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A comment on The gig economy of the 18th Century. Parent comment

Re:The gig economy of the 18th Century by francisofascii on Monday July 24, 2017 @10:44AM (#14838817)
The problem is the contractor, may not be working more because he wants to, but because he is not certain the work will be available in the future. Also, since the contractor is willing to work 60 hours, he is a little more attractive to employers. Also the town you live in has a finite housing supply. So even though you think you are making decent money, you are being outbid by all the 60 hours/week contractors who have more money than you. So you eventually give in and start working 60 hours to keep up.
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Re:The gig economy of the 18th Century by conanbatt on Monday July 24, 2017 @12:35PM (#14839900)
To keep up what. His own expectations?

The angle of your comment, to me, doesn't take into account basic incentive differences between contractors and employees.

Employees are provided with certain benefits, but those benefits are paid by the employees themselves, not by "the company" or "the state". PTO is paid by the employee, simply because any job in existence has a salary based on perceived value by the employer. There isn't really a fundamental difference to an employee (in general)between paying 110 a year with 1 month time of, or paying 10 monthly without pto and allowing 1 month of licensing.

There is a difference to the employee though: he perceives, falsely, that the time off he gets is "free time, paid by someone else" and so he is way more inclined to use it. Specially when there are rules like expiration on them.

A small business man that runs his own shop or contracting work, knows that the time he does work he doesn't get paid. Because the cause and effect are so close together, the contractor is way more unwilling to take time off, because he wants that money.

Contractors work more not because they don't have worker rights, but because they can more clearly see what the effect of not working is. Now figure a law that says that contractors shouldn't work more than 40 hours a week: what a disaster it would be for them and for society, that people that want to work are prohibited from doing so.

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Re:The gig economy of the 18th Century by francisofascii on Monday July 24, 2017 @01:37PM (#14840700)
> Now figure a law that says that contractors shouldn't work more than 40 hours a week: what a disaster it would be for them and for society

I agree that people should definitely not be prohibited from working more than 40 hours. But disastrous? Let's assume such a law was passed. People would visit friends and family, spend time with kids, get better sleep, have time to cook, exercise, read more books. How is that disastrous? What is disastrous is people never having time to enjoy the things I just mentioned. So I would support simple policy disincentives to people working outside the range of let's say 30-50.

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Re:The gig economy of the 18th Century by conanbatt on Monday July 24, 2017 @02:43PM (#14841386)
It would be disastrous if it were enforceable. In the us the avg time is 47 hours: forcibly reducing 7 hours would mean that there would be 20% less labor. GDP would have such a huge contraction, and there would be not only less money, but less things to spend money on. It would be a huge economic hit in the aggregate.

Of course, laws that would try to do such things always end up failing because people are pretty ingenious.

People can make the choice every day to work less and enjoy more, but they dont not because they are forced to, but because they assess what they like the most. Every person has to do a trade off between work and leisure, and restrictions on work just messes with what people want.

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