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The Gig Economy Keeps Growing, But Worker Benefits Aren't (technologyreview.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: According to a new report out from Brookings, the number of non-employer firms -- primarily incorporated freelancers and gig-economy workers -- has grown 2.6 percent every year since 1997. By contrast, payroll employment has grown by only 0.8 percent annually in that time. That means a growing number of people lack employer-sponsored benefits like paid leave, health care, and retirement assistance. The Aspen Institute has proposed a system of portable benefits that are not tied to one job. Companies would make contributions to a worker's benefits on the basis of how much the employee works for them. To date, the U.S. government has not been helpful. House and Senate bills supporting gig-worker benefits have died in committee. But state and local governments are taking action. Washington, California, New York, and New Jersey are exploring avenues to provide benefits to their gig workers.
Everyone thinks they deserve something for nothing. Premium benefits, unlimited time off, first class insurance. All paid for by someone else. Look, if you're driving people around from point A to point B, or answering customer complain calls for a living, you aren't doing something that's worth those kind of benefits. Sucks, but it's true. Improve your skills, become marketable, hoist yourself up by your own petards, and join the economy as a maker and not a taker.
The "gig-economy" isn't a new concept. This is how things used to be before there were unions. What happened was laborers were exploited and then unionized to fight back for fair treatment. The outcome here will be no different, even if different means are used.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Legal chain immigration brings about 1M legal immigrants into the country per year. That's on top of the illegals, most of whom compete with workers on the low end.
It doesn't matter what you feel about immigration. The fact is that our immigration policies are nothing more than a safety valve on capital to ensure that the supply side is always high enough that the demand side never has to negotiate.
Here's a simple plan that would cause real growth in average wages very quickly:
1. Build the wall with the military's budget like Trump is threatening.
2. Abolish chain immigration.
3. Shred the green cards of all immigrants who arrived on chain migration in the last 20 years and order them to self-deport or face prison time.
4. Tie corporate taxes to how much business and how many American citizens are employed by the business.
5. Impose steep FICA excise taxes on outsourced labor. Make that offshore team in India so damn expensive in FICA costs that its not competitive.
6. Shred NAFTA and impose a minimum 25% tariff on all goods made by American companies in Mexico for the American market.
7. Pass a federal law that allows state and federal law enforcement to declare any business that relies on illegals to be a criminal enterprise as a whole entity and make its entire asset sheet liable for liquidation upon conviction.
It’s not “single payer”. It’s 48% of taxpayers paying for everyone. At least call it what it is.
Ladies and gentlemen, what we have here is a supply problem. The world is oversupplied with labor (people) for the amount of work demanded, thanks to productivity, automation, and the gradual end of the baby boomer growth era that fueled jobs and pay for everyone without a college degree.
No amount of hand-wringing or puzzling over the edges of the gig economy, or living wages, the decline of manufacturing, or working conditions, are going to overcome the fundamental pressure of demographics.
There are too many workers for companies to feel any pressure to raise wages, provide better benefits, or do anything that they don't need to, to keep sufficient workers on staff. (in general).
Welcome to what it feels like when growth stalls -- everyone yells at everyone else thinking that someone caused / can fix the problem, when in fact it's mostly out of our hands. Don't worry, it'll work itself out -- in about 10-15 years... just wait a while.
The problem with using "just get better" as a justification for accepting growing inequality is that it does not scale. If everyone had PhD's, there wouldn't be enough room for the elite positions, and many PhD's would end up mopping floors and other grunt work.
It's not a zero-sum game, but close enough that "just get better" isn't a complete solution.
American workers rank among the top in the world in economic productivity, but the benefits of that hard work is not trickling down to most workers. I'm not proposing pure socialism, just enough of it to distribute the wealth better without significantly harming incentives. There's a better balance point than what we have now. Set the dial to 5 instead of 9 on the socialism-to-plutocracy scale.
Table-ized A.I.
The Gig Economy Keeps Growing, But Worker Benefits Aren't
Umm... wasn't that kind of the whole point of companies pushing for a gig economy? Does anybody really believe that this consequence wasn't at least foreseen, if not downright planned for, by the corporate sector? Corporations believe it to be in their best interests both to reduce the amount of money they pay their employees, and to decrease those employees' freedom and autonomy so as to make them more docile and compliant. A gig economy gives workers the illusion of increased freedom, even as it increases their servitude. I'm pretty sure that's the penultimate wet-dream of c-levels and board members everywhere. Of course, the ultimate wet-dream is to replace all those workers with machines.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.