The problem is that they don't contribute nearly as much to the system and they're in very precarious situations: no contribution to retirement, no paid vacations, no parental leave, no unemployment benefits, &c.

It really depends on how you see the problem, from the individual perspective or from the community perspective. In the short term individual POV gig work is amazing, in the long term community POV it's disastrous

> The problem is that they don't contribute nearly as much to the system and they're in very precarious situations: no contribution to retirement, no paid vacations, no parental leave, no unemployment benefits, &c.

All of this is applicable to contract work in general, not just gig work. Why not fix it for all contractors rather than only gig workers?

Because some people are genuinely contractors while others are disguised employees.

I also don't see the inherent problem with contractors, some jobs require it, some people want the flexibility. The issue with "gig workers" is that a lot of them end up with all the disadvantage of being employe, all the disadvantage of being contractors, and none of the benefits of either.

But "no contribution to retirement, no paid vacations, no parental leave, no unemployment benefits, &c." seem like pretty big concerns for most workers. I don't see how they evaporate for non-gig contract workers.

Non-gig contract workers charge more and so are expected to pay that all by themselves. Often they do not, but usually they are at level where they should be able to do it.

That is why prices for lot of work is so expensive.

> Non-gig contract workers charge more and so are expected to pay that all by themselves. Often they do not, but usually they are at level where they should be able to do it.

Sounds like we should levy that as a tax on all contract workers rather than only reclassifying certain types of contractors.

Or set minimum billable rate. Which the companies employing gig workers would need to meet. Kinda like minimum wage, but higher as they are not giving benefits or paying employer fees and taxes.

That still doesn't make sense from a fairness perspective. Why should should contract workers get to opt out of all the taxes that employees are subject to?

Ya agreed, I would think taxing gig work to compensate for those things is a better solution. IE, you pay 7 euros an hour, on the backend you pay the government 7 euros to cover health care, pension, etc.

This seems like a tracking problem and easier to tax it at the source by the company... as if a gig worker has 10 clients and sporadic work, they are not able to manage the complexity, nor should they have too.

Kinda like taxing HFT, you tax it and then comp society for the danger it creates.

Why should we as a society, or even worse, poor immigrats, subsidise a company's bad business model.

If you want to compete for labour and customers in a society, you should follow the rules.

If you cannot provide food deliveries whilst paying your employees fairly, then you should not be in business.

Even worse if you are skimming minimum-wage worker's pay to produce a 10X VC return.

>If you cannot provide food deliveries whilst paying your employees fairly, then you should not be in business.

This doesn't address the parent poster's point:

>For many, it is the only type of job / income they can secure (i.e recent immigrant) and otherwise would be locked out of the legal economy altogether and will transition into the _illegal_ economy for want of options.

Changes like these aren't a free lunch. If they're too onerous companies reduce their workforce, which would leave their workers worse off. Presumably the reason why they were working there in the first place was that it was their best option.

If slavery was legal and about to be made illegal, would you argue the same point?

Except slavery is non-consensual whereas working in a shitty job isn't.

Slavery is still a thing. Some authorities warn that there are more slaves today than at any time in history (e.g., https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/25/modern-slavery-... ).

This isn't slavery. But good job dismissing the reality of slavery by comparing it to a voluntary paid job.

I don't think you can make the argument — in good faith — that the current requirements are too onerous.

Facilitating the exploitation of vulnerable people in order to provide cheap services for customers with much more price flexibility and increase the profit margin of VCs is a political decision. One that I will not support, and I'm glad our collective government is acting against it. It does not go far enough.

but the whole point is that they are effectively used as full time workers but not given the benefit, security or basic dignity.

most gig workers don't have the luxury to do this as a part time side job. it's their main source of income as you already said.

and allowing companies to exploit people because they're immigrants is not good for anyone in the labour market.

this is a win. those VC douchebags can get f*ked.

In the vast majority of cases, gig workers are exploited. They have no protections, and don't get the same rights as employees do (no health insurance, no vacation time, etc). This is bad all around and should not be permitted if you want better working conditions. Too many people working the 'gig' economy are working full-time hours with no added benefits.

We're just going backwards with the 'gig' economy by allowing bigco to exploit people in this manner.

They aren't eliminating gig work, they are just ensuring that if you want to categorize your workers as contractors, you have to treat them as contractors. Companies are taking advantage of loose definitions to blur the lines, they want the benefits of employees without the liabilities. This forces them to decide, do you actually want contractors, or do you want employees? The workers that stay as contractors will have more freedom and ability to set their own work boundaries. The workers that get converted to employees will get better benefits and stability. On average, workers will be better off. There will be companies going either route so gig workers should be able to find a company that matches their needs.

It's important to understand though, that most of this work is not sufficient to sustain society. There's a report from the Centraal Planbureau in the Netherlands 'Immigration and the Dutch Economy' (https://www.cpb.nl/sites/default/files/publicaties/download/...).

Take a look at page 61 and the graph 'age profile of net contributions'. As you see, even the average non-Western immigrant, which of course includes highly productive people from places like Japan, India, etc. has a very bad curve.

A gig worker is almost certainly going to have a curve at least that bad, i.e. he has a negative net contribution to the state economy. It might well be better to try to find people something where they can make a net contribution than to have them try to offset the costs by doing what is in effect random work.

I guess that assumes wage is proportional to added value to society?

For people other than teachers, physicians and some other things of that sort, I think that's a true assumption.

> gig working is not always a straight forward 'capitalism bad' exploitation

It's not even about exploitation. Gig work is terrible from a capital formation standpoint. Gig workers are permanently low productivity workers with no breathing room or incentive for anyone to upskill them.

It's bad from a capitalist standpoint. Underdeveloped economies are basically all gig work because there's low levels of corporate organization. One explicit goal of the Nordic welfare model wasn't just alleviating poverty, but literally driving low productivity work out of the economy. Gig working is literally reverting to a sort of pre-capitalist mode of production. Varoufakis comes to mind, who correctly points this out in his recent book on digital platforms.