> Maybe they'll pay their bees better. They'll hire them outright and give them bee benefits instead of having them work as 1099 labor. That'll win a bunch of hearts and minds. "Oh, it's better for the bees, so now we only buy our honey from Willy".
I always ask to be 1099 labor, and I'm always told "absolutely not. It'll never happen; completely unacceptable".
Where does this delusion come from that W2 status is a good thing that workers want to have and employers want to withhold? Where are these W2-withholding employers?
The difficulty in finding 1099 arrangements these days for tech companies is that they often want to monopolize your time, which they can't do in a 1099 arrangement. Basically, back in the late 90s or so, Microsoft tried to use 1099s to avoid giving out benefits
(such as unemployment insurance) and got hammered by the Labor Department for it. So now most places either put everyone under W2 or are super strict about the number of hours you can work.
It basically comes down to who gets to say when you start and stop working. If the company wants to demand a certain set of hours of the day (not just an aggregate of hours during a work period), then the person doing the work is not a "contractor". Contractors are supposed to be able to make their own hours and find any number of clients they wish to fill their time. If the client doesn't like you doing that, then they are obligated to make you an employee.
The mentality of some companies are beyond weird. If I hire a contractor, especially in tech sector, I couldn't care less what hours he does as long as the job is done.If I can't measure what the guy does in x days/month- I'm a tool in here. There are still too many managers out there who think that if a person sits all day staring at the monitor that equates working.
> If the company wants to demand a certain set of hours of the day (not just an aggregate of hours during a work period), then the person doing the work is not a "contractor". Contractors are supposed to be able to make their own hours and find any number of clients they wish to fill their time.
This is not true in general; for example, security guards can have contractor status while obviously still being required to show up during their shift and not someone else's shift.
> security guards can have contractor status while obviously still being required to show up during their shift and not someone else's shift
No, the IRS (assuming we're talking about the US) wouldn't allow it - that security guard would either need to be classified as an employee or provide their services to the customer as a corporate entity themselves. The guidelines[1] around this are very straightforward:
"Under common-law rules, anyone who performs services for you is your employee if you can control what will be done and how it will be done. This is so even when you give the employee freedom of action. What matters is that you have the right to control the details of how the services are performed."
> And yet your quote doesn't even mention scheduling or the concept of time.
If you drill down[1] on that page to "Behavioral Control," you'll find :
"An employee is generally subject to the business’s instructions about when, where, and how to work. All of the following are examples of types of instructions about how to do work.
- When and where to do the work."
> This is not true. Please don't spread falsehoods in public like this.
I'm not sure it's fair to classify a widely-accepted interpretation of the law as a "falsehood" but anyway, according to this[2] it seems that at least one court agrees that security guards are not independent contractors if they meet the above-linked criteria:
"A Louisiana federal district court has granted a motion approving a confidential settlement in a collective action by New Orleans security guards under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act...They claimed that the company had complete control over how, when and where the guards performed their work; set the guards’ work schedules; and required the guards to wear uniforms with the company’s logo."
If you're hiring them personally, no. This is only applicable when the hiring entity is a company.
On the other hand, if you're wealthy and run your household via e.g. a family LLC which contracts that cleaner in a professional capacity, then - technically - yes. It's possible there's an exception for scenarios like this, but I'm not familiar with it.
Disclaimer: I'm neither an accountant nor a tax attorney, but I've dealt with classification issues as both an employer and an indie consultant for years.
I guess that's a reasonable trade-off. if I want to protect my personal assets through an LLC, I have more obligations to the worker than some random Joe.
There is a fuzzy line there, between defining what the job is and how it should be done.
If you say "sand the floor", a contractor that shows up with a power sander and sands the floor is still a contractor.
When Mr. Miyagi kicks away the power sander, reveals two sanding blocks, and says, "No, like this," then Daniel-san is his employee.
If the job is "clean my house on Wednesday no earlier than 8 am and finished by noon, without using bleach", as long as the only thing you're managing is to check the cleanliness of the house at 12:01 on Wednesday, that's still contracting. If you are then surprised that your cleaner subcontracted with the Cat in the Hat, and a Seussian steam-engine rolls in at 11:50 and back out at 11:59, leaving everything spotless and sparkling, you'd best just keep your mouth shut and enjoy the cleanliness. Because if you concern yourself with the who and the how, instead of just the what, where, and when, you should have hired an employee.
If you can't hand off the job to another equally qualified person and still get the money yourself, that's not contracting.
In the metaphor, the "apiarists" should probably have some contracts for honey with queen bees, who then manage their own hives in their own way to make delivery. But then those queens would have negotiating power, and the ability to switch apiarists to get the best price for their honey.
Aren't security guards usually contractors by virtue of the fact that they are employed by a company that is contracted to do the work? (Usually the company whose name appears on their patch)?
Laws vary by jurisdiction. I recently learned about how it works in Saskatchewan, Canada: indie contractor guards pretty much don’t fit into our legislation. A company offering guard services must be licensed and bonded, and the guards themselves must be licensed. A guards license requires the applicant to pass a one-time exam, and their license is tied to a specific employer. If you’rea guards and want to change your employer, you have to reapply for a new license.
You could set up your own Corp and offer guards services, and in that case it would be pretty clear that you’re a contractor (you’ve put up your own bond and registered your company with the province), but otherwise there’s not really any way to have a solo contractor guard.
Mark is Uber and Barry is Lyft. The bees are the drivers. Uber and Lyft do not want to put them on payroll, while the drivers filed a class action suit saying they should be treated as employees not contractors. Swap in #1 and #2 from any "gig economy" market, same story.
> Where does this delusion come from that W2 status is a good thing that workers want to have and employers want to withhold? Where are these W2-withholding employers?
The last dev agency I worked for, all designers/developers were 1099 at the start but everyone had to transition to W-2 by like 2009ish. The reason being that Colorado was cracking down hard on companies with 1099 workers. As far as labor board is concerned, if you walk like a duck, quack like a duck, you're a duck.
A long time ago I worked for Bell Northern Research (which eventually became Nortel, which eventually became insolvent). When I started there they had a retirement savings program where they would sell you BNR stock for half price (though you had to have it in your retirement savings). I said "No thank you" and a lot of people thought I was crazy. At the time the company was pulling in $18 billion a year and was making about a 5% profit (later it was found that the "5% profit" was actually accounting fraud but nobody knew that at the time).
From my perspective, I looked at the business and realised that we were selling hardware at a 90% margin, but only eking out a 5% profit. Where was the rest of the money going? Well, obviously to a very inefficient rest of the company that included the software developers (me ;-) ). Later it was discovered that it was also being imbezzled, but we didn't know about it at that time...
It occurred to me, though, that the only thing that was stopping a company from eating our lunch was that telecom hardware was a capital intensive industry. So you had BNR, AT&T and Seimens capturing practically the entire market, each being as incompetent as the other, but with very little distinction between them. All you needed was a few billion dollars to shake the industry to the core. And, of course, that happened. It took only a couple of years (less than 5 I think) for Nortel to go from 100K employees to zero (with the executives slurping up the retirement fund to pay for their own "retention bonuses", because what would have happened if the executives bolted as soon as bankruptcy proceedings started??? I mean apart from retirees actually getting their retirement money, obviously...)
But it's a funny thing because if I were Barry, I would be selling mead. And I would open up a visitor centre in a "Ye Olde Merry England" vibe where you can sample the mead. And I would start an onsite bakery with Knights in Shining Armour theme where I would test out recipes on my customers. And I would make a joint venture with a factory producing confectionary to try to get into convenience stores. And because I would quickly run out of honey to sell, I would buy up all of Mark's honey and eventually just acquire him so that he's my employee. Then I'd fire him because he's mean to bees.
But realistically, I think Barry will just be trying to figure out how to siphon a few extra dollars out of the business and into his pocket because starting up new ventures are risky and hard work.
Honeybees are delicate creatures. If bee hive is not treated well, it gets sick, decreases honey production and maybe does not survive winter. Mark in this story would probably went bankrupt in a few years.
That seems like a pretty unrealistic scenario. I guess it's a thought experiment but positioning (and the existence of branding/marketing) alone would indicate to me that Barry and Mark are not going to be exactly the same.
Positioning is always going to be at the very least a soft-moat and especially in consumable goods it's going to be a pretty strong moat (think Coke vs. Pepsi).
This reads like some kind of allegory, but I really cannot tell for what... But taking it in the somewhat literal spirit: we have a good analogy in the market with free range eggs.
Here in Australia, "free range" hens must be kept at no more that 10,000 head/hectare (or 1 sqm of land per hen). This is massively better than battery hens, which are kept at as low as... 0.03 sqm of cage/hen. The animal welfare benefits are huge, battery hens have a truly horrible existence, to the point where I believe that it is immoral to farm them in this way.
But some producers are advertising lower stocking densities, some 6 sqm per hen and others even 10 sqm. They are charging a small premium for their eggs, and some people pay it, because they like the idea of animals being treated well.
So yes, many people are prepared to pay a bit extra for ethical treatment of animals. Even people (if that where the original post was pointing at).
Given the source, I interpreted it as referring to how companies treat their employees (i.e. worker bees). The story suggests that, all other things being equal, consumers might gravitate towards companies with a reputation for treating their employees well. Mark, Barry, and Willy produce the same product at the same price, so how they treat their employees becomes how they differentiate themselves and win over consumers.
The problem is, all things are rarely equal and, if they are, businesses usually find ways of differentiating themselves that consumers care more about than happy employees. When Mark starts losing business to Barry, he's going to cut his prices, spend more on advertising, etc.. Treating his bees poorly may actually help him squeeze more honey out of them at less cost, so Barry might not be able to match him without starting to mistreat his bees a little too. Willy's costs are probably the highest of the three, but maybe he can use clever advertising to portray his product as a luxury item that's somehow better than Barry's or Mark's, even if it's identical. If that fails he'll have to choose between happy bees and not going bankrupt.
I'd like to live in a world where a virtuous feedback loop would lead to companies treating their employees better and better, but history says that's not the world we live in. We live in a world that has had to come up with labour unions when spirals of mistreatment and cost-cutting got out of hand. We live in a world where executive pay is going stratospheric while employee benefits are stagnant. Perhaps it would be a better world if people cared more about how companies treat their employees, but I honestly don't see how you get people browsing Amazon to choose the honey that's $2/jar more just because it came from slightly happier bees.
I interpreted it a bit more broadly as a message about a company's image in the media (though this may be influenced by how it is reputed to treat its workers).
I thought the author's point was that if your company's only value proposition is that you are "less evil" than some company B (but with virtually the same product), then your position is extremely vulnerable.
> I'd like to live in a world where a virtuous feedback loop would lead to companies treating their employees better and better, but history says that's not the world we live in.
The world we live in has historically treated workers better and better, with some ups and downs, mostly for economic reasons.
The primary factor that determines worker welfare is the price of labor. If labor is cheap due to low demand and lots of people compete for jobs, they will accept being mistreated. If labor is expensive due to high demand and fewer people competing for jobs, they will not accept being mistreated. They will move on to greener pastures.
This is different across industries, of course. The plight is upon those who have little to offer to the demands of the economy. If nobody wants to eat honey anymore, having bees work for free wouldn't save the company.
What we also have learned from history, but tend to forget, is that price fixing doesn't solve the problem.
> We live in a world where executive pay is going stratospheric while employee benefits are stagnant.
This is numerically irrelevant, because there are very few such executives. Cutting into their compensation to pay the many lower-tier workers a tiny bit more would make no difference.
CEO pay is a scapegoat. The real transfer has gone to shareholders. US is basically bisected to two classes now where the below class lives inside a meatgrinder with no realistic way out.
Shareholders are scapegoats as well. Just as dividing up CEO compensation among workers would be a drop in the bucket, dividing company profits (or just dividends) amongst them often wouldn't amount to a substantial difference.
Shareholders only have made paper profits in the S&P 500 because the governments of the world have decided that debt has to be cheap in order to avoid another liquidity crisis, therefore assets must be relatively expensive.
This isn't a wealth transfer, it's price inflation. Warren Buffett may have a bigger dollar valuation to his name today, but he couldn't buy any more stock or real estate with it.
You got me there, Quote:'The problem is, all things are rarely equal and, if they are, businesses usually find ways of differentiating themselves that consumers care more about than happy employees.'...but...
"'Ethical' behavior rules the internal- and security policy social", anyone ?? P-:
> I'd like to live in a world where a virtuous feedback loop would lead to companies treating their employees better and better, but history says that's not the world we live in.
This sort of comment always reminds me of the quintessential answer: "That's funny, I always thought the world is what we make of it."
If the only way we can 'make consumers choose better' is to continually publish and broadcast the worst corporate behavior in order to spur these kinds of shifts, then so be it.
Scream loudly about WalMart subverting local government and historical societies to build a store within sight of Tenochtitlan.
Republish over and over about Amazon's treatment of their fulfillment workers.
Shame them all until the baseline is as much better as we can make it, and keep pushing against the entropy.
The world is what We make it, not what I make it. The coordination problem is not trivial.
Look at our lord and savior Bill Gates saving the USA from novel Corovirus. He could only do that after amassing a fortune from being a criminally savage businessperson for decades.
Agreed it's not a trivial problem. That was my point, that we need to show the cases of worst behavior often, loudly, and broadly so that people are informed and have the option to make choices.
Bill Gates has money because he created a product that set back science for decades. It still hurts science today. The way Windows differentiates itself from Unix for the sole reason of not being compatible has set back society immensely.
Today, after having made all this money exploiting society in general and science in particular, he is putting money back into science.
Look, I get it, the damage is already done, so him putting money back we gain some back. And I also get it. If he didn't do it someone else would have.
My main issue with that approach is in practice it has two issues one of which is escalation of standards for being "good" means that you are still a bastard for paying workers $15/hr when the minimum wage is $10. And responding to one demand means others try to push more without any returns. It makes conceding not worth it and does everything about negotations wrong. And attempts to influence companies fundamentally are negotations which depend upon being a party to it one way or another.
Meanwhile ignoring the "fuck you we don't care" bad actors already know about especially the commodities it winds up disproportionate.
The second issue is lack of chosing battles it depletes social capital to the point nobody outside the bubble takes them remotely seriously.
> The story suggests that, all other things being equal, consumers might gravitate towards companies with a reputation for treating their employees well.
I got that feeling as well, but I think it's not really well-supported in the real world. Some consumers gravitate towards companies with a good reputation / ethical platform / health focus / whatever. But the vast majority of consumers choose on price or value separate from these things. For example, in the US how many people shop at Whole Foods vs. normal supermarkets? I'd be surprised if it's more than 1 in 10.
> We live in a world that has had to come up with labour unions when spirals of mistreatment and cost-cutting got out of hand
The OP story is one reason that unions in certain geographies will attempt to unionize the entire industry all at once, so that there's no competitive disadvantage for one employer against another on labor costs.
If you're organizing janitors in Miami, building owners will need to hire SOME contracting service to maintain the building but want the cheapest, still-quality one available. So if the workers do it together, it actually makes the fight with the employers easier not harder because they're less worried about losing business.
Of course, this also means the lack of union density makes it harder for any individual place to unionize.
I'd say it's not just the ethical treatment of animals, but quality also. Animals growing in cages are under huge stress and much more prone to diseases, so they are often given a number of medications as a prevention. Their whole physiology is heavily altered. As they're never exposed to direct sunlight production of some vitamins is severely reduced in caged animals. They're fed special food to stimulate nesting, to make yolk more yellow, etc. It has to be highly concentrated and hormone rich to stimulate them laying unnaturally many eggs, from very young age.
> so they are often given a number of medications as a prevention
This in fact leads to evolution of multi resistant germs which then leads to those germs landing on the meat products and finally on humans. If you are healthy this isn't a problem but if you get an infection by those germs, treatment options are greatly reduced.
The US has a massive resistant germ problem, and it's partly caused by laxer regulations aroud antibiotic application in industrial animal farms compared to the EU where there are strict regulations and the resistant germ problem is smaller.
So yes, if you eat that kind of meat you are directly exposed to a major health risk. People still die of sepsis today, limbs are still being amputated because of untreatable infections.
The definitions vary (so it's hard to be exact), but they don't necessarily "live" at that density, but may only have the option to have some "yard time".
I've seen one standard which defined the minimum number of hours per day and the diameter of the pipe through which the chickens could reach said yard (fairly similar to their own size). Equivalently and slighly tongue-in-cheek, you can go for a stroll in a park for a few minutes, and go back to the apartment. Free range.
> Here in Australia, "free range" hens must be kept at no more that 10,000 head/hectare
Australian "free range" eggs are a scam. When people imagine "free range", they're thinking of chickens walking free in a green meadow, which is nowhere near what actual "free range" chickens get to experience. 10,000 head/hectare is disgusting.
I dont remember what is the requirement in my part of Europe (maybe there is a EU standard?) for free range chickens, but anyway: many years ago a close family friend wanted to start producing free range eggs on his farm. There was a huuuge area (to meet the requirements) fenced that the chickens were free to use, but still very rarely any chicken walked over 15 meters away from their shelter.
That's going on to an extent over here as well, except that it has more or less been incorporated into government strategy as a way to differentiate local farmers from lower cost competitors.
As a result, meat is expensive, but the quality is much better than what you get across the border(s).
The real kicker is that Zürich is now ground zero for food tech, and there's a real chance that they're going to outcompete local farmers on quality, price, and ethics.
I read it as a straightforward swipe at companies whose entire business is “X other company, but ethical.” They’re sitting ducks for another company to come along and trivially one-up them in the virtue stakes.
While it might suck to be someone whose only value is "slightly less evil", being replaced would seem to come with the territory of making 'slight ethics improvement' your major marketable feature.
Either you remain on the forefront of ethics, continually re-capturing your market and basically creating an ever moving 'ethics' moat, or you are replaced and forgotten just as surely as a smartphone manufacturer who declines to update their models
For the smartphone manufacturer, ethics isn't the key thing, features are. But for bee farming or egg farming or what have you, perhaps ethics are the key feature, the key differentiator in the market.
Ultimately it would seem that an 'ethics arm race' powered by ethical consumers would be a good thing, even if there is some noise on the supply side about who precisely is producing the ethical outcomes
but it's not a race to the bottom. Some folks are just looking for a service provider that is not absolutely terrible. So there is not a demand for ride share services from Mother Theresa, but there is a demand for ride share services that don't make you feel bad about consuming them. Per this interpretation, it's a satisficing problem, not an optimization problem.
I think the 1099 bit is pretty obvious. It's about how employees and customers are treated. Remember the Delete Uber campaign a little while ago? Lyft had absolutely no secret sauce to differentiate itself aside from a slightly more positive brand identity. It was never accused of ignoring sexual assaults and has a reputation for paying drivers slightly better.
Same thing applies to dairy cows and their male offspring. There literally is no free lunch with large scale dairy. Not to mention debeaking and other carnal processes used to curtail the animals.
No, eggs can be ethical if you run a small farm where you have the resources to take care of both the males and females. But I've not heard of large farms doing such, probably because of the issue of fertilization necessarily leading to segregation of sexes. Perhaps there is a farm that takes care of the males despite their economic negative - if so, sign me up for their eggs.
If this is a comparison between Uber and Lyft, I'm not sure I really get it.
Platform business models are essentially winner takes all. Lyft's value proposition is that they're number two in a market where anyone who isn't in the top 4-5 has almost no chance of winning.
This doesn't mean that they're doing enough to differentiate themselves from Uber, or that they'll ever be able to turn an actual profit, but for the short and medium term game they're more than capable of fending off Uber-copy #27.
That's why I take all alternatives to Google and Facebook with a grain of salt. Their UVP is to be less evil than the near-monopolies they try to compete with. But they need to make money somehow!
The current "common knowledge" is that if they don't profile people, they can't be efficient. That's very wrong. There are many ways to deliver ads to people that might be interested in them without profiling individuals. But the market is too inert, and people too hooked to FB and Google already.
I think a lot of the long tail of open source projects are like this, the small treams and solo-contributors. Or at least that is what they put front-and-center. I know I've been guilty of doing it myself. "Our software is better because it's not made by Evilbook Partners, LTD".
The natural, default position is to think everyone else thinks like you do. So if you present a solution to a problem, they should value it the same way you do. "I wrote this because I didn't want to do X". But it seems to turn out that most people don't care about your specific X.
My last, big attempt at FOSS didn't start that way. When I first started the project, it was the only such project available. But a household-name corp started their own, competing project a year later and all I was left with was (other than a much more complete implementation) some proselytizing about the open web. But none of it could compete with them funding developers out of pocket--while I scraped together contact jobs--to go out and implement their library for other people's projects, write more blog posts than I have hours in a day, and generally just fill the space with "look at us, we're the only dog in town" fake news.
I knew their project was nowhere near as complete or easy to use as mine. But I never put the time into expressing that. Well, for one thing they were playing the "we're all one, big, happy community of niche-industry devs" card, so it was impossible to say anything that could at all be considered negative towards them. But I had so much code to write, and code is a lot easier to me than marketing. It would have taken me becoming an expert in their project, when they had no such burden with regards to mine.
I let myself get pushed into taking about my project in terms of theirs. Hell, some people even accused me if "wasting time, reinventing the wheel" (to this day, no phrase pisses me off more).
Now, I'm just trying to write software for myself. That's all I was ever really doing. The FOSS stuff had no plan, it was just "here's some code, maybe other people will find it useful". While that is often the ur-myth of FOSS, if it were ever true, is just not how projects grow today.
The author is making a point, by analogy, that consumers make purchase decisions based on a relative ranking of company behaviors and reputation. This is why PR firms exist.
Consider what might happen if 'someone' produced a popular documentary on the psychological trauma that YT or FB moderators endure. (If such a documentary already exists I'm sure it will be posted here)
The longer a business is around, the more opportunities to generate some negative press that has some people label them as evil, which is a label that generally doesn't get removed no matter what comes after. It's another reason why startups can win over customers. In general, startups from inception have a squeaky clean image until they get big enough for journalists/bloggers to shit on -- then repeat.
The way I read this is that companies who are slightly less evil than others are really the bad ones because someone else could come in and be slightly less than them, and then everyone loses?
Except if companies are fighting to treat employees better, then everybody wins because conditions get better.
All Mark has to do is reduce his price a little.
People will then rationalise their decision to buy Mark's honey by telling themselves that if the price was the same they'd buy Barry's because they care about the bees.
Exactly! Then they start a race to the bottom, take up debt, and spend on marketing until one goes bust! By then everyone is buying imported synthetic honey which is way cheaper anyway. Heil capitalism.
They get a product which is worse, but in very non-obvious ways, and has some sort of negative environmental impact that is hard to identify until years later.
The biggest problem with modern capitalism is that you don't know if something is "good" before you buy it. The information asymmetry / obfuscation ensures that.
Information asymmetry and lack of regulation allow bad businesses to stay in business. I’m sure you can recall quite a few if you sit down for a minute.
Also poverty (lack of options). Think of how the 70% of the population who barely gets by would read your comment on being cheap.
Thanks to this effect, small food companies are growing fast since the 2000s. "Big Food" is fighting back by doing local-washing: silently buy small companies, industrialize them, then pretend to be local and responsible.
The proposition that ethical sourcing is the differentiator in an otherwise undifferentiated market seems incoherent.
If Barry is able to communicate to the market that his honey operation is more ethical, then he can communicate other things to the market as well, irrespective of whether they have any substance or basis in product. Lots of brands of water out there, many different shapes and sizes of bottles. Barry's honey is differentiated, just not in terms of product.
Mark can continue treating his bees badly, or he can try to discredit Barry, or he can try to differentiate his product in some way (planting health-giving plants whose pollen they can deposit into their honey).
The post imagines only one assumption being relaxed: that of ethical sourcing and the ability to communicate that fact. But in relaxing those assumptions, it is natural to relax others: the power of marketing being foremost. This is a complex system and you cannot change a single variable, or imagine that Mark simply takes Barry's moralistic grandstanding lying down.
Completely agree with you on supply-side. But Barry need not be alone in his market communication. It is reasonable to suppose that demand-side is also a complex, dynamic system which may respond to diverse communications, including such as in the original post.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 221 ms ] threadI always ask to be 1099 labor, and I'm always told "absolutely not. It'll never happen; completely unacceptable".
Where does this delusion come from that W2 status is a good thing that workers want to have and employers want to withhold? Where are these W2-withholding employers?
It basically comes down to who gets to say when you start and stop working. If the company wants to demand a certain set of hours of the day (not just an aggregate of hours during a work period), then the person doing the work is not a "contractor". Contractors are supposed to be able to make their own hours and find any number of clients they wish to fill their time. If the client doesn't like you doing that, then they are obligated to make you an employee.
This is not true in general; for example, security guards can have contractor status while obviously still being required to show up during their shift and not someone else's shift.
No, the IRS (assuming we're talking about the US) wouldn't allow it - that security guard would either need to be classified as an employee or provide their services to the customer as a corporate entity themselves. The guidelines[1] around this are very straightforward:
"Under common-law rules, anyone who performs services for you is your employee if you can control what will be done and how it will be done. This is so even when you give the employee freedom of action. What matters is that you have the right to control the details of how the services are performed."
1. https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
And yet your quote doesn't even mention scheduling or the concept of time.
> the IRS wouldn't allow that - that security guard would either need to be classified as an employee or provide services as a corporation
This is not true. Please don't spread falsehoods in public like this.
See https://coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2016/03/my-new-hero-and-h... and the link through, https://www.cato.org/blog/four-more-courts-smack-down-obama-... .
The fact that a job needs to be performed at a particular time is not sufficient to prevent contractors from performing that job.
If you drill down[1] on that page to "Behavioral Control," you'll find :
"An employee is generally subject to the business’s instructions about when, where, and how to work. All of the following are examples of types of instructions about how to do work.
- When and where to do the work."
> This is not true. Please don't spread falsehoods in public like this.
I'm not sure it's fair to classify a widely-accepted interpretation of the law as a "falsehood" but anyway, according to this[2] it seems that at least one court agrees that security guards are not independent contractors if they meet the above-linked criteria:
"A Louisiana federal district court has granted a motion approving a confidential settlement in a collective action by New Orleans security guards under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act...They claimed that the company had complete control over how, when and where the guards performed their work; set the guards’ work schedules; and required the guards to wear uniforms with the company’s logo."
1. https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
2. https://independentcontractorcompliance.com/2017/11/06/octob...
On the other hand, if you're wealthy and run your household via e.g. a family LLC which contracts that cleaner in a professional capacity, then - technically - yes. It's possible there's an exception for scenarios like this, but I'm not familiar with it.
Disclaimer: I'm neither an accountant nor a tax attorney, but I've dealt with classification issues as both an employer and an indie consultant for years.
If you say "sand the floor", a contractor that shows up with a power sander and sands the floor is still a contractor.
When Mr. Miyagi kicks away the power sander, reveals two sanding blocks, and says, "No, like this," then Daniel-san is his employee.
If the job is "clean my house on Wednesday no earlier than 8 am and finished by noon, without using bleach", as long as the only thing you're managing is to check the cleanliness of the house at 12:01 on Wednesday, that's still contracting. If you are then surprised that your cleaner subcontracted with the Cat in the Hat, and a Seussian steam-engine rolls in at 11:50 and back out at 11:59, leaving everything spotless and sparkling, you'd best just keep your mouth shut and enjoy the cleanliness. Because if you concern yourself with the who and the how, instead of just the what, where, and when, you should have hired an employee.
If you can't hand off the job to another equally qualified person and still get the money yourself, that's not contracting.
In the metaphor, the "apiarists" should probably have some contracts for honey with queen bees, who then manage their own hives in their own way to make delivery. But then those queens would have negotiating power, and the ability to switch apiarists to get the best price for their honey.
You could set up your own Corp and offer guards services, and in that case it would be pretty clear that you’re a contractor (you’ve put up your own bond and registered your company with the province), but otherwise there’s not really any way to have a solo contractor guard.
The last dev agency I worked for, all designers/developers were 1099 at the start but everyone had to transition to W-2 by like 2009ish. The reason being that Colorado was cracking down hard on companies with 1099 workers. As far as labor board is concerned, if you walk like a duck, quack like a duck, you're a duck.
From my perspective, I looked at the business and realised that we were selling hardware at a 90% margin, but only eking out a 5% profit. Where was the rest of the money going? Well, obviously to a very inefficient rest of the company that included the software developers (me ;-) ). Later it was discovered that it was also being imbezzled, but we didn't know about it at that time...
It occurred to me, though, that the only thing that was stopping a company from eating our lunch was that telecom hardware was a capital intensive industry. So you had BNR, AT&T and Seimens capturing practically the entire market, each being as incompetent as the other, but with very little distinction between them. All you needed was a few billion dollars to shake the industry to the core. And, of course, that happened. It took only a couple of years (less than 5 I think) for Nortel to go from 100K employees to zero (with the executives slurping up the retirement fund to pay for their own "retention bonuses", because what would have happened if the executives bolted as soon as bankruptcy proceedings started??? I mean apart from retirees actually getting their retirement money, obviously...)
But it's a funny thing because if I were Barry, I would be selling mead. And I would open up a visitor centre in a "Ye Olde Merry England" vibe where you can sample the mead. And I would start an onsite bakery with Knights in Shining Armour theme where I would test out recipes on my customers. And I would make a joint venture with a factory producing confectionary to try to get into convenience stores. And because I would quickly run out of honey to sell, I would buy up all of Mark's honey and eventually just acquire him so that he's my employee. Then I'd fire him because he's mean to bees.
But realistically, I think Barry will just be trying to figure out how to siphon a few extra dollars out of the business and into his pocket because starting up new ventures are risky and hard work.
Positioning is always going to be at the very least a soft-moat and especially in consumable goods it's going to be a pretty strong moat (think Coke vs. Pepsi).
Here in Australia, "free range" hens must be kept at no more that 10,000 head/hectare (or 1 sqm of land per hen). This is massively better than battery hens, which are kept at as low as... 0.03 sqm of cage/hen. The animal welfare benefits are huge, battery hens have a truly horrible existence, to the point where I believe that it is immoral to farm them in this way.
But some producers are advertising lower stocking densities, some 6 sqm per hen and others even 10 sqm. They are charging a small premium for their eggs, and some people pay it, because they like the idea of animals being treated well.
So yes, many people are prepared to pay a bit extra for ethical treatment of animals. Even people (if that where the original post was pointing at).
The problem is, all things are rarely equal and, if they are, businesses usually find ways of differentiating themselves that consumers care more about than happy employees. When Mark starts losing business to Barry, he's going to cut his prices, spend more on advertising, etc.. Treating his bees poorly may actually help him squeeze more honey out of them at less cost, so Barry might not be able to match him without starting to mistreat his bees a little too. Willy's costs are probably the highest of the three, but maybe he can use clever advertising to portray his product as a luxury item that's somehow better than Barry's or Mark's, even if it's identical. If that fails he'll have to choose between happy bees and not going bankrupt.
I'd like to live in a world where a virtuous feedback loop would lead to companies treating their employees better and better, but history says that's not the world we live in. We live in a world that has had to come up with labour unions when spirals of mistreatment and cost-cutting got out of hand. We live in a world where executive pay is going stratospheric while employee benefits are stagnant. Perhaps it would be a better world if people cared more about how companies treat their employees, but I honestly don't see how you get people browsing Amazon to choose the honey that's $2/jar more just because it came from slightly happier bees.
I thought the author's point was that if your company's only value proposition is that you are "less evil" than some company B (but with virtually the same product), then your position is extremely vulnerable.
The world we live in has historically treated workers better and better, with some ups and downs, mostly for economic reasons.
The primary factor that determines worker welfare is the price of labor. If labor is cheap due to low demand and lots of people compete for jobs, they will accept being mistreated. If labor is expensive due to high demand and fewer people competing for jobs, they will not accept being mistreated. They will move on to greener pastures.
This is different across industries, of course. The plight is upon those who have little to offer to the demands of the economy. If nobody wants to eat honey anymore, having bees work for free wouldn't save the company.
What we also have learned from history, but tend to forget, is that price fixing doesn't solve the problem.
> We live in a world where executive pay is going stratospheric while employee benefits are stagnant.
This is numerically irrelevant, because there are very few such executives. Cutting into their compensation to pay the many lower-tier workers a tiny bit more would make no difference.
Shareholders only have made paper profits in the S&P 500 because the governments of the world have decided that debt has to be cheap in order to avoid another liquidity crisis, therefore assets must be relatively expensive.
This isn't a wealth transfer, it's price inflation. Warren Buffett may have a bigger dollar valuation to his name today, but he couldn't buy any more stock or real estate with it.
"'Ethical' behavior rules the internal- and security policy social", anyone ?? P-:
This sort of comment always reminds me of the quintessential answer: "That's funny, I always thought the world is what we make of it."
If the only way we can 'make consumers choose better' is to continually publish and broadcast the worst corporate behavior in order to spur these kinds of shifts, then so be it.
Scream loudly about WalMart subverting local government and historical societies to build a store within sight of Tenochtitlan.
Republish over and over about Amazon's treatment of their fulfillment workers.
Shame them all until the baseline is as much better as we can make it, and keep pushing against the entropy.
That's how we make the world better.
Look at our lord and savior Bill Gates saving the USA from novel Corovirus. He could only do that after amassing a fortune from being a criminally savage businessperson for decades.
Got a bone to pick about BG, gotcha.
Bill Gates has money because he created a product that set back science for decades. It still hurts science today. The way Windows differentiates itself from Unix for the sole reason of not being compatible has set back society immensely.
Today, after having made all this money exploiting society in general and science in particular, he is putting money back into science.
Look, I get it, the damage is already done, so him putting money back we gain some back. And I also get it. If he didn't do it someone else would have.
But does that absolve the sins of the individual?
there is actually a lot many more examples, I am just summarizing in one sentence.
Meanwhile ignoring the "fuck you we don't care" bad actors already know about especially the commodities it winds up disproportionate.
The second issue is lack of chosing battles it depletes social capital to the point nobody outside the bubble takes them remotely seriously.
I got that feeling as well, but I think it's not really well-supported in the real world. Some consumers gravitate towards companies with a good reputation / ethical platform / health focus / whatever. But the vast majority of consumers choose on price or value separate from these things. For example, in the US how many people shop at Whole Foods vs. normal supermarkets? I'd be surprised if it's more than 1 in 10.
The OP story is one reason that unions in certain geographies will attempt to unionize the entire industry all at once, so that there's no competitive disadvantage for one employer against another on labor costs.
If you're organizing janitors in Miami, building owners will need to hire SOME contracting service to maintain the building but want the cheapest, still-quality one available. So if the workers do it together, it actually makes the fight with the employers easier not harder because they're less worried about losing business.
Of course, this also means the lack of union density makes it harder for any individual place to unionize.
This in fact leads to evolution of multi resistant germs which then leads to those germs landing on the meat products and finally on humans. If you are healthy this isn't a problem but if you get an infection by those germs, treatment options are greatly reduced.
The US has a massive resistant germ problem, and it's partly caused by laxer regulations aroud antibiotic application in industrial animal farms compared to the EU where there are strict regulations and the resistant germ problem is smaller.
So yes, if you eat that kind of meat you are directly exposed to a major health risk. People still die of sepsis today, limbs are still being amputated because of untreatable infections.
That seems awfully low for "free range". It's at least 8 sqm in Austria.
Not sure if I should be paying extra for a chicken to have a nice apartment when I can't afford one myself.
Australian "free range" eggs are a scam. When people imagine "free range", they're thinking of chickens walking free in a green meadow, which is nowhere near what actual "free range" chickens get to experience. 10,000 head/hectare is disgusting.
To get what you imagine you're getting with "free range", you need to buy pastured chickens and eggs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=can8xFpZKRs
More accurately, they pay extra for the perception of ethical treatment of animals. Chickens on "free range" farms suffer horribly too.
As a result, meat is expensive, but the quality is much better than what you get across the border(s).
The real kicker is that Zürich is now ground zero for food tech, and there's a real chance that they're going to outcompete local farmers on quality, price, and ethics.
Either you remain on the forefront of ethics, continually re-capturing your market and basically creating an ever moving 'ethics' moat, or you are replaced and forgotten just as surely as a smartphone manufacturer who declines to update their models
For the smartphone manufacturer, ethics isn't the key thing, features are. But for bee farming or egg farming or what have you, perhaps ethics are the key feature, the key differentiator in the market.
Ultimately it would seem that an 'ethics arm race' powered by ethical consumers would be a good thing, even if there is some noise on the supply side about who precisely is producing the ethical outcomes
All male chicks are macerated because they cannot lay eggs.
https://youtu.be/t_u0jxi_v-w
Same thing applies to dairy cows and their male offspring. There literally is no free lunch with large scale dairy. Not to mention debeaking and other carnal processes used to curtail the animals.
Wiping out lives is inherently wrong. Lives/Souls shouldn't just be used like an ass-wipe.
This topic reeks of Cloud Atlas fabricants or the "grasshopper" bars from Snowpiercer.
Like I said, it's a video that's extremely unpleasant to us - to you as well, and it's normal to react to it.
Platform business models are essentially winner takes all. Lyft's value proposition is that they're number two in a market where anyone who isn't in the top 4-5 has almost no chance of winning.
This doesn't mean that they're doing enough to differentiate themselves from Uber, or that they'll ever be able to turn an actual profit, but for the short and medium term game they're more than capable of fending off Uber-copy #27.
The current "common knowledge" is that if they don't profile people, they can't be efficient. That's very wrong. There are many ways to deliver ads to people that might be interested in them without profiling individuals. But the market is too inert, and people too hooked to FB and Google already.
The natural, default position is to think everyone else thinks like you do. So if you present a solution to a problem, they should value it the same way you do. "I wrote this because I didn't want to do X". But it seems to turn out that most people don't care about your specific X.
My last, big attempt at FOSS didn't start that way. When I first started the project, it was the only such project available. But a household-name corp started their own, competing project a year later and all I was left with was (other than a much more complete implementation) some proselytizing about the open web. But none of it could compete with them funding developers out of pocket--while I scraped together contact jobs--to go out and implement their library for other people's projects, write more blog posts than I have hours in a day, and generally just fill the space with "look at us, we're the only dog in town" fake news.
I knew their project was nowhere near as complete or easy to use as mine. But I never put the time into expressing that. Well, for one thing they were playing the "we're all one, big, happy community of niche-industry devs" card, so it was impossible to say anything that could at all be considered negative towards them. But I had so much code to write, and code is a lot easier to me than marketing. It would have taken me becoming an expert in their project, when they had no such burden with regards to mine.
I let myself get pushed into taking about my project in terms of theirs. Hell, some people even accused me if "wasting time, reinventing the wheel" (to this day, no phrase pisses me off more).
Now, I'm just trying to write software for myself. That's all I was ever really doing. The FOSS stuff had no plan, it was just "here's some code, maybe other people will find it useful". While that is often the ur-myth of FOSS, if it were ever true, is just not how projects grow today.
As an aspiring beekeeper: Please no! I can't afford to pay 100.000 Bees! We can talk about an retirement plan though, as they all die working.
From my experience, analogies usually are a mechanism of manipulation, trying to drag in some arguments which bare facts cannot support.
Consider what might happen if 'someone' produced a popular documentary on the psychological trauma that YT or FB moderators endure. (If such a documentary already exists I'm sure it will be posted here)
Except if companies are fighting to treat employees better, then everybody wins because conditions get better.
Of course it is also up to you. You can always choose to buy from dodgy sellers to save a few bucks.
Brands exist for a reason, to guarantee a certain quality.
Also poverty (lack of options). Think of how the 70% of the population who barely gets by would read your comment on being cheap.
Don't know about the US, but I think most people there shop at Walmart or Costco. Seems to work fine.
Tech has exactly the same problem.
If Barry is able to communicate to the market that his honey operation is more ethical, then he can communicate other things to the market as well, irrespective of whether they have any substance or basis in product. Lots of brands of water out there, many different shapes and sizes of bottles. Barry's honey is differentiated, just not in terms of product.
Mark can continue treating his bees badly, or he can try to discredit Barry, or he can try to differentiate his product in some way (planting health-giving plants whose pollen they can deposit into their honey).
The post imagines only one assumption being relaxed: that of ethical sourcing and the ability to communicate that fact. But in relaxing those assumptions, it is natural to relax others: the power of marketing being foremost. This is a complex system and you cannot change a single variable, or imagine that Mark simply takes Barry's moralistic grandstanding lying down.