Lots of issues in modern US business arise from laziness / stupidity / corruption / uselessness of Congress.

I believe that there should be reform and that we should be working towards a better legal environment for informal workers and companies that want to use them at scale facilitated by technology. You can believe that and still recognize that the law as written would not support a definition of these workers as independent contractors (because they are not and it really is not a gray area due to the way that they are managed/directed).

It's also an issue for the US that we can go many years under an enforcement regime that assumes that we basically have this new category of worker that we are, for reasons of convenience, defining as independent contractors, but that the law clearly states do not meet the definition of independent contractors. Then we get a new administration that decides it will enforce the law as it's written instead of tacitly recognizing the fake pseudo reform of non enforcement that we had from earlier administrations. That isn't good government.

The problem with your argument is that because the law is ambiguous with regard to this situation, the labor secretary is effectively making law by choosing a particular interpretation of the law.

Though to be clear, I agree with you 100% that this is because Congress is just perpetually failing America through corruption, selfishness, etc., and that failure puts the labor secretary in an unenviable position of having to enforce laws that don't really work for the situation.

Your argument does not provide any basis for preferring one interpretation over another.

In terms of preference, mine is not for one labor secretary's policy over another (I mean, I have a preference there, but it's beside the point here). My argument is that the labor secretary is making law here, and that is a bad thing because it is the job of Congress to make laws, which they are utterly failing to do.

Congressional paralysis is definitely a problem, but until we have a major change in either Senate rules or political paradigm, we not see any improvement on that front.

My understanding is that if a worker has any characteristic of an employee, they are an employee. Any of several criteria are sufficient and only one of them is necessary.

In the bigger picture, Congress passes laws and delegates authority to a branch of government to establish rules and regulations using a process complying with other statutes that dictate how rules and regulations become binding.

Essentially, in the US at all levels -- Federal, State, and Local -- there are two types of legal requirements. Statutes and rules/regulations. The statute is the what. Rules and regulations are the implementation details...ok, there's actually a third parallel part which is legal precedent established by the courts.

Anyway, Congress delegates authority to executive agencies so that it can focus on other things and not have to micro-mange each tiny detail of everything under the sun.

As to "Anyway, Congress delegates authority to executive agencies so that it can focus on other things and not have to micro-mange each tiny detail of everything under the sun." - each tiny detail? This is a case of classifying millions of workers. We're not talking about a tiny detail, we're talking about something that is immensely important both to all the people affected by it as well as all the companies that have to operate under these labor laws. This isn't Congress delegating away the details, it's them failing for an extended period of time to address an absolute enormous and critical issue in the labor market.

In terms of scale the Department of Labor classifies all workers. Should Congress classify each worker individually?

Were previous Labor Secretaries out of line for classifying the workers as contractors?

As a member of the Executive branch, that seems to be his job, yes.

“Employees” gain access to the full gamut of employment-law protections; “workers” get some protections but can be dismissed at will; the self-employed are taxed more lightly but receive few legal rights.

The Surpreme court ruled that Uber drivers are workers and not self-employed.

And self-employed here generally are not taxed less, rather about the same (details vary), but have to do the taxation themselves.

I should note that you still can be fired illegally, for example surrounding harassment or protected status (gender, race, etc...).

And by extension lots of issues in Congress arise from laziness / stupidity / corruption / uselesssness of the electorate that put them there. Invest heavily in education and revisit in a few generations.

It is a persistent myth that the US does not invest in education. Not only is the dollars per student spent in the US competitive, it exceeds the majority of European nations spending per student by a large margin.

"In 2015, the United States spent approximately $12,800 per student on elementary and secondary education. That is over 35% more than the OECD country average of $9,500. At the post-secondary level, the United States spent approximately $30,000 per student, which was 93% higher than the average of OECD countries ($16,100)."

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/020915/what-country...

I see this question only rarely asked. Too many people seem to think that shoveling extra money on X will get you better results almost automatically. No, it won't, corruption and special interests can capture that extra value unless the investor is careful.

Now it is true that underfinancing will get you worse results, but the opposite just does not hold.

Money is going somewhere but most of it isn't into the actual education.

It also means that outside money can lead to successful primaries of otherwise popular legislators, if the legislator doesn't toe the line required. There used to be many Republicans that not only publicly agreed that climate change is a real, human-caused, phenomenon and that also proposed action to solve the problem. After a few legislators got primaried out of their seats, this position is no longer allowed at all in public statements by Republicans, because most legislators are too scared to risk being primaried.

Increasing the House of Representatives by ten fold or more might help.

Getting rid of many of the procedures that prevent votes from happening would probably help too.

And of course, overturning Citizens United...

While you would end up with much more representatives - and in theory more representation - each individual rep would become much less influential. I think expanding the house to be thousands of members large would also make deliberations much more difficult and shallow as a result. I have no idea how parliamentary procedure would work with thousands of interested parties. But I do acknowledge that it is do-able.

That being said, I am in favor of increasing the size of the house, but only by about 100 seats or so. I'd also want term limits in order to facilitate more turnover for district seats. But that's a separate debate.

This.

Sometimes I feel like the entire nation needs to go back and revisit our civics books. The job of the Labor Secretary is to make certain that federal labor laws are followed. If you want changes to federal labor law, it does you no good to demand them of the Labor Secretary. Call your congressperson and your senator. Even better, vote for more qualified congresspeople and senators.

This is a republic. Which means that ultimately, the labor laws are far more our fault than the fault of the Labor Secretary.

The problem with this comment (and others like it) is the presupposition that the problem is that people are not voting "correctly", because if only they did, all the problems would be solved.

But that glosses over a very large number of problems, some of which are deeply systematic, at which point questions like "whose job is it really to fix these issues anyways" may in fact deserve answers that are more out-of-the-box than "the republican democratic system works as intended, so the problem must be elsewhere".

This glosses over the fact that enough of the population disagrees with your assessment of the problem and proposed solutions that there is no consensus and that is why your problems are not being solved in the way that you want. In fact, that is almost always the case.

People feel that the thresholds of consensus required in republican processes get in the way of their plans only when they fail to persuade others. Then they start looking for more authoritarian solutions, such as having party-bureaucrats make laws by fiat.

Yes, this is part of it, but it goes even deeper than that. For example, California government passed AB-5, and then later popular ballot passed prop 22, which essentially goes contrary to AB-5. Does that suggest that leadership is out of touch with the electorate? Maybe. The fact that numerous pages of exceptions had to be carved out in AB-5 in the first place (and it's still criticized even after that) also indicates that the legislation wasn't very well thought out to begin with.

If you think in terms of a software engineering organization, it would seem crazy to take bug reports and just blindly do whatever the tickets with largest number of CAPS LOCK words says. But governments often do exactly that: they take some top-of-mind idea and just go with it, without paying heed to any sort of expert research, leaving implementation details to be determined by others "lesser" offices of government, and without care for the repercussions of rolling out such policies. It's the equivalent of pushing the "release" button in your enterprise software, cross your fingers and hope for the best, without any observability infrastructure and without a rollback plan if everything breaks.

> People feel that the thresholds of consensus required in republican processes get in the way of their plans only when they fail to persuade others. Then they start looking for more authoritarian solutions

This is also true, and it's definitely a touchy subject. On one hand, global consensus seems "fairest", but is it really the fairest if the vast majority of people are not affected by a decision (or they are affected to different degrees depending on various factors)? What of their expertise in the subject matter? Many problems do have solutions that align with common sense, but many others require solutions that are counterintuitive, but that can only be proven to be more effective with hard research. It's a difficult line to thread, and I feel that the status quo favors popularity more than science when it comes to decision making.

The idea of representative government is you outsource decision making to people, not that you hire people to always do what the majority wants. That is the justification for a ballot initiative override. Not necessarily saying that ballot overrides of legislative actions are good structure -- there are pros and cons. But in the case of AB-5, that was clearly an out-of-touch legislative body taking some very extreme measures that were more radical than the state population wanted. That is a common thing when you have one-party states like CA, so in the current CA landscape ballot initiatives are a good safety check on what is a one party legislature controlled by party insiders.

> If you think in terms of a software engineering organization, it would seem crazy to take bug reports and just blindly do whatever the tickets with largest number of CAPS LOCK words says. But governments often do exactly that

In my experience in the corporate world, working from everything from non-profits to start ups to DJIA member companies, I find corporate decision making to be equally random and opaque. They are just random in different ways. In the corporate world, if you can find an executive sponsor and frame something the right way, you can convince them to follow a road of sheer madness. In government, if you can convince a politician that something is trendy or a cheap way of getting votes, they will commit huge blunders. If you can convince them that something is a moral imperative, they will commit unspeakable atrocities.

> This is also true, and it's definitely a touchy subject. On one hand, global consensus seems "fairest", but is it really the fairest if the vast majority of people are not affected by a decision (or they are affected to different degrees depending on various factors)?

Indeed a tough subject. The way I think about is this. If you are in the business world and you are leading a team of 5 engineers, who are trying to make a decision. Let's say 3 strongly believe in A. 2 Strongly believe in B and are strongly opposed to A. Do you say "majority rules"? Unlikely. You will try to find consensus. Consensus could be something like 60%A and 40%B. This consensus gathering process is why businesses often do crazy things, but they don't know a better way as pissing off 40% of your team is something you need to avoid. The 2 people can quit -- they can transfer to another team. So ultimately you do need to gather consensus rather than search for 50% +1 in making decisions within a team.

But a society is like that team. It requires more than 50% +1, otherwise you will find groups seceeding. One way of addressing this is to put in various roadblocks to require more than 50%. Say you need 2/3. Then people have to negotiate. If you want to do something 1/3 hates, then you can do it if you give them something in return. You bargain and you reach a consensus where everyone gets some of what they want, even if they don't like it. But then you might reach a situation where the society is split and simply can't come to a consensus because there are moral issues at stake that they are not willing to compromise on. Then your option is federalism. You break the society up into two groups and let each one make rules for themselves. Within each federalist group you have the super majority requirement again, but because they have shared values, they can reach that super majority.

All of this stuff was debated long ago in 18th-19th C France and England, and many very smart people looked at all these issues, which is why we have this weird federalist form of government in the US where you have both a senate and a house and it's really hard to get anything passed into law unless you have both a geographic and population supermajority on your side. But as the nation splits into two camps that view each other as basically evil, unreedemable, hopelessly foolish people, you are finding more and more gridlock and more and more appeals to Federalism. California wants to run their own climate policy? Fine, let them. Oklahoma wants fracking and free gasoline to everyone? Fine, let them. If you don't, the days of the republic are numbered.

That's fair, but it's still madness :)

> ultimately you do need to gather consensus

I think consensus is just one form of conflict resolution. Compromise is another, for example. When we have a scenario of 5 people, 3 pro-X and 2 pro-Y, one could argue that are actually three choices: X, Y and the status quo, where an impasse between X and Y is functionally equivalent to everyone being pro-status-quo. Rephrasing in terms of status quo vs something else might help in understanding where X and Y overlap and where they differ and might lead to more productive open-ended discussions than a discussion that is solely adversarial between X and Y.

I don't believe it's necessarily possible to reach consensus in all cases. For example, the issue of abortion doesn't seem like one where either side is willing to let go. But I do believe that it's possible to reach a compromise in many cases (for example, pro-life proponents might be willing to concede that a anencephalic fetus posing life threatening risk to the mother is an acceptable case, while still believing that normal unplanned pregnancies should be taken responsibility for).

There's also always a possibility of a fourth choice Z, for example a policy from a different country (e.g. Portugal's handling of drug abuse being seen as a medical problem, rather than limiting the discussion to one solely about the spectrum of criminal severity). And there's yet other ways to handle conflicts, such as the iron fist approach that China uses (which some might argue was effective at handling covid, for example, questionable as it may be in other areas such as freedom of speech).

My take away is mostly that even if things are as they are because of something that was settled by scholars centuries ago, it still behooves us to revisit different ideas, ideologies and approaches to tackle today's problems, rather than ignoring or not understanding the weaknesses of the status quo processes.

For issues that can't be compromised, federalism is the solution. However this falls apart for issues where there are real (or perceived) externalities. If you are anti-abortion because of your moral framework, its unlikely you see allowing another community to do it as acceptable. The same as if you are worried about climate change, you don't want fracking in places you don't live.

It also doesn't really matter what the Federal law is or Labor Secretary does/says, worker agreements are governed by State law, and their are 50 States with similar, but not identical legal standards defining employees vs independent contractors. In some cases you may be defined as an employee at the State level but Independent Contractor for purposes of the Federal level (say the IRS Code/Federal Taxes). Even within a single State one agency say unemployment office was classify you as employee and another such as workers comp classifies you as independent contractor.

But if you think the labor sec should merely concern themself with robotically enforcing the most literal meaning of the labor code, I think that's dubious as well. They should be thinking more big picture than that, like about whether the laws, when enforced, achieve their ostensible purpose. In this case, I would think it means saying, "well, if we want to do right by workers, I recommend we refactor the labor system like so...". That is, pass that on to Congress and the administration.

That, I think, should be a higher priority than fighting ever harder to be technically correct on an increasingly arcane distinction.

At which point congress is free to ignore the secretary. Ultimate authority always lies with congress. We can change that, assuming we want to change the Constitution. But today, congress is in charge of making laws. It is not in the remit of the Secretary to short circuit the Constitutional order. The best the secretary can do is, effectively, to send an email to congresspeople and senators. Which email would be a whole lot more effective coming from the voters instead of the secretary.

If the Labor Secretary is not acting in accord with Federal Statutes passed by Congress and legal precedents established by the Federal Courts, the Secretary can be sued and injunctive relief sought. Of course the Secretary can be sued even if they are following the law.

I have real independent contractors in my family, they might work 2 hours each for 50 different customers in a year. They do their job exactly how they want to. It's not like it makes sense for any one of their customers to provide benefits of any kind. This is the kind of stuff this classification was meant for.

They already have as much time off as they choose to have. It's all (obviously) unpaid as "who would pay them?"

Really all PTO is for most salary exempt positions anymore is ability to delay work without getting fired. Now if you work in a position where you churn out things on a daily basis or less and someone will fill in for you while you're gone, PTO is actually PTO.

There's an implication from PTO of a different era where you weren't required to makeup work you missed while on PTO. Much of that has disappeared. That's fine for most salary exempt positions assuming you aren't fed a constant queue of work to keep you pushing 50+ hour weeks regularly and it's OK to do 20 hour work weeks and some 50 hour work weeks.

Maybe I'm just old and people don't care that they do more for less TC than they did in years past.

And how exactly would you reach this conclusion? How would you know what's better for someone, better than they do? At least in CA, the decision was clear that it wasn't against people's interest.

Basically imagine you have Job A all things being equal you can have the Job A and all the benefits of being an employee or you can have Job A and none of the benefits of being an employee. How is it possible it is in anyone's interest to take Job A and not receive the benefits they are legally entitled to?

This must be why Uber incessantly spammed their workers with Prop 22 propaganda via push notifications[1] on their phones and tablets.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/15/21517316/uber-spamming-u...

Prop 22 actually removes options from the table, making it almost impossible to modify, repeal or replace the proposition. Surely if you and Uber cared about giving people options, then you'd recognize that labor law needs to adapt with the needs of workers, instead of being cemented in time in a manner that benefits some employers over everyone else.

There's a lot of jobs where work simply is not with a regular customer -- i.e. tradesmen, independent consultants, musicians, etc.

If a person mows lawns for 25 different customers in a given week, who gives them their vacation/retirement/health benefits?

The "gig economy" is a legal hack by corporations to pay workers less than minimum wage [2]. We can talk a lot about problems with government (there are a lot of issue there), but the fact that the government has issues does not act as a free pass to allow private institutions to pay workers less.

[1] https://mashable.com/article/uber-driver-survey-pandemic/

[2] https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-uber-driver-w...

20% is good for job dissatisfaction. Why would you be dissatisfied working there? Because you'd rather be doing something else. That's why they pay you.

I don't even get your initial point. Have you never worked a job you didn't like? Many jobs suck, but people have to earn money. They will hopefully, eventually move on to more satisfying jobs.

> Many gig workers explicitly do not want to become employees

I’ll be more clear, I have two points, point 1 is that “workers do not choose gig economy jobs because they offer flexibility, they choose them because they have low barriers to entry”. This means that employee classification is irrelevant to workers, they do not explicitly want to be contractors. The 20% job dissatisfaction statistic is sufficient to prove my point because if there were alternatives, those 1/5 of workers would not be working for Uber.

Point 2 is “the gig economy benefits employers more than traditional employment and disadvantages workers more than traditional employment” I support this claim with the statement that Uber drivers have been paid less than minimum wage.

We want employers to provide benefits, as opposed to the government because that means higher taxes. Then you put a million exclusions and tax deductions and other loopholes, so no one knows what they're really getting, but we can say we did something and that benefits do exist to serve as arguments against broadly, easily accessible benefits to serve as a floor on quality of life.

Universal healthcare, say Medicare for All style, does not have to mean higher taxes. And it would make a big difference to gig workers and the ones working for the likes of Walmart.

A very high percentage of Walmart employees need government assistance due to their income not actually being enough to pay the laborer what their labor costs them to deliver.

At a minimum, labor needs to exist reasonably and show up for work. Healthcare is a part of that, right along with the basics.

All of us are subsidizing labor for a few of us to put profit, or more peak profit in the bank.

The priority discussion boils down to what makes the most sense for the nation.

Do we cut back on the military industrial complex?

Maybe we decide subsidizing labor makes sense. That would also mean not shaming and blaming people who seek and obtain help from the government. Doing that is baked in right now, in that no matter what those people do, a large percentage of them will need help.

Or, we simply change nothing and yes, taxes are higher, but the national spend is lower overall. Many of us will benefit.

We could prioritize it so employers are more on the hook in various ways. Some of them will not be viable. Even if they all are, we may not have enough jobs. Government could be an employer to make sure everyone has a work opportunity that pays enough to exist and show up for work.

There are many options. Not all mean higher taxes, but all that discussion means a national priority talk also has to happen.

If we do nothing, our priority is not having people make it, exist reasonably and show up for work.

Predictably, lots of people are not making it, may do crime, are homeless, may not have health care, maybe will show up for work, if they can get it.

If our priority becomes about people existing reasonably and showing up for work, we will see that, but will have higher taxes, or back off some other things we currently make a priority.

The US spends $676 billion on defense, almost the exact same amount on Medicare, $1 trillion on Social Security, and $409 billion on Medicaid. Social welfare spending is a much, much larger portion of the US budget than military spending. Here are the numbers straight from the Congressional Budget Office https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2020-04/56324-CBO-2019-budg...

Did that Trillion not come from people contributing? You know it did.

And still, we can and should totally question our current spend.

How does that impact the discussion? Do we think we need another problem by not actually paying those benefits?

Secondly, back to the first question, so?

What's our priority?

Right now that priority is not healthy people, able to show up for work, existing reasonably.

Does that make the best sense? I don't think so.

The other thing I did was walkthrough a little bit about what those priorities might look like. There's several ways to solve this problem.

And we do have a problem when roughly half the labor force makes roughly 30k a year.

How would that be? It seems like it certainly would to me. Maybe by less than employees plus employers currently pay in aggregate healthcare costs, but I can't imagine a way where the government pays for Medicare-for-all and taxes don't go up.

Do you have a specific idea in mind that I'm missing?

In short - you can buy a banana for a dime or give the government a nickle and get a "free" banana.

I'm super glad my mom has Medicare! But she isn't benefitting from it being efficient, she's benefitting from it setting the rate it pays and requiring providers to accept it.

The other is a compulsory payment to a government entity as a result of earning income.

The rest of the developed world would very strongly disagree.

The penalty for not making that payment can be death, is likely financial ruin.

For many people, that optional payment is enough to buy a home.

Ask around about "optional"

Then we can set that aside and recognize net, liquid income will go up for most everyone.

All in the US more or less pays roughly 2x or more what some other countries pay for equivalent healthcare, so there is nominally room to extend coverage while keeping costs flat in theory. In practice, it's complicated. Also 'roughly' and 'more or less' have some wiggle room for systemic differences, but it's about right.

The obvious solutions include new hybrid classifications or mandating certain benefits based on tenure. Why is this not considered? Why take away choice from those who specifically decided not to get a full-time driving job (which have always existed)?

I think a more productive line of debate would be:

1. Do we, as a society, believe we should only care for those who can be productive?

2. Do we, as a society, value things other than productivity?

3. Do we, as a society, believe it is the place of a governing body to ensure a standard quality of life (whatever that standard may be)?

Putting barriers around who deserves what doesn't really serve to do much other than exclude people who don't know how to work the system, or those who are unable to work the system.

In some countries these decisions are made for you and funded through taxes and fees. Other nations require you to plan your own way. The USA leans toward the individual over the state.

Certain things like healthcare should be revamped to remove the ties to employers but it's important to keep the prevailing culture in mind. People overwhelmingly still want the ability to choose here - what they lack are the options to choose from.

As an example my grandfather lost his leg to a blood clot due to being sent to an overwhelmed hospital that left him sitting undiagnosed for hours on end - it is easy to read that scenario as being forced into a lack of care, but choices wouldn't help things here. If he had a choice he would have advocated for going to his family doctor first which would have made the situation worse - in all honestly hospital overcrowding and underfunding is the only thing that led to him losing his leg.

Healthcare is a sector of the market that most people here (even me - and I work in a company that deals specifically in the US healthcare market) don't have enough knowledge to make intelligent choices in because the knowledge needed to comprehend all the random crap that can go wrong with your body is intensely deep.

I also don't think it's far to say the US favors individuals over the state - the US cares very little about individual health. And that's not precisely what you meant when you said it favors individuals over the state but I think it's important to highlight that the situation in the USA is quite detrimental to a lot of individuals.

And yes, I do want to choose my healthcare. I want to select the plan that best fits my needs. If you want a larger simpler plan that covers everything then you can choose that.

Me having choice does not take away from you, it only provides more for both of us.

And I especially don't understand how it doesn't lead to exactly the problematic outcome we are talking about which is that poor people can't afford access to quality healthcare.

You don't "choose" what level of fire department protection you need. How is healthcare different? I suppose you can always hire your own private firefighter/doctor...

So long as you give people the choice, and it's based on PERSONAL financial contributions rather than government-organized taxes, those with less means will have less access to a finite set of healthcare resources and result in systemic inequalities.

I suppose I can imagine that there is some "ultra deluxe" version of healthcare where instead of crutches you get a wheelchair, and instead of a shared recovery room you get your own, and I do support those with the means to pay extra for something like that. But the baseline HEALTHCARE access part needs to remain the same...

The issue is that better coverage requires private insurance, mostly offered through corporations. Smaller companies can't compete, some people can't leave a bad job because of losing their plan, and others are limited to public options because they don't work. This is the overwhelming problem with USA healthcare. There aren't actually many choices because of this complex and outdated connection between jobs and benefits.

I know that today America has choice. But it leads to the highest healthcare costs in the Western World (to allow for middlemen healthcare companies to be some of the largest privatecompanies in the country), with the worst quality for the poorest people.

So the question is, how do you solve the problem of universal access while giving people the "choice".

> The issue is that better coverage requires private insurance, mostly offered through corporations

Not in the rest of the western world. We just simply don't have these companies. They don't need to exist. They are a form of corporate socialism transferring wealth from taxpayers to mediate something that can be handled directly.

Health insurance companies is a moral failure. I'm going to double down on my metaphor. Fire engines don't check your insurance to decide if they should put your fire out. That used to be how things worked 100 years ago.

The choice for better healthcare is limited and locked behind employment. That's the problem, instead of letting everyone have access to all plans, and the solutions are too complicated to discuss here. However insurance is not a moral failure, it's a financial and risk management concept. Just because your government manages somethings for you with your taxes doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I understand that when you're a fish it's hard to understand what water is, but the fact that employment plays any part into this whatsoever is a problem. Nobody in Canada or the UK or Luxembourg (some countries i have some experience with) would ever factor in healthcare in a decision to start or leave a job. It is absolutely not a variable.

Yes, I've said exactly this about half a dozen times now. It seems you're arguing based on myths and preconceived notions against the USA rather than actually responding to anything I've said. Let's end it here.

I just don't understand you acknowledging that healthcare choice being locked behind employment and insurance companies middlemen being a problem yet still wanting "healthcare choice." What does that mean to you if you don't have the others any longer?

I absolutely want to choose my healthcare.

The choice being discussed here is specifically around health plan particulars like stronger vs. weaker drug covers - surprising you by not covering any oncological drugs - or having a different balance between deductible and cost.

I'm still trying to grip why people care about choice though since most of those become non-issues with national insurance - most of those choices are about how you're going to balance paying for care with limited resources, while in nationalized systems the question of cost is mostly or fully removed - it's just the auxiliary costs that still can bite you (i.e. parking costs at a hospital, costs for a private room for recovery, etc...)

People have preferences for different doctors. Choosing different doctors is part of choosing your healthcare. Personally, I order my own tests and come to doctors with recommendations and ideas to discuss. Not all of them are open to this collaborative approach.

In terms of choosing insurance... It's a little silly to talk about what people want. What many people want is to go to whatever doctor or hospital whenever they want and have someone else pay for it. They often foolishly choose to limit out of pocket costs at point of service, while paying for coverage they don't need. Different people have different concerns. My preference is for my insurance to be for when I need it, and "first dollar coverage" is insuring me for an expense I can already afford, making it a bad deal.

To me the "prevailing culture" is more about the vibrancy of walking into a vendor and directly paying for services that you would like, rather than needing to appeal to some bureaucracy (whether "public" or "private") to convince it to agree that you "need" something. The medical system is currently so far from this, that I don't think it has much bearing on the practical reforms being discussed. Although I would love to see reforms in this direction as well - eg published price lists uniform for any payer, and a prohibition on arbitrary post-facto billing.

It's more like the providers have to conform to the Medicare pricing, instead of screwing the payers. This is why we need single pricer. Simply put into Medicare pricing agreements that the provider cannot charge anyone more than they charge Medicare or Medicaid. Not only does it avoid the price gouging of the uninsured and privately insured, it also ends the whole concept of out of network. Very few providers can survive without Medicare funds.

Politically I wonder what's holding this back, as it seems like it would be more palatable than Medicare for all. Silent hospital lobby? Big insurers that don't actually want to make their market more efficient as they're effectively cost-plus entities?

Not balancing this means society will go into decline one way or the other.

Offering basic levels to society members is health if the society can afford it and allows the society to grow quickie because risk is removed.

This is overly simplistic. Someone providing child or elder care is providing social value in a way which should not be measured against economic measures of production. Life is not an economic zero-sum game.

You might "work" 2h a month, because you spend the rest of it caring for family members, or maybe you're trying to get that first draft/beta version out the door.

Or you might just not want to work.

We need to stop assigning so much worth to work. We know automation is coming, and we know that not everyone is going to be able to find work in the future.

I mean it as a serious question, as it's not clear to me what the difference between benefits and salary is (not being from US).

I understand that the health insurance is one of them (and, to be clear, I do believe you should have that whether you work 0 or 100 hours a month).

But what are others? Pension contribution is just a part of your salary that you are required by law to put aside. Guaranteed minimum time off comes to mind, but that obviously makes less sense if you are already not working too much. What else?

There are millions of employees in the US who work part-time and choose their own schedules.

They do not allow you the same flexibility to work for the next 30 minutes, take a few hours off, then work another hour this evening without doing anything more than just starting or stopping the app whenever you feel like.

How would you replicate that with part-time hours?

This is a silly argument. You pay for your healthcare no matter what, it's just a question of who administers it.

> Then you put a million exclusions and tax deductions and other loopholes, so no one knows what they're really getting

This is precisely the current state of employer-sponsored healthcare, and also the wildly complicated medicare/medicaid system.

Universal coverage combined with higher taxes (ideally on people who already have lots of money and therefore place very little value on marginal income) is arguably better and easier to reason about than a mandate for employer-provided coverage and its associated opaque and complicated effects on labor markets, including higher fixed costs of hiring people and decreased ability for people to move between regions, industries, and even jobs within the same industry/career.

But who administers it has a lot to do with how much you pay for it. For example, a high deductible plan will save you a lot of money as long as you aren't in the 99th percentile of healthcare needs, and (unless the deductible is really high) still not bankrupt you if it turns out you are.

Any kind of government plan that doesn't give you that choice because it's paid from taxes rather than premiums is plausibly going to cost you more money. And that's true even on average, because high deductible plans make people more price sensitive, which exerts downward pressure on costs. (The fact that US healthcare regulations disfavor high deductible plans is one of the reasons costs remain high.)

The US system is also uniquely screwed because the rest of the world piggybacks on US medical R&D while in practice regulating prices even for products under patent. The result is that the US market is paying a disproportionate share of the R&D cost. Cost comparisons to single payer systems that pretend that single payer systems are inherently less expensive are ignoring the lower contribution of those systems to worldwide medical R&D. Moreover, the recipient companies are disproportionately in the US and have lobbyists and large numbers of voter-employees, so implementing a single payer system here would be unlikely to remove those costs. Then you're left with the resulting increase in price insensitivity and the US system becomes even more unaffordable.

It's actually a hard problem. The solution probably has to involve the other countries paying more of the R&D.

I'm happy to talk about manufacturer drug rebates which is an amazingly crazy portion of the healthcare market that would be illegal in almost any other market due to the perverse market incentives it creates. But yea, the short version is that the private healthcare market is incredibly inefficient.

"We" don't necessarily think benefits should be provided by the whims of private businesses.

as opposed to the government because that means higher taxes.

The assumption here being that benefits from the government are paid with higher taxes, and benefits from employers being paid from the kindness of the CEO's heart and not from wages that would have otherwise been paid you.

>"We" don't

I want the money that my employer pays into health insurance to be paid to me into an HSA like tax sheltering of healthcare funds, and then I want no health insurance middleman. Poof---there goes all the corrupt incentives and ridiculous administrative overhead.

That is literally impossible. Even if insurance companies are made illegal tomorrow, that role of market maker between providers (doctors and hospitals, drug companies) and customers (patients, employers) will always exist. This is because such a role is needed.

Patients do not have the capacity nor the knowledge to find the best doctor, the best hospital, or the best drug maker for them.

Health insurance was invented in the late 1930s as a political ploy to forestall government health programs. Did patients all get stupid at that time, or was it the case that they were all going to the wrong doctors and hospitals before then?

Please give human beings a little credit. We make decisions every day, some of which are a lot more substantial than which state-licensed physician to hire.

ps. you don't know what "market maker" means...

Okay, but I didn't mean literally outlaw insurance middlemen.

I mean fix the incentive structure such that I have the option to forego insurance middlemen.

> Patients do not have the capacity nor the knowledge

I completely disagree, and what business of yours or anyone's is it to say I'm `lacking in capacity and knowledge` to such a degree I shouldn't be allowed to make my own healthcare decisions!?

Worse still, right now the US government puts a cap on the percentage of profit an insurance company can take from premiums which coupled with the current near monopolistic healthcare insurance system incentivizes paying as much as possible for treatment to justify higher premiums.

And what defines a good quality of life depends on who you ask.

I have a chronic condition and for a year the only reason family didn’t end up on street is because of gig jobs. Most days 12-16 hours a day in bed essentially blind in horrific pain. But sometimes totally fine. Disability straight up laughed at me.

Ironically this completely flies in the face of any motion or ‘diversity and inclusion’.

At a certain point I had to stop going to the doctor so I would be able to get enough hours in keep keep the house.

What is 'decent housing' for instance? An apartment in the affordable part of town, shared with 3 room-mates? Your own condo? Your own house in the suburbs? A home in a gated community?

Is 'decent food' the minimum amount of recommended nutrition as defined by the USDA? Or eating out 3 nights a week? Or enjoying prime rib whenever you feel like it?

Is "decent healthcare" a checkup every year? Or a Cadillac insurance plan?

Any combination of these could be called an acceptable standard of living depending on who you ask. It's totally subjective, but the difference between them is tens of thousands of dollars a year.

And how do you define those? I've heard people on here complain that $200k isn't enough for a good life with a family. Yet I make less than half that and pay all the bills for my family. Clearly standard of living and cost of living can have a huge fluctuations on location and what one thinks they are entitled to under a decent life.

For example, a studio apartment in a bad school district might be decent for a single person with no kids. Yet that likely would not meet the definition of decent for a family of 4. Unless, that was a step up from wherever you were living before (maybe on the street). Some people might say they have to eat out or have steaks to have decent food. But others might just want a discount grocery story with freash fruits and veggies with off-brand staples to meet their criteria of decent.

It all depends on people's expectations and needs.

They basically make money buying and selling items occasionally, when they see a deal. That's enough for them to buy all the "luxuries" they want ($5k car, $2k laptop) every couple years.

I think there's a big difference between peoples desires/definition of acceptable and what they put in to obtain them.

And then that's just talking about the structure. What about the location - if a person's entire support system is in one location but the available free housing is 75 miles away and they don't have a car, that isn't decent. This comes up all the time re the affordability of the Bay Area where locals get priced out, someone says "just move to stockton" and the resident feels it's not fair (or "decent") to have to leave where they were born and raised.

You could link location to workplace I suppose but then that would create massive downward pressure on wages since people would be willing to sacrifice pay in order to live where they prefer. This sounds like a net negative.

This question is only hard if you haven't thought about it for more than like 2 seconds.

I can't believe I'm spelling this out. A person picking out their ideal home has trouble figuring out exactly what they want. Ok. We all don't ever know exactly what we want. It's the human condition. But I don't want to live in grinding poverty. I don't need to look within to figure that one out.

I don't want my home to be dilapidated, overcrowded, full of pests and toxins, or to not exist.

If you're still pretending to have a hard time with the definition of "decent," consult a dictionary.

This line of argument is absurd word chopping. "Oh my, I could never in good conscience try to lock down a subtle word like 'decent' into a singular meaning, guess drivers will have to stay earning a sub-living wage forever. Sorry! Definitions are hard!"

No.

What I am arguing against is your baseless assertion that defining "decent housing" is easy, and that everyone who thinks it's hard is simply being obstructionist/anti-poor/whatever.

The closest thing we might have today to an across-the-board definition of "decent housing" might be HUD's FHA standards which -- to your shock and amazement, I assume -- is much more complex than "must be decent"

The current structure treats them as serfs and says what really matters is the efficiency of the overall system, or its ability to generate a profit for its shareholders, or whatever. In short, the problem is these guys work too much in exchange for too little. Whatever theories anybody might have about the market, the role of the state in the market, etc, those are the basic facts on the ground: over-exploited workers seeking dignity where they currently lack it. The idea that they are "contractors," in the way that you or I might be contractors sometimes (I assume you are a tech worker), as experts in a technical field, is a sick joke. They don't have any power to get what they need, in that market, as individuals (they aren't even allowed to set their own prices!). If they could bargain collectively, they might. That's the context here.

When somebody enters the discussion and says, "Well, yeah, but what IS dignity, anyway, when you really think about it, man???" you'll have to forgive me if I don't believe they're doing it out of a devotion to clarifying terms but because they just want to take Uber's side in the fight. Yes, it's obscurantism.

In deeply complex and high-stakes systems, the details matter a lot; I haven't thought about it too deeply but my intuition says that they're the only thing that matters. Unintended consequences (like my salary depression example above) need to be carefully considered. There is inherent inequality built into a naive system like you suggest: an apartment in SF is worth multiples of an apartment in OK, are we alright with that? (don't answer, just an example). The details and their impact are important.

Some –certainly not all– have taken it a step further and offer pharmacare, daycare, a livable minimum wage, and free higher education.

Still, worldwide, there's an uneven or inequitable provision of other basics, such as disability benefits, guaranteed housing, food, and internet access. All of which I would argue is even more necessary for a good quality of life for all.

I don’t want to be chained to my employer for benefits, for retirement, for healthcare. It’s stupid to put a sociopathic entity with no accountability to you in charge of your basic needs.

Just look at how the city of Flint, MI poisoned their own citizens water while suppressing knowledge of their actions. [0] While in the grand scheme of government atrocities this actually appears relatively minor, this issue happened in very recent times.

One could fill pages listing government atrocities before even getting to basic incompetence and mismanagement. While inefficiencies happen in all bureaucratic organizations, governments hold singular power over their citizens in a way that no corporation could ever dream of.

This is not an argument against government. There are some services that only the government can provide. E.g., a strong military. Nor is this an argument against government playing some role in promoting general welfare.

I just personally would like the option to not be further dependent upon our government and would rather use my own economic agency to provide for my own unique needs. Many other people feel similarly and therefore reject this further intrusion of government in dictating our labor relations with employers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis

I guess I don’t understand why this is the line in the sand, and why we must depend on private profit-motive entities to provide for basic welfare and an economic safety net when we can see it working in developed countries around the world.

Everyone choosing what is exactly right for them implies those choices are all possible and the complexity, risk and cost profile also makes sense.

Those things are not true, and the outcome is rapidly escalating cost and risk exposure.

This has been addressed in many ways, and one of the easier ways is to have government fund those bennies to provide a respectable floor. People who need more can choose to do that and the market for such things would make much more sense and be lower cost and risk for everyone.

An example seen worldwide is supplemental plans that operate in addition to primary plans, which are actually illegal in many parts of the world due to the inherent conflict between profit motive and health care.

You wanting to keep your money and make choices is very different from wanting other people to keep their money, which is an overreach frankly.

Further, in the current scenario, you really can't be sure medical people have your best interests in mind because the priority is making money not making sure we have healthy people.

When medical people are free to actually make healthy people a priority, the discussion about best interests becomes a much easier one.

Rough state of affairs, I would imagine.

However, I am far from unique.

>Many gig workers explicitly do not want to become employees, as there are many disadvantages to doing so

Then companies that want to attract gig workers can give them the freedoms that are set by statute, regulatory bodies, and precedent. Like setting their own rates and picking which contracts to fulfill.

The government policy would prevent companies from misclassifying employees as independent contractors, and any individuals who did not want to be employees could opt out of that classification, but that's up to the individual, not the company.

When there are more people who prefer convenient hours than shifts available, some will only have the option to take inconvenient ones. As hourly employees, Uber can't use dynamic pay to manage supply and demand imbalances.

I dealt this as a teenager working at McDonald's. Most of us didn't want closing shift, and occasionally at 25 cent/hour incentive would be added. But more often than not, the demand for any hours was sufficient. Labor supply simply exceeded demand.

Still think Uber and likes should be regulated away until we have true self driving cars. That may take a decade or more.

Quite the contrary: the government acts to prevent a ruthless race to the bottom as someone who skips e.g. on health insurance or on worker protection laws (e.g. daily work time maximums) can outcompete someone who sticks to the rules.

Especially with health insurance, the government has to pay the tab of those who skip it and then can't pay for the hospital.

> Many gig workers explicitly do not want to become employees, as there are many disadvantages to doing so.

The only reason I see why people want to voluntarily go gig worker is schedule flexibility - they don't want a regular full time or part time schedule because of children, elder care or whatever. And for what it's worth employment regulations should be made more flexible in that regard, but it must be prevented that employers go and abuse it to exploit their workers (e.g. by arbitrarily cutting their hours).

If these drivers want to be independent contractors and not employees, great, if these laws were fully enforced from the beginning it would be the drivers that organized and owned the ride sharing business and UBER would have never been able to compete with them (UBER's own S-1 admits this risk, and acknowledges if drivers were Employees it would be an existential threat to their business). Its also no surprise this legal inevitability comes after their public offering.

Sure many gig workers may not want to be employees, but they were, they just were not being provided the benefits and protections. I don't think the politicians are the only ones who benefited clearly the UBER investors and private shareholders pre-IPO were the single largest beneficiary.

Is there any reason on the merits you disagree with the current legal standards distinguishing employee vs independent contractor? I mean the drivers desires is not part of the standard, and in fairness, I don't think you are able to collectively speak on behalf of all drivers and say that's what they wanted, clearly based on the number of lawsuits and employment claims many of them did want the employee status and benefits that come with it.

Generally what you're describing is a full time employee... that's kinda the thing you didn't seem to like.

Please. I'd love to redistribute my wealth to subsidize people's healthcare instead of subsidizing a tiny minority's bank account. Because that's what my low tax rates are doing right now - that and bombs.

One is 'ability to pay': https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/ability-to-pay-taxation...

> One idea behind "ability to pay" is that those who have enjoyed success should be willing to give back a little more to the society that helped make that success possible.

The idea of 'ability to pay' rubs some people the wrong way. On its face, some view it is "take more from the rich" without any underlying principle, much less any notion of fairness.

However, there is an underling principle that (imperfectly) justifies ability-to-pay taxation. It goes like this:

1. People profit from society unequally

2. This profit is often largely to rule of law and societal spending (i.e. public education, infrastructure, etc)

3. Therefore, tax the people who reap the benefits at a higher rate

To be fair, a moral philosopher should be prepared to defend why a higher rate is warranted -- as opposed to simply a higher total amount. I'm going to skip this aspect for now.

There are many ways to implement a tax based on whatever fairness criteria you choose. For example:

> Most taxes can be divided into three buckets: taxes on what you earn, taxes on what you buy, and taxes on what you own.

https://taxfoundation.org/the-three-basic-tax-types/

I'd like to see more public debate about asset versus income taxes -- however; tracking assets tends to be viewed as more difficult than tracking income.

Also, one could add 'taxes based on what you do' ... but these are often called 'fees'; e.g. driver license fees.

Harrison Bergeron's world incoming...

Have you read moral philosophy or political economy? I'm not saying these are the only way to approach the ideas, but at least these provide a common ground for discussion.

This is known as "bad luck.”

This quote assumes that what held true for most of history holds true today, when machines and computers can complete the tasks necessary for ensuring the flourishing of our species orders of magnitude more efficiently than ever before. Why should we assume that poverty would be the normal condition of man today?

Because if it wasn't for a complex network of trading & specialization, we would be in poverty. That network uses trade & profits to organize itself. Those machines and computers you cite are created and maintained by people who are seeking to make themselves wealthy. None of this is a given. Free trade and specialization is what gives us the abundance we have today. Your average North Korean or Venezuelan standard of living is what you would observe if you forced people away from free trade & specialization.

I don't think people appreciate how delicate supply chains are, or how much starving and poverty would happen if trade was disrupted.

Consider cell phones. The richest person in the world could not have a phone that they can carry in their pocket and make a call to another rich friend from anywhere in the world, if not for the widespread consumer demand that drove the construction of the cell phone system.

A skewed wealth distribution monetary has a tendency to corrupt both government and markets. Therefore, it is in society's interest to prevent high levels of inequality. (I'm assuming some flavor of a representative democracy paired with some degree of capitalism.)

To some, this feels like a rather blunt instrument. Many, of course, advocate for more targeted policies: regulation of mergers, inter-generational wealth taxes, campaign finance reform. In my view, all of the above sound good, in practice, because making progress is hard work.

But hey, since we've already mortgaged our future so we might as well kneecap our present as well.

There is a logical fallacy here, but I'm not sure if there is a name for it. In essence, the above argument is assuming "the government" is one actor who is able to choose between various options at the same time. In practice, "the government" is a collection of actors, with many competing interests, with different mechanisms of influence available at different times.

Aside: for anyone that thinks technology is hard, I would suggest running for office -- even a 'minor' role like being a school board member. This might shed some light on the difficulties of leading in a broader context. There is a reason it is called 'public service'.

I think most know the worker routine. If they don't look a certain way, the right age, the right resume, they won't get the job.

And the fact once they are an employee, they lose any bit of autonomy they think they have by being a independant?

It's too bad that we have a huge line of people:

1. Buying a vechicle specific four door vechicle Uber approves of before even applying to use the app. That is a huge upfront expence. Uber makes it sound like we all have a late model four door sedan collecting dust in the four car garage?

People are going bankrupt at best, but usually ruining credit, buying this huge asset in order to drive at the whims of Uber. There's no guarantes whatsoever. Want a deal on a four door sedan? Look at Craigslist used vechicle sales. Look for the last year Uber allows independents to drive. Actually I have noticed guys get another newer vechicle a couple of years before their vechicle ages out of Ubers strict year requirements. Some keep the useless four door sedan to drive a few more years under Lyft, or that's what I heard.

2. The guys whom are making a livible wage are usually driving to a big city. (A guy I know drives from santa Rosa to SF 7 days a week to make it work financially, and he is barely making it. He's working 80 hrs week.)

3. No health, they pay for gas, and insurance.

4. Yes--I'm picking on Uber.

My point is before Uber Bought the proposition, many drivers wanted better working conditions, and most seemed excited Uber might have to give them a vechicle, and working conditions would be better.

Then reality/fear set in? They will probally be fired next, or never hired me in the first place?

Maybe I'll just stick with this chitty job? America has become the king of chitty jobs.

And we have a lot of desperate people who will take these lousy jobs.

I'm not seeing it anymore, but I recall seeing an Uber related lease program, and now I'm seeing Uber related rental car programs. In the Seattle area, it looks like I could rent a car from two different companies for about $220 per week that's intended to be used for unlicensed taxi services.

If I were going to drive for Uber, and they didn't like my current vehicle, I'd drive a rental for a few weeks at least, to make sure it met my needs before dumping a bunch of money into a car.

At lower paying hourly jobs typically the employer doesn't cover any of the cost. For many these are prohibitively expensive, even if you work full time. Typically for higher paid work, most salary positions, the employer covers most of the cost.

In my experience, most benefits are use-it-or-lose it.

Practical barriers in terms of the maximum limit of complexity legal and HR are willing/able to take on and remain effective while dealing with? Absolutely. Everyone thinks "It shouldn't be that hard!"

In reality, it kinda is. HR abstracts away the complexities of jurisdiction specific hiring requirements from the rest of the org, and legal does much the same. If you ask for extraordinary accomodation, I'm not saying it won't work, but I can guarantee you will experience friction while HR/Legal figures it out.

On the plus side, if it works, new employment template. If it doesn't, you don't get offered the job.

I've ended up the awkward giraffe in a couple places. You being flexible, and the HR/Management recognizing your unique capability to create value helps. However, when talking Gig work, they will invariably go for the template approach. There's also the fact that Gig work really conflates the distinction between "contractor" and "employee" in the sense that contractor carries with it an assumption you are providing for your own affairs. The compensation you quote them should have parity with their total outlay for an employee to do the job, because you should be arranging the same things for yourself; thereby obviating your need for the employer to do it. The thing you get out of by the contract route is all that paperwork and process overhead. You do a one-time disbursement of funds, and donezo.

The problem is, no one ever tells you (the contractor) that, and Uber et al does not let you quote price or have input on the cost calculation. So you accept super under-bid compensation, because you don't know the difference between a market rate and a hole in the wall, or an appreciation for the total footprint of the business model.

Uber, and services like it, make their money by predating. on this ignorance. This is not to say that stuff like "licensing" gig workers to vouch for the fact they really know what they are doing is really a good idea... I'm kind of curious though what kind of effect that sort of thing would have on the worker pool. Like a short course that make sure they understand the accounting. Wonder if an experiment could be run with that sort of thing somewhere and how it would effect the market.

That being said, it kinda kills the value prop of people just needing a few bucks here and there, but I question the seductive simplicity underneath that pitch, because everytime I've run into something that's pitched that way there's a big ole ugly iceberg beneath it.

If you are a salaried employee the sad state of the system is a lot of companies tend to take advantage of you and overwork you and don't pay you overtime.

The flip side of it is contractors don't usually get paid vacation, so it's both an advantage and a disadvantage.

The fact that most employers do dictate hours is a function of those job expectations, not their legal employment classification.

It is pretty common for mid or senior level white-collar salaried jobs to have a decent amount of freedom in working hours within what is functionally reasonable for their role.

That is so disconnected from reality for the majority of American workers that you might have broken me. But lets start with salaried workers have a job .. Their employers don't care what time you work as long as you get that job done. How exactly would that work for Uber? quotas? avg 2-3 rides and hour or ur fired?

I am saying, classification as an employee does not require Uber to change anything about their expectations of their workers' work frequency, duration, or schedule. It can remain voluntary just as it is now.

There are currently voluntary hourly jobs that exist, but people here are probably less familiar with that concept as compared to salaried jobs.

As employees, Uber cannot dynamically vary the pay/minute rate, especially if it falls below minimum wage combined with vehicle/gas reimbursement.

Are you comparing full-time hourly employees to part-time contracting?

> They also give her

When you say it like that, you are describing an employee not an independent contractor.

But your layer comment, about setting her own rates, makes me think that she is working as an actual freelancer, not as a gig employee.

Is this... a thing? I've never had that option in any of my jobs. Sure, I can choose not to take the employee sponsored health insurance, but then I'm just opting out of my share of the monthly premiums the company would deduct. But in general, a company pays more than that. I've never been able to opt out of company insurance and recover their share of the premiums! I assumed that wasn't legal for them to offer.

Oh, and to be explicit about the connection: that's why an independent contractor would be paid more. If an employee's wage is $x, a company generally pays something like $(2x), and so an independent contractor would expect to be paid something closer to 2x than x. (Usually because they* then have to pay certain taxes, and worry about their own benefits, etc.)

"When you say it like that, you are describing an employee not an independent contractor."

This doesn't make sense to me. She has more autonomy than an employee would. They give her that level of autonomy by not making her an employee. She does not get a W2.

"But your layer comment, about setting her own rates, makes me think that she is working as an actual freelancer, not as a gig employee."

There's a lot of overlap between those terms, except replace employee with worker. I would say she's a freelance gig worker. Freelance tends to mean that you are just independent. You can work on an individual project for a company and move on, but it's usually larger pieces of work. As a gig worker, I see it as being more of a repetitive task for various customers. You can be a freelance driver and work for both uber and Lyft, or even uber and a taxi company. The gig part is that they are always individual tasks you get paid for - each ride. This is very similar to what she is doing.

So I see gig workers as freelancers, but not all freelancers are gig workers.

In 5-10 years, what will be the current driver's expectations for pay?

You're mistaken. It is not independent workers that are disadvantaged, but employees who as a result of those laws are less attractive to hire.

The solution here is to remove those arbitrary restrictions, not to expand them.

There are all manner of things we seem to lean on business to provide that government does not. Health insurance is the obvious one.

But we also seem to have a large part of our electorate that like it that way — that don't want government involved in our welfare.

If you want to tip the table toward government taking more responsibility and corporate America less, that is a tougher battle.

Sounds exactly like a gig industry talking point, a classic conflation of making something a right with forcing it onto people. At the moment, being categorized as an employee is not even an option for gig workers. How's that for choice?

You can say that they can't decide for themselves because they are being oppressed, etc, etc... and while I agree with the sentiment I don't think "oppression" here is that bad as to force people to vote what gig economy companies want them to vote on an independent poll.

I agree with the ethos of your response, but not the rationale.

Many people don't understand the costs associated with being gig workers.

Many people don't understand the value of benefits given to them by employers.

This is a big reason why democracies exist - many people simply can't make decisions for themselves.

[0] - There's only one for the record and it's Switzerland.

So then why do articles like this exist? If people know all of the things that directly affect them, why do they make so many mistakes?

https://blog.stridehealth.com/post/1099-tax-mistakes

https://www.taxslayer.com/blog/rideshare-drivers-avoid-these...

https://www.ayroyal.com/uber-tax-form-mistakes-avoid/

https://www.ridesharingdriver.com/top-5-uber-lyft-tax-mistak...

On what basis do you say this? Have you found good unbiased survey research?

Gig workers should be able to organize and effectively negotiate reasonable contracts instead of getting the shaft. My brothers union contract for musical performance crates a more free market environment than the whims of companies like Doordash.

In America, we already gave up on that fight. Instead, we made it your employer's responsibility to provide you healthcare. And now the government is yelling at Uber for not giving you healthcare.

Fascinating.

The people who are not successful are independent workers who are dependent on an employer. The government cannot fix a logical contradiction.

Gig worker falls off a ladder and ends up a paraplegic. Guess who will be footing the bill?