Silicon Valley (and elsewhere) where companies offer hard-labor contracts to people, pay them peanuts (with little liabilities), and yet find a reason to celebrate their business and encourage more to come onboard. From the article: Fiverr, which had raised a hundred and ten million dollars in venture capital by November, 2015, has more about the "In Doers We Trust" campaign on its Web site. In one video, a peppy female voice-over urges "doers" to "always be available," to think about beating "the trust-fund kids," and to pitch themselves to everyone they see, including their dentist. A Fiverr press release about "In Doers We Trust" states, "The campaign positions Fiverr to seize today's emerging zeitgeist of entrepreneurial flexibility, rapid experimentation, and doing more with less. It pushes against bureaucratic overthinking, analysis-paralysis, and excessive whiteboarding." This is the jargon through which the essentially cannibalistic nature of the gig economy is dressed up as an aesthetic. No one wants to eat coffee for lunch or go on a bender of sleep deprivation -- or answer a call from a client while having sex, as recommended in the video. It's a stretch to feel cheerful at all about the Fiverr marketplace, perusing the thousands of listings of people who will record any song, make any happy-birthday video, or design any book cover for five dollars. I'd guess that plenty of the people who advertise services on Fiverr would accept some "whiteboarding" in exchange for employer-sponsored health insurance. At the root of this is the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system. The contrast between the gig economy's rhetoric (everyone is always connecting, having fun, and killing it!) and the conditions that allow it to exist (a lack of dependable employment that pays a living wage) makes this kink in our thinking especially clear.
This all stems from the widespread adoption in America of the the Puritan philosophy of human worth, best summed up as "the quality, quantity, and duration of achievement."
So, yes, by their standards the ultimate goal is to work hard, until death, to earn a place by the side of god as the most righteous. The bonus is that this also allows the hardest workers in life to demean those who have not worked so hard.
The thing is, I've used fiverr. I paid $5 to have some EE student in Romania create some parts for KiCAD that I had no time to do myself and then published the parts under an open license for use by others. Once you know how to read a datasheet and use KiCAD, you can whip these things out in minutes. $5 is not much to me, but it's a great gig for a student in a poorer country. Same with 3D models for the same parts -- had some kid in the Philippines whip a few up for me.
I've also used Upwork to have professionally designed models for injection molding, first by a guy just starting out in the middle of Nowhere, Utah, and then by a guy in Belarus. I have no way to hire a mechanical engineer full time.
Without these services, I'd waste my own time doing the parts in KiCAD, never have a 3D model of the parts, and -- more importantly -- not have a product at all because without these services, the barrier to entry is much too high.
No one has to work at Fiverr. Or at any of these other "gig" jobs. It's a choice. The only thing that needs to be policed is that the people offering and using the services are not being misled by the companies.
The article is written as if the author thinks people "deserve" a full time job. No one deserves anything in life. If you don't have a full time job and need income or you want to supplement your full time job, you now have opportunities for that which never existed before.
Americans have to get over their fear of socialism and accept that, all other things being equal, a community that works together is stronger and more prosperous than one that does not.
You are both right and totally wrong at the same time. Socialism isn't about community its about the state as a stand in for community! Yes we need to accept that in the modern world very men can be islands. Bureaucracy isn't the answer though, it does not scale. Just sit an watch Argentina, Greece, and for that matter the whole Western Europe as it faces mass immigration! That is the future socialism results in.
What we need is actually a form of isolationism. We need force the capital class to have some ties to place and their community again. We can't let them just be world tourists! If you make it harder or impossible for them to import labor from elsewhere, make it hard for them to take their capital over national boarders, etc. They will be forced to invest in their local community to secure their own feature. Right now its "I need H1Bs because there are to few qualified Americans" It needs change to "I need to build a science center in $city and donate heavily to the local schools so my business will have pool of qualified people to hire in the future." That is what community is about and that is the relationship between capital and community we need to create.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I think Uber and Lyft are an awful scam for the drivers, but we should ask ourselves if the "gig economy" is better or worse than working three minimum wage jobs to make ends meet, as was the case in the late 80's through early 90's. Or, being a taxi driver and barely making your gate fee plus gas in a day.
There are workers marginalized by geography, education, social issues, and family conditions that are poorly utilized; the net effect of this is they cannot demand higher wages. It is hard for me to understand if it is better for them to do nothing, or eke out a little income to help themselves out.
Personally, I know a few people that would rather make $50-75/day from home doing "gigs" than $100-150/day commuting to a job. I think they are approaching the problem illogically, but that is their life and decision.
So, you're saying that these people don't exist because you haven't met him? Are you saying that there aren't people working for minimum wage or less who are trying to live a life from that income? I realize that, yes, this is a fabricated situation, but clearly, these kinds of peopl exist, so we can explore the details of this abstract idea. If you are just worried about you and your situation, that's fine, it's a conservative stance, and it's one that I personally don't agree with. It puts the burden of survival squarely on the individual's shoulders. Not everyone is able to do the things that you can do, and I don't need a concrete example of this. There exist people who are more capable than you are, and also there are people less capable than you are. The gamut will run from the most capable to the least capable. Are we to assume that the least capable people should not survive because their skill set doesn't allow them to earn a livable wage? Requiring concrete factual examples of things in order to discuss possible outcomes isn't realistic. We have to assume that these situations exist, or have a possibility of existing so that we can be proactive with thinking up possible solutions, instead of waiting until we have already experienced the situations to start coming up with damage control reactive solutions.
IIRC calling someone a "moron" is one.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And your money goes abroad, fueling the economy there instead of here. It's basically the same problem you can potentially have with immigrants who send the money they earn here back home to their family where the 30 bucks surplus they maybe generate are a fortune, while here it's basically a dinner for two at a restaurant.
Now extrapolate and you have a restaurant near you closing down because there aren't enough patrons frequenting it. Leading to its waiters getting unemployed. And the domino line continues.
Sending money abroad weakens your economy. And may eventually endanger your own job.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Between the Bush recession and Obamanomics (that is, deliberately making it more costly to hire full time workers) people assume that incomes are chronically falling due to automation (in spite of evidence of this being anecdotal at best) and therefore you need to make burger flipping a career rather than a short term job, and therefore burger flippers should have the right to the same income as doctors, because they're human beings too.
We can just call that "entitlement economics", and like communism before it, it will pass.
Another reason for UBI. It disincentivizes companies from acting like that and levels the playing field a bit for the workers.
Oddly enough, the grandpost is (wholly inadvertently) insightful. Marx nails this one as a natural consequence of alienation. It's a tremendously important concept, and a great, still-fresh lens for looking at this moment in a historical way. Splendid bandwagon, really; give it a read.
Thanks! If anyone is interested in reading a bit about the theory behind my point of view, the best place to start is David Graeber's magnificent "Debt: The First 5000 Years". You'll be chuckling within a few pages, and awed within the first 100.
You'll also be stunned at all the wrong beliefs that many people accept and take for granted. At the risk of further enraging those of other persuasions, I can reveal that one of Graeber's biggest ideas is that human beings naturally practice a form of "rough communism". Unless educated to do otherwise, we have a strong tendency to cooperate and help out. Here are a couple of choice extracts:
"After all, we do owe everything we are to others. This is simply true. The language we speak and even think in, our habits and opinions, the kind of food we like to eat, the knowledge that makes our lights switch on and toilets flush, even the style in which we carry out our gestures of defiance and rebellion against social conventions – all of this we learned from other people, most of them long dead. If we were to imagine what we owe them as a debt, it could only be infinite. The question is: Does it really make sense to think of this as a debt? After all, a debt is something that we could at least imagine paying back”.
“[Peter] Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him. The man objected indignantly:
“’Up in our country, we are human!’ said the hunter. ‘And since we are human we help each other. We don’t like to hear anyone say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs’.
“The last line is something of an anthropological classic, and similar statements about the refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found throughout the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began ‘comparing power with power, measuring, calculating’ and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt”.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.