The point is true gig work allows you the flexibility to fit it around whatever else you have going on, be that part time work, starting a startup, taking care of a family, etc. of course it’s downsides and probably needs some more rules to protect the workers. But banning eliminates the opportunity entirely.

It sucks to be a freelance writer and it’s easy to get screwed; should we ban that too?

Your only comment here is to try to pivot into other arguments that you are inventing. Not gonna work here.

That would encourage companies to offer full time positions. Current law (in the US) financially penalizes full time employers, which is why most part time workers end up working multiple part time jobs.

A full time job gives your employer the power to dictate your life schedule to you. Your boss wants you at your desk at 8am but you have to take your kid to school at 8:30? Too bad! You’re there at 8 or you’re fired.

It’s even worse in retail and food service, as I alluded to in my original post. These workers get their schedules a week ahead, with shifts all over the place. One day you’re opening at 6am. Next day you’re closing at 9pm. Good luck having any kind of life outside of work with a schedule like that!

It results in eliminating part-time jobs, overloading full-time employees, and increasing unemployment.

That is irrelevant, because of how it's measured: 1 person working 40 hours/week and 9 people not working gives an unemployment of 90%, but 10 persons working 4 hours/week gives an unemployment of 0% -- but both scenarios have the same amount of work. Of course using part-time jobs reduces the unemployment figures. It says nothing, however, about the availability of work.

All this does is eliminate more jobs.

In your hypothetical scenario, a company that hires 2 or 3 people part-time would need to do health insurance for each of them, benefits for each of them and the additional full-time equivalent paperwork for each of them...

In that scenario, the company would end up just hiring 1 person full-time for the hours, and have much less added overhead costs.

This would lead to higher unemployment, because now instead of 3 people being employed part-time, only 1 person is employed.

Where's the good in that? Maybe I'm just not seeing it from my perspective, if anyone else can chime in?

His dad can work at anytime, anywhere and doesn't have a boss to mandate when he clocks in. How is that being an indentured servant?

> Skip, on the other hand, penalizes his earnings if he falls below 80% moving average accept rate (over the last 10 orders).

Certainly your ability to reject jobs or even to select the time you want to work would be severely limited (but let’s ignore that..)

If they were employing him, penalizing him for declining work would be fine.

Any company which would have to directly employ him would certainly penalize him for not accepting work and would not allow him to start his shift whenever he wanted.

That other app he’s using seems to be somewhere in between gig and normal work (so you seem to get the worst from both worlds).

> If they were employing him, penalizing him for declining work would be fine.

Which seems like a huge downside?

I find it so puzzling that some people can’t accept that there are gig workers who prefer the flexibility and many of them wouldn’t be able to work at all if they had to be treated as part/full time.

That's not exactly true if we consider the environment that allows companies to operate like this, insomuch as his dad will eventually starve or be homeless if he doesn't eventually clock in. Hence the indentured servitude. The "worker's choice" of "just do gigs for a different gig company" doesn't really work if all gig companies stand together at the other side of the homelessness cannon.

How are traditional full time jobs not even worse then? They require you to clock in at times chosen by the employer or you lose the job and income.

The term refers to situations such as "An employer pays for transit of one or more people on condition that work of the employer's choosing is performed until the cost of transit, and any accompanying expenses, are repaid to the employer." Generally, these include specified wages, but employers commonly arranged that expenses and wages combined guarantee that the workers will be unable to pay off the contract within any specified timeframe. This often resulted in lifelong service, and could at times extend to workers' heirs (whether debyst inheritance be legal or not, as such workers were often at severe disadvantage to risk challenging the employer on any matter). Effectively, indentured servitude was usually indistingushable from slavery.

To address your "will eventually starve if he doesn't _eventually_ clock in", this seems to be the default case for all forms of employment (even if you employ yourself, in the wilderness, entirely on your own). The exception being that some places have sufficient social or legal safeguards to prevent a "clocked out" person from meeting this fate.

It all comes down to trade offs in the end. Either we optimize for people to hold jobs that allow them to survive in society and earn enough to do things like pay rent and buy food. Or we optimize for job dabblers who don't really need the work but want some extra cash. I believe we should optimze for people to hold steady jobs that allow them stability and do important stuff like pay rent and buy food. We should optimize for survival of the worker and workers require steady employment.

Eg, ridesharing can be done ride-by-ride by people choosing to accept fares from a marketplace but stocking store shelves works better having people there on committed shifts and delivering packages is in between, where people sign up for shifts but are expected to complete the full shift.

Why can’t we fulfill the needs of both people who want reliable, shift-based employment and people who want variable gigs?

Not everyone doing gig work is hustling as a second job to get ahead (though that should also be both legal and accepted, IMO).

And you don't see an issue with that?

I don't think we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Certainly there's some legal regime where workers can continue to enjoy the kind of work time flexibility they have with gig work, while also being compensated and treated fairly.

Social unrest is bad for business. I'm not sure why companies keep turning the screws when profits are at record highs.

I think on the one hand maybe a lot of people are away on summer vacation so not ordering food as often. On the other hand, interest rates in Canada have shot through the roof, so maybe a lot of people are cutting back on ordering in and choosing to cook more to save money.

Unfortunately, interest rates also affect my dad, so he’s getting squeezed pretty hard. I can’t blame the gig companies for that though, that’s the Bank of Canada’s doing.

I know I have never ordered from either because I was immediately aghast at the massive markup over the regular price for the products...

If the alternative is more degrading forms of labor, with businesses sneaking around full time protections by only giving people 30 hours of work, and paying an absurdly low minimum wage, that's hardly an indictment of the idea of strong labor protections - quite the opposite. Why did you bring up socialism? Are you saying capitalism can't provide good labor conditions and we need socialism to do so? Extremely based take.

It's not. Gig work is one of many options.

You can be a full-time employee. You can be a part-time employee. You can start your own business. You can work for local, state, or federal government in innumerable roles.

Or, if it suits you, you can be a gig worker.

Focus on specific cases of companies treating workers unfairly, as this legislation appears to do. There's no point railing against "the system" because there is no "system".

Prottip: they don't exist

Delivery drivers always got paid jack and made the majority of thier income from tips. It was always a bad industry and Uber etc just make it worse by taking an additional cut and causing businesses to outsource to fewer total workers across the industry than would be employed/were employed under the traditional model where any business that wanted to do delivery had to do so by directly employing someone.

That argument is essentially: Workers should suffer so those who already were of means can profit more.

You can't open a restaurant unless you're already doing well, with large amounts of capital etc.

Drivers are generally living oatcheck to paycheck with zero available capital.

You do see why I feel zero sympathy, right?

And that's ignoring you're actually arguing for drivers to do more work for the same or even less pay....

- have unlimited VC money (35 billion in operational losses over 10 years)

- offload things like medical insurance, depreciation, equipment costs etc. onto people who work for them

- screw over restaurants

I can't see how it's a net benefit

If we had any kind of sense, as a society, this shit would have been banned years ago.

This is absurdly patronizing to people making their own choices, and the freedom to seek employment or work as they see fit. As someone who, as an independent contractor in CA, was the victim of such patronizing sympathy that resulted in regulation which was deeply contrary to my own interests, please stop trying to "protect" people like me. Ironically, that regulation was targeted at Uber, who then received a specific carve out that left me screwed over as a small independent contractor.