[HN Gopher] Gig workers are organising, in tech-savvy ways
___________________________________________________________________
Gig workers are organising, in tech-savvy ways
Author : edward
Score : 113 points
Date : 2020-05-07 18:54 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| paulpauper wrote:
| gig workers are going to be at a big disadvantage in coming
| months due to increased labor competition from laid off worker,
| depressing gig wages and increasing competition.
| [deleted]
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Looked at from the other side: There is safety in numbers and
| this trend could help shift power to the worker, especially if
| they are savvy about organizing.
|
| I've done gig work for a few years now. I am pro gig work and I
| think it can be a good deal for the worker even though it
| currently has a terrible reputation as being a raw deal for the
| worker. I'm happy to see that the pandemic is fostering
| development of this sort in this area.
| taurath wrote:
| How do you prevent scabs when work is decentralized?
| hinkley wrote:
| Referrals still count for a lot in software.
|
| So the tricky bit will be that if the caliber of workers in
| your guild (or whatever you wish to call it) is below
| average, then you have to make it up in volume.
|
| If it's high, then you will get a feedback loop.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I have no idea, but I don't think you need perfect control
| over everything.
|
| _The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star
| systems will slip through your fingers. -- Princess Leia_
|
| I think we just need to work out what is a reasonable rate
| and the expectation that gig work should be a means to make
| a living wage for people who do it and not just for some
| sliver of the people who do it, but for most people who do
| it. I'm okay with there being a learning curve and yadda,
| but it shouldn't be a situation where only some really tiny
| fraction of people have any hope of making it and then they
| have to live in terror of the rules changing overnight on
| them and killing their livelihood.
|
| Part of the value of labor movements is just setting the
| expectations for both sides that "You need to pay X amount
| for this." A lot of stuff we do is basically culturally
| determined and labor movements help shape culture and
| cultural expectations and so forth.
|
| So I don't think details like that are necessarily
| important. Sometimes they are, but sometimes they aren't.
| And sometimes they can be a real threat but don't have to
| be if you have your priorities straight.
|
| I don't care how we get there, I just would like to see gig
| work become something with a reputation as legitimate work
| that should reasonably support you if you meet some
| reasonable standard of quality and put in some reasonable
| number of hours. I think we need to ditch this idea that
| gig work is simply slave labor and is unfixable and needs
| to be converted to regular employment because that's the
| model we are familiar with and know how to package up in a
| way that works reasonably well for both sides.
| bubbleRefuge wrote:
| Hoping someway, somehow, something like medicare for all comes to
| fruition at the national scale given that the economy will become
| even more of a gig economy than pre-corona. Can't understand how
| this is not being talked about much since Bernie dropped out. A
| good family plan for a gig worker (without subsidies) is like
| 1500 a month in major markets.
| hinkley wrote:
| I don't know what the fee structure looks like, but there are
| at least a few tech organizations that offer insurance.
|
| https://www.washingtontechnology.org/
|
| Should probably be more of these, cooperatives, and foundations
| that work on software to support bootstrapping.
| vkou wrote:
| > Can't understand how this is not being talked about much
| since Bernie dropped out.
|
| It's not being talked about much because it is unpalatable to
| the pro-big-business arm of the Democrat establishment. And you
| cannot find a more pro-establishment candidate than Biden.
|
| We'll get a chance to try again in four years.
| wolco wrote:
| You won't because the super delegates + plus press control
| over friendly outlets prevent candidates the public loves
| from winning and gives them candidates they are told they
| should like. And even though they look good on paper they
| never feel right. Then the general election happens and the
| other party wins because whoever their candidate is they
| generally have populist support. Once in a generation people
| do get the candidate they want but they give themselves a
| serious disadvantage each year.
| blockmarker wrote:
| Just because you don't like the candidate it doesn't mean
| that nobody else does.
| drngdds wrote:
| You what? Biden won because the public liked him more than
| Bernie, as you could see by the polls and the vote counts.
| bubbleRefuge wrote:
| You mean Big Insurance Big Pharma ? Because I think most
| businesses , big and small, would benefit from a universal
| medicare type solution. One less thing to worry about for
| them and presumably government funded/single payer/ yada
| yada. It seems to me the whole theory that government
| programs need to be "paid for" is out the window as the Fed
| has 6T on their balances sheets and Congress has instructed
| the Treasury to spend 1.5 or 2T on C19 relief by printing
| treasury securities(that the Fed can buy if needbe). So its
| not about how can we fund universal health care ( and also a
| more dignified Social security retirement system [leave that
| for another thread]) its about the will to freaking do it and
| stand up to Big Pharma, Big Medicine, and Big Insurance
| lobbies.
| whb07 wrote:
| So if the healthcare and insurance markets are screwed up
| because of government, the solution then is more government? I
| always find this logic lacking. Maybe I could get an eli5 from
| someone ?
| vangelis wrote:
| What is government to you? Does government add complexity? If
| complexity is the issue, then folding multiple insurance
| companies with different reimbursements rates and interfaces
| into one entity should reduce complexity. Hospitals already
| deal with CMS, why not only deal with CMS?
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| The parent post said nothing about healthcare and the
| insurances markets being screwed up because of government.
|
| The argument for single-payer hinges on the theory that the
| profit motive is incompatible with the very idea of insurance
| (that is, as long as denying services is more profitable than
| providing them, an insurance market is an inefficient way to
| provide said services).
| bhupy wrote:
| It's complicated.
|
| 1) "Single payer" is not the only way to deliver universal
| healthcare. Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, Singapore
| all have thriving multi-payer systems. In Switzerland and
| the Netherlands, ALL insurance is private. In Singapore,
| while the government covers catastrophic care, 70% of total
| health expenditures are private.
|
| 2) The biggest problem in the US is that healthcare is just
| more expensive, and American insurers end up having to pay
| more. An example: doctors in America earn more (PPP
| adjusted) than in any other country. MRI's in America cost
| more (even on the Medicare fee schedule) than almost any
| other country. A lot of this is actually caused by a series
| of well-intentioned policies passed over the last half
| century.
|
| 3) In the US, for-profit insurance profit margins are a
| pretty meagre 5%, which doesn't really make a dent in
| costs. Also, some of the biggest insurance providers are
| non-profits (Blue Cross Blue Shield, Kaiser)
|
| 4) Medicare fee schedules aren't that much better, in fact
| the part of Medicare that's actually working the best is
| Medicare Part C (Medicare Advantage), which relies on
| private payers.
|
| Source: I work at a claims adjuster
| MiroF wrote:
| At least in Switzerland, the government pays if you are
| paying more than 8% of your income, the government caps
| deductibles, and the government prohibits profit seeking
| for the basic plan. Very different from the US
| bhupy wrote:
| Sure, I'm not defending the US status quo, just attacking
| the idea that "single-payer" is the best/only solution.
| Not arguing for an anarchist free-for-all either -- some
| of the most successful private healthcare regimes
| (Switzerland, Singapore) are also well regulated.
| andreareina wrote:
| Government doesn't need to turn a profit off of the
| healthcare system. Arguably that is (or should be) part of
| government's remit: to provide infrastructure and services
| that can't reliably be provided at a profit, yet serve the
| public good.
| bhupy wrote:
| Private insurance profit margins are, on average, about 5%.
| Reducing healthcare costs by 5% doesn't get you very far.
| MiroF wrote:
| Even conservative economists are more charitable and
| cogent in their critique of m4a than this comment is.
| bhupy wrote:
| ...can you elaborate?
|
| I can tell you ALL about M4A vs private insurance, I
| currently work at a claims adjuster, and adjust claims
| myself.
| karpierz wrote:
| The public option isn't supposed to replicate private
| insurance. Monopolistic/legislative powers allow the
| public option to set market rates.
| bhupy wrote:
| That's true, in theory, but in practice Medicare fee
| schedules aren't that much better than private insurers.
|
| Additionally, providers themselves are starting to charge
| out-of-network rates that are LOWER than Medicare fee
| schedules. For example, Wal-Mart has launched healthcare
| in Georgia, charging $25 for a cleaning[1], which is
| significantly lower than the amount for a cleaning
| (procedure code D1110) set by Medicare/Medicaid. You can
| look it up yourself by visiting the FAIR Health code
| lookup tool
| (https://www.fairhealthconsumer.org/dental/results), and
| setting the ZIP code to that of Carlton, GA (location of
| the Wal-Mart clinic), 30627. The average allowed amount
| is $64.
|
| Finally, the US government has historically been pretty
| bad at setting prices, as a monopsony buyer. The US
| military spends more per capita on the military largely
| because it pays more per-soldier, per-fighter jet, etc
| than any other nation on the planet. You would think
| that, as the sole buyer of US defense sector fighter
| jets. The F-35 is expected to cost $1.5 trillion (!!)
| over its lifetime, and the US enjooys
| monopoly/legislative powers over that cost.
|
| NASA's planned SLS moon mission is a bit of a disaster --
| way over budget and way behind schedule. Because the
| boosters aren't reusable, each launch is expected to cost
| $1B (with a B) dollars -- EACH launch[1]! Meanwhile
| SpaceX's target cost-per-launch is $50M.
|
| While you're right that, in theory, a monopsony can
| extract the lowest possible price, there's absolutely no
| guarantee of this, indeed American empirical evidence has
| at times proven otherwise.
|
| [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-25/wa
| lmart-t...
| Kluny wrote:
| Government is made up of people. "More" government isn't a
| meaningful term. The difference is who is in that government,
| how they are educated, what their values are, and how much
| trust they have in each other.
| pixelatedindex wrote:
| I don't know about "more" government, but "less" government
| is also not the solution. The real solution is a "better"
| government, and that's a very layered problem.
|
| Either way, we pay a lot more for a very subpar health
| ecosystem compared to the rest of the world.
| sequoia wrote:
| Single payer isn't _just_ "more government," it's also "more
| open market competition" at least in my limited experience as
| an American in Canada (been here almost three years).
|
| Single payer means _everyone_ has a health card entitling
| them to spend tax money on their own healthcare how they want
| (within certain parameters, of course). This means health
| insurance companies don 't get to act as cartels, limiting
| (patient) access to care, and, crucially, limiting _provider_
| access to patients & patient dollars. If I want to see a
| doctor in Toronto, I don't go to the doctor "in my network",
| probably at a big practice that has some convoluted agreement
| (or not!) with my particular insurance provider. If I want to
| see a doctor in Toronto, I can basically go to any available
| doctor who is taking new patients.
|
| Imagine _literally everyone_ has a health-care budget to
| spend, regardless of how rich poor they are. Can you imagine
| the type of competition & innovation this creates for those
| health-care dollars? Pharmacists remember my name & ask
| whether the meds worked as expected, doctors will visit me
| _at my house_ (this has been cut back by the latest
| provincial government), I can check wait times at drop-in
| clinics online & book an appointment, see a doctor same day,
| even within a couple hours. Try that in the USA without going
| to the ER, and even then I'd be surprised if you see a doc in
| less than a few hours.
|
| I was amazed to see the competition and market innovation in
| healthcare in Canada when I arrived here. You might be amazed
| as well.
| [deleted]
| bhupy wrote:
| Doesn't have to be national -- Canada's single payer healthcare
| system 1) is Provincial, 2) came about gradually from Province
| to Province. Saskatchewan was the first Province to offer
| single payer in 1947, followed by Alberta in 1951, etc. By
| 1961, all Provinces had some form of a single payer healthcare
| system.
|
| The US can do the same, this doesn't have to be all-or-nothing
| at the Federal level.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Not really, US States are much less powerful and represent a
| smaller fraction of the whole than Canadian provinces. A US
| state wouldn't have the power in practice to implement
| universal healthcare.
| bhupy wrote:
| What?
|
| US States are
|
| 1) far more powerful than Canadian Provinces, to the extent
| that anything not explicitly delegated to the Federal
| government by the Constitution is left to the States (10th
| Amendment)
|
| 2) nearly every single state in the US has a GDP per capita
| on par with whole European nation-states, which is more
| than enough to fund a single-payer system
| amiga_500 wrote:
| Surely New York could bankroll this.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.md/4weWH
| yarinr wrote:
| Thank you. Seems like everything is pay-walled these days...
| formalsystem wrote:
| I went out to grab a burger last night and there was a huge line
| of Uber Eats drivers and they were waiting for what seemed like a
| long time especially considering how little they're paid.
|
| Is there any reason why an OSS Uber competitor wouldn't be
| tractable? Drivers and passengers can pay a small booking fee
| which would go towards maintaining server costs. Client app can
| be really bare bones and I believe people would be willing to use
| it if it's way cheaper. So many scammy people talking about
| decentralized computing but this seems like a low hanging fruit
| which gives gig workers their autonomy back.
|
| Same question for all gig worker apps.
| sequoia wrote:
| I have seen this question come up a lot recently when food
| ordering apps are on hacker news (disclaimer: I work for one of
| "those companies").
|
| My answer is this: Respectfully, if you think creating &
| running a platform like DoorDash is not that complicated, I say
| knock yourself out. Show us the low-fee, "non-exploitative",
| reliable, "OSS" solution. There's even white-label delivery
| platforms[1] (you bring your own fleet) that could get you
| started dispatching orders right away. To be honest I'm not
| sure what you mean by "OSS" here as the issue is not
| proprietary software but the digital and physical
| infrastructure, payment processing, fraud prevention, merchant
| recruitment etc. as well as the very large support staff.
|
| I would love to see better and better solutions to the
| "convenient, cheap, fair-to-couriers, fair-to-restaurants food
| delivery challenge." I think you'll find it's a more difficult
| problem than it seems at first blush.
|
| 1: https://onfleet.com for example
| clairity wrote:
| i thought about this recently too. the technological
| complexities are not trivial, but they're dwarfed by the
| operational, marketing, and regulatory ones. for instance, who
| handles crimes like assault or theft between the various
| parties? who sets up payments and issues refunds?
|
| i'd love to organize/contribute to something like this, but it
| has some serious hurdles to think through.
| spaced-out wrote:
| Even the technical challenges are significant. It's one thing
| to make an app, it's another thing to have a 24/7, global,
| distributed application with lots of money running through
| it. You'll need site-reliability teams to handle maintenance
| issues and a significant number of developers on staff. If
| there's some new law, regulation, or bug which requires
| changes to your system it needs to be done NOW, not whenever
| someone gets around to it.
|
| >who handles crimes like assault or theft between the various
| parties? who sets up payments and issues refunds?
|
| Lawyers. You're going to need a lot of lawyers.
| clairity wrote:
| yes, i didn't mean to imply that the technical challenges
| weren't substantial. real-time matching and routing are
| also not trivial.
| eblanshey wrote:
| Would be cool to have an open protocol where anyone can make
| an app to hook people up P2P.
|
| > who handles crimes like assault or theft between the
| various parties?
|
| If it's P2P, then the same as any other P2P transaction. If I
| pay a random dude to deliver my lunch, and he assaults me,
| this is handled by the local police. It's a risk I'm willing
| to take if I choose to trust him. A distributed trust system
| w/ reviews will help make things safer.
|
| I feel like sometimes we seek 100% safety in a world where
| that's not possible, and when it DOES happen we point
| fingers. With a middleman like Uber we can point fingers more
| easily, but ultimately we're responsible for ourselves.
|
| > who sets up payments and issues refunds?
|
| There are public escrow services such as escrow.com that
| could be integrated. And there's always cryptocurrency.
| clairity wrote:
| i like p2p as the default, but i'm not as confident that
| the liabilities go away so easily with that configuration.
|
| totally agree that the world is full of risks and sometimes
| we just have to accept them.
|
| escrow in some form would likely be necessary, but the fees
| of escrow.com are prohibitive for this use case.
|
| instead of pricing being controlled by the marketplace,
| it'd be cool if it were more like a trading platform where
| riders bid for rides and drivers offer rides (with
| considerations for starting point, distance, and trip
| time).
| karpierz wrote:
| How do you prevent your platform turning into a tool for money
| laundering/extracting cash from stolen credit cards?
| bhupy wrote:
| The operations are non-trivial. UberEats, DoorDash, GrubHub et
| al all have full-time operations personnel in nearly every
| market they operate. Operationalizing this requires things like
| fraud/risk protection, order defect minimization, courier
| safety, refunds/chargeback adjudication etc.
|
| Not to say that this CANNOT be done in a decentralized, OSS way
| -- but it's not just a CRUD app.
| DevX101 wrote:
| I'm surprised it's taken this long for some tech enabled labor
| platform to emerge. Power is gained by coordinating some portion
| of the value chain into a single node. Amazon is powerful because
| they can centralize demand into a single node (Amazon.com) and
| then force suppliers to play their game. Saudi Arabia is powerful
| because they can centralize the supply of oil into a single node
| (AramCo) and then force buyers to pay their price via OPEC.
|
| Labor doesn't have a centralizing node, and is consequently
| powerless. Even engineers, relatively well paid as they are, are
| somewhat powerless. The high salary commanded here is due to
| autonomous market forces, not a coordinated strategy.
|
| Unions used to be strong before the 70s but they've gotten
| successfully defanged by political parties.
|
| There's definitely room for building MASSIVE and powerful without
| the political corruption of yesteryear's unions.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Labor doesn't have a centralizing node
|
| Why doesn't the US have a Labour Party? That's what we have in
| the UK. (But it's not very popular!)
| ketzo wrote:
| The U.S. only has two parties with meaningful amounts of
| support -- Republican and Democrat -- and it has been this
| way (with few notable exceptions) since the 1800s. I've been
| told this seems very weird coming from countries with multi-
| party governments.
|
| Ostensibly, the Democrats are the "party of the working
| people," but a lot of modern leftists (myself included) would
| argue that the vast majority are barely more worker-friendly
| than the Republican party.
| amiga_500 wrote:
| The UK and the USA are both based on the UK establishment's
| greatest invention: first past the post. This forces two
| parties.
|
| One party is "pro establishment". Then you only have one
| party who is supposedly "anti-establishment".
|
| At this point you only have one party head to keep an eye on.
|
| If the mood turns ugly (and it won't often because the
| establishment own all the press/media), you have to fix the
| head of the one "anti" party now and again.
|
| UK: use the media to circulate a smear campaign against
| Corbyn after he nearly got in power and surprised them
|
| USA: use the media to ignore/denigrate/belittle Sanders as
| some kind of insane communist.
|
| Trudeau campaigned on removing FPTP and as soon as he got in
| someone, somewhere told him to drop it like a hot potato.
| Legalizing weed was fine, even though this was apparently
| hotly contested before, because it's not a real issue and is
| there to be sacrificed when real power issues come up.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| These just seem like your personal opinions on the parties
| and the media rather than a comment on why the US doesn't
| have a labour party as one of its two main parties when the
| UK does.
| cced wrote:
| Do you recommend any resources that I can read regarding the
| defanging of unions?
| _jal wrote:
| It isn't quite what you're asking for, but _A History of
| America in Ten Strikes_ by Eric Loomis is a great book of the
| general history of American labor.
|
| The telling of the stories includes a lot of the strategy and
| tactics, legal and otherwise, of busting unions down to where
| they are now.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B078XKHSSB
| DevX101 wrote:
| I don't study this academically so don't have any good
| sources offhand. But the history of union busting has a long
| history in this country. In the 1890s steel workers tried to
| unionize and strike and Andrew Carnergie sent in the
| Pinkerton's (private precursor to today's FBI) to spy on the
| unions and break up strikes. They'd do this violently and
| many people got killed.
|
| Today it's less physically violent, but if you get a job as a
| floor worker at a big company like Walmart, you've got
| mandatory videos about how terrible unions are. And yes, you
| will be fired if the word 'union' comes out your mouth on
| company property.
| mycall wrote:
| I always said if sysadmins all banned together, they could
| change the world overnight. Let your imagination fill in the
| gaps.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > I always said if sysadmins all banned together, they could
| change the world overnight.
|
| What do you think they could all agree on though?
| DenisM wrote:
| Write a movie script, make a fortune!
|
| Ah but then you might lose the interest in the revolution...
| artificial wrote:
| Banning as a group? Such as deplatforming everyone as if
| they're dictators even though they don't own the network?
| andrewflnr wrote:
| I believe it was meant to be "banded together". My
| apologies if you were aware and trying to make a joke. :)
| CrackpotGonzo wrote:
| Isn't this kind of what Frank (https://getfrank.com/) is trying
| to achieve?
| clairity wrote:
| that's not the only option. you can strengthen the unions and
| amass power in yet another organization, or you can disperse
| the power of corporations to better equalize the footings of
| the various constituencies.
|
| while not against unions _prima facie_ , i'd encourage
| moderating power structures as the first-order solution over
| building new ones. societies should be people-first and power
| structures second (or third, or whatever).
| mdkrkeo9 wrote:
| You mean have them pay taxes
|
| It doesn't need to be wrapped in technical jargon, y'all
|
| Aristotle wrote about this shit 2,000 years ago
|
| This isn't new territory to society
|
| Look at tax rates between WW2 & Reagan and the growth in the
| wealth of the middle class during the same period
|
| Ffs just accept it: you've been lied to so long you've come
| to believe the lie about taxes
|
| Political unrest at every point along the path of building
| human society is centered around gross material inequality
|
| Stop bloviating at your screen as mom & dad did when Dan
| Rather would say something stupid and get to work solving
| these problems
|
| All I see is people creating a market for more of the same
| prioritizing rich grandpas demands
|
| Rather than follow Andreessen, the next generation should
| have what he had as a kid: higher taxes funneling shit tons
| of resources into local communities to evolve as the people
| need, not as finance market speculators dictate
|
| Pitter patter
| johndubchak wrote:
| Let's get 'atter.
| bhupy wrote:
| > Look at tax rates between WW2 & Reagan and the growth in
| the wealth of the middle class during the same period
|
| Are you talking about income taxes? Because, yes you're
| right that Federal income taxes are nowhere near what they
| were post-WW2, but...
|
| > and the growth in the wealth of the middle class during
| the same period
|
| ...the wealth of the upper class has grown to historic
| levels because the vast VAST majority of upper-class wealth
| right now (top 0.1%) is 1) in unrealized capital gains, and
| 2) once capital gains are realized, they are taxed at the
| same rate that they were all the way up until the 70's,
| where it spent a brief decade moderately higher than it is
| today.
|
| Bezos doesn't have $100B+ sitting around in a checking
| account, and a WW2-era marginal tax rate wouldn't really
| raise as much as you think it would. Most of the richest
| billionaires have a salary of $1.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Bezos doesn't have 100B$ sitting on a bank account, but
| he has a low-interest high throughput equity line against
| his hare portfolio that means that if he wants to cut a 5
| billion dollar cheque in the next 30 minutes, he can.
| Which is pretty damn close to having 100B$ sitting
| around.
|
| If he did pay a high tax rate every time he realized his
| gains in any way or tapped his equity through a financial
| instrument, I think things would be much better. But
| right now Bezos can pay a realized tax rate of under 20%
| if he wants.
| bhupy wrote:
| Yes, these billionaires take collateralized loans, but
| that doesn't change the fact that they will eventually
| HAVE to pay taxes. At some point, Bezos has to realize
| some gain somewhere to have cash to pay back the loan --
| and odds are, that will be taxed as capital gains, the
| rate for which has been essentially constant since WW2.
| mdkrkeo9 wrote:
| It's even worse then; they truly own less than they claim
| and are just de facto in charge because economists (who
| I'm sure have nothing to gain by it) let us know this is
| all exactly how it works
|
| If you see everyone as atomic agents of work, is Bezos
| worth so much because of cherry picked models favored by
| law, or is he himself distributing goods in a universally
| mathematically efficient way by some unknown force,
| invisible hands and "free markets (in a nation of
| laws?)"?
|
| If he's literally doing it, wow! Ok. But if it's
| mathematical efficiency it's mathematical efficiency.
| Bezos didn't measure it. He took object distribution and
| abstracted it. Wow! Business innovation!
|
| Nevermind guys like Krugman openly admit Hari Seldon like
| powers of bending social agency are exactly his goal
|
| That's great if the people in charge are truly benevolent
|
| Old enough to wreck the planet and die before it's a
| problem doesn't really suggest to me they're going to be
| motivated to voluntarily acquiesce to measurable anxiety
| this creates for folks that aren't quite so old
|
| Again more disingenuous western BS
|
| That carbon emissions have detrimental effects on human
| health and the environment was pretty obvious in London
| and elsewhere back in the day
|
| But since it's not in your neighborhood, those laws of
| physics that matter for computers are lying to us when we
| annotate the inputs differently?
|
| Ok. Yup. Shark jump achieved.
| bhupy wrote:
| > If you see everyone as atomic agents of work, is Bezos
| worth so much because of cherry picked models favored by
| law, or is he himself distributing goods in a universally
| mathematically efficient way by some unknown force,
| invisible hands and "free markets (in a nation of
| laws?)"?
|
| > If he's literally doing it, wow! Ok. But if it's
| mathematical efficiency it's mathematical efficiency.
| Bezos didn't measure it. He took object distribution and
| abstracted it. Wow! Business innovation!
|
| I guess optimization of global supply chains in a way
| that enables anyone to practically materialize literally
| anything they want within 2 days might not count to you
| as a real "innovation", so I'll take a different angle.
|
| Half of Amazon's revenue comes from Amazon Web Services.
| Starting a business today is easier than it has ever
| been, thanks in large part to AWS. I work at a small
| seed-stage tech startup, and our product runs on
| infrastructure that, until recently, was only available
| to giant blue chip corporations with the resources to
| employ 100s of engineers to maintain datacenters,
| databases, tooling, monitoring & alerting, load
| balancing, etc. All of that is now available to our tiny
| little team for a simple monthly subscription fee. You
| can attribute the value of most startups today to the
| availability of this infrastructure as a service.
|
| > That carbon emissions have detrimental effects on human
| health and the environment was pretty obvious in London
| and elsewhere back in the day
|
| Not sure how this is relevant to income tax rates, gig
| workers, or labor unions -- but we probably agree that
| carbon emissions are bad. IMO we should tax emissions as
| much as possible.
| clairity wrote:
| yes, the special rate for capital gains is ostensibly
| justified as an investment incentive, but it's
| unnecessary for that purpose. investors would still chase
| the highest returns for their capital.
|
| we should instead treat all income the same for tax
| purposes.
| bhupy wrote:
| I mean, no disagreements there, I'm just attacking the
| inaccurate and often used WW2 era vs Reagan era income
| tax argument.
|
| Even back then, none of the super rich were paying that
| income tax rate, because the wealthiest people in the
| world owe their wealth to ownership in their
| corporations.
| nickff wrote:
| Well, one problem that unions have had is that almost every
| non-monopoly whose workers they successfully organize seems to
| fall apart. It may just be a correlation, but it is also
| possible that the unions are causing the failures.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| There is an obvious causal chain there. Companies in non-
| monopoly markets have to price competitively or lose
| customers. If unions are actually getting anything for their
| workers then they would be extracting more from the company
| than companies with non-union workers, but companies in
| competitive markets don't have thick margins to pay the
| difference with so they would have to raise prices, which
| makes them uncompetitive.
|
| This is not an argument in favor of monopolies, however,
| because unions can extract more from a monopoly but so can
| capitalists, and it all comes at the expense of the consumer,
| which is also you. It's better to make $2 and spend $2 than
| to make $3 and then have to spend $4 just to get the same
| stuff.
| Klinky wrote:
| Typically it's not make $3 and spend $4, it could even be,
| make $3 and spend $2.01. Labor rate going up $1 doesn't
| mean unit price goes up $1.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The entire price paid either goes to labor or capital,
| and most of it already goes to labor. If you pay 1% of
| the workers $3 instead of $2 then the price may only need
| to rise by $0.01, but then you're just taking $0.01 each
| from a hundred workers and giving it all to 1% of them.
| And what happens after you do that a hundred times?
|
| Meanwhile, again, introducing a monopoly increases the
| money that can be extracted from customers by labor but
| also by capital. So if you introduce a monopoly and it
| raises prices by $0.01 or $100 or whatever amount, and
| you're very lucky and labor gets 90% of the increase and
| capital only 10%, then on average workers have lost 10%
| of that amount. Because you still pay 100% of the price
| increase and then get less than 100% of it back.
|
| There are also taxes, which make it even worse -- you get
| paid $1 more, the government takes 25%, you go to buy the
| thing that costs $1 more (so capital is getting 0% of the
| money) but then you owe 8% of the $1 in sales tax, and
| you've now lost a third of the money you used to have to
| Uncle Sam so they can give it to Bank of America and
| Halliburton.
| acituan wrote:
| That causal chain only works in perfect competition where
| prices are convergent with marginal cost. In real market
| conditions perfect competition doesn't exist just as
| perfect monopolies are rare.
|
| Google and Apple are competing on selling phones, Google
| and Facebook are competing on selling ads, yet all sit on
| billions of dollars of cash. I don't see their workers
| being able to "extract" more from their companies?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > That causal chain only works in perfect competition
| where prices are convergent with marginal cost. In real
| market conditions perfect competition doesn't exist just
| as perfect monopolies are rare.
|
| Only "close enough" is required, not perfection. Sure, a
| union could negotiate a 1% raise without destroying most
| companies, but then they'd eat that amount in union dues
| and time value of doing paperwork etc. Meanwhile if they
| demand a 30% raise, that's more than the companies in a
| lot of industries could absorb.
|
| > Google and Apple are competing on selling phones,
| Google and Facebook are competing on selling ads, yet all
| sit on billions of dollars of cash. I don't see their
| workers being able to "extract" more from their
| companies?
|
| Are you not familiar with the level of compensation paid
| by these employers?
|
| They are also hardly exemplars of competitive markets.
| Think restaurants or farmers.
| acituan wrote:
| Let's assume your premise is correct. Then it could also mean
| that there hasn't been any working combination of capital and
| labor that didn't depend on labor being exploited. I don't
| believe this to be the case, but your assertion actually
| validates the necessity of labor unions, not undermines them.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Your assumption is that all non-union labor is being
| exploited.
| grawprog wrote:
| To be fair, when I know Union workers doing the same job
| as me are being paid nearly twice as much with medical
| benefits, sick time, regular raises, proper safety
| equipment, regulated working hours etc. It's kind of hard
| not to feel a bit exploited by comparison.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Meanwhile, how many non-union software developers do you
| know who don't have medical benefits or sick time? It's
| the nature of the occupation rather than the presence of
| a union that determines those things in the long term.
|
| And if you go and unionize workers in an industry where
| the workers can't command that kind of premium, the next
| thing that happens is the company goes out of business or
| moves its operations to Mexico or similar, and then how
| are the unionized workers doing on the unemployment line?
| vkou wrote:
| > the next thing that happens is the company goes out of
| business
|
| As long as the company pays its owners more than their
| lowest-paid employees, it can afford to pay their
| employees more, without going out of business.
|
| There's plenty of profitable firms that can't just pack
| up and move to Mexico.
| karpierz wrote:
| Not exactly. Its owners could always pack up and work
| elsewhere. Or in the case of capital, invest elsewhere.
| You have to beat the alternative option.
| vkou wrote:
| What is going to stop wherever they pack up to go to from
| organizing in a similar manner?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > As long as the company pays its owners more than their
| lowest-paid employees, it can afford to pay their
| employees more, without going out of business.
|
| If the CEO makes a million dollars a year in a company
| with 100,000 empoyees, wiping out that entire salary
| would add less than $0.01/hour to each of the employees'
| wages. Also, then you would not have a CEO, which you
| might actually need sometimes.
| vkou wrote:
| The CEO is rarely the owner of a company big enough to
| require unionization. When they are, their primary
| remuneration is rarely in wages.
| acituan wrote:
| Do you genuinely think if FAANG software engineers were
| to unionize, those companies would out of business with
| their huge cash reserves, or move to Mexico or outsource
| to Bangladesh?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Half of those companies are monopolies or close enough.
| But they also already provide very generous compensation,
| so what would you expect a union to negotiate for?
|
| You would also run the risk in that case not that they
| outsource to Bangladesh but that they outsource to
| Europe, if the union started demanding things they didn't
| want to give. Or just let the union walk out and hire
| different workers.
|
| That's the other reason unions don't really work outside
| of monopolies. If the company needs 100,000 workers and
| only 200,000 workers with that skillset exist in the
| world and the other 100,000 work for a competitor, you
| need the workers you already have. If the company needs
| 10,000 workers and a million workers with that skillset
| exist in the world, they can let you walk and hire other
| people. And in this case it's a real monopoly, not the
| soft stuff like Google and Facebook have -- Google
| doesn't have a lot of competition for search, but a
| random engineer from Facebook or Apple or Microsoft could
| still do most of the work they need to do, and vice
| versa.
| acituan wrote:
| That's not my assumption, as I explicitly stated. I
| wanted to show the possibility of a union-favorable
| explanation of the OPs premise.
|
| In case you are curious about my actual assumption; I
| think there are a lot of externalities that are not
| priced-in in the contract, which will naturally favor the
| more organized side, which happens to be capital than
| labor most of the time. I don't know if exploitation is
| necessarily the right adjective for every case, but I
| believe there is a large potential for asymmetry in
| untracked disutility an individual can get out a
| transaction with their employer.
| creddit wrote:
| Huh? If you aren't assuming that then how does this fall
| out:
|
| "Then it could also mean that there hasn't been any
| working combination of capital and labor that didn't
| depend on labor being exploited."
|
| Is it not your assumption because of the so-called weasel
| words "could mean"??
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| No, because they already rejected the premise that came
| before "Then"
| myspider wrote:
| An obvious problem was offshoring and arguably the unions
| contributed to that by making US manufacturing more
| expensive.
|
| Every so often someone suggests that software engineers
| should unionize. Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but I think that
| it would be the best thing that ever happened to Bangalore. I
| worry about all our jobs ending up in Bangalore eventually,
| I'm just hoping I can make it to retirement before that
| happens.
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