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Why Hasn't The Gig Economy Killed Traditional Work? (npr.org)
An anonymous reader quotes NPR:
In recent months, a slew of studies has debunked predictions that we're witnessing the dawn of a new "gig economy." The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) found that there was actually a decline in the categories of jobs associated with the gig economy between 2005 and 2017. Larry Katz and the late Alan Krueger then revised their influential study that had originally found gig work was exploding. Instead, they found it had only grown modestly. Other economists ended up finding the same -- and now writers are declaring the gig economy is "a big nothingburger."
Arun Sundararajan, a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business and the author of The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism, remains a true believer in the gig revolution.... When asked about the onslaught of data contradicting his thesis, Sundararajan said the Bureau of Labor Statistics continues "to underestimate the size of the gig economy and in particular of the platform-based gig economy." The best BLS estimate of the number of gig workers employed through digital platforms -- whether full-time, part-time or occasionally -- is one percent of the total U.S. workforce, or about 1.6 million workers, as of mid-2017. Sundararajan argues that the survey questions the BLS used to gather this data were clunky and don't quite capture what's going on.... He believes work done through gig platforms can be more efficient than work done in a traditional company -- and that will spell the company's doom...
The dawn of a new gig economy has seemed plausible because the Internet has been dramatically reducing transaction costs. Search engines have made it incredibly cheap to find goods and services, compare prices, and get bargains. Social media and peer reviews have made it easier to determine if people are trustworthy. E-commerce has made it easier process payments. You can click a button on a mobile phone and instantaneously have GPS guide drivers right to you. But as big as these efficiency gains have been, a new economy based on crowds of people doing gigs through digital platforms -- as exciting or scary as that might sound -- still doesn't compare to one based on the efficiencies and stability of the good old-fashioned company.
Arun Sundararajan, a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business and the author of The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism, remains a true believer in the gig revolution.... When asked about the onslaught of data contradicting his thesis, Sundararajan said the Bureau of Labor Statistics continues "to underestimate the size of the gig economy and in particular of the platform-based gig economy." The best BLS estimate of the number of gig workers employed through digital platforms -- whether full-time, part-time or occasionally -- is one percent of the total U.S. workforce, or about 1.6 million workers, as of mid-2017. Sundararajan argues that the survey questions the BLS used to gather this data were clunky and don't quite capture what's going on.... He believes work done through gig platforms can be more efficient than work done in a traditional company -- and that will spell the company's doom...
The dawn of a new gig economy has seemed plausible because the Internet has been dramatically reducing transaction costs. Search engines have made it incredibly cheap to find goods and services, compare prices, and get bargains. Social media and peer reviews have made it easier to determine if people are trustworthy. E-commerce has made it easier process payments. You can click a button on a mobile phone and instantaneously have GPS guide drivers right to you. But as big as these efficiency gains have been, a new economy based on crowds of people doing gigs through digital platforms -- as exciting or scary as that might sound -- still doesn't compare to one based on the efficiencies and stability of the good old-fashioned company.
Because banks, lenders, landlords, etc don't look at gig work as 'steady employment'? People don't want to set up their own company, buy their own tools, pay for their own training, healthcare, taxes, etc? Not to mention the job offers are terrible, gigs worth doing are hard to find..
Perhaps, despite all the noise about how "a recession's coming!" -- people are no longer desperate enough to work for less than minimum wage for exploitative gig economy platforms.
All this has done is displace those who would have worked at McDonalds.
Unless there is a massive race to the bottom then really workers have just moved slightly from one business to another. Given there are no reasonable gains to had at this tier of income I'm not sure what he was hoping for.
Anything remotely successful in this area is still going to resemble a typical corporation. Ahem, Uber, where we have gone from crufty shitty taxi service to a better taxi service.
That is probably the only positive because the traditional Taxi sucked ass. It was so unreliable and expensive at one point that I had a personal driver(s). It was actually a group that would share a phone and they always said call at any time.
I'd rather get paid all the time and slack off when I want than only get paid when I actually work
Why can't you? Uber only requires 1 drive a month and the driver app has 'destination mode' for you to reach a destination while taking rides.
... traditional work kills YOU!
"Gig economy" is for the desperate. Desperate workers who will take a shitty job, and desperate employers who need [task] done with minimal overhead and no commitment on their part. There is some overlap between "desperate" and "loser", but they are not always going to be the same.
Employment based around desperation isn't good thing in the long term, for either party. I think what we saw was a spike in desperation at the same time these services became technically and socially feasible. How big it is will vary year to year with the bubbles and fickleness inherent in the free market. Hypeman economists like Sundararajan will have their heads going in circles trying to make sense of it.
I think it's helpful in understanding to avoid buzzwords like "gig economy" altogether. These kind of buzzwords are loaded up with an entire narrative that makes it mentally easy for you to forget context and history, being swept up in the hype. The facts become harder to actually integrate into your worldview. Keep history and context in mind, and it's clear the "gig economy" is more evolution than revolution. You're fixed on this image of a bedraggled hipster, that is the detritus of Sundararajan's investment hype. The reality is more... real. Normal people wanting the same things they always have.
There are a few different options for you, then: Waze carpool app, and Scoop carpool app. I can't say which is better, but I've heard good things about Scoop.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"Gig economy" used to be called "contract work", it has always been a niche, and the new name has not changed anything about its upsides and downsides, which are well known and are the reason for it occupying that niche.
most individuals can not lead that kind of life!
;)
I have been a self employed contract programmer for 30+ years. It takes a different thought process to in essence run a small business which is what contractors/self employed/gig workers are doing.
I do not have personal/work lives. As an individual who is self employed I have a life.
Most individuals do not have the ability/drive/desire to run a business/be self employed. They do not have that special ability to create opportunities, cope with problems and solve them themselves.
Just my 2 cents
"Arun Sundararajan, a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business... remains a true believer in the gig revolution...."
I bet Arun has tenure at NYU.
I wonder if his position at NYU became like that of an uber driver (an independent contractor), he'd still be "true believer in the gig revolution"??
For some people and some jobs the gig model works. For other jobs, firms just use it to circumvent worker protection. Recall that MS and others have paid huge fines for misclassification of workers. If everyone is honest, being a contract worker is a good deal.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
If those count?
The trades are full of small and medium contracting firms, not to mention no shortage of self-employed as well. Far from being a new thing of course.
At the grocery store company (in the central USA) where I work, a number of the ~twenty-somethings are doing "gigs", but not for any happy reason.
...And many of them try to push that work off the app when they can; to avoid the app fees and so they can skim on taxes as well...
All of them live on their own--so they need a full-time income--but none of them can find a starting job that is full-time.
And getting one part time job is easy, but most part-time jobs refuse to give fixed hours anymore, so it's nearly impossible to get two part-time jobs at different places.
So they are working one 'normal' part-time job (at the store, for 20-25 hours a week) and doing odd jobs on various phone/web app companies online. The online work is low-skill stuff like yard work, house cleaning, dog walking and so on.
So the truth with most of these people is that they're doing online gig work not because it's better than a part-time job, but because they can't find any full-time job, and because they can't find two part-time jobs that will schedule around each other.
I am not an economist, but I don't know that this is exactly a good sign.
When I just 'opted out' and went to enjoy my basement life.
Nobody hires full time anymore. Nobody promises raises for good performance anymore. Standing out as a productive employee is a double edged sword that in some places helps you rise fast and in others ensures employees or managers will gun for you to keep you from moving up.
Based on everyone I know (family included) running businesses, nobody is following the law 100%, lots of people get paid in cash and leave it off their taxes.
The whole system is broken from top to bottom, and the only way to tell the honest from the dishonest is if they are in debt, but only spending meagerly. Everyone else seems to be living with dirty laundry stinking up some part of their life.
> Why Hasn't The Gig Economy Killed Traditional Work?
Because there's still a demand for traditional work. Next.
Because the workers needed to make the Gig Economy (TM) haven't embraced it? And why would that be? Maybe it's because:
1. Gig workloads are inconsistent. One day or night you're busy, the next you might be sparsely working
2. Too many people started competing for those gigs, which leads to....
3. The Gig payscale is awful and many people give it up after a while because they realize they'd make more at a boring steady job where they can reliably predict what their next paycheck will look like.
4. Hours are supposed to be flexible on whatever the worker wants to do, but in reality there are boom times and down times. If you're not working those, you're not paying your rent.
As an example of the above, we don't have Uber where I live but when I travel I use it a lot. It's great for the customer. But I also make a point of talking to the drivers about their experience with it as I'm quite curious about what they have to say. More than half the drivers I talk to say the profit for them keeps declining because of increasing operations costs and Uber's income share on the rides keeps shifting. Most of the full-time drivers say if they had known how the numbers would work out they would probably not have ditched their old day job to do Uber full time. Maybe one in 10 I talk to actually seem to enjoy it.
The gig economy is bullshit. It's just another fancy label for "you're going to be at will contractors and we're gonna pay you peanuts"
... similar technologies would save it anyway!
" You can click a button on a mobile phone and instantaneously have GPS guide drivers right to you.", wow what a great enabler! What can you do with it, some kind of postal service? It's not doing well as it is... Sure, Uber would have some success if the regulated competition needs to spend on licenses, insurances, minimum wages and such but it's not because it's more efficient but because it's circumventing the law (that we probably have way too many laws and regulations and circumventing them might be sometimes beneficial it's another story).
Otherwise some things never took off - yes you could have some products delivered to your door by the producer directly but even grocery delivery from big chains never were a success. Obviously you won't be making heart surgery or even smartphones in the "gig economy" and what other things you can make or offer are pretty well covered as they'll ever be, from plumbers to prostitution. That you'll have in some years some services as pervasive as Uber or heck YouTube and you'll be wondering how was the life before sure. But to have other special expectations about "gigs" is like people were saying when the hard drives went up 200% in prices in 2011-2012: I'll just save it in the cloud. Riiiight.
...in 2008 we were in a drastic economic condition that allowed regulators to look away from business subcontracting employees to shed their responsibility in paying their fair share of taxes and benefits.
As our condition improved, regulators started to take a hard look at how employers were classifying their employees and a large amount of these employers saw the writing on the wall and hired their "contractors". The ones that didn't are currently taking their lumps with the AGs of many states.
So, companies got off not paying their fair share of comp, FICA, retirement, UI, and benefit packages for 4 or 5 years. You know, just like the banks. As usual, those "contactors" took it in the rectum and were held responsible to cover the full cost of taxes and insurance.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
First there was slavery/indentured servancy, but that didn't turn out so well with all the 'human rights' abuses and all. So the 'slave' corporation decided to rename to 'gig' corporation to improve its public image. Because 'cool hip sounding names are everything'., it doesn't matter what you do.
Next question.
... is more efficient.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Long term software I mean. It is more and more important how long one can maintain the software, fixing it, improving it than how effectively, how quickly you can write it from scratch (which is what "gig" economy is about: drive-by writing). That relies on healthy long term employment of real FTEs.
I heard from one of my works a reply to my criticism of his software: "it works". That is the lowest level of readiness of the software.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Unless of course more people start using those places as they get richer. I mean I prefer using websites if possible, but a lot of them seemed determined to make my life as miserable as possible through the awesome power of JavaScript. It's kind of impressive that they can over come my innate desire to not deal with actual people, but there you go.
I've found as I've advanced in my career, got paid a bit more and have less tube that there's value in being able to chuck some money at something and have it done for you hassle free.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
As in most industrialized countries, the labor force is declining which reduces the potential benefits of competition on the labor market. Furthermore, many more complex tasks require people doing a job for a longer time. Not providing them with a stable and guaranteed working environment will result in people leaving.
The gig economy isnâ(TM)t really that new. Casual jobs have been around for a very long time (forever?). Hereâ(TM)s a newsflash: most jobs benefit from specialisation of labour and experience and most employees prefer longer employment commitments.
because gigs are total shit like 90% of the time, the remaining 10% is typically mislabelled traditional self employment
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
... is more efficient.
Yep. Kinda hard to staff a helpdesk by "gig", for example.
And the highest tier helpdesk are the programmers who actually know the system. Good luck providing that to your customers via "gig".
Workloads ebb and flow in almost every organization - if all workers are gigged (so to speak) then all the knowledge and experience walks out the door at the first ebb. Paying regular salary and benefits smooths out the ups and downs of labor requirements.
There are liability issues
Where I live and frok my perspective, I don't see any desperation or lack of full-time jobs. We probably live in different places, though. Anyway, you mentioned something that reminded me of something interesting.
> low-skill stuff like yard work, house cleaning, dog walking and so on.
Funny thing about that is the going rate for someone to cut your grass or clean your house is about $30/hour here in Dallas. (Roughly equivalent to $50/hour on the coast), yet the vast majority of people lacking marketable skills would rather make $12 / hour at a "regular job".
I've talked to a lot of people because I like to help young people get started and convicts get re-started and the number of people who choose $12/hour working for someone else rather than $30-$40/hour working for themselves is surprising to me.
It seems there are at least two reasons. A somewhat logical reason is that they want consistency. Doing gigs you don't know if you'll make $400 this week or $550. People like consistency so much they prefer to know they'll make $400 working at the mall.
A purely emotional reason is that people are so nervous about having their own business - despite the fact they know many twelve year old kids mow lawns. They might personally know a 12 year old who mows 10 lawns every week for $300, yet they work 30 hours for the same money because their nervous about whether they can do the same thing that kids all over America do.
The power is with the platform not with the gig workers.
Some of the anti-discriminatory laws and equal access laws can be more easily flouted in gig economy along with laws regarding safety, insurance etc. So a few bad apples can cut a large swath of the market to swear off such platforms.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Live performance terminated at-will without cause, by definition a performance art. The Gig Economy is a one-time event all have witnessed, participated or enjoyed. Its real until it isn't. Work lasts a lifetime, real and business organized on the principle of it outlasting the life of its workforce.
The onus for providing benefits and worker's comp is put on the contractor instead of the contractee. If you wind up having an accident, tough. You are on your own to heal thyself and get another gig. No workers comp, that is if you don't get a DBA and a federal tax ID, declaring yourself as a company. Then guess what? You are a businessman operating a company, paying state and federal taxes, like it or no.
Oh, and if you want to retire, you have to plan one out yourself with help from a financial advisor. And pray the money flow stays constant.
Vacation? Who needs them? You are working to feed you and your family now. So you have to stay at it, pretty much all the hours you want to or have to be scheduled for? Long days and/or nights doing gigs. Oh, loads o fun.
So much for the advantages of the gig economy.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
You pay $30 an hour, but for every hour of work there's another hour or more of searching for the work, making arrangements with you, and of course driving who knows how far to you and back. And then sometimes there's a middleman taking a cut too.
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Don't forget equipment maintenance.
I hate euphemisms, and "gig worker" is just a euphemism for slave-wage day laborer. We've been down that path before, is this really what we want to go back to? Color me shocked that people are resistant to voluntarily opting into this!
Some people are hesitant to set up their own business because it's not quite as simple as it was when you're 12 and mowing lawns. Some jobs require insurance, which you pay for annually whether you work or not. Others require you to be incorporated. The quarterly filings aren't a big deal, but might scare some people off, but even after twenty years of doing so, prefer an accountant to do the annual filings and schedules. Soon as you do that, you run into $500-$1000/year expense and have equipment that needs to be expensed and depreciated. It's really not the same as mowing lawns.
It's also better for part time work, where you can pick up a contract whenever you want. Uber was supposed to be like this. Ride sharing whenever you had some time and a spare seat in your car. But too many people turned it into a way around cities cab regulations to become full time taxi drivers.
Have gnu, will travel.
Because running around, not having a schedule, not having insurance, constantly looking for work, is exhausting, and the people who had just entered the work forces when day laboring, sorry, I mean "Gig economy" started are tired of it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
well-off baby people.
I just had a relative pass. She married into money in the 50s.
Her funeral had people, across every generation starting in 1930. None of the one with money do shit for themselves.
It's funny how you mention travel agents. I thought they were gone until 2 weeks ago when some 20 year old is talking about havng his travel agent do some books.
I thought he was kidding. Nope, it turns out he and his friend prefer to do that.
So, to sum up: People with money prefer other people to do work.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
30 an hour? I'd love to get those prices.
My yard won't take a professional more the 30 minutes to do, and the cheapest I could find was 130 a week.
House keeping? 175 for 2 hours.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I look at temp and gig workers as separate things. Where I work we have temps that have been there for years. Most temp work, unless itâ(TM)s for a special event like set up and tear down, is for work that lasts longer than a few weeks. You will be very limited in finding work if you canâ(TM)t work a 40 hour work week with whatever shifts they have available. Gig seems more like being paid by the task, per ride, per delivery. I think it would be better if temp work could be more like gig work. Maybe if Iâ(TM)ll could get some of the training out of the way by watching a video on your own, and rather than having to call an agency and having them say what they have, you could have an app and say what block of time you can work. If I wanted to work 4 hours today, I cant do that as a temp, I can with a gig.
to get out of paying unemployment, pay roll taxes, benefits and minimum wage. They did it to taxi drivers for ages but it used to be mostly immigrants and the occasional ex-con 7 years past his sentence.
It wasn't right when we did it to them, but expanding it into the economy as a whole is bad juju for the entire workforce. It puts downward pressure on everybody's wages.
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I rather work the 40 hours to get a steady check and benefits.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
Because it's killing its workers.
Although back then it was called "Victorian working conditions" and it was shit and evil.
Arun Sundararajan is a hypocritical asshole - unless he's waking up every day wondering if he'll have any work to do at NYU Stern School of Business and is being paid the lowest possible wage the law will allow (because the free market will allow him to be charged to go to work - something that actually happened in Victorian days. You could be paid in company money which could only be spent in company shops).
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Be careful not to confuse the hourly rate you're paying as a customer with the hourly rate the worker is receiving. Even if they are self employed, working lawns carries several additional costs. e.g. Capital equipment (truck, trailer, mower, edger, etc.) and the maintenance on all those items, their time managing that maintenance, their time scheduling the work (and dealing with schedule changes), etc.
8 hours of pay is costing probably 12 hours of their time, which effectively brings their hourly rate from $30 down to $20. Now subtract expenses. I don't know exactly how much that would be but even if you estimate only $5/hr that brings them down to $15/hr which is only $31k/yr assuming they can work all year, which is not true for lawn care in most states.
If the kid gets sick for a few weeks, he'll lose those customers and that's okay. The kid's parents are providing food, housing, clothing, medical care and all the other necessities.
Most adults would quickly find themselves homeless with mounting medical debits in the same situation. Around 2/3 of the bankruptcies in the US are at least partly caused by medical costs.
So stuff your "they work 30 hours for the same money because their nervous about whether they can do the same thing that kids all over America do" right back where it came from. It's BS. They're nervous because the US doesn't provide the social safety net that the 12 year old has and failure as an adult means losing your place in society and, quite possibly, your life.
A purely emotional reason is that people are so nervous about having their own business - despite the fact they know many twelve year old kids mow lawns. They might personally know a 12 year old who mows 10 lawns every week for $300, yet they work 30 hours for the same money because their nervous about whether they can do the same thing that kids all over America do.
That 12 year old kid doesn't "own a business". Owning an actual business comes with tax an regulatory implications. You have to set up an LLC, pay both sides if FICA, arrange to pay yourself through the business, etc. Sure, it can be done. But it's not the same as some kid mowing lawns for spending money.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
30 an hour? I'd love to get those prices.
My yard won't take a professional more the 30 minutes to do, and the cheapest I could find was 130 a week.
House keeping? 175 for 2 hours.
Are those independent contractors? Those prices are ridiculously high. Nextdoor or your neighbors probably can recommend someone a little more reasonable.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Also, if you're doing everything above board, the guy doing gig work has to pay self employment taxes. As a W2 the employer would be responsible for half of your federal taxes; but as a gig worker you have to pay both halves. That 30/hr starts looking more like 10/hr very quickly once you factor all the typical expenses and taxes.
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Owning an actual business comes with tax an regulatory implications. You have to set up an LLC, pay both sides if FICA, arrange to pay yourself through the business, etc
Sole proprietor here. No, you don't have to set up an LLC to have a business. And a 12 year old earning $300 per week is not going to be mowing all year and very unlikely to hit the $12,000 mark that requires them to file taxes, not even FICA.
Scratch that, it's a $400 minimum for self-employed people. There's probably no more tax fraud among kids than among adult business owners from what I've seen. People are always wanting to pay me in cash, thinking that I'm somehow not going to keep detailed records and not report income.
Does anyone else think this blog post is profoundly stupid????
Thank you for stating what should be obvious to each and all and why I think this /. posting is beyond pathetic and ignorant. Also, would recommend reading The Myth of Capitalism if you haven't read it yet (don't agree with all the authors' opinions, but do support their data!).
looney tunes, supported right-to-be-fired without any notice, etc.
I turned down both a full-time job and several contract jobs because I have two kids, one who had a serious medical condition at the time - proper group policy insurance was worth waiting for, even at lower take-home pay.
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
I've found as I've advanced in my career, got paid a bit more and have less tube
Sorry to hear about your tube shrinkage. Perhaps you could contact one of the entrepreneurs that are always sending me mail about increasing the size of my tube and get that issue addressed.
Enigma
A few people have answered this from the employees' perspective, but there's a much more obvious answer...
My projects at work are almost always multi-week, sometimes even taking the better part of a year. Just getting familiar with the systems my employer uses took me over a year, and that's already having been completely competent in the base platform and proficient at the tools and languages involved in doing the actual work.
The "gig" economy is great for situations where "probably" is good enough and the work is low-to-no-skill. If one Uber driver doesn't show up, it just means you wait two extra minutes for the next one. If one day-laborer is sick today, there's 20 others to pick from in the Home Depot parking lot. And even then, that doesn't always work - If the ship or railcar doesn't get unloaded, you're paying demurrage. If the checkout lines aren't adequately staffed, people start abandoning full carts and walking out.
Not everything can be a "gig". If an employer needs either highly skilled labor, or a guaranteed minimum number of bodies present - Not a gig.
I was just talking to a floor repair specialist, he said he works 80+ hour weeks sometimes because he never knows when a zero hour week will come along. I wondered at the time if I could ever handle that sort of uncertainty.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
If you save the extra money during good weeks, spending only what you make ON AVERAGE, you can quickly have three months of expenses saved and then you're not so scared about bad weeks.
This simple, but not easy.
I wonder if anyone from O'Reilly reads this site?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Well I have several joba that need done. I'll pay $25/hour. :)
Funny to hear the Gig Economy gospel from Mr. Sundararajan, a tenured university professor with all the benefits that regular employment can bring, along with the job security that few jobs can offer.
Maybe he should leave the ivory tower and try living out the precarious work life he preaches.
Funny thing about that is the going rate for someone to cut your grass or clean your house is about $30/hour here in Dallas.
I asked a relative in Dallas. The response to $30/hr was one word: 'bullshit'. $15/hr is apparently on the high side.
For those using the owner's (of the lawn) equipment somewhat under $15/hr is typical according to my people in Dallas.
In other words Raymorris's post becomes 'Why would you work for someone for $12/hr, possibly with health care as compared to very slightly more, net, with all the attendant risks and no health coverage?'
Those are unusually high rates unless you live somewhere where the cost of living is high.
If they know ANYONE who will do it for $15/hour, I have a house that needs cleaned, a lawn that needs mowed, a pool needs painting, lots of stuff. Send them my way! I'll gladly pay $20/hour, assuming they aren't a crackhead.
If the kid gets sick for a few weeks, he'll lose those customers and that's okay. The kid's parents are providing food, housing, clothing, medical care and all the other necessities.
Most adults would quickly find themselves homeless with mounting medical debits in the same situation.
As far as my understanding of the US system goes, this would happen to the employed adult, too.
bickerdyke