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US Senator Introduces the First Bill To Give Gig Workers Benefits (techcrunch.com)
Virginia Senator Mark Warner has introduced a bill that will give basic benefits to gig workers. "Warner has just proposed the first-ever piece of national legislation aimed at helping on-demand and other non-traditional workers without traditional benefits, like paid sick days or a retirement plan, have some sort of a safety net," reports TechCrunch. "The bill asks the federal government to set aside $20 million in funding for organizations to use to look at the types of benefits programs individual workers could take with them from job to job." From the report: "[Portable benefits is] that emergency fund," Warner told BuzzFeed, which first reported news of the bill. "It might be a fund to take care of a disability if you get hurt. It might work with some existing retirement programs. Part of it would be, depending on what happens with Obamacare, an ability to help deal with health care expenses. I think there will be a variety of models." The funding wouldn't be enough to cover everyone, of course, but if it gets the green light a draft of the bill indicates it would earmark $5 million toward grants doled out by Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta for organizations already looking into portable benefits and $15 million for new programs.
..which specifically targets computer programmers from an era before the government allowed millions of Americans to lose their jobs to cheaper offshore labor and to foreign nationals imported to be trained as their replacements to work in America without even knowing how to use toilet paper, deodorant or having any loyalty to the country, intent to contribute in any way to the common good or even an ancestor who ever defended the world from tyranny.
$20 million now. $20 billion in 10 years. $200 billion in 20. And it keeps going up.
This bill says "basic" but you know what that means. "Basic" now, but in five years it will be argued that these are entitlements that everyone should receive if anyone who says otherwise is racist, sexist, and greedy.
Is running a sole proprietor business a "gig"? Or is that too formal to count? It's the same exact thing with even more volatility.
... but would it have been too much to ask, to mention that he is of course a Democrat.
Marx never intended for his ideas to be implemented in feudal Russia or the carcass of Austria-Hungary. He more so had in mind developed countries like the UK or the US, where workers actually existed.
The more I look at the state of the so-called first world, maybe some of Marx's ideals should be reviewed without the stain of Stalinism applied to it. I know this is all nonsense to most Americans who hear the word Marx and automatically think SATAN.
With more and more of the US population somehow being reliant on government handouts anyways, we've got communism coming in through the backdoor. Maybe we should just be honest with ourselves and just dive in head first to the Marxist experiment the US has long been under and just not aware of it.
more on researching and administering this than all the benefits they will pay to end workers combined, guaranteed. Until companies don't receive the benefit of "contracting" employees, this won't change.
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Do you prefer handouts to employers that get almost free workers due to the charity of taxpayers to making sure that employers don't leech off taxpayers like you in that way?
If so, why?
Marx did not propose ideas — to be implemented or not. He thought of his theories as laws of nature — like gravity — take it from someone, who was forced to study Marxism in high school and college...
His claim was, the workers' revolution is inevitable when the means of production develop beyond a certain point. That it did not actually happen in the US, UK, and other countries is proof, the asshole was a fool and wasted years of his life on a big mistake — while his wife brought up their children.
Or maybe we should, now that the realization is kicking in, stop this creep up of Communism and go back to having a drastically lower involvement of government in the citizens' daily lives? Something like this, perhaps?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
How about giving benefits to workers scheduled exactly 29 hours per week, or who are 'contractors' in name only.
This sounds more like a plan to create a committee that will start to think about the issue, rather than a solution.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
The ACA gave gig workers access to healthcare, this is unnecessary as long as it's in place.
Virginia Senator Mark Warner has introduced a bill that will give basic benefits to gig workers. "Warner has just proposed the first-ever piece of national legislation aimed at helping on-demand and other non-traditional workers without traditional benefits, like paid sick days or a retirement plan, have some sort of a safety net," reports TechCrunch.
All gigworkers need to do is register as a corporation, pay both sides of FICA/SS (worker and employer), and by not offering himself healthcare coverage can qualify for subsidized Obamacare... that is the purpose of those two existing programs, no need to throw millions down the rat hole of 'analysis' and 'study'.
As for giving gig workers a 'safety net', that's their responsibility, folks outside the gig economy shouldn't be paying subidies, paid sick time, etc. for gig economy workers, being self-employed, essentially what a gig economy worker is, it is THEIR responsibility to provide paid sick leave, etc. to themselves.
Ken
Exactly - this is how you kill the 'gig economy'.
Ken
^^^^^^ sorry, read previous comment wrong.
Ken
""The bill asks the federal government to set aside $20 million in funding for organizations to use to look at the types of benefits programs individual workers could take with them from job to job."
look at the types of benefits programs? For fucks sake, can we please just have Medicare for All already and a proper safety net? We don't need exploratory committees. We already know what works and what doesn't.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
what about enforcing the labor laws / adding an in between from 1099 to W2. or some like if you must where an uniform then you are W2.
I would love to one sign up for a 1099 job that forces an uniforms and not where it when they ask where is the uniform I can say where is the W2?
Right now we have sub contractors that are listed as 1099 but are controlled like w2 and when something goes wrong they get lumped with all of the costs even when it's not really there fault.
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
https://www.generalliabilitycl...
I thought the entire point of the "gig" economy was to provide people with flexibility to earn extra cash. Not as a full time job. The price for that flexibility of working how much and when you want is no benefits. Want a full time job with benefits, go get a real job.
They're talking about musicians here, right?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
How about rather than handing out money to the corporations to "do the right thing" we tax the fuck out of corps paying primarily 1099 and use that to fund real benefits for people.
Only Nixon could go to China. Only Trump can bring socialism to America.
Why do you want to use the violent coercive power of the state to enforce one-sided contacts that are detrimental both to the worker getting screwed over and to society as a whole? Contract fetishizing Libertarianism is laughably hypocritical. It's impossible without a strong, central, authoritarian state.
This is why I think the real, long-term solution to the conflict that split classical liberalism into (on the one hand) socialism and (on the other hand) libertarianism, is a kind of modified libertarianism that takes a good hard look at what kind of contracts are acceptable. Initially it was only contracts of rent and interest that I sought to invalidate, but then I started thinking maybe it's contracts more generally; a respect for property rights, the core of libertarianism, doesn't say anything about any power of people to create new rights or duties to bind each other. I used to phrase this idea as "libertarianism without contracts, only trades", but then realizing that it becomes really difficult to frame some basic services in terms of trades, which is to say exchanges of ownership -- if I pay you to rub my shoulders, what property has changes hands besides my money to you? -- had lead me to this more interesting current line of thought:
In philosophical and legal analysis, rights are divided up along two axes: active vs passive, and first-order vs second-order. A first-order active right is a liberty, which is just a right to do or not do something, with no corresponding duty or prohibition on anyone else. A first-order passive right is a claim, which is a right to have someone else do or not do something; this doesn't just mean positive rights, your right not to be punched in the nose is a claim against being punched in the nose, it prohibits others from doing so.
Meanwhile a second-order passive right is a claim against having your first-order rights changed, and is called an immunity; if you have an immunity, then you have some claims or liberties that cannot be changed. A second-order active right on the other hand is a liberty to modify first-order rights, and is called a power. Immunities limit powers and vice-versa, and likewise claims limit liberties and vice versa.
The general libertarian stance is, broadly speaking, one of maximal liberties except as limited by the claim to property (and your body is your own property, of course), and maximal immunities except as limited by the power to contract. Which is to say that you can do anything, except transgress upon someone else's property, unless you exercise your power to contract to change that, and enter into an exchange of new obligations with someone.
Except, on that first-order line, we have to make an exception to that exception or else we get anarcho-pacifism: if we are to allow for defense, then we have to have the liberty to act upon the property (their person is their property remember) of someone who would transgress against our property, otherwise someone assaulting you could claim that, in fighting back, you were committing ever bit as much a crime as them. So maximal liberty, except the claim to property, but with an exception to that exception restoring some further liberty again, limiting an attacker's claims.
So what then is the missing analogue for the second-order rights? Maximal immunities, except the power to contract, but with some exception to that exception restoring some further immunity again? I say the exception to the exception is for reflexive contracts: we do not have the power to prohibit ourselves from entering other contracts or requiring that we do so. That, in effect, limits all contracts to straight-up trades of goods and services, and does away with all kinds of problematic contracts such as exclusivity deals, non-competes, and rent and interest, among others I probably haven't thought of.
The elimination of rent and interest in particular then demolishes capitalism per se -- the system whereby wealth concentrates in the hands of the already-wealthy -- without requiring state intervention, in fact by requiring less of it because certain contracts are now unenforceable. This achieves socialism, but in a free market, resolving the contradiction that destroyed the progress of classical liberalism and stranded us in the quagmire we've been in for a century now.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
More half measures. Fix this problem, fix that problem, when what we really need is a sensible, universal, single payer system. American healthcare is increasingly looking like a tower of quick fixes and temporary patches, which of course are ineffectual, because we won't start the root problem in the face. We need a healthcare system, not a medical industry.
Half measures are likely the only viable course of action at this point, because we don't stand a chance in hell in dismantling the trillion-dollar Medical Industrial Complex.
Greed N. Corruption has become far too powerful. Not saying it's right, just stating fact.
In several jurisdiction on the European continent, contractors are already legally required to get their own insurance (in countries that don't provide it), save money for retirement, pay insurance for sick leave, factor in vacation time in their rates, etc.
This ends up working nicely there.
It helps bringing down the amount of working poors.
So yeah, we "Evil Euro-Communists" have actually manage to find a way to fuck it less than your "Land of the Free (markets) !"
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
All of libertarianism is impossible without a complete dictatorship. Interestingly one of the first people to every realize that and say it out loud was a highly regarded conservative.
History lesson follows:
Back in the 1970's after the democratically elected but left-leaning Salvadore Alende's government was overthrown in a coup by Pinochet, major libertarian economist F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman basically wrote his economic policy. Pinochet did the whole republican pipe dream. He destroyed the welfare state. He cut taxes on the rich. He locked the currency to the dollar and declared war on inflation. He got rid of practically every regulation (in between he killed tens of thousands of people rather brutally but lets' focus on the economics).
It was called the "Chilean Miracle" - the country's GDP growth rate shot up to amazing levels, it looked set to rapidly become the wealthiest country in South America ! It seemed too good to be true.
And Hayek set off to Britain to use those numbers to sell the idea to Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher went over the list, looked at the amazing results in Chile, and listened to Hayek and then adopted quite a few of Pinochet's policies. Hayek ranted that only adopting SOME of those policies would not achieve the same good results and Thatcher told him: it's impossible to do more than a few. Chile is a dictatorship, Britain is a democracy. You can ONLY do the full libertarian recipe for an economy in a dictatorship - it's impossible in a liberal democracy over a free people.
The tail of the story is that it turned out the Chilean miracle actually WAS to good to be true - it literally never happened. What DID happen is that, in the absence of any significant taxes bankers had nothing to discourage padding their profit margins to drive up share prices, and in the absence of basically any regulation of the finance industry: there was no way to catch them doing it.
Soon every banker was reporting massively greater profits than any of them were actually making. In reality - none were making much more than they had been making under Alende - and the entirety of that massive GDP growth consisted of nothing but flagrant lies on balance sheets - bankers pretending they made much more profit that never existed, driving up their share prices and getting a lot richer.
By 1982 investors started getting fishy, some started investigating... and discovered the fraud- and the Chilean economy collapsed into tatters.
The greatest libertarian economic experiment of all time did not yield a single penny in growth - all it did was to produce perhaps the greatest scale of bankfraud in human history (Seriously - it made the subprime crises look like somebody misplaced the petty cash). Somebody else based his ideology on the Chilean miracle - and never altered it even after the miracle was shown to be nothing but smoke and mirrors, Ronald Reagan.
And, in a very real sense, that's how the world we live in now was born.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
contractors still need some of the min wage stuff so they can be changed for stuff like dine and dash / CC change backs / etc.
He's so awesome that he finds it hard to comprehend that some people aren't as awesome as he is.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This is your brain on libertarian stupidity.
Kids, don't become libertarians.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
The reason benefits are tied to employers is because government regulations and tax incentives make it so. That's why we now need even more regulations to deal with gig workers, and preexisting conditions, etc. And don't be fooled: people like Mark Warner will use this kind of regulation as yet another opportunity to pay off supporters, lobbyists, and special interests, including the gig economy corporations themselves.
Health insurance, disability insurance, etc. should be like car insurance: tied to the individual, with all the tax breaks and support going to the individual, not his employers. And people who are destitute should get simple financial support, not get caught up in big government-run programs.
Nope. It is because he was wrong. Fundamentally...
According to him, for example, 8 hours of work by a ditch-digger is equally valuable as 8 hours of an engineer or a pastry-chef. Equally valuable and therefore to be equally rewarded. As I said, wrong .
The progressive movement of 1900 had little to do with what's known as "progressive" today. But if you are willing to defend, what those guys did, let's start with the Prohibition... :)
No. The reason was Capitalism's ability to produce wealth — more than any other regime — and enough of it to keep the workers and the farmers satisfied, to the dismay of the Marxists. It is this satisfaction they've been trying to erode with varying success ever since — with made-up "outrages" over non-issues like "gender equality"... See also Marxism 2.0.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
No, I don't think this is true — what ditch-digger would prefer a ditch he dug to a pastry? But even if he did value his ditch out of some sentimental attachment, what of it?
No, I haven't. And why is such inequality even a bad thing automatically and by itself? Is Michael Phelps' ability to swim so much better than that of the rest of us alarming? Should we impose a "windfall" tax on his Olympic medals? People have equal inalienable rights, but we aren't born equal. Unless you are also prepared to cripple the strong, lobotomize the smart, and disfigure the beautiful — for equality — why would you tax the successful?
But stipulating, the said disappearance of the middle class is both real and bad, why are you accusing the Capitalists of it — and not, for example, the ever increasing government "spreading" of everybody's wealth around? Or, for another example, not the trade policies favoring the truly oppressive (Marxist) China?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
What has eroded away the middle class are blue collar jobs going away. Between jobs going to Mexico, Indonesia and China and the taxes paid, the middle class has taken a hit. When the factories close, blue collar workers become waitresses and the like.
... is how this will help people get gigs.
And aren't there existing insurance policies that cover this stuff?
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
The newly unemployed gig workers thank you for your help.
From your link ( https://www.bloomberg.com/poli... )...
Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said "We are no longer going to measure compassion by the number of programs and the amount spent on those programs."
Bloomberg fraudulently inserted a period to make it seem like that was the full quote. It was not. The full quote is:
"We are no longer going to measure compassion by the number of programs or the number of people on those programs, but the number of people we help get off of those programs."
Bloomberg's cut-off, altered version doesn't make sense. But the full quote demonstrates an understanding of what true compassion is all about.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
I get it. You really #HateTrump. But you still have to call him President... Suck it up, cupcake.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.