In this particular case, the important thing to me is the focus on honesty about the nature of the job. If they tell you, while you're voluntarily entering an agreement, that you'll have a certain degree of flexibility, and in practice they try not to let you have that, you've been lured into the deal on false premises. Usually we call that fraud, and in any case it should be uncontroversial that it's immoral.

After reading the comments here I was prepared to be disappointed by the policy direction, but instead I'm only disappointed I didn't see any specific enforcement teeth mentioned. Demanding transparency and that companies treat their contractors as contractors is IMO the correct direction; it's certainly better than retroactively classifying as employees people who never wanted to be such, as we sometimes see.

But I do agree with you on everything else. I think that companies who want to hire contractors, should treat them as such, and not as employees for which they can reap the rewards of a contractor classification.

Of all forums, on HN I feel I ought to be able to make a precise logical statement, meaning no more or less than I said, and be understood correctly. I like to think that most readers did, and the commenters (you less so, I'll grant) trying to draw obviously stupid conclusions from my careful wording are the minority.

You can still do this, it's called three hots and a cot. The police will direct you how to sign up.

If there are people desperate enough to go to prison to eat and have shelter, we should probably find a solution for those people within society. That likely means there is some point between what we currently offer and what prison offers where those people would be better off. Without those (shitty) jobs, you have a binary choice between good job or the streets.

Honestly, I think a lot of this comes back to housing policy and healthcare. You can't build boarding houses anymore. Zoning laws basically make it so you can be homeless or pay $1k / month (metro city). There's a lot of room in the middle there. The healthcare system is so bloated and broken that I do not think we will bring costs down, so the only solution there is state funded then using state leverage.

Setting a floor for voluntary agreements sounds very humane, but it also means that anyone who can't reach that floor is open to abuse. The same goes for immigrant labor. We don't clamp down on it because doing so sounds racist, but it creates a system where people can be easily exploited.

Do we though? If UBI and universal healthcare were a thing, I would be OK green-lighting ALL voluntary agreements. What am I missing?

What are the working conditions that cause something to be literal slavery as opposed to contract labor?

Would individual contracts with a nation's armed forces count as slavery? Why or why not?

Let's take Uber as an example: if you wanted to open a rival company following the taxi laws that Uber ignores you'd have higher employee and maintenance costs. Eventually you'd go broke: your drivers may be happier, but yor clients are all taking Uber because it's cheaper. And once you go broke, your drivers have no choice but to work for Uber. It's a race to the bottom.

> Where do we draw the line of interfering with an agreement between two competent, free parties?

Typically, when the deal is too disproportionate and/or one-sided. Anti-usury laws and contracts void due to lack of consideration are two examples, but I'm sure there are others.

People take Uber now because it's about the same cost as a taxi, but the credit card machine is never broken, and they can be summoned on demand.

Want to really hurt Uber?

Tighten taxi regulations so that a taxi may not legally operate without the ability to accept its full published list of acceptable payment options. The operator can take it out of service until repairs are complete, or police impound it.

You call it sucking the air out of the market because you don't like it. It's not a better job, it's the same job, you just want it to pay more.

Yes, if you cannot provide a service as cheaply as your competitor, you go broke. That's capitalism. If Uber is the cheapest taxi provider, then yes they will dominate...but that's because consumers chose Uber over more expensive alternatives. If Uber can charge low prices because lots of people are willing to work for it, and consumers choose Uber because of its low prices...where is the problem? If Uber subsidizes rides and goes broke, they deserve that fate as well.

> And once you go broke, your drivers have no choice but to work for Uber.

Or they do something else. This is the natural balance of market forces. Driving an Uber is essentially unskilled labor. If the attractiveness of the job drops, people go and do something else. The labor pool shrinks, and Uber is then forced to raise wages to attract people back into their ranks. Your cut-and-dry extremes are just not how the real economy works.

> Typically, when the deal is too disproportionate and/or one-sided.

These contracts are not too one-sided. A gig worker can stop working at a moment's notice (which has historically been one of the perks).

Every "obligation" that Uber and friends avoid with its gig workers policy (health insurance, accident insurance, unemployment, retirement) falls on the shoulders of the taxpayer. The companies are privatizing the profits and socializing the costs (which is something that capitalists like to do) and society is arguing that this is not what they want. It's the same reasoning for forcing construction companies to pay for the safety equipment of their workers even if market forces would prefer the workers to pay for it themselves.

> If Uber can charge low prices because lots of people are willing to work for it, and consumers choose Uber because of its low prices...where is the problem? If Uber subsidizes rides and goes broke, they deserve that fate as well.

Except once Uber starves and destroys the taxi service in a city, and one day declare bankruptcy and close down their servers, that city is going to be left in a pinch with a void that can't immediately be filled, leaving society to foot the bill for their greedy destruction.

It seems like this argument and some others constantly suffer from the libertarian wet dream where any business, no matter how complex, can be spun up in an instance _if only there was no government to interfere_. That has never been true, and every business has externalities towards society that may need to be managed and prodded back in line from time to time with very necessary regulations.

Forget about the libertarian wet dream, your bias is clear. What is the negative externality that you believe society is imminently facing and must be regulated? Do you believe Uber is on the verge of shutting down?

Don’t worry too much about capitalist ideals, we should be willing to bend the rules as needed to promote a system where there is healthy competition and innovation.

If we can do un-capitalistic things like bail outs and PPP schemes to help businesses when their chips are down, we should be able to handicap them when things are in their favour, to help new businesses challenge them.

... isn't the lack of a better offer one of the components necessary to exploit a worker? You can only exploit a worker, without violence, if they are (financially) pressed against the wall and have no better options, right?

So given that these companies aren't making money, what if these changes drive them out of existence? If gig workers truly don't have a better offer, well now they have no offers. What do this people do then?

You want to say "better this job than the worse one then", right? I understand that. But if you view the working conditions of gig workers as exploitive, this can't justify their existence, IMO. Otherwise you get a race to the bottom and can justify any work condition with the exception of the absolute bottom of the barrel.

Whether or not you see the working conditions for gig workers as exploitive is up to you, of course.

I have views on that, not appropriate for this thread, and I accept if someone wants to make this argument. But again, this is a social critique...nothing specific to the gig economy.

1. Everybody says DoorDash doesn't pay their workers enough.

2. Everybody says DoorDash charges restaurants too much.

3. Everybody says DoorDash marks up the food too much.

4. Nobody is forced to use DoorDash, work for DoorDash, or sell on DoorDash.

5. DoorDash has never made a profit.

To answer your question, yes it’s probably a bit of a and a lot of b, but what does that change?

My open question again was not about whether to draw a line, like your mining example, but rather where we draw it.

I just happen to be of the opinion that gig workers, and miners working in dangerous conditions, happen to fall on opposite sides of that line.

Constantly. Endlessly. Daily.

We draw the line everywhere, all day, in every single aspect of lives. It’s the core concept of government, in fact it’s the basic premise of civilization.

Two parties can’t agree to enter into slavery. Or a Ponzi scheme. Or a restaurant meal where the cooks don’t disinfect the kitchen. Or a bank where there’s not enough reserves. Or an airplane that hasn’t been maintained. Or a verbal agreement to buy a house.

In all cases it’s because we’re not ok with the effect on society, like E. Coli outbreaks, plane crashes, bank failures, destitute old people, and lots of other stuff.

It’s not necessarily that the people themselves are being taken advantage of. Society is. The companies are externalizing costs and risks on everyone instead of absorbing them. We get to decide that’s not OK.

All of your examples are incredibly unlikely things for two informed parties to enter into. In fact, the reasons those laws exist is because of the information asymmetry. That seems reasonable to me.

But gig workers are not under the illusion that they are going to receive healthcare or other benefits. It's like if I took a job offer for $X and then demanded I was being exploited because I want $Y. I fully support gig workers in pushing for more, I absolutely do. These are natural market forces. Everyone should act in their own self interest...we know that Uber will.

I just think that in this instance, this qualifies as government overreach.

Considering the bought and paid for political legislatures with lobbying money and unusual whales funded by corporate interests, if you think this little blip by workers is “overreach” then you’d be flabbergasted by what corporate lobbyists get away with.

If the company is using some AI model to resolve disputes against statutory and contract requirements, same problem.

Same thing again with deceptive conduct and misrepresentation, if you take a dollar from one million people that you wouldn't have without deceiving people, this is a good area for regulator (like FCC) to handle. Class actions as an alternative seem to end up with a worse result.

Zero people would care about this if there wasn't a huge outcry from the gig workers themselves! This isn't just paternalism, it's the gig workers themselves driving these changes.

This isn't universal though. If you go to places where gig workers discuss these issues (say /r/UberDrivers) every post complaining about pay has people saying "if you don't like the fare, don't accept it!" and to be fair there are also lots who are not complaining about it.

In any event, I don't mean to defend uber. I don't favor their model. I would just say that it is NOT universal.

A single Uber driver can and often does do both.

Calfornia's AB5 was massively protested by gig workers. This sort of generalization is absolutely paternalism.