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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.
companies report record profits and the rich get richer.
guillotines are being prepared.
"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."
Whoever came up with that deserves excessive waterboarding.
Who is the sucker here?
> 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.
It's a choice between community and individuals. Self-reliance was great back in the day when you could (in theory) walk into the wilds and build your own civilization, but if you want a modern standard of living there are simply too many things to do, too much to know. We rely heavily on people taking on highly specialized roles and ultimately everyone lives better as a result.
Modern 'self-reliance' is more like modern 'fuck you, I got mine'. It's people exploiting others and making them like it by holding out the carrot of their own anomalous success. And we eat it up because the human brain is shitty at probabilities... we all think WE are going to be the next big exploiter when the odds are far better that we'll win the lottery, and the truth is we're more likely to die by lightning strike than have either of those things happen.
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. Or they can watch wealth disparity continue to increase, a smaller and smaller portion of the population living like near-Gods while the greater portion has less and less. It'll take time for that to become apparent, so long as bellies are full and everyone has an Internet connection, but eventually the mob rises up and you get a revolution.
The outrage is that this is the future that awaits most workers in almost any sector, and instead of trying to remedy this, we think it's a positive thing that people can choose between poor working conditions and starvation.
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.
Since you are so obviously in favour of choice, for your lunch you have the following choices:
1. Shit sandwich
2. Vomit stew
3. Ground glass hash
Enjoy!
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
“You eat a coffee for lunch,” the ad proclaims. “You follow through on your follow through. Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You might be a doer.”
I'll see you and raise you this:
"The busy man is never wise, and the wise man is never busy".
- Lin Yutang
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
And both you and I know that's a useless gesture, and sometimes you simply cannot boycott some companies. Tell me, can you find a computer not made in poor working conditions? Probably not. The problem is the system itself and the way we are headed to. The Americans have an obsession with "competing" with China and India, but this only means that they will end up working for Chinese and Indian wages in Chinese and Indian conditions. Don't worry about me. I'll be good enough to retire soon. You should worry about the people around you when they get tired of living like that.
I'm not aware of people saying "gee, I really don't want that nine-to-five job, I want to be an uberer/fiverr/lyfter". They* are taking those jobs because they don't have anywhere else to go
*I fully expect a few "disproving anecdotes", the best kind of science. But its overwhelmingly true.
Ah, the great "meaning" argument. Whether they were intended as full-time work originally or not, they most certainly have morphed into that. And I don't really care about motivation as much as impact. And Uber/Lyft with their car leases, definitely are trying to make you think of it as a full-time job.
Which isn't at all the message Fixerr/Uber/Lyft are putting out there.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
The last time that you could get a decent permanent job without solid skills and education was the 70s. But they weren't easy jobs - things like auto plant worker. And many of those jobs vanished in the 80s. Today's WSJ has an article why... basically people got progressively more expensive, while automation got less expensive. The "gig economy" is no different than what people did before about it... Amway or Fuller, or holding Tupperware parties, or starting a lawn care or housecleaning service, or starting your own cab/limo company before cities regulated and medallioned that option off the list. The unfortunate part is that we fall for the sob stories, the anecdotes of emotion, and then close off another rung on the upward-mobility ladder in the name of protecting the people that, as a result, are held down more firmly.
SV is one huge company town right from the last century. The only thing that is missing is Pinkerton thugs cracking skulls.
This is the logical conclusion of all union-busting that we have done last 25 years. While you might hate unions, the alternative is much worse.
The gig economy is just gigs for some cash not full time employment.
I frankly don't buy it! There are small groups of people who are interested in that sort of thing. Teenagers who still are largely fed/clothed/housed by their parents, perhaps a stay at home parent needing something to do while the kids are at school, retirees who don't perhaps have savings for entertainment and actually want light work as a diversion. Maybe some trust fund babies that want to make a few bucks without rules attached. I am sure there are others. I am also sure this isn't a large enough labor pool to meet the demand in terms of scale companies like Lyft, Uber, fiverr, Amazon (turk) etc in vision.
The rest of the labor force isn't taking gigs because they want to! They are taking gigs because they are trying to meet needs or at least perceived needs. Most sensible after working a 40-60 hour week want to use their remaining time, to enjoy the home they secured, eat a nice meal, watch a movie, watch the world go by, read a book, talk to family, see friends, etc. Some people who are self employed might be self motivated to work 9 hours + and that might make sense if they are doing it so they can 'get a head' and eventually not have to work so hard etc. Its also different in that they are working for something that is their own, in the same way some of us would work DIY remodeling our own home etc.
Really do think that Uber driver would not be somewhere else if they did not feel like they really needed the money at least on some level? They are doing it out of some kind of insecurity, tangible or emotional. Don't tell me some people just like driving either, I love driving. I take my Sunday drives on the Blue Ridge Parkway either by myself or with my wife. I don't play taxi driver for randos downtown. I don't believe anyone else would either if they were 'entirely free' to decide.
There is some external pressure and its almost certainly in the form under employment, unemployment, under paid and without negotiating leverage, trade competition and similar. The capital owner element of the gig economy is keenly aware of this, its the reason they have a labor pool to hire. I am not saying its exploitative, people should be free to make whatever contract, work whatever job they wish. I just don't have any illusion that this is a bunch of people out there looking to make a little mad money. There are major structural factors at work here and the market is simply responding. I am also of the belief that its response isn't unaffected by governmental policy. They people we voted for are doing this to us.
They have been doing it to us since the 60's. People are getting fed up. Trump is just the tip of the ice burg (hopefully)! The capital class that owns the media and dominates politics are reacting virulently to his populist message and that tells me they are frightened it could endure beyond his presidency. Perhaps someone a little more politically savy will be able to take the Trump ball and run with it.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Yes, ideally this would work. However, if you are charging X and your competition is charging 0.1X, you're not going to get any business until you drop your rates to theirs.
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.
American society has always had the obsession on self-reliance, but I'm glad people are starting to see gig economy jobs for what they are. The question is what we do when the possibilities of realistically supporting yourself evaporate completely, and we go back to a semi-feudal system -- the nobles having all the power and letting the peasants who serve them exist at the bare minimum standard.
For decades in the US, the formula was simple:
- If you're smart, go to college and study anything. A large company will hire you at the entry level and take you through to the end of your career
- If you're semi-skilled, go to trade school, become an apprentice and join a trade union; there will be work until you retire.
- If you're less skilled, go join a union and work in a factory -- same deal, there will always be work.
It seems to me like this is gone, and no one noticed until now, or brushed it off. The modern economy is built around steady paychecks -- people can't buy a house for cash, they have to get a mortgage and pay it off as they earn. Same thing for consumer credit...no one is going to go into debt if they feel they can't pay for it, and debt is what drives the economy to some extent.
Steady paychecks are one of the reasons I've stayed out of the IT contracting world, even though I've been told I'd be excellent at it. It's stressful worrying about your job, or where the money is going to come from, and having to constantly hustle to find new work.
This works on a retail level but there is no way this can be done at the base material level. How do you boycott a mining company that employs slave labor when their metals pass through several transactions before they end up in your computer?
Nobody is forcing you to buy a computer, and I probably can find a computer assembled by people who care about the product and their conditions. If you think there's a substantial unmet demand for that kind of thing, maybe you or a fellow-traveler should start selling artisanal computers made from sustainably sourced, fair-trade components.
You want to "fix" the parts of human nature that you've been brainwashed to find distasteful. Don't expect the rest of us to jump onto your Marxist bandwagon.
Repeat after me: "The market is not a magic fixall for every problem."
How bizarrely deluded must you be to think that this entirely arbitrary concept of market forces is a substitute for actually caring about actual people and their living conditions?
People hate on unions, then wonder why they are treated like crap by employers.
Exactly, we aren't talking about YOU in particular. We are talking about the masses who are wage takers. The ones who don't have the ability to dictate their terms of employment because they don't have the skills necessary to do that. Ideally, they would have those skills, or be able to enroll in training programs to teach those skills. In short, I'm not worried about you. I'm worried about the guy whose only option is to take whatever job is available, and the competition that he faces for that job, which will inevitably push wages down to their lowest possible point.
What is your suggestion? That these people whose alternative is no job take that alternative? That the employers raise prices to support higher wages for their workers, leading to much reduced demand and most of their current workers bring out of work? That the employers start printing money so they can pay more than they take in?
How many commenters have I seen here saying people are poor because they're not taking risk on starting a business and being successful. That requires debt!
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
"Self-reliance" does not mean working yourself to death for peanuts. Oh, are we going to have the government step in, because you're too stupid to keep a reasonable work/life balance and negotiate fair compensation? Ultimately, you're going to want to progress from the tier of self-employment to owning your own business, because in the long term owning your own job means having no paid vacation or sick days. But self-employment is often the next step on getting out of the employment scam. You know the one: the claim that if you can just get a college degree, you'll get a safe, secure job and work until your comfortable retirement. Millennials, if anyone, should know this is hasn't been true for their entire lifetime. And government isn't going to get one for you, either.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
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.
Anecdotes are useless, but many of the people I have met riding Lyft/Uber do it as something a few hours a day, either semi-retired, between jobs, learning a new city, housewives getting out of the house, etc. Most are doing it full time, or effectively full time, but ~20% outside New York seem to do it kind of as intended.
... or you could just have a society with sane and decent regulation. Contrary to what the propaganda says, that is not automatically communism, it's simple human decency.
Talking about decent, I seem to remember that one rather popular religion is preaching this. Something to do with a rebel that got up the nose of the Roman authorities. And isn't there another rather popular religion that has giving to the poor on its shortlist of things you definitely should do? And then there is another religion/philosophy that explains that being decent to your fellows may help you escape suffering in multiple incarnations. Come to think of it, it seems that being decent to your fellow human beings is on the recommended list of just about every religion. Imagine that, perhaps it is just a good idea?
If their business model can't support paying a living wage, it SHOULD go away rather than damaging the economics of more adequate employers.
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.
Tools like Fiverr, Mechanical Turk, etc are an amazing way to create positive trade with low-income nations. They get a living wage, we get cheap labor, everyone wins.
They are an abysmal way to run a sustainable first-world economy, due to all the problems listed in the many comments above.
But don't let the shittiness of a gig economy in the US, EU, and other prosperous areas overshadow the value they have in allowing poor areas of the world an instant economic advantage. The Internet has allowed us a way to provide aid without creating beggers, to create a cash flow where value is moving in the both directions, and to allow for economic success in developing nations without sweatshops and mines, without employers siphoning off most of the wealth, or warlords stealing the crops.
Five dollars for an hour of work is shitty here, but when five dollars can be a days wage (or a weeks) in many places it's amazing. If they can get Internet access (and that's a big if...) then it opens up a huge economic opportunity for many of the poorest nations. This kind of opportunity is why Google projects to get the Internet out to rural Africa, India, and South America are so vital.
So yes, it sucks for us here. It should be fought. But the idea itself has merit, it's just where it's being applied that is inappropriate.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
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.
I've been one for three decades now. Self-employed is, and always has been, a recipe for way more work. The benefit, of course, is way more control; you're expected to translate that control into less work over time -- either by shifting the type of work, or by proceduralizing the efforts involved.
A gig, as is being discussed, doesn't provide any control benefits. A lyft driver can't outsource the driving, can't build the better car, and can't make better routes. Similarly, most of the other gigs are already fully proceduralized, and hence are already so commodity-based, that there is no legitimate benefits for improvement. This results in the up-front huge efforts similar to any self-employment, but without any opportunity to reap the benefits of that extra work.
Secondly, and this is probably the bigger deal, most of these gig-workers aren't entrepreneurs. Instead, they are would-be-factory-workers, lured by more-and-flexible hours, unable to see what they've lost as a result. Typical wage-earners usually work full weeks, for reasonable pay, with reasonable hours and reasonable benefits, but dream of "more hours" and "more flexibility". These gigs offer both of those, but don't translate into "more money".
But that's always been the farce of "the american dream". You can come to america, and you have every opportunity to make-it-big. You can be the next mcjagger. Of course, so can everyone else, so you aren't at all likely to be. What percentage of garage-bands become the rolling stones? You're much more likely to fizzle -- on the order of a 100 to 1. Think about it. 300 million americans, 1% make it big, 297 million don't -- and 200 million don't even come close, with 100 million failing miserably.
They are? Awesome! I decide that I don't work anymore!
Wait. No, I can't do that, then I won't have no money.
Ok, then I decide to only do what I want to do!
Wait, no, that doesn't work either, nobody's going to pay me to post on /. all day.
Ok, then I decide that I find a job where they don't care that I post on /. all day!
Unfortunately such jobs don't exist.
Then I go self-employed and do it!
Yes, but still... nobody's going to pay for that.
Making my own decisions sucks. Mostly because they're not my decisions at all. In the end, I can only decide between choices others have offered, and the chances are high that none of them are what I'd decide for if I really had to choose. It almost feels like an election, you know...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Pay peanuts, get code monkeys.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's a choice between community and individuals.
With one statement, you show yourself the fool, utterly lacking in understanding of what individualism is about, or the power of what it can do - not for a person, but for the COMMUNITY.
Individualism is not "I got mine". At the heart it is, if possible do not be a burden to others, because you have taken care of yourself as best you can. If you are personally in good shape then it makes it far easier to help others.
Your philosophy is the truest form of selfishness because it encourages members to leech off others with no return. Individualism is the simple common sense of "put your oxygen mask on before assisting others". Is that wrong?
Individualism is making sure that AS MANY members of the community are in a position to help others as possible, so that when the need arises people can get help instead of everyone assuming "the community" is helping someone while they freeze to death in a ditch.
Individualism is about looking out for other individuals, because a little assistance early heads off major and possibly impossible assistance later.
Americans have to get over their fear of socialism
Yeah, no reason to be afraid of a philosophy that has killed hundreds of millions, sometimes brutally and sometimes through sheer indifference.
Go visit Cuba or some former communist nations to see just how much communism should not be feared.
P.S. What is the deal with you communists forcing Trump into office? What did you think you'd get out of that anyway?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
Rubbish. You're just picking winners (e.g. the small number of taxi drivers) over losers (the huge number of Uber or Lyft drivers). And your living wage shtick is fucking risible. It's an analog of the Parable of the Broken Window. Why, if we just make employers pay people more, everyone will benefit because then people will have more money to spend!
Good luck with that in a global economy. I'm sure China and India will be happy to play by those rules and force their own employers to pay people the equivalent of $35k a year or whatever insane number you and your ilk think Americans should be guaranteed. That's so laughable that it has no basis to even be in a reality based discussion. And in reply to your inevitable "but muh services are different from muh goods!!!!" prattling, in 15 years we will have automated cars. If you force the market by banning Uber/Lyft type services it will be in less than 8 years.
Your policies would only hasten us to the inevitable UBI system before we're really ready for it. And yes, I agree at some point some major changes will need to be made like a UBI.
It's so absurd. If you look at 10k years ago humans probably had an 18 hour a day, 365 days a year "workday" just to survive. 200 years ago, the average person probably needed to work 90 hours a week to have a lifestyle equivalent to a lower (but not lowest) class Indian or Chinese person.
And now people bitch and whine and moan because people who live like kings relative to most of humanity's history have to get by with only enough income to eat, have shelter, and have modern conveniences and entertainment. Oh, the fucking humanity.
The worst are the "but muh wage slaves!!!" people and the "work life balance!" assholes. Oh noes, you have to work in order to get other people to work for you (which is all money really is, a proxy for other people's labor)?!?!! Poor fucking babies.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we should have anarchy and poor farms and shit like that. I believe in a reasonable welfare state, but jesus christ enough whining about needing to work to live like a king vs. merely a lucky American.
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.
Um... no.
You send money abroad when you buy ANYTHING made in China or wherever.
You send money abroad when using any service which is at some point in its flow using any resources which are not internal to the country you live in.
Those immigrants sending money to their own countries should be VERY low in your priority list.
Your mobile phone, clothes, car, TV, even food, all of them read "money sent abroad" when you look at them. If anything, immigrants actually REDUCE those amounts indirectly through them paying taxes, renting homes locally, eating food locally, etc., although they're subjected to the same issues that you're facing (stuff they use also originates from abroad to some extent).
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)