I doubt this is a new observation, but what strikes me is that the US employment system is based on benefits via employment (healthcare, retirement).
The current "gig economy" trend removes these benefits from employment, and with a government currently opposed to public benefits, the US could be headed towards a problem within a single generation.
This race to the bottom (disruption) seems counter productive for anything but short term investment.
>This race to the bottom (disruption) seems counter productive for anything but short term investment.
And you know who most benefits from this type of investment (basically the ones with the big money to invest with little to no real risk to their way of life). So I don't see it ending any time soon...
There's already tens of millions of people with no employer provided healthcare or retirement savings. The gig economy is reducing wages and stability.
In the case of health insurance, it mostly came about because of wage controls during WW II. Companies couldn't offer more money in a tight labor market but they were allowed to offer fringe benefits like insurance.
401(k)'s history is almost wacky. It was an obscure provision in 1978 tax law and a benefits consultant figured out a way to turn it into something that companies could easily offer to employees as a tax-advantaged benefit.
Of course, once a benefit becomes the norm, it's almost impossible for individual firms to not offer it.
> Companies couldn't offer more money in a tight labor market
It was illegal for them to offer more money - Roosevelt instituted wage fixing. Offering benefits was a way around the law.
> Of course, once a benefit becomes the norm, it's almost impossible for individual firms to not offer it.
The real reason is that health insurance paid from pre-tax money by the employer makes it cheaper than being post-tax money by the employee. It's the tax system that binds workers to jobs via health care benefits.
Another reason people want wage increases in the form of employer-paid benefits is then they get to lie about the terrible pay they get, because they never ever account for the value of the benefits.
For example, whenever the teachers complain about their salaries, never mentioned are the generous benefits package they get.
More about benefits is driven by the tax code than probably should be. But the issue is much more that many people can't simply buy the same insurance offered by their employer (whether with tax-advantaged dollars or otherwise)--and it's an expensive benefit, which means a lot of people feel they can't afford it unless someone else is paying.
Now, sure, supposedly salaries would go up if the company no longer offered health insurance but there are lots of moving parts and people and any such transition would be difficult.
401 (k) history is something I've wondered about. Why is it provided by the employer, as opposed to you choosing your own IRS-approved provider and telling your employer to send a portion of your check there?
I am by no means an expert but my understanding is that it's mostly a function of its somewhat accidental history. Which also makes things like rolling over 401(k)s from previous employers way more convoluted than it should be.
You do additionally have a personal option, IRAs, that you can establish at the broker of your choice that give you a lot more flexibility. You can probably setup payroll auto-deduction in many cases.
I've done it and know others who have. It's "complicated" in the sense that it wasn't just click some things online. That may be a good thing from a security perspective but it's still a PITA.
Lobbying by employers I would guess - this is strictly verboten in the UK due to various reasons, Robert Maxwell plundering of his company's schemes for example.
I am surprised that post enron that US pensions where not reformed.
You're conflating 401(k)s and pensions. 401(k) accounts are in employees' own brokerage accounts. The company can't touch them. All the company does is decide what funds and stocks to make available, do payroll deduction, and contribute whatever matching.
Defined benefit pensions are different and are much less common than they used to be. So mostly they have been reformed by ceasing to exist in the US. There are various protections for pensions but they're still an issue--especially in municipalities with financial issues.
ADDED: And there's actually a lot of sensitivity these days to 401(k) options that are perceived as risky. Such as a company's own stock.
Pensions worked a lot better when employees were often with IBM or Dupont for decades. And, even then, there was no guarantee that someone would be around to pay out the pension after a few decades--although there were various insurance mechanisms.
Someone always needs to bear the risk that the planned payout will be less than forecast. Whether it's the employee or the company. And, at some point, if the money's not there it won't be paid out.
“Easier” in the sense that it removes the illogical connection between employment and access to health care.
Definitely not easier in the sense that a sizeable plurality of the country, currently in control of both houses of Congress, the Presidency, the Supreme Court, and the majority of state legislative and executive branches, think this is a terrible idea that they equate with creeping Communism.
Or, we could have people buy health insurance with their own money, and provide assistance to those who can't afford it. The same thing we do with food, housing, transportation, and basically everything else.
Probably this is one reason why gig economy is much bigger in the US than elsewhere (excluding cross-border services delivered from poor to rich countries). Airbnb is big in other places, but Uber much less so.
I'm sure it's a nightmare for a professional journalist. And I don't mean that as an insult - it'd be a nightmare for me too.
But you know what's more of a nightmare? Driving around to every retail outlet in a 30 mile radius, trying to convince them that you can be the most submissive and obedient out of the 200 applicants. It's hard to begrudge the gig economy for providing an alternative to that.
People do at least own their own schedule which is a big difference from much of retail. That said, as this article notes, your cost to do these gigs is often higher than people think it will be (or even realize it is).
People do at least own their own schedule which is a big difference from much of retail.
Right, and this can easily be underappreciated by those of us working in environments where it's hardly ever a problem if you need to take a few hours to deal with personal issues.
I've been running my own tech company for over a decade now, and prior to that my job was everything from cleaning toilets to changing lightbulbs. On paper it sounds terrible, but I was very happy.
The work environment matters a lot. The other people you work with matter. How you are managed matters. I think if gig software designers thought a lot about this, they would see a lot of improvement in worker retention and satisfaction.
This, and very well written! A lot of the complaints from the article are really all easily solvable issues. I mean, really? I need to click an app for an hour to get the block? Just run a lottery. And what do you mean I have to catch people around? Change the rules so that I need to make best effort (and document it), and that's it. And give customers your own numbers so you can forward calls just during the working hours (though that makes it look even more like the workers are your employees). I won't even comment on trouble with scanning codes.
Note that while this would make job a lot more enjoyable for workers, I still think everyone should enjoy the same basic benefits, no matter what kind of employment relationship they are in. But that could also be solved in other ways (basic income for example).
A momentary feeling that you're your own boss (which isn't even correct as you're micromanaged by the app) doesn't really compensate that you don't get any benefits or protections.
I don’t think you have to do lot of convincing to get minimum wage jobs these days. Benefits are virtually non-existent for most minimum wage jobs. Gig economy just gives you flexibility while traditional job gives you predictability and some hope for climbing the ladder. This journalist would have felt misrable for virtually all minimum wage jobs out there.
> Amazon also does not break down how much he receives in tips and how much he receives in pay from the company—for all he knows, people are tipping him $20 and Amazon is paying him less than minimum wage.
Wow. Do other gig economy jobs do this? Uber and Lyft? I may just start carrying cash to leave tips now.
Am I the only one who felt how jealous the author was of the people to whom he was delivering these packages? Someone else made deliberate life choices and maybe sacrificed a lot to be in a position they are at a prestigious tech company with a good salary. Heck, even if that person just got plain lucky, I still don't see where dwelling on their success vs the author working a gig job gets anyone anywhere.
I'm not jealous of movie or sports stars and the millions they earn. Where does this person get to think life is unfair because they never applied to/were never hired by Google or the like?
This article reads like it was written by an entitled millennial (i.e. someone who never had to make sacrifices and perform hard and unappreciated work to enjoy basic comforts).
Every job is optional. If it’s beneath you, don’t take it. Hard work is hard work. It’s above minimum wage, and you’re not being abused, then what’s the problem?
You don’t get to dictate your value. You earn what you’re willing to work for.
What did she think she was signing up for? Find another job if it doesn’t suit you. No job is perfect.
There are legions of Flex employees who are grateful for the flexibility this job provides.
If you want to make more money, educate yourself, network, apply to different jobs, work hard, be persistent.
People are so myopic about work these days. Opportunities are out there if you work to find them. The same work ethic that it takes to find those great opportunities will make you successful in life.
Problem with this reasoning is that today, the population is decreasing in most developed countries, meaning that older generation will beg the younger more and more. People have less and less kids, so the job market is shrinking.
There's a lot of workforce shortage in many places in the EU (esp. smaller towns) partially because of low fertility and partially because of intra-EU migrations. Fertility is dropping around the world so the migrations will also lessen. Always increasing real estate costs and stagnant wages make it hard for immigrants to secure a living. EU population is expected to start falling within 30 yrs max.
There is an oncoming labor shortage in developed countries. It already hit Japan significantly. Even China will stop increasing the number of working people because of their population ago profile and number of children produced. Russia is another country with this shortage of workers problem.
So what? What's the point of these articles? You could write the same about anything."I cleaned houses for a week and it was a nightmare", "I worked as a store clerk for a week and it was a nightmare"...
This is cheap click-bait journalism trying to get on the wave of writing something about Amazon labor conditions.
Modern American journalism is a joke. Many things in this country are wrong and people can and should rightfully complain/voice their concerns about those things, but this type of journalism is just the equivalent of setting a house on fire just to have the exclusive that you were the one who covered it first. How can we trust any news outlet right or left, if their motivation is only just clicks and impressions?
A lot of people don’t necessarily know about the working conditions of these employees. It’s perfectly in line with the purpose of journalism to report on such things. In a time past it might have been an article about the conditions faced by coal miners. Or lax conditions at an assembly of plant. Etc.
And actually checking it out first hand seems like a pretty good effort at journalism as opposed to just writing a "think piece" from the comfort of the news room.
The difference is that Amazon is crushing local store retail everywhere it does business, which is everywhere, and spends large amounts of effort on brand management to softpedal the fact that this domination is largely thanks to its ability to squeeze more from its labor force. We'll leave aside how this crushing of local retail was also aided by its ability to avoid local taxes for many years while it was growing. All of this makes it very fair game for criticism, especially when Amazon touts the "great earnings" of being a freelance driver for them.
If there was some giant corporation that was dominating house cleaning nationally and touting the great pay of cleaning toilets for them as a freelancer, that would certainly warrant some inspection, too.
Amazon is crushing local store retail everywhere it does business
Around here the local retail businesses Amazon is crushing are owned by large corporations, who previously put the small, independent retailers out of business decades ago.
The same way Netflix put Blockbuster out of business, who put the small, independent video renters out of business long before.
I liked the article. I didn't know about Amazon Flex and I was happy to learn how it works. The title is clickbaity, but the article is fairly nuanced. For example, she talks about a few other workers who don't seem to mind the job.
I don't see anything wrong about a first-hand report about horrible working standards. I fail to see how you can call covering this important issue "setting a house on fire".
Comments here so far seem oddly dismissive of the article ("what's the point", "entitled millenial", "jealous", "click-bait").
But they're missing the larger critical points which are very newsworthy:
- The author almost injured themselves with an overly heavy box because Amazon didn't provide them with a dolly, warn them they needed one, and if they did injure themselves the medical bills are their own
- Amazon is asking them to deliver packages where parking without getting a ticket is a logistical impossibility and risk making negative $ for the day due to tickets
- These kinds of safety and minimum wage regulations which have been hard-won over the past decades are being completely avoided by Amazon by (possibly wrongly/illegally) classifying them as independent contractors, which seems to be a scandal that laws/regulations ought to fix, but compulsory arbitration may be preventing class-action lawsuits which would otherwise correct the situation
> The author almost injured themselves with an overly heavy box because Amazon didn't provide them with a dolly, warn them they needed one, and if they did injure themselves the medical bills are their own
Why is it someone else's fault if you lift something too heavy for you? What is "too heavy" is a fairly personal thing. It's trivial to tell if something is too heavy for you. Do I need to explain how?
As for not injuring yourself from lifting, that's a skill everyone should learn by themselves, like how to not fall down the stairs. It's not someone else's fault.
If the box is too heavy, refuse to lift it. It's not hard. Amazon can't force you to.
If a dolly will help, you can pick one up for 40 bucks or so (ironically, from Amazon!). I keep one around, because I find it useful. Many occupations require you to furnish your own tools (and if you're an auto mechanic, that can run into thousands). I've bought and used personal equipment at every job I've ever had.
40 dollars isn't much for you but it can be a lot to ask for many people in this country to just shell out on a moment's notice. If you find that hard to imagine because you make more than that in an hour, then may be you should take a break and realize your experience doesn't extend to people whom the article is talking about.
You're getting there. That $40 dollars will go to gas, food, bills, basic things that you need for life. You don't have much left to pull out for random things you didn't account for.
Maybe. If you couldn't afford to fix it before, you definitely can't after a few tickets. But if you give up the car then you can't get to your job, so how are you going to pay off those tickets?
I've been recently unemployed, I own a car, stretching to an extra $40 on top of other costs is actually tricky. I had no appreciation of this until just recently and now understand the hardships folks on unemployment benefits experience.
I was being paid GBP 76.00 per week which has to cover heat & light, food, telephone, internet, gas for the car, car insurance, car tax, etc....it goes on. There is nothing left. I was also being paid "housing benefit" which doesn't pay anywhere near the actual cost of rent.
You should try this some time before making such poorly informed and sweeping statements.
If your employer asks you to lift a 30kg box and you damage your back, it's their fault, I struggle to see how you could argue otherwise. Only situation where I think it's not true is if they provided you with a dolly and you chose not to use it - then it's on you.
I'm not going to cut my arm off if Amazon ordered me to. Would you? Amazon can't possibly know what the state of your back is. Only you do, so take some responsibility for yourself.
If you can reasonably do that without damaging your back, and you choose to make an ill advised lift, maybe that's on you.
Where it's debatable is how well Amazon set you up for solving the 30kg problem in a safe way. It's quite possible they failed in providing reasonable instruction and equipment to this guy.
What if you hurt your back trying to lift a 20kg box? Or a 5 kg one? Or a 200kg one that you should know you can't lift? At some point you have to blame the worker, or blame it on bad luck.
The weight given in the article was "over 30 pounds", which is 14kg. That should not trouble a healthy adult and could easily be expected when you sign up for a job delivering package. For comparison, airlines use the "heavy baggage" tag above 23kg, and depending on the airline accept bags up to 50kg or so.
I believe there is a very high fee attached to checking in 23kg-32kg bags (€80?) which are then specifically marked. It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s added for free on some business class fares.
Indeed, now that I look, some airlines allow higher per-luggage limits. I wonder if it's new, and it's due to more automation of the handling.
Anecdotally, I flew Norwegian recently and I was the only one that handled the luggage. I had to figure out how to attach the label, which was mildly intimidating.
Didn't you see that they didn't tell them anything about the weight of the boxes? You are just supposed to deliver them, without any info about their size and weights, also without other details.
I read the entire story and I did not identify any larger theme besides complaining. Is Amazon behaving immorally here (note, did not say "unethically")? Sure, I'll agree with that. If this was a concentrated attack on Amazon and their Flex program then I would be understanding. As it's written the article takes swipes at office workers (??) and laments a lack of a pension (because who gets that now-a-days besides gov/factory employees)??
To put it another way: I also order using Flex and I've never considered working a gig. Am I somehow supposed to feel bad because of this simply due to the author's hardships or feel bad about myself because I don't need to work a gig job?
Please help me understand the zeitgeist here because the downvotes surely aren't.
I read a number of themes, how contractors have been a means for companies to avoid giving benefits, how pay doesn't count in costs incurred during work, how the gig economy is inherently exploitative.
Do you just want to deny these are issues? If so why?
I'm not a downvoter, but I'll try to help you understand another perspective on this.
If you think you'll never have to consider doing this type of work, I don't think you should feel bad about using Flex, but I hope you will acknowledge that you are enjoying a level of prosperity that doesn't seem to be available to everyone.
Also, awareness of how business is able to turn things that used to be costs into externalities may be an early step in the process of making them take responsibility for costs that seem (to me) to be rightfully their own responsibility.
Many HNers may lack self-awareness of their own privileged situation, working in a field where employees are often showered with benefits unthinkable in most other professions.
I've always been puzzled by this; Nobody seems to care about Joe average. Even worse is that saying that you are "disrupting" Joe average's world / life is regarded as a good thing. All these ideas to disrupt all seem to have in common that they are a race to the bottom for average Joe.
While some markets need to be torn open it's always done with a total disregard for the average Joe's who are caught in the crossfire and are paying the price for it.
If someone can disrupt a market that Joe's working in and provide the same (or better) service cheaper, why on Earth does he have an obligation to think about said Joe? That just sounds like a Copenhagen principle of moral entanglement to me.
Because he's a person. Because she has problems. Because he has a family. Because that's my friend and uncle and neighbor. What on Earth do you mean "why do we have to care about them?" Because they're real.
I get where you're coming from about the exasperatingly impossible web of moral obligations, but you can't give up.
> Because he's a person. Because she has problems. Because he has a family.
That's just appeal to empathy - any human has it, until he's a sociopath, but like any other basic instinct, it's human nature to reign over it and not let it run your life.
> Because he has a family. Because that's my friend and uncle and neighbor.
Most likely he's not - there are very few people who I (or you) would actually call family and care about in the way you care about family. This Joe is most likely just an anonymous person that you don't know or care about.
> I get where you're coming from about the exasperatingly impossible web of moral obligations, but you can't give up.
I can't give up something that I didn't put on myself first.
>If someone can disrupt a market that Joe's working in and provide the same (or better) service cheaper, why on Earth does he have an obligation to think about said Joe?
Because the next wave of innovation might send them and their market out to sea.
We've just seen the first phase of the Industrial Revolution with the automating of physical labor, and the automation of mental labor is still in its infancy, but the obsolescence of the "knowledge worker" is coming.
Yes, it might indeed. But what's the actual causal connection here? Do you suppose that if the current disruptors go and create a socialist utopia for the current disrupted, the same welfare net will be there for them to fall upon, too? I don't find it very likely, to say the least.
If its cheaper because you found some way to circumvent labour laws and pit all the Joe average's against each other in a race to the bottom (like most of the "sharing economy" disruption does): Because it does not make the world a better place.
I mean should my window cleaning really be 5 bucks cheaper if that means the guy/gal doing it is not insured if he/she falls of the ladder and can never work again? If you let people choose to take those kinds of risk there will always be some people doing it. Undercutting the people who don't want to take these risk but get forced because they need to be competitive.
That's why we had those kind of labour laws in the first place. Because we thought while being allowed to compete everyone should have certain basic rights which should never be compromised.
> Because it does not make the world a better place.
This is a very high level of abstraction. Making the world a better place is sometimes interesting and to me, and sometimes it's something that I (or you) would be completely indifferent to. Unless you're from a Coke commercial or a hippy commune, "making the world a better place" is not really what you're after.
Now, how are all these things that you mentioned actually relevant to your or me?
> Now, how are all these things that you mentioned actually relevant to your or me?
Well that depends on the kind of person you are. To stay with my earlier example; I personally like the person who cleans my windows to not have to go live under a bridge if that person falls off the ladder and never being able to work again. All because my window cleaning had to be a bit cheaper.
So if its relevant for you is a matter of personal taste.
Apply this logic to granting unlimited work visas (like H1Bs and green cards) for non-Americans and see how many of the same people with the same argument immediately change their tack.
I don't see it. In both cases, you've got "these people" (I guess you mean conservative americans, why didn't you say so, by the way) simply ask, how is it relevant to them and their self-interest. It's the same logic.
Which is all true though would hardly describe the average SV employee as "showered" with benefits when compared to the average European employee.
Compared to the UK:
Pensions suck
Tax treatment of options suck
You Don't have "any" statutory leave and much less AL period.
Sick pay is non existent a good professional employer will offer > 6 months on full pay
Sure. I'm Finnish myself but the same holds here in that IT companies often offer benefits way above and beyond what's mandated by law and collective agreements. And even here gig economy and labor-hire workers are a growing segment of the working populace and lack many if not most of the benefits and protections guaranteed to regular employees. Traditional union-backed left hasn't been particularly interested in the matters of the "precariat" either.
By and large white collar workers view every job as coming with a 401(k), healthcare, and a host of fringe benefits, because every job they’ve had in their professional lives had those things.
Does working in tech have benefits? Sure. That's why so many people are hungry to get into the field by any means possible.
Are there drawbacks? Of course and these are things I rarely see mentioned because the "techies have it so well" is just too good of a narrative. Some examples: no pensions (haha, but the article mentioned it, so why not?), no unions, no overtime, some get stuck with 24/7 on-call rotations, constant need to self-improve or get laid by the wayside, average job security. I can go on.
Personally I would call government employees privileged. High job security and if you just "do your time", you get set with a sweet pension!
My big concerns is the author's objectivity. This journalist has now written ten articles (including this one) mentioning Amazon in the headline, and one which strongly implicates Amazon (and has pictures of Amazon boxes), all since February of this year.
Of these eleven articles, ten of them run against Amazon, its business model, or its affects on society either directly in the headline or in the tagline listed on her author page...the only one I could find that didn't was "Free Shipping Isn't Hurting Amazon" piece.
So, as a person who had written a bunch of articles in the last 7 months criticizing Amazon, did that color her expectations of her Amazon Flex experience? It seems pretty clear she took the job so that she could write the piece, even basically admitting at one point that she was carrying around her reporter's notebook while on at least one of her Flex runs.
I doubt she made any false statements, but along with the objective statements, she included quite a number of subjective ones which clearly supported a thesis of "Amazon ruthlessly exploits the gig economy". And a significant portion of the article was dedicated to her own "tech support" issues...none of which seemed to be supported by quoted observations from the people she interviewed.
I don't doubt that there are valid problems and criticisms of Amazon Flex. I just don't know how much I can trust this article to objectively communicate them.
Or this is what investigative journalism is all about, you suspect something bad or illegal is going on, so you go undercover to try to collect the evidences? Journalists don't stumble on evidences of misconduct by accident, they usually already have an idea about the story that they wish to write, so they investigate in that direction. Her direction seems to be investigating the shitty treatment of employees by Amazon, so she's wrote a series of articles on that subject and got a job so that she could write this one. As long as evidences presented are solid I don't see how this affects the authenticity of her stories? Especially since she's hardly lonely in this, tones of people are writing and complaining about the same kind of problems with Amazon...
Our economy, indeed much of our societal ethos in general, is rooted in the assumption that labor is a scarce commodity. This was true throughout most of human history, but it started becoming less true with the advent of the industrial revolution, and AI and automation will soon drive the last nail in the labor-scarcity coffin.
When labor is scarce, there are two consequences of that scarcity that make our current societal structure work: first, anyone capable of working possesses an inalienable resource (their own labor) that they can exchange for other goods and services in order to survive, and second, basing your economy on this kind of exchange (as opposed to, for example, slave labor) encourages people to work and be productive.
But when labor is no longer scarce, all of this changes in radical ways. Humans in general no longer have access to an inalienable source of wealth, and wealth becomes rooted exclusively in ownership rather than production. We essentially revert back to a slave-like economy, with machines playing the role of chattel slaves. But for non-owners, for people without capital, there is no longer any recourse. Sooner or later, something is going to have to give.
There are only a very few things that humans can still do with more economic effectiveness than machines: drive vehicles, pick fruit, clean houses, and fold shirts. Really, that's about it. And technology is busily chipping away at the first one. Sooner or later, we are going to have to make a fundamental change in how our society is structured, or things will get very unpleasant for a lot of folks.
> Very few of them are driving to a job folding shirts and cleaning houses.
I think you'd be surprised how many of those people are doing just that. And you left out the third category of work: driving itself.
But I did leave out one important category: work requiring interpersonal interactions, like sales, particularly retail sales. But that is starting to go away too.
product design and development is also a really big category. We have big productivity increases, but so far elastic demand just counters any work speed increase with more demands and design goals, making the sector very stable
Yes after 1/3 to 1/2 of Europe died from the bubonic plague. Workers were scarce so they were able to demand better pay and working conditions. Which is why those who run our economy would prefer to keep labor plentiful.
The labor market has never had the useful properties of free markets we see in other industries. Notably price discovery doesn't function in labor markets because there is no way (for most people) to not participate in the labor market. Non participation is a key property of effective free markets.
For three out of the four, there are options not to participate. Housing I would claim also suffers from market distortions.
Food, I can choose not to participate in any given variety of food markets, I can buy groceries, or I can go to restaurants, or I can buy from family farms and hunters. Or I can make it myself.
Clothing is similar to food. And cell phones are trivially easy to refuse to participate.
> But for non-owners, for people without capital, there is no longer any recourse. Sooner or later, something is going to have to give.
We still have an inalienable right - to work for ourselves directly, for our family and community. We can be self reliant with the help of human work + judicious use of advanced tech. We revert back to the self reliant farm or village, not to a new age of capital. Self reliant tech such as solar panels, water filtration, computing, AI, 3d-printers, robots and drones would help us achieve that, as long as they are open sourced and a maker culture exists around them. Do you think billions of able, jobless people would prefer to sit around do nothing and collect UBI rather than working to make more out of what they have? What would they do with their free time when they have little resources than to work for themselves and become more self reliant?
Say you are a jobless teacher. Then you teach poor kids and their parents pay you with food or money. Same for many other non-bullshit jobs - you can work for people who in exchange would render other services or payments back to you. When billions would be jobless, their needs would be ignored by the corporations because there is no profit. But the people would value their needs and work power, and find a way to make due with what they have plus work.
If the AI is a better teacher than you, then the AI will be the teacher, and it takes no salary/food.
There will always be jobs that machines can't do. The question is will they be enough for all of humanity?
"their needs would be ignored by the corporations because there is no profit." But then how would you pay the teacher? Apparently there was some value in skills and you had money to pay the teacher. Unless you're implying that we'd go back to manually farming the villages, like the amish.
> There are only a very few things that humans can still do with more economic effectiveness than machines: drive vehicles, pick fruit, clean houses, and fold shirts. Really, that's about it.
if by clean house you also mean hvac, plumber, and handyman I'm still waiting for robots to do that because they charge an arm and a leg in large cities
That's a good point. I should have included construction in the list.
[EDIT] On second thought, I've decided that I will not concede construction. My list was supposed to be a post-AI list (though I concede I did not make this sufficiently clear). I think in 20-30 years it's very likely that we'll have robots that can do most construction and repair jobs, if for no other reason that by then most products will be designed to be either robotically repaired or disposable.
> There are only a very few things that humans can still do with more economic effectiveness than machines: drive vehicles, pick fruit, clean houses, and fold shirts. Really, that's about it. And technology is busily chipping away at the first one. Sooner or later, we are going to have to make a fundamental change in how our society is structured, or things will get very unpleasant for a lot of folks.
Out of curiosity, have you ever read Vonnegut's Player Piano? It touches on many of these topics, but in particular what you describe is also a key theme. There are few remaining jobs that people can do that machines can't (in the book, tend bar and give a haircut). Human labor is in such a high surplus that the state essentially hires all working age (18-45) males who don't demonstrate the potential to become an engineer or a manager (hews closer to understanding policy, statistics, and systems than actual people management). Then they receive a pension (as in the military today) for the rest of their lives. Societal change becomes necessary, but of course it's Vonnegut so even that doesn't go the way the people intend.
> Our economy, indeed much of our societal ethos in general, is rooted in the assumption that labor is a scarce commodity. This was true throughout most of human history, but it started becoming less true with the advent of the industrial revolution
This is the exact opposite of historical fact.
Before the industrial revolution, labor was next to worthless. Laborers were paid next to nothing by current standards, and lived in poverty below current day third world levels.
The industrial revolution made labor more scarce. Many industrial jobs were created and wages rose as competition for workers intensified. This has been going on uninterrupted for 250+ years now.
This could change in the future, but note that the impending replacement of human labor by machines have also been predicted for 250+ years. I'll believe it when i see it.
> Laborers were paid next to nothing by current standards, and lived in poverty below current day third world levels.
That's true. But...
> labor was next to worthless.
That does not follow. Before the industrial revolution, nearly everyone, even royalty, lived in what would today be considered poverty. Labor as a percentage of total economic output was much higher before the IR than after. It's just that overall productivity vastly increased.
> Many industrial jobs were created and wages rose as competition for workers intensified.
That's true, but...
> The industrial revolution made labor more scarce.
No, that's not true. Yes, many jobs were created, but many previously existing jobs were destroyed. Unemployment as it exists today was unknown before the IR.
Please note that I am not saying that these changes are bad. Before the IR, an unemployed person would have been a dead person because there wasn't enough economic margin to support an unproductive population. Unemployment was a luxury that pre-IR society simply could not afford. Society as a whole is vastly better off because of technology. All I'm saying is that the rules we have for how wealth is distributed is based on assumptions that are becoming less and less true as time goes by, and that we need to address this or it will cause more and more serious problems.
> drive vehicles, pick fruit, clean houses, and fold shirts
What? That's a weirdly specific and tiny list. How about:
- Nearly any sort of creative work: programming, graphic design, product design, landscaping, architecture, writing marketing copy, technical writing, music.
- Diagnosing any complex system. Machines are terrible at diagnosing themselves. Ever pulled an OBD-II code from a car and then wondered which of a hundred actual problems might be the cause of it? How about finding out which exact part is causing your dishwasher to back up and flood?
- Actually repairing any problems that have been diagnosed. Repairing a car is vastly more complicated than building one from scratch using a neatly laid out set of parts in a predetermined series of steps. Hell, making a robot that can reliably change lightbulbs in homes would be a milestone achievement.
- Construction, or any job that requires using tools to performs a task that isn't defined with absolute precision and sequencing. Similar to repair work.
- Human interaction. Medical care, guided tours, live entertainment (not just the performers, but they people they interact with backstage), police work, HR, public relations, management, child care.
- Any mission-oriented or long-term goal-oriented work, i.e., military strategy, city planning, legislation, social policy, organizational direction.
Some corporations derive a huge benefit from the gig economy - either as a central part of their business (Uber drivers) or enticing more customers from competitors (Amazon with great a delivery service).
The losses on the gig worker (benefits, holiday entitlement, etc.) need to be borne by someone - and it doesn't make sense, in my view, to make either the gig work or the government (the wider public) pay for it.
I would suggest that all companies using gig workers (anyone doing work for a corporation without a proper employment contract) need to pay in to a mandatory fund to cover the lost benefits. To me its obvious that the cost should be borne by whoever is extracting the greatest benefit.
I recently saw a 6-year old boy delivering a package for Amazon. He got out of a regular van, dropped off the package, and bounded back to the car. I guess he was probably the child of one of these Flex contractors.
This happened just off Sand Hill Rd., as it happens.
Reminds me of this episode from Vice news [0]. They don’t get paid for car maintenance, gas or any other unforeseen expenses while delivering packages.
A lot of jobs suck. I worked at a KFC for 3 years and a Gameworks, two full time jobs, for 3 years before I began my tech career. I got paid $6.50/hr at KFC and $9.00/hr at Gameworks. No health insurance, benefits, I had to use my own car often to do stuff for them both. It was hell and I hated it. It’s sad but these jobs always exist and probably will for at least the near future.
That said, Amazon should be doing a better job to educate people on how to be successful in these jobs and should adapt the jobs depending on city. It makes no sense to have people driving around in their own cars in SF delivering packages. They could go a long way by hiring bike couriers and doing a better job at distribution. It sure doesn’t sound like last mile delivery when they are forcing people to drive down to south SF to get the stuff.
If I was an engineer at Amazon working on this flex program I’d be embarrassed. If you filter out the entitled and emotional undertone of the author there are many matter of fact things that are just poorly designed and executed on the designers of this system. Sitting at home and refreshing an app? Really? That hour you keep people occupied with a pointless task because of your poor design is an hour you’ve burned of their time that could have been spent doing something productive for either themselves or Amazon.
Not doing address validation, poor distribution logistics, poor use of labor. I guess there is no external pressure to fix anything until they have burned through the labor pool in SF and no one wants to work with the dysfunction? Wonder when that will be...
Kind of a wild west for DIY local delivery jobs. I've talked to the UPS guy several times about these new logistics businesses that have popped up as delivery partners for Amazon and he's said it's a sh%tshow sending drivers off to delivery all over the city, total chaos.
Density populated areas, airports, sporting events, etc all have had to make changes to deal with Uber and Lyft traffic so the city handing out parking tickets doesn't solve much. Seems like heavily populated city addresses & building owners need to solve the last 10 yards because it's not going to slow down.
143 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadThe current "gig economy" trend removes these benefits from employment, and with a government currently opposed to public benefits, the US could be headed towards a problem within a single generation.
This race to the bottom (disruption) seems counter productive for anything but short term investment.
>This race to the bottom (disruption) seems counter productive for anything but short term investment.
And you know who most benefits from this type of investment (basically the ones with the big money to invest with little to no real risk to their way of life). So I don't see it ending any time soon...
Edit: And in turn purposefully growing an existing problem.
401(k)'s history is almost wacky. It was an obscure provision in 1978 tax law and a benefits consultant figured out a way to turn it into something that companies could easily offer to employees as a tax-advantaged benefit.
Of course, once a benefit becomes the norm, it's almost impossible for individual firms to not offer it.
It was illegal for them to offer more money - Roosevelt instituted wage fixing. Offering benefits was a way around the law.
> Of course, once a benefit becomes the norm, it's almost impossible for individual firms to not offer it.
The real reason is that health insurance paid from pre-tax money by the employer makes it cheaper than being post-tax money by the employee. It's the tax system that binds workers to jobs via health care benefits.
Another reason people want wage increases in the form of employer-paid benefits is then they get to lie about the terrible pay they get, because they never ever account for the value of the benefits.
For example, whenever the teachers complain about their salaries, never mentioned are the generous benefits package they get.
Still, teachers are not paid enough.
Now, sure, supposedly salaries would go up if the company no longer offered health insurance but there are lots of moving parts and people and any such transition would be difficult.
You do additionally have a personal option, IRAs, that you can establish at the broker of your choice that give you a lot more flexibility. You can probably setup payroll auto-deduction in many cases.
I am surprised that post enron that US pensions where not reformed.
Defined benefit pensions are different and are much less common than they used to be. So mostly they have been reformed by ceasing to exist in the US. There are various protections for pensions but they're still an issue--especially in municipalities with financial issues.
ADDED: And there's actually a lot of sensitivity these days to 401(k) options that are perceived as risky. Such as a company's own stock.
Someone always needs to bear the risk that the planned payout will be less than forecast. Whether it's the employee or the company. And, at some point, if the money's not there it won't be paid out.
Definitely not easier in the sense that a sizeable plurality of the country, currently in control of both houses of Congress, the Presidency, the Supreme Court, and the majority of state legislative and executive branches, think this is a terrible idea that they equate with creeping Communism.
The German style system is as probably the system you could have got if people weren't so obsessed with Obamas skin color.
But you know what's more of a nightmare? Driving around to every retail outlet in a 30 mile radius, trying to convince them that you can be the most submissive and obedient out of the 200 applicants. It's hard to begrudge the gig economy for providing an alternative to that.
Right, and this can easily be underappreciated by those of us working in environments where it's hardly ever a problem if you need to take a few hours to deal with personal issues.
What was again the name of that psychological test they all use to measure the degree of slavish conformance?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
The work environment matters a lot. The other people you work with matter. How you are managed matters. I think if gig software designers thought a lot about this, they would see a lot of improvement in worker retention and satisfaction.
Note that while this would make job a lot more enjoyable for workers, I still think everyone should enjoy the same basic benefits, no matter what kind of employment relationship they are in. But that could also be solved in other ways (basic income for example).
Wow. Do other gig economy jobs do this? Uber and Lyft? I may just start carrying cash to leave tips now.
I'm not jealous of movie or sports stars and the millions they earn. Where does this person get to think life is unfair because they never applied to/were never hired by Google or the like?
Every job is optional. If it’s beneath you, don’t take it. Hard work is hard work. It’s above minimum wage, and you’re not being abused, then what’s the problem?
You don’t get to dictate your value. You earn what you’re willing to work for.
What did she think she was signing up for? Find another job if it doesn’t suit you. No job is perfect.
There are legions of Flex employees who are grateful for the flexibility this job provides.
If you want to make more money, educate yourself, network, apply to different jobs, work hard, be persistent.
People are so myopic about work these days. Opportunities are out there if you work to find them. The same work ethic that it takes to find those great opportunities will make you successful in life.
Birth rates may decrease, but that’s why we have immigration. Men and women both work these days, doubling the labor pool.
I don’t understand this comment.
This is cheap click-bait journalism trying to get on the wave of writing something about Amazon labor conditions.
Modern American journalism is a joke. Many things in this country are wrong and people can and should rightfully complain/voice their concerns about those things, but this type of journalism is just the equivalent of setting a house on fire just to have the exclusive that you were the one who covered it first. How can we trust any news outlet right or left, if their motivation is only just clicks and impressions?
If there was some giant corporation that was dominating house cleaning nationally and touting the great pay of cleaning toilets for them as a freelancer, that would certainly warrant some inspection, too.
Around here the local retail businesses Amazon is crushing are owned by large corporations, who previously put the small, independent retailers out of business decades ago.
The same way Netflix put Blockbuster out of business, who put the small, independent video renters out of business long before.
But they're missing the larger critical points which are very newsworthy:
- The author almost injured themselves with an overly heavy box because Amazon didn't provide them with a dolly, warn them they needed one, and if they did injure themselves the medical bills are their own
- Amazon is asking them to deliver packages where parking without getting a ticket is a logistical impossibility and risk making negative $ for the day due to tickets
- These kinds of safety and minimum wage regulations which have been hard-won over the past decades are being completely avoided by Amazon by (possibly wrongly/illegally) classifying them as independent contractors, which seems to be a scandal that laws/regulations ought to fix, but compulsory arbitration may be preventing class-action lawsuits which would otherwise correct the situation
Why is it someone else's fault if you lift something too heavy for you? What is "too heavy" is a fairly personal thing. It's trivial to tell if something is too heavy for you. Do I need to explain how?
As for not injuring yourself from lifting, that's a skill everyone should learn by themselves, like how to not fall down the stairs. It's not someone else's fault.
If a dolly will help, you can pick one up for 40 bucks or so (ironically, from Amazon!). I keep one around, because I find it useful. Many occupations require you to furnish your own tools (and if you're an auto mechanic, that can run into thousands). I've bought and used personal equipment at every job I've ever had.
I'm genuinely not sure if you're completely unaware of the real world financial problems low paid folks have, or are just trolling now.
I was being paid GBP 76.00 per week which has to cover heat & light, food, telephone, internet, gas for the car, car insurance, car tax, etc....it goes on. There is nothing left. I was also being paid "housing benefit" which doesn't pay anywhere near the actual cost of rent.
You should try this some time before making such poorly informed and sweeping statements.
If you can reasonably do that without damaging your back, and you choose to make an ill advised lift, maybe that's on you.
Where it's debatable is how well Amazon set you up for solving the 30kg problem in a safe way. It's quite possible they failed in providing reasonable instruction and equipment to this guy.
The weight given in the article was "over 30 pounds", which is 14kg. That should not trouble a healthy adult and could easily be expected when you sign up for a job delivering package. For comparison, airlines use the "heavy baggage" tag above 23kg, and depending on the airline accept bags up to 50kg or so.
Without looking it up, what's the recommended technique to lift a 30 kg box from the back of a van?
Anecdotally, I flew Norwegian recently and I was the only one that handled the luggage. I had to figure out how to attach the label, which was mildly intimidating.
To put it another way: I also order using Flex and I've never considered working a gig. Am I somehow supposed to feel bad because of this simply due to the author's hardships or feel bad about myself because I don't need to work a gig job?
Please help me understand the zeitgeist here because the downvotes surely aren't.
Do you just want to deny these are issues? If so why?
If you think you'll never have to consider doing this type of work, I don't think you should feel bad about using Flex, but I hope you will acknowledge that you are enjoying a level of prosperity that doesn't seem to be available to everyone.
Also, awareness of how business is able to turn things that used to be costs into externalities may be an early step in the process of making them take responsibility for costs that seem (to me) to be rightfully their own responsibility.
While some markets need to be torn open it's always done with a total disregard for the average Joe's who are caught in the crossfire and are paying the price for it.
I get where you're coming from about the exasperatingly impossible web of moral obligations, but you can't give up.
That's just appeal to empathy - any human has it, until he's a sociopath, but like any other basic instinct, it's human nature to reign over it and not let it run your life.
> Because he has a family. Because that's my friend and uncle and neighbor.
Most likely he's not - there are very few people who I (or you) would actually call family and care about in the way you care about family. This Joe is most likely just an anonymous person that you don't know or care about.
> I get where you're coming from about the exasperatingly impossible web of moral obligations, but you can't give up.
I can't give up something that I didn't put on myself first.
Because the next wave of innovation might send them and their market out to sea.
We've just seen the first phase of the Industrial Revolution with the automating of physical labor, and the automation of mental labor is still in its infancy, but the obsolescence of the "knowledge worker" is coming.
I mean should my window cleaning really be 5 bucks cheaper if that means the guy/gal doing it is not insured if he/she falls of the ladder and can never work again? If you let people choose to take those kinds of risk there will always be some people doing it. Undercutting the people who don't want to take these risk but get forced because they need to be competitive.
That's why we had those kind of labour laws in the first place. Because we thought while being allowed to compete everyone should have certain basic rights which should never be compromised.
This is a very high level of abstraction. Making the world a better place is sometimes interesting and to me, and sometimes it's something that I (or you) would be completely indifferent to. Unless you're from a Coke commercial or a hippy commune, "making the world a better place" is not really what you're after.
Now, how are all these things that you mentioned actually relevant to your or me?
Well that depends on the kind of person you are. To stay with my earlier example; I personally like the person who cleans my windows to not have to go live under a bridge if that person falls off the ladder and never being able to work again. All because my window cleaning had to be a bit cheaper.
So if its relevant for you is a matter of personal taste.
Compared to the UK:
Are there drawbacks? Of course and these are things I rarely see mentioned because the "techies have it so well" is just too good of a narrative. Some examples: no pensions (haha, but the article mentioned it, so why not?), no unions, no overtime, some get stuck with 24/7 on-call rotations, constant need to self-improve or get laid by the wayside, average job security. I can go on.
Personally I would call government employees privileged. High job security and if you just "do your time", you get set with a sweet pension!
https://www.theatlantic.com/author/alana-semuels/
Of these eleven articles, ten of them run against Amazon, its business model, or its affects on society either directly in the headline or in the tagline listed on her author page...the only one I could find that didn't was "Free Shipping Isn't Hurting Amazon" piece.
So, as a person who had written a bunch of articles in the last 7 months criticizing Amazon, did that color her expectations of her Amazon Flex experience? It seems pretty clear she took the job so that she could write the piece, even basically admitting at one point that she was carrying around her reporter's notebook while on at least one of her Flex runs.
I doubt she made any false statements, but along with the objective statements, she included quite a number of subjective ones which clearly supported a thesis of "Amazon ruthlessly exploits the gig economy". And a significant portion of the article was dedicated to her own "tech support" issues...none of which seemed to be supported by quoted observations from the people she interviewed.
I don't doubt that there are valid problems and criticisms of Amazon Flex. I just don't know how much I can trust this article to objectively communicate them.
I trust her article because she focused on the facts:
* delivery address information wrong
* heavy boxes
* No ability to contact recipient for delivery
* unreliable app for scanning packages
* etc.
"Balance" is bs if balance comes at the cost of accuracy.
When labor is scarce, there are two consequences of that scarcity that make our current societal structure work: first, anyone capable of working possesses an inalienable resource (their own labor) that they can exchange for other goods and services in order to survive, and second, basing your economy on this kind of exchange (as opposed to, for example, slave labor) encourages people to work and be productive.
But when labor is no longer scarce, all of this changes in radical ways. Humans in general no longer have access to an inalienable source of wealth, and wealth becomes rooted exclusively in ownership rather than production. We essentially revert back to a slave-like economy, with machines playing the role of chattel slaves. But for non-owners, for people without capital, there is no longer any recourse. Sooner or later, something is going to have to give.
There are only a very few things that humans can still do with more economic effectiveness than machines: drive vehicles, pick fruit, clean houses, and fold shirts. Really, that's about it. And technology is busily chipping away at the first one. Sooner or later, we are going to have to make a fundamental change in how our society is structured, or things will get very unpleasant for a lot of folks.
The roads are clogged every day with people driving to work. Very few of them are driving to a job folding shirts and cleaning houses.
I think you'd be surprised how many of those people are doing just that. And you left out the third category of work: driving itself.
But I did leave out one important category: work requiring interpersonal interactions, like sales, particularly retail sales. But that is starting to go away too.
Of course now we're finding ourselves completely surprised at the same point - only that a lot of erosion has already been done to undercut unions.
Why did half the world go through communist revolutions, is that because workers were too wealthy?
Before the industrial revolution, yes.
> Was work ever an inalienable form of wealth?
In a society that does not allow slavery, yes.
Yes after 1/3 to 1/2 of Europe died from the bubonic plague. Workers were scarce so they were able to demand better pay and working conditions. Which is why those who run our economy would prefer to keep labor plentiful.
That doesn't follow, unless you're going to claim that price discovery also doesn't function for food, housing, clothing, and cell phones.
Food, I can choose not to participate in any given variety of food markets, I can buy groceries, or I can go to restaurants, or I can buy from family farms and hunters. Or I can make it myself.
Clothing is similar to food. And cell phones are trivially easy to refuse to participate.
We still have an inalienable right - to work for ourselves directly, for our family and community. We can be self reliant with the help of human work + judicious use of advanced tech. We revert back to the self reliant farm or village, not to a new age of capital. Self reliant tech such as solar panels, water filtration, computing, AI, 3d-printers, robots and drones would help us achieve that, as long as they are open sourced and a maker culture exists around them. Do you think billions of able, jobless people would prefer to sit around do nothing and collect UBI rather than working to make more out of what they have? What would they do with their free time when they have little resources than to work for themselves and become more self reliant?
Really? How? What exactly is someone with no capital assets supposed to do in today's world?
There will always be jobs that machines can't do. The question is will they be enough for all of humanity?
"their needs would be ignored by the corporations because there is no profit." But then how would you pay the teacher? Apparently there was some value in skills and you had money to pay the teacher. Unless you're implying that we'd go back to manually farming the villages, like the amish.
if by clean house you also mean hvac, plumber, and handyman I'm still waiting for robots to do that because they charge an arm and a leg in large cities
[EDIT] On second thought, I've decided that I will not concede construction. My list was supposed to be a post-AI list (though I concede I did not make this sufficiently clear). I think in 20-30 years it's very likely that we'll have robots that can do most construction and repair jobs, if for no other reason that by then most products will be designed to be either robotically repaired or disposable.
Out of curiosity, have you ever read Vonnegut's Player Piano? It touches on many of these topics, but in particular what you describe is also a key theme. There are few remaining jobs that people can do that machines can't (in the book, tend bar and give a haircut). Human labor is in such a high surplus that the state essentially hires all working age (18-45) males who don't demonstrate the potential to become an engineer or a manager (hews closer to understanding policy, statistics, and systems than actual people management). Then they receive a pension (as in the military today) for the rest of their lives. Societal change becomes necessary, but of course it's Vonnegut so even that doesn't go the way the people intend.
This is the exact opposite of historical fact.
Before the industrial revolution, labor was next to worthless. Laborers were paid next to nothing by current standards, and lived in poverty below current day third world levels.
The industrial revolution made labor more scarce. Many industrial jobs were created and wages rose as competition for workers intensified. This has been going on uninterrupted for 250+ years now.
This could change in the future, but note that the impending replacement of human labor by machines have also been predicted for 250+ years. I'll believe it when i see it.
That's true. But...
> labor was next to worthless.
That does not follow. Before the industrial revolution, nearly everyone, even royalty, lived in what would today be considered poverty. Labor as a percentage of total economic output was much higher before the IR than after. It's just that overall productivity vastly increased.
> Many industrial jobs were created and wages rose as competition for workers intensified.
That's true, but...
> The industrial revolution made labor more scarce.
No, that's not true. Yes, many jobs were created, but many previously existing jobs were destroyed. Unemployment as it exists today was unknown before the IR.
Please note that I am not saying that these changes are bad. Before the IR, an unemployed person would have been a dead person because there wasn't enough economic margin to support an unproductive population. Unemployment was a luxury that pre-IR society simply could not afford. Society as a whole is vastly better off because of technology. All I'm saying is that the rules we have for how wealth is distributed is based on assumptions that are becoming less and less true as time goes by, and that we need to address this or it will cause more and more serious problems.
What? That's a weirdly specific and tiny list. How about:
- Nearly any sort of creative work: programming, graphic design, product design, landscaping, architecture, writing marketing copy, technical writing, music.
- Diagnosing any complex system. Machines are terrible at diagnosing themselves. Ever pulled an OBD-II code from a car and then wondered which of a hundred actual problems might be the cause of it? How about finding out which exact part is causing your dishwasher to back up and flood?
- Actually repairing any problems that have been diagnosed. Repairing a car is vastly more complicated than building one from scratch using a neatly laid out set of parts in a predetermined series of steps. Hell, making a robot that can reliably change lightbulbs in homes would be a milestone achievement.
- Construction, or any job that requires using tools to performs a task that isn't defined with absolute precision and sequencing. Similar to repair work.
- Human interaction. Medical care, guided tours, live entertainment (not just the performers, but they people they interact with backstage), police work, HR, public relations, management, child care.
- Any mission-oriented or long-term goal-oriented work, i.e., military strategy, city planning, legislation, social policy, organizational direction.
Indeed. I didn't make it sufficiently clear, but I intended this sentence to be the operative one:
"AI and automation will soon drive the last nail in the labor-scarcity coffin"
So that list was supposed to be a post-AI list, not a contemporary one.
I wonder why that is. Do they think it's so obvious that it's not worth mentioning, or they really don't care?
I stopped there.
The losses on the gig worker (benefits, holiday entitlement, etc.) need to be borne by someone - and it doesn't make sense, in my view, to make either the gig work or the government (the wider public) pay for it.
I would suggest that all companies using gig workers (anyone doing work for a corporation without a proper employment contract) need to pay in to a mandatory fund to cover the lost benefits. To me its obvious that the cost should be borne by whoever is extracting the greatest benefit.
This happened just off Sand Hill Rd., as it happens.
[0] https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/kzyw4y/amazon-is-imitati...
That said, Amazon should be doing a better job to educate people on how to be successful in these jobs and should adapt the jobs depending on city. It makes no sense to have people driving around in their own cars in SF delivering packages. They could go a long way by hiring bike couriers and doing a better job at distribution. It sure doesn’t sound like last mile delivery when they are forcing people to drive down to south SF to get the stuff.
If I was an engineer at Amazon working on this flex program I’d be embarrassed. If you filter out the entitled and emotional undertone of the author there are many matter of fact things that are just poorly designed and executed on the designers of this system. Sitting at home and refreshing an app? Really? That hour you keep people occupied with a pointless task because of your poor design is an hour you’ve burned of their time that could have been spent doing something productive for either themselves or Amazon.
Not doing address validation, poor distribution logistics, poor use of labor. I guess there is no external pressure to fix anything until they have burned through the labor pool in SF and no one wants to work with the dysfunction? Wonder when that will be...
Density populated areas, airports, sporting events, etc all have had to make changes to deal with Uber and Lyft traffic so the city handing out parking tickets doesn't solve much. Seems like heavily populated city addresses & building owners need to solve the last 10 yards because it's not going to slow down.