Problem is that many who are moving aren't giving a whole lot of thought as to why California has had such a large reduction in quality of life. They simply know QoL has declined to a level where they want to be somewhere else. They may have different theories as to why QoL tanked, some might even know that some of the policies they voted for had a hand in it while believing that they simply weren't implemented well in California but think "we'll get it right this time" in their new home state.
Quality of life in California is grand if you don’t factor in the high cost of living, which is primarily due to land being expensive. California is a victim of its own success and of its bad zoning laws and nimbyism.
Or we should make it so companies can't write an unrepealable law and then dump hundreds of millions of dollars into a disinformation campaign to get it passed.
The game Kingdom of Loathing had (has?) a short literacy test that you had to take before using the ingame chat function. A part of me wishes that there was a similar test that you had to take before making claims about a law online.
It wouldn't be practical for things like the latest omnibus COVID stimulus bill, but Prop 22 is only ~15 pages. I've seen so many people spreading FUD about Prop 22. It's obvious when someone is just regurgitating something they saw elsewhere and saying things that are contradicted by the actual text of the proposition.
For those who maybe clicked through to the comments before reading or didn't make it several paragraphs into the article, this is a direct result of Prop 22 which was passed on the backs of a nearly $200m campaign by Uber, Lyft, and other rideshare companies. This is one of the exact results predicted by opponents of Prop 22. Also there is basically no way for Prop 22 to be amended or repealed through the state legislature. These companies effectively bought a law and are already repeating the benefits at the expense of the workers of California. Expect other industries to follow this path in coming elections.
Wait... how come before AB 5, companies didn't do this, why wait till AB 5 was passed then repealed by Prop 22 before doing this (are they clairvoyant)?
In other words, had AB 5 not passed, this would likely have happened anyway as a progression towards off-loading "non-core" competencies to third parties as has continued to happen across industries (an iconic example is janitorial services which used to be handled in-house but were off-loaded starting in earnest in the early 90s?)
Companies are unwilling to upend their business based on laws that are highly controversial and the likely subject of future changes. Prop 22 provides the stability that these companies need to drop their full time employees and commit to outsourcing this work to rideshare drivers.
How on earth can you say prop22 has provided any stability, when we are literally discussing an article bashing it, and with there being multiple ways of it being still repealed?
Explain yourself.
We are not talking about stability of AB5, but rather the situation before it. It was trivial for most other industries to get excemptions to AB5 (there are tens, if not close to 100 excemptions now). So what really changed with prop22 comapared to before AB5?
Let's suppose AB 5 provided cloudy outlook... before AB 5 that was not the case. There was no such law... did they somehow secretly know what was happening 5 years down the road and said, uhh, let's wait this out.
No, they could have done this before AB 5. They did not. This seems to say that this move would have happened if conditions allowed it and the situation was right for business.
What that means is sure AB 5 would have nixed this option. However, the trend before AB 5 was to off-load "non-core" competencies. Prop 22 re-instated the previous status, it did not introduce an altogether new status.
Prop 22 indicated the people preferred the original status to the new status introduced by AB 5, so we're back to where we started before AB 5.
The rideshare industry likely couldn't have supported this 5 years ago and it was clear that something like AB5 was going to happen for years. Prop 22 provides unprecedented clarity on how ridesharing will be legislated in California for the foreseeable future.
Let's suppose you're right, Uber and Lyft and DD all knew this and despite this knowledge thought, you know what, yeah it's uncertain but let's set CA as our HQ and concentrate our efforts there anyway...
Vons and Pavilions are not the same as Uber, Lyft, etc. I think they did it because they thought it was time to change their delivery logistics and were not waiting for concretization of the law around this.
Put another way, Vons' business model isn't centered around this law. It's incidental.
You are establishing weird timelines on these decisions. Uber, Lyft, etc set themselves up in California because they consider themselves tech companies. The state of California likely couldn't have cared less about the special class of workers they employed until the group reached a critical mass which obviously didn't happen before these companies were founded. I don't know specifically when they reached critical mass, but it was likely within the last 5 years. At that point it became clear that the state needed to do something. AB5 was one of those attempts.
Companies like Albertsons who could benefit from these businesses weren't willing to commit to embracing them until there was stability in the industry. For all the faults of Prop 22, it provides stability through its incredibly high requirements for repeal or amendments. Companies like Albertsons now have the stability they desired and will embrace these rideshare companies to save a few bucks by shifting a greater financial burden onto individual drivers.
Albertson's doesn't need it. They would use a third party AB 5 or not. It may cost more if AB 5 were in effect, but it's still less than having your logistics in-house.
Having someone else do your deliveries and such has been a thing for a long time. Companies have gone back and forth depending on who's doing the bean counting and what they think is crucial to business. Sometimes they would split it. Some in-house some hired out.
Untrue.
1) This has always been allowed, but AB5 made it illegal.
Then a shitton of industries got granted exceptions to it, and ride-hailing + food-delivery did the same.
2) Prop22 can be be amended only by a seven-eighths vote of the Legislature or a new ballot measure — AND state labor laws can be superseded by federal laws and regulations for enterprises that affect interstate commerce.
Point two is why I threw a "basically" in that sentence. Yes, you are technically correct that the state can change it with a 7/8ths majority. However requiring a supermajority that high is a nearly unprecedented requirement for the legislature and it is one that is going to be nearly impossible to achieve.
I honestly don't know what you consider "false information" here beyond me saying "basically no way" for something to happen when it is realistically unfeasible.
You realize many laws don't allow any legislative input at all right? By default, a law enacted by ballot measure can only be changed by another law enacted by ballot measure.
The will of the people will not be superceded. Why would we allow legislature to overpower a ballot measure? We voted. The only thing people can be upset about is their lack of educating themselves on what they were voting for in the ballot measure. People cannot be coddled when it comes to their vote. Any undue influence would rot the inside and then why have a democracy?
It’s not practical for most voters to educate themselves on the typically dozen or so ballot measures. It’s too much homework, and you don’t get paid for it.
I do my due diligence, but it’s not easy to get a full understanding of how I want to vote. It’s a significant amount of work, and a lot of people will not spend the time.
>"I’ve looked at a lot of ballot measures over the years," said Moylan, adding that a two-thirds majority is common.
>But a seven-eighths "super, super, super-duper majority," she said, "is new as far as I’m aware."[1]
It is relatively standard for propositions to include some ways for the legislature to amend the law. It isn't a full legal requirement, but it is common. The a 7/8 majority is nearly impossible to reach on anything but the most milquetoast bills. That requirement was seemingly included so they supporters of the bill could feign that it was flexible while not really conceding any possibility of it being changed. If Prop 22 is going to be amended or repealed, it basically has to be done through the popular vote.
>No surprise, many ballot measures do not say otherwise. Compared to that default, Prop. 22’s high bar for amendments actually gives the Legislature more influence than the norm.
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>If Prop 22 is going to be amended or repealed, it basically has to be done through the popular vote.
Because the 7/8 majority is nothing but lip service to being flexible. It is designed to be used the exact way you are doing now in debates like this. A majority that high is not feasible to actually be implemented.
??? Are you just ignoring everything we previously discussed?
Having a way to directly amend the law via some majority is completely optional. There is no need to ever include that in the ballot proposition. Why are you choosing to completely ignore this clear fact?
I'm not ignoring anything. I am simply pointing out the 7/8 majority is so impractical that it is a worthless addition that only serves the appearance of making the law appear amendable but in practice it can only truly be amended by the popular vote.
>It is relatively standard for propositions to include some ways for the legislature to amend the law. It isn't a full legal requirement, but it is common.
I'm really questioning if GPT3 would come up with better responses than @slg. They seemed to talk themselves into circles, and repeat themselves quite often, not taking into account new information. It's almost like they have a litany of responses that they fall back onto.
>Prop 22 which was passed on the backs of a nearly $200m campaign
You mean, passed on the backs of nearly 10 million voters.
I always find it strange to tout the line of how much money was spent in an election, as if to say that the voters have no agency or culpability. Clinton spent nearly 2 times what Trump did and still lost. Money does not equal votes if the people don't support an issue.
Money buys votes at the margin. Everyone agrees on this including the people who supported Prop 22 otherwise they wouldn't have spent some $175m more than their opponents.
Uber/Lyft/DoorDash etc. threatened to summarily shut down in the middle of a pandemic if Prop 22 didn't get passed.
Uber and Lyft actually did this in Austin, but since it wasn't in the middle of a pandemic people had other options and could make adjustments. And then Uber and Lyft went crying to the state government to override Austin because Austin started generating alternatives and we found out that Uber/Lyft don't really have an unassailable position but they have LOTS of VC cash to spend on lobbying and advertising.
Unfortunately, making the kind of adjustments that people in Austin did borders on impossible right now, so this kind of threat was quite effective.
> Clinton spent nearly 2 times what Trump did and still lost.
That election is a bad example since:
- Trump was already a TV and Twitter celebrity brand.
- Hillary Clinton was an unlikeable candidate who was ill, financially corrupt (received large Saudi contributions to her foundation) and avoided reporters for 2 months during the campaign (similar to Biden in 2020)
I've seen estimates that Trump added $2 billion in value to Twitter, so Trump also got some advantage out of that relationship.
What's interesting is that SV ad companies denied knowing that Trump was underspending until their end of quarter, then blamed their poor results on that saying, "Who knew?"
In fact, anybody who read a newspaper knew, so it was odd hearing that nonsense from people paid millions to know that.
This of course has led to a lot of 'I told you so!' and finger-wagging that voters were too stupid, and shouldn't be allowed to have the initiative system because they're too easily manipulated.
Prop 22 wasn't unclear. The voters knew what they were voting for, which was to keep the status quo with regard to gig economy jobs, and roll back the broad, messy legislation that the state legislature had enacted.
Had Prod 22 not passed, jobs would've been lost in other areas. The small fraction of 'full-time' gig workers would've come out ahead. The much larger majority of part-time gig workers would've lost their side job. Overall, in the end Prop 22 was a wash. We can't paper over our lack of viable careers by creating low-skilled jobs that pay the same as jobs requiring a college education. There is no free lunch.
>>"We can't paper over our lack of viable careers by creating low-skilled jobs that pay the same as jobs requiring a college education."
Well, why can't we? If we are saying that these types of jobs need to exist, why can we not agree that the people who do the job deserve to be compensated with a living wage and deserve dignity and stability?
No one is denying that independent contractors deserve dignity and stability. Imposing a forced employment framework violates the dignity of non-full time contractors who want a side income to supplement their normal job. This discussion also should account for the benefit to society of having safe and low cost transportation and delivery options, which raises the dignity of many people who otherwise could not afford the rates of for example taxis.
Living wage is a mutable concept and is determined in large part by where you live and how many children you have. Wages for a job are based on a fair market rate within reasonable bounds, like minimum wage. Raising minimum wage too high has adverse effects on job availability.
This is a story about a grocery store chain replacing their own employees who perform a job at the company, with "independent contractors" from a 3rd-party service. I'm not sure what case you're trying to make, whose dignity are you saying is violated? Who said anything about taxis?
Why are you arguing to me against raising minimum wage, when all I said was that people deserve a living wage?
> Why are you arguing to me against raising minimum wage, when all I said was that people deserve a living wage?
Well, you said:
> why can we not agree that the people who do the job deserve to be compensated with a living wage and deserve dignity and stability?
How do you propose that a person doing a "job" earn a "living wage" without making changes to the minimum wage? I sense much more of an argumentative tone to your comments than the person you're replying to, by the way.
As others have said in this thread and in many other places, the minimum wage does not really correspond to the wage required to live a comfortable and dignified life. It is merely the least amount of money an employer can pay an employee without it being illegal, and has very little to do with the cost of living.
If I seem argumentative, it is because I am exasperated with the gymnastics that people will do in order to justify the conscription of more and more people into precarious existences under a gig economy, which largely benefits people at the top of the economic ladder at the expense of those at the bottom.
I'm a bit late in answering. I brought up the decentralization and deregulation of taxi transport (via Uber / Lyft) because I believe the impacts - significantly lowering cost and improving availability of transportation - are a net societal benefit, despite reduced wage stability. This improves public safety, creates incentives against drunk driving, creates affordable alternatives to lengthy public transit rides.
Grocery delivery is a similar case - for many, reducing the cost and improving availability of grocery delivery is a significant benefit. Instead of being the domain of the wealthy, it is massively more available to the average person.
"Living wage" is used to argue that people are owed wages higher than the market would actually pay. Lots of jobs pay vastly higher than living wages - not for fun, but because the supply of workers is more scarce and the economic output of the job is higher. Minimum wage is how we as a society have defined a floor for what is an acceptable job, which I think is intimately associated with the construct of a living wage.
Minimum wage is not based on a fair market, within reasonable bounds. I remember when minimum wage went from $5.15 to $6.25 in Louisiana in 2008, it's now $7.25 in Louisiana. You could get a lot more in 2000 for $5.15, than you can in 2020 for $7.25, and Louisiana is one of the cheapest places in the US to live.
Perhaps we could decouple benefits from employment so that 8 hours of gig work per day would actually add up to roughly the same thing as 8 hours per day of employment.
Decoupling health care from employment doesn’t actually require making it universal. Private individual insurance would also work.
(I’m not advocating for this — I’m just pointing out that private insurance does not require employment, and the US could easily get rid of the incentives for employers to provide insurance.)
We paper over the fact that stocks and real estate are predominantly appreciating due to the low interest rate environment. It's the only way to keep the party (and economic growth) going.
I concur. It's rich to me that, for some problems, papering over is a completely legitimate approach to 'solving' the problem, but when the same approach is suggested in a different context, it is immediately dismissed.
> why can we not agree that the people who do the job deserve to be compensated with a living wage
Living wage based on locally inflated housing prices is just fundamentally broken concept. It is just ideological cover for wealth transfer from productive economy to landlords (by focusing on 'living wage' based on market housing costs and not on 'affordable rents' based on market wages). If there is an excess of workers and a shortage of housing, one cannot determine apriori where is a proper balance between 'living wages' and 'affordable rents', it is necessary to let market find the balance.
Ok, why can't we just say housing isn't a market, it's priced primarily for livibility and less for some concept of quality. Then living wage doesn't need to be opened to inflated housing markets.
Because there is an existing large class of people (2 in 3 Americans) who have acted based on the idea that housing is a market and have bought a home on that basis. They have no interest in altering the status quo. To add to that, you can't choose what housing is priced by unless you have government price controls and that is a cure that's worse than the disease.
Singapore has some pretty nice public housing. If there was a government policy that any time median rents climb above X, the state will procure land and build housing until it drops below that number again, it might be more workable than the blunt instrument of price caps.
I am a huge fan of public housing, not least because of the fact that I think that in the absence of a Land Value Tax, the state owning a large amount of land in high-growth regions is important for the public to diminish the impact of rent-seeking.
However, the practice of this is that these governments are highly corrupt, and usually conspire to use the mechanism of public housing as primarily a means to enrich themselves through the proxy of their construction contractors.
Look no farther than Dianne Feinstein and Tutor Perini.
Unfortunately, even the state gets caught up with the broken system of building approval with NIMBYist local interests control zoning and building approval.
Public housing in thE US is almost entirely shitholes, though. It's better than being homeless, maybe. That's about it. That is the reason many large cities have torn most of it down and replaced it with section 8 vouchers. This scatters the ghetto-dwellers from their former high-rise islands into neighborhoods, which triggers flight by the existing residents since the people coming out of public housing are clueless about taking care of a property and being good neighbors.
That's entirely because of the way our procurement process works. We have separate capital and maintenance procurement processes. Typically, we splurge on a high capital budget (the cost to build housing) and then skimp or cut out the maintenance budget. Or worse, we expect the housing to be self supporting.
Public housing done right is distributed, low rise apartments rented below market rate and not expected to be self supporting.
As a tax payer, it's so frustrating to see us build good things and then totally neglect to maintain them.
I will say that high rise public housing in the US introduces complexity because it necessitates a degree of service infrastructure that's more costly than more, lower buildings.
I brought up Singapore's public housing model because in Singapore residents have the option to buy, so the housing is occupied and maintained by owners who are invested in the property. I think this would work well in California and would avoid a lot of the previous, designed-to-fail public housing systems we've tried. Singapore attaches their public housing to transit and doesn't have California's regulations for parking, which cuts costs significantly.
I own a home, and if it steadily loses value but my city becomes affordable for anyone who wants to live here, that seems like a pretty fair trade to me...
I'm talking about how, in the transition between housing as a commodity vs housing as a public good there would be loss of value.
And I think people still would want to own houses. There's pride in being a homeowner for many. Knowing you have a place that is yours.
It does scale, because not everyone wants to live here. Some people want to live in nyc or Miami or Houston or Chicago, etc. There's a finite interest in any location.
Tell that to the people who will be underwater on the mortgage, only way this is equitable for all is if mortgage loan principle is adjusted in reverse in parallel.
Well, due to limitiations in supply, housing is market based on scarcity. There is no way to fix that without fixing the fundamental issue of insufficient supply.
Sounds good. Build more, subsidize buildings with lots of units, eliminate parking minimums, upzone popular areas, pay for public housing, and tax land in a way that disincentivizes surface parking lots.
All those seem doable to me, which would address your concerns. Any reason we couldn't do all that?
> Living wage based on locally inflated housing prices is just fundamentally broken concept. It is just ideological cover for wealth transfer from productive economy to landlords (by focusing on 'living wage' based on market housing costs and not on 'affordable rents' based on market wages).
Man, this is painfully true. Until California can decide between housing being affordable and housing being an asset that is guaranteed to increase in value 10% every year (which is what we've decided for the moment) every increase in wages is just going to be an additional subsidy for the top 1%.
Because the real economic value of those jobs is less than a "living wage."
A delivery driver is not a skilled job. I know, I delivered pizza when I was in college. And that was before mobile phones or navigation apps so drivers actually had to learn their way around their delivery area.
If you have a drivers license and a car you can be a delivery driver. That's not a very high bar. So those jobs don't pay very much.
Yes, it was clearly unethical to rob these employees of the freedom of being piecework contractors.
Only through pulling bootstraps and making lemonade from lemons will these uneducated wretches be able to bask in the sunshine of freedom. Back in the glory days of Victorian England you could flip a boy a farthing for grocery delivery... I for one and pleased the make these opportunities available.
As entertaining as it must be to you to write in this style, it is quite annoying to read.
Clearly GP was saying "we had to choose between a few well-paid jobs with many unable to access them or many low-paid jobs; it's a trade-off". It's obvious that that statement is intended to consider everyone's well being, not just some idle nobility as you imply.
Maybe that what it feels like for a well compensated tech worker.
The baseline assumption of the argument is that you are entitled to some minion fetching your stuff at a price low enough that not even the meager protections afforded a Walmart employee apply. Instead you have contractors working for a platform that steals tips. Gross.
The law that prop 22 is overriding was patching loopholes with employment law. Where companies exploited employees by making them independent contractors so they don't have to provide benefits.
The law in question (AB5) essentially banned hiring employees as independent contractors if they were performing a primary function of the business.
While I didn't support prop 22, and still think it is bad that it passed (and no, voters are dumb and did not know what they were voting for), I think this is totally unrelated to Prop 22 or AB5. Most likely after many drivers got sick and became unavailable for weeks due to covid, Vons decided to outsource delivery.
> Prop 22 wasn't unclear. The voters knew what they were voting for, which was to keep the status quo with regard to gig economy jobs, and roll back the broad, messy legislation that the state legislature had enacted.
Prop. 22 didn't restore the pre-AB5 legal status quo, which was set by the 2018 Dynamex decision which AB5 largely codified and created some exemptions from.
> The small fraction of 'full-time' gig workers would've come out ahead. The much larger majority of part-time gig workers would've lost their side job.
No, they wouldn't. The Dynamex/AB5 would require some workers that under Prop 22 are contractors to be regular employees, but it would not require them to be full-time employees. This was among the very many bits of misinformation spread to sell Prop 22.
AB5 should definitely not be regarded as the "status quo" at any point. It was a terrible terrible, which was evidenced by the 50+ amendments it has since received.
Full-time or not has no distinction in this argument. You are nitpicking.
> California voters seem happy to keep voting themselves destructive legislation. Vote with your feet.
I did, and I left in the the early 2010's as the writing on the wall could not be ignored. But, this already happened with Kroger (King Soopers), Safeway affiliate chains and CVS in Colorado as I saw several advertisements on the stores for home delivery being done by cars and drivers with Doordash decals, these were seemingly outsourced via partnerships with Doordash, as Ubereats and Grubhub failed to obtain that Maketshare.
The logistics capability at the small scale home delivery model is actually very expensive/costly in an already low margin business model, especially when contrasted to its more common large scale volume based counterpart that has decades/centuries of iteration via economies of scale refinement, and this mainly because of last mile hindrances. It's pragmatic, albeit concerning, none the less but I can understand the reasoning behind it.
> These companies effectively bought a law and are already repeating the benefits at the expense of the workers of California. Expect other industries to follow this path in coming elections.
Agreed.
Especially as Doordash has lobbied to not classify its drivers as workers and removed a large amount of the liability and costs associated with the well compensated FT drivers whose associated employment benefits are often seen as liabilities to the an eager bean counter wanting to reduce overhead from operations to justify their own position.
Big tech's version of the gig economy is actually pitting itself with people to choose between low, unstable government based benefits that can be precarious at best as they often come too little too late (if at all) or choose a more accessible route at gamble on taking a significant health risk and being in a perpetual underclass with no social mobility: Big tech and VCs are the new Wall Street and Bank predators of the 21st century, and are making full use of Naomi's outlined Disaster Capitalism model.
I can only hope those of you who choose to work there have a very deep introspective moment and ask yourself what exactly it is you are bringing into the World. Because Big Tech has made it clear it has aspirations to eventually get rid of its well compensated useful idiots (software developers) model, too. Which is probably why you see Google wanting to unionize while it still can while Amazon and Tesla will openly go to great lengths to quell any and all who even remotely suggest it.
Just to be clear, I don't like the notions of collective bargaining, non terminable labour, and ultimately a system that forces someone into what is essentially a legal form of racketeering (unions) with overbearing social peer pressure and ostracization as its main selling point.
I was asked to help get involved in creating one its early stages due to my anarchist ideology (perhaps a failure to understand that Anarchism does not necessarily mean syndicalist which is often more in line with socialist/communist/Marxits variants of anarchism), but I couldn't do so in good conscious.
I've seen its presence be in tandem with the darkest period of the Automotive Industry in the US in my lifetime, and seen how workers (directly or indirectly because of unions is not entirely clear) become complacent and quality control and quality assurance suffered significantly, as innovation lagged behind all other concerns as everything become a perpetual and existential struggle by the 'proles' against the 'Bourgeois' in respect to most other Countries... but as seen in German Auto manufacturing (which tends to have low wages for non-union, lower skill work) it can 'work' and must be said that in certain circumstances it is the only real deterrent to these kind of heavy handed overreaches in power. But it can also be horrible, as seen in the French Auto Industry. Especially as Unions then get to have far more power which eventually leads t...
Everyone is so against this move but it I was a grocery store I wouldn’t want this responsibility either. These stores are in the business of groceries, not delivery.
They got into delivery because they had to and I’d imagine it was losing a lot of money and not to mention tough for them to accomplish and manage.
Everyone else and their brother is moving to doordash white label because it makes the most sense. They focus on their core competency and allow doordash to focus on theirs.
People are most upset about the health insurance aspect. The issues need to be decoupled.
i dont think anyone is arguing that grocery stores should run their own delivery service. the problem is that these delivery drivers / gig workers should be getting benefits and fair wages for essentially working full time jobs.
No they shouldn’t. That will perpetuate the issue. Healthcare needs to move in the direction of being provided by the state or at least needs to be decoupled from your profession and affordable.
The status quo is what needs to change. Gig economy work is going to take over. People need to insure and protect themselves. And it needs to be possible.
If the government can get universal healthcare done, it can enforce better labor policies around gig work, even if it makes it unprofitable or substantially destroys demand for it.
The gig economy is only going to take over if people keep voting for it. Lots of states and a federal government left to take up the issue.
People are voting for it by doing it. The work is absolutely exploding. Shipt cannot hire fast enough. They are handing out thousand dollar bonuses left and right. And I am in Metro Detroit, not a big area by any means.
From a macro-economic perspective there is two very different "gig economies"
- utopian: recognition that humans cannot do sustained productivity, higher experts in short bursts capture peak productivity, everyone works less overall
- dystopian: automation makes more surplus labor, which reduces the incentive of further automation by hiring low productivity but dirt cheap labor. If everyone does this, and it isn't worth it to maintain yesterday's automation, overall productivity can go down.
Unfortunately Americansn live in the second one. We are suburban squatters in the rotting ruins of our past greatness.
I agree, but there is great risk in letting the norms of what is a "decent and fair" standard of living degrade until the universal basic income and healthcare arrive.
Except the majority of Americans are happy with their current situation[0]. They recognize improvements are required for other's, but personally don't dislike their situation. This is the core problem, and will not get fixed if everyone continues to be happy and content. Papering over the inefficacy by off loading the burden into other sectors is the exact cause of US's healthcare issue. For the political will to arrive it requires more people to become unhappy, you cannot cut an onion without tears. Or you can protect everyone and not change the system, that's what US has been doing for a hundred years.
Why, from first principles, should healthcare be tied to employment? Most other countries don't do it this way. That we do it here is just an accident of history (healthcare as a benefit is not treated as taxable).
You're trapped in the present and unable to think of a better future. This is all better horse rhetoric: "horses should be trained to go drink their own water and poop in designated areas just like they can be trained to seek food".
No. The right answer is to deregulate healthcare so that you can buy it from anywhere. You can still have your AMA-certified doctors, but if you can get other doctors as well, you'll be better off.
The reason for that is that while wealthy people like the US middle class worry about the quality of care, everyone below them merely worries about access. Even care that is a fifth as good, if accessible will be superior to inaccessible care that is currently available.
The US government already runs housing, schools, retirement plans. But it doesn’t mean private lenders, private schools or private retirement companies have disappeared.
The same US government incentivizes employer healthcare by allowing the deductibility of those benefits - which allows the healthcare industry to capture that money, and employers to trap employees.
Don't know about Vons nameplate stores, but their Pavilions stores offered delivery in the early/mid 90s. It wasn't as heavily used as today but did keep two fulltime employees booked up constantly. Since I no longer live in Southern California, I don't know if Pavilions has maintained this service continuously but suspect they have as it fits very well with their upscale customer focused business model.
I grew up in California. I had friends who worked at Albertsons. I know that they had refrigerated trucks and tried to make it a thing. It never took off. They (all the local grocery chains) collectively wasted millions of dollars on their delivery systems.
I don’t see how this is a bad thing? Albertson’s, a national grocery chain, goes all in with a single vendor (instacart) of an ancillary service (delivery) for efficiency.
It’s frustrating to see this portrayed as some local chain responding to local laws when it’s just natural streamlining after a business sale.
It's a "bad thing" because there are benefits to being employed with a company that treats you like an employee, which you are not going to get when you're fired and told to go work for Instacart as a contractor if you want to keep getting paid. This is a bad thing for the employee who no longer has their job.
Not surprising. I can imagine there are efficiency gains to be made by using Doordash software and infrastructure, not to mention potential pickup and dropoff route optimization.
Very weirded out tho on why the article has a prop22 angle. All prop22 did was amend AB5. This sort of thing happened already all the time before AB5. Now it will just continue.
Can someone help me out here? Maybe because its from Knock-LA, a left publication?
I will go one step further and say that in the developed nations, we need to abolish the concept of "contractors" at least in obvious cases where the contractors make minimum wage or even less for working fulltime jobs.
From my experience in most of the cases, companies (regardless of the country) use this window to circumvent employment regulation & protections.
A contract assumes that there is negotiating power from both ends. It is a joke to think that a poor Uber driver has any power to negotiate their "contract" with Uber to drive 14 hours per day for them.
The UFCW sounds really weak in this article. When I worked for Pavilions twenty-five years ago, it was a closed shop and the union was protective of any attempt to change that. Allowing an entire segment of employees to be replaced with independent contractors seems to set the stage for other groups of employees, perhaps cashiers, to also be replaced with contractors. Grocery delivery isn't something new for Pavilions. They offered it at least as far back as the mid 1990s and maybe all the way back to their opening day as a premium-service grocery store.
Something I don't understand – everyone online is fuming that these drivers will lose health insurance and other benefits, but wasn't the point of prop 22 that DoorDash (and others) will have to provide these benefits to their drivers regardless? Why would any full time driver lose health coverage due to this?
They're replacing good paying union jobs with contract workers for a 3rd party company. The original jobs that are being cut are not in any way comparable to what prop 22 offers gig drivers.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadbut on a serious note- union?
Dont vote for the same things that made you left on your new place!
You're actually neither of these things.
But yeah, I agree. Don't try to institute the same policies in your new state which lead to your decision to eventually leave your old state.
Both are probably wishful thinking though.
They think this law is "unrepealable" which doesn't even make sense if you take half a second to think about it.
Kinda says more about them than anything else I guess.
Shit that's deep I'ma have to think on this one.
It wouldn't be practical for things like the latest omnibus COVID stimulus bill, but Prop 22 is only ~15 pages. I've seen so many people spreading FUD about Prop 22. It's obvious when someone is just regurgitating something they saw elsewhere and saying things that are contradicted by the actual text of the proposition.
In other words, had AB 5 not passed, this would likely have happened anyway as a progression towards off-loading "non-core" competencies to third parties as has continued to happen across industries (an iconic example is janitorial services which used to be handled in-house but were off-loaded starting in earnest in the early 90s?)
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25641580
No, they could have done this before AB 5. They did not. This seems to say that this move would have happened if conditions allowed it and the situation was right for business.
What that means is sure AB 5 would have nixed this option. However, the trend before AB 5 was to off-load "non-core" competencies. Prop 22 re-instated the previous status, it did not introduce an altogether new status.
Prop 22 indicated the people preferred the original status to the new status introduced by AB 5, so we're back to where we started before AB 5.
Vons and Pavilions are not the same as Uber, Lyft, etc. I think they did it because they thought it was time to change their delivery logistics and were not waiting for concretization of the law around this.
Put another way, Vons' business model isn't centered around this law. It's incidental.
Companies like Albertsons who could benefit from these businesses weren't willing to commit to embracing them until there was stability in the industry. For all the faults of Prop 22, it provides stability through its incredibly high requirements for repeal or amendments. Companies like Albertsons now have the stability they desired and will embrace these rideshare companies to save a few bucks by shifting a greater financial burden onto individual drivers.
Having someone else do your deliveries and such has been a thing for a long time. Companies have gone back and forth depending on who's doing the bean counting and what they think is crucial to business. Sometimes they would split it. Some in-house some hired out.
2) Prop22 can be be amended only by a seven-eighths vote of the Legislature or a new ballot measure — AND state labor laws can be superseded by federal laws and regulations for enterprises that affect interstate commerce.
Please stop spreading false information.
Point two is why I threw a "basically" in that sentence. Yes, you are technically correct that the state can change it with a 7/8ths majority. However requiring a supermajority that high is a nearly unprecedented requirement for the legislature and it is one that is going to be nearly impossible to achieve.
I honestly don't know what you consider "false information" here beyond me saying "basically no way" for something to happen when it is realistically unfeasible.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25641377
You can go learn something about it from here: https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/initia...
I do my due diligence, but it’s not easy to get a full understanding of how I want to vote. It’s a significant amount of work, and a lot of people will not spend the time.
>But a seven-eighths "super, super, super-duper majority," she said, "is new as far as I’m aware."[1]
It is relatively standard for propositions to include some ways for the legislature to amend the law. It isn't a full legal requirement, but it is common. The a 7/8 majority is nearly impossible to reach on anything but the most milquetoast bills. That requirement was seemingly included so they supporters of the bill could feign that it was flexible while not really conceding any possibility of it being changed. If Prop 22 is going to be amended or repealed, it basically has to be done through the popular vote.
[1] - https://calmatters.org/politics/post-it/2020/10/california-a...
>No surprise, many ballot measures do not say otherwise. Compared to that default, Prop. 22’s high bar for amendments actually gives the Legislature more influence than the norm.
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>If Prop 22 is going to be amended or repealed, it basically has to be done through the popular vote.
And how exactly is this a bad thing?
Having a way to directly amend the law via some majority is completely optional. There is no need to ever include that in the ballot proposition. Why are you choosing to completely ignore this clear fact?
>It is relatively standard for propositions to include some ways for the legislature to amend the law. It isn't a full legal requirement, but it is common.
You mean, passed on the backs of nearly 10 million voters.
I always find it strange to tout the line of how much money was spent in an election, as if to say that the voters have no agency or culpability. Clinton spent nearly 2 times what Trump did and still lost. Money does not equal votes if the people don't support an issue.
Uber/Lyft/DoorDash etc. threatened to summarily shut down in the middle of a pandemic if Prop 22 didn't get passed.
Uber and Lyft actually did this in Austin, but since it wasn't in the middle of a pandemic people had other options and could make adjustments. And then Uber and Lyft went crying to the state government to override Austin because Austin started generating alternatives and we found out that Uber/Lyft don't really have an unassailable position but they have LOTS of VC cash to spend on lobbying and advertising.
Unfortunately, making the kind of adjustments that people in Austin did borders on impossible right now, so this kind of threat was quite effective.
That election is a bad example since:
- Trump was already a TV and Twitter celebrity brand.
- Hillary Clinton was an unlikeable candidate who was ill, financially corrupt (received large Saudi contributions to her foundation) and avoided reporters for 2 months during the campaign (similar to Biden in 2020)
I've seen estimates that Trump added $2 billion in value to Twitter, so Trump also got some advantage out of that relationship.
What's interesting is that SV ad companies denied knowing that Trump was underspending until their end of quarter, then blamed their poor results on that saying, "Who knew?"
In fact, anybody who read a newspaper knew, so it was odd hearing that nonsense from people paid millions to know that.
Prop 22 wasn't unclear. The voters knew what they were voting for, which was to keep the status quo with regard to gig economy jobs, and roll back the broad, messy legislation that the state legislature had enacted.
Had Prod 22 not passed, jobs would've been lost in other areas. The small fraction of 'full-time' gig workers would've come out ahead. The much larger majority of part-time gig workers would've lost their side job. Overall, in the end Prop 22 was a wash. We can't paper over our lack of viable careers by creating low-skilled jobs that pay the same as jobs requiring a college education. There is no free lunch.
Well, why can't we? If we are saying that these types of jobs need to exist, why can we not agree that the people who do the job deserve to be compensated with a living wage and deserve dignity and stability?
Living wage is a mutable concept and is determined in large part by where you live and how many children you have. Wages for a job are based on a fair market rate within reasonable bounds, like minimum wage. Raising minimum wage too high has adverse effects on job availability.
Why are you arguing to me against raising minimum wage, when all I said was that people deserve a living wage?
Well, you said:
> why can we not agree that the people who do the job deserve to be compensated with a living wage and deserve dignity and stability?
How do you propose that a person doing a "job" earn a "living wage" without making changes to the minimum wage? I sense much more of an argumentative tone to your comments than the person you're replying to, by the way.
If I seem argumentative, it is because I am exasperated with the gymnastics that people will do in order to justify the conscription of more and more people into precarious existences under a gig economy, which largely benefits people at the top of the economic ladder at the expense of those at the bottom.
Grocery delivery is a similar case - for many, reducing the cost and improving availability of grocery delivery is a significant benefit. Instead of being the domain of the wealthy, it is massively more available to the average person.
"Living wage" is used to argue that people are owed wages higher than the market would actually pay. Lots of jobs pay vastly higher than living wages - not for fun, but because the supply of workers is more scarce and the economic output of the job is higher. Minimum wage is how we as a society have defined a floor for what is an acceptable job, which I think is intimately associated with the construct of a living wage.
remove the tax benefits around employer health plans, or exclusivity of 401k plans
Then it doesn’t matter if you have a hotdog cart, shine shoes or are a white collar worker.
(I’m not advocating for this — I’m just pointing out that private insurance does not require employment, and the US could easily get rid of the incentives for employers to provide insurance.)
I concur. It's rich to me that, for some problems, papering over is a completely legitimate approach to 'solving' the problem, but when the same approach is suggested in a different context, it is immediately dismissed.
Living wage based on locally inflated housing prices is just fundamentally broken concept. It is just ideological cover for wealth transfer from productive economy to landlords (by focusing on 'living wage' based on market housing costs and not on 'affordable rents' based on market wages). If there is an excess of workers and a shortage of housing, one cannot determine apriori where is a proper balance between 'living wages' and 'affordable rents', it is necessary to let market find the balance.
However, the practice of this is that these governments are highly corrupt, and usually conspire to use the mechanism of public housing as primarily a means to enrich themselves through the proxy of their construction contractors.
Look no farther than Dianne Feinstein and Tutor Perini.
https://ktla.com/news/california/its-insane-san-diego-county...
Public housing done right is distributed, low rise apartments rented below market rate and not expected to be self supporting.
As a tax payer, it's so frustrating to see us build good things and then totally neglect to maintain them.
I will say that high rise public housing in the US introduces complexity because it necessitates a degree of service infrastructure that's more costly than more, lower buildings.
I mean the house steadily loses value due to deterioration. But the land appreciates due to scarcity and the available financing.
>affordable for anyone who wants to live here
That doesn’t scale
And I think people still would want to own houses. There's pride in being a homeowner for many. Knowing you have a place that is yours.
It does scale, because not everyone wants to live here. Some people want to live in nyc or Miami or Houston or Chicago, etc. There's a finite interest in any location.
All those seem doable to me, which would address your concerns. Any reason we couldn't do all that?
Man, this is painfully true. Until California can decide between housing being affordable and housing being an asset that is guaranteed to increase in value 10% every year (which is what we've decided for the moment) every increase in wages is just going to be an additional subsidy for the top 1%.
A delivery driver is not a skilled job. I know, I delivered pizza when I was in college. And that was before mobile phones or navigation apps so drivers actually had to learn their way around their delivery area.
If you have a drivers license and a car you can be a delivery driver. That's not a very high bar. So those jobs don't pay very much.
You mean “Had Prop 22 failed”?
Only through pulling bootstraps and making lemonade from lemons will these uneducated wretches be able to bask in the sunshine of freedom. Back in the glory days of Victorian England you could flip a boy a farthing for grocery delivery... I for one and pleased the make these opportunities available.
Clearly GP was saying "we had to choose between a few well-paid jobs with many unable to access them or many low-paid jobs; it's a trade-off". It's obvious that that statement is intended to consider everyone's well being, not just some idle nobility as you imply.
The baseline assumption of the argument is that you are entitled to some minion fetching your stuff at a price low enough that not even the meager protections afforded a Walmart employee apply. Instead you have contractors working for a platform that steals tips. Gross.
Sorry my comment was awkward to read.
The law in question (AB5) essentially banned hiring employees as independent contractors if they were performing a primary function of the business.
While I didn't support prop 22, and still think it is bad that it passed (and no, voters are dumb and did not know what they were voting for), I think this is totally unrelated to Prop 22 or AB5. Most likely after many drivers got sick and became unavailable for weeks due to covid, Vons decided to outsource delivery.
Prop. 22 didn't restore the pre-AB5 legal status quo, which was set by the 2018 Dynamex decision which AB5 largely codified and created some exemptions from.
> The small fraction of 'full-time' gig workers would've come out ahead. The much larger majority of part-time gig workers would've lost their side job.
No, they wouldn't. The Dynamex/AB5 would require some workers that under Prop 22 are contractors to be regular employees, but it would not require them to be full-time employees. This was among the very many bits of misinformation spread to sell Prop 22.
Full-time or not has no distinction in this argument. You are nitpicking.
Really? We've got employees with benefits and healthcare who just got their healthcare yanked out from under them in the middle of a pandemic.
That looks like a pretty big net loss to me.
I did, and I left in the the early 2010's as the writing on the wall could not be ignored. But, this already happened with Kroger (King Soopers), Safeway affiliate chains and CVS in Colorado as I saw several advertisements on the stores for home delivery being done by cars and drivers with Doordash decals, these were seemingly outsourced via partnerships with Doordash, as Ubereats and Grubhub failed to obtain that Maketshare.
The logistics capability at the small scale home delivery model is actually very expensive/costly in an already low margin business model, especially when contrasted to its more common large scale volume based counterpart that has decades/centuries of iteration via economies of scale refinement, and this mainly because of last mile hindrances. It's pragmatic, albeit concerning, none the less but I can understand the reasoning behind it.
> These companies effectively bought a law and are already repeating the benefits at the expense of the workers of California. Expect other industries to follow this path in coming elections.
Agreed.
Especially as Doordash has lobbied to not classify its drivers as workers and removed a large amount of the liability and costs associated with the well compensated FT drivers whose associated employment benefits are often seen as liabilities to the an eager bean counter wanting to reduce overhead from operations to justify their own position.
Big tech's version of the gig economy is actually pitting itself with people to choose between low, unstable government based benefits that can be precarious at best as they often come too little too late (if at all) or choose a more accessible route at gamble on taking a significant health risk and being in a perpetual underclass with no social mobility: Big tech and VCs are the new Wall Street and Bank predators of the 21st century, and are making full use of Naomi's outlined Disaster Capitalism model.
I can only hope those of you who choose to work there have a very deep introspective moment and ask yourself what exactly it is you are bringing into the World. Because Big Tech has made it clear it has aspirations to eventually get rid of its well compensated useful idiots (software developers) model, too. Which is probably why you see Google wanting to unionize while it still can while Amazon and Tesla will openly go to great lengths to quell any and all who even remotely suggest it.
Just to be clear, I don't like the notions of collective bargaining, non terminable labour, and ultimately a system that forces someone into what is essentially a legal form of racketeering (unions) with overbearing social peer pressure and ostracization as its main selling point.
I was asked to help get involved in creating one its early stages due to my anarchist ideology (perhaps a failure to understand that Anarchism does not necessarily mean syndicalist which is often more in line with socialist/communist/Marxits variants of anarchism), but I couldn't do so in good conscious.
I've seen its presence be in tandem with the darkest period of the Automotive Industry in the US in my lifetime, and seen how workers (directly or indirectly because of unions is not entirely clear) become complacent and quality control and quality assurance suffered significantly, as innovation lagged behind all other concerns as everything become a perpetual and existential struggle by the 'proles' against the 'Bourgeois' in respect to most other Countries... but as seen in German Auto manufacturing (which tends to have low wages for non-union, lower skill work) it can 'work' and must be said that in certain circumstances it is the only real deterrent to these kind of heavy handed overreaches in power. But it can also be horrible, as seen in the French Auto Industry. Especially as Unions then get to have far more power which eventually leads t...
They got into delivery because they had to and I’d imagine it was losing a lot of money and not to mention tough for them to accomplish and manage.
Everyone else and their brother is moving to doordash white label because it makes the most sense. They focus on their core competency and allow doordash to focus on theirs.
People are most upset about the health insurance aspect. The issues need to be decoupled.
The status quo is what needs to change. Gig economy work is going to take over. People need to insure and protect themselves. And it needs to be possible.
The gig economy is only going to take over if people keep voting for it. Lots of states and a federal government left to take up the issue.
We’re supposedly a first world country; we should act like it with regards to labor regulation.
- utopian: recognition that humans cannot do sustained productivity, higher experts in short bursts capture peak productivity, everyone works less overall
- dystopian: automation makes more surplus labor, which reduces the incentive of further automation by hiring low productivity but dirt cheap labor. If everyone does this, and it isn't worth it to maintain yesterday's automation, overall productivity can go down.
Unfortunately Americansn live in the second one. We are suburban squatters in the rotting ruins of our past greatness.
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2019/12/09/politics/gallup-private-h... <- first duck duck go search result
The employer should pay for it. It’s a benefit like retirement savings.
If employers want better employees, they can offer fully-paid or low deductible plans to their employees.
I do not want the US government running healthcare.
No. The right answer is to deregulate healthcare so that you can buy it from anywhere. You can still have your AMA-certified doctors, but if you can get other doctors as well, you'll be better off.
The reason for that is that while wealthy people like the US middle class worry about the quality of care, everyone below them merely worries about access. Even care that is a fifth as good, if accessible will be superior to inaccessible care that is currently available.
The same US government incentivizes employer healthcare by allowing the deductibility of those benefits - which allows the healthcare industry to capture that money, and employers to trap employees.
It’s frustrating to see this portrayed as some local chain responding to local laws when it’s just natural streamlining after a business sale.
Very weirded out tho on why the article has a prop22 angle. All prop22 did was amend AB5. This sort of thing happened already all the time before AB5. Now it will just continue.
Can someone help me out here? Maybe because its from Knock-LA, a left publication?
From my experience in most of the cases, companies (regardless of the country) use this window to circumvent employment regulation & protections.
A contract assumes that there is negotiating power from both ends. It is a joke to think that a poor Uber driver has any power to negotiate their "contract" with Uber to drive 14 hours per day for them.