Freelancing implies some independence/freedom which most uber or deliveroo drivers don't have in practice.
For example in France you can't declare yourself as a freelancer if you have a single client which dictates your working hours and employs you for very loosely defined missions, because for all intent and purpose you'd be an employee.
>For example in France you can't declare yourself as a freelancer if you have a single client which dictates your working hours and employs you for very loosely defined missions, because for all intent and purpose you'd be an employee.
Is this some European thing I'm no aware of? Gig workers can accept jobs from multiple apps and log on anytime they want.
IE, where are the teeth?
The problem with saying "like x" is it requires court cases and means enforcement is impossible. Because the gov has to challenge and challenge and challenge because it is so vague as "like x".
Could they not just tax gig workers on an hourly basis and then comp the workers with "employment" like services?
This isn't just about investors, it's also about getting access to systems that people with employment contracts have, that gig workers don't have.
Why should they be treated as second-class citizens?
So not only do companies save on employment expenses, and offload them to the gig workers (who are underpaid generally), but they also have limited access to the market for things like credit.
Poor investors, right?
The positive intent to give citizens greater protections is laudable but gig working is not always a straight forward 'capitalism bad' exploitation as it is often characterised.
For many, it is the only type of job / income they can secure (i.e recent immigrant) and otherwise would be locked out of the legal economy altogether and will transition into the _illegal_ economy for want of options. For others, gig work provides the sort of flexibility not available in many traditional blue collar FTE (i.e they are primary carers, maybe can't commit to rigid schedule). For yet others it is an opportunity to _escape_ the obligations of badly paid, physically challenging FTE - last Uber I took was in Eindhoven, driver was a long time resident in Netherlands. Left Phillips factory line job to Uber - better hours, sees his kid, doesn't break his back.
All types of workers need better protections all round, but legislating to eliminate a category which is self evidently popular with _some_ workers is not the way to do it
If you want to compete for labour and customers in a society, you should follow the rules.
If you cannot provide food deliveries whilst paying your employees fairly, then you should not be in business.
Even worse if you are skimming minimum-wage worker's pay to produce a 10X VC return.
This doesn't address the parent poster's point:
>For many, it is the only type of job / income they can secure (i.e recent immigrant) and otherwise would be locked out of the legal economy altogether and will transition into the _illegal_ economy for want of options.
Changes like these aren't a free lunch. If they're too onerous companies reduce their workforce, which would leave their workers worse off. Presumably the reason why they were working there in the first place was that it was their best option.
It really depends on how you see the problem, from the individual perspective or from the community perspective. In the short term individual POV gig work is amazing, in the long term community POV it's disastrous
All of this is applicable to contract work in general, not just gig work. Why not fix it for all contractors rather than only gig workers?
This seems like a tracking problem and easier to tax it at the source by the company... as if a gig worker has 10 clients and sporadic work, they are not able to manage the complexity, nor should they have too.
Kinda like taxing HFT, you tax it and then comp society for the danger it creates.
We're just going backwards with the 'gig' economy by allowing bigco to exploit people in this manner.
Take a look at page 61 and the graph 'age profile of net contributions'. As you see, even the average non-Western immigrant, which of course includes highly productive people from places like Japan, India, etc. has a very bad curve.
A gig worker is almost certainly going to have a curve at least that bad, i.e. he has a negative net contribution to the state economy. It might well be better to try to find people something where they can make a net contribution than to have them try to offset the costs by doing what is in effect random work.
It's not even about exploitation. Gig work is terrible from a capital formation standpoint. Gig workers are permanently low productivity workers with no breathing room or incentive for anyone to upskill them.
It's bad from a capitalist standpoint. Underdeveloped economies are basically all gig work because there's low levels of corporate organization. One explicit goal of the Nordic welfare model wasn't just alleviating poverty, but literally driving low productivity work out of the economy. Gig working is literally reverting to a sort of pre-capitalist mode of production. Varoufakis comes to mind, who correctly points this out in his recent book on digital platforms.
most gig workers don't have the luxury to do this as a part time side job. it's their main source of income as you already said.
and allowing companies to exploit people because they're immigrants is not good for anyone in the labour market.
this is a win. those VC douchebags can get f*ked.
