The ability to earn some money with zero notice is awesome. The minute you start requiring contracts and working hours, and qualifications, and exclusivity, it has suddenly made life dull. Suddenly you're a drone wearing a suit working 9-5 for 50 years then retiring when you're too old to fulfil your dreams. No thanks!
I'm not saying no-one wants it. The vast majority of people would love to take a safe job working in a car plant or in the civil service if it paid for a good lifestyle, home etc. Once you have a family you have certain restrictions on routine e.g. school that force you to do things in a certain way even if you're completely flexible. I've had plenty of career gaps and flexibility but strangely all within the flexibility of pretty standard permanent jobs.
That’s really only one way to look at flexibility. I’ve had my employment end rather abruptly in the past, and I turned to gig work to get by (it wasn’t Uber, but it was the same sort of employment relationship). The issue I had wasn’t that I could only work certain hours in the day. It was that I needed to start a new job immediately. If only stable long term employment relationships were legal, then I would have had to search for weeks, go through endless recruiting processes, and if I was lucky I could have expected to get my next pay check in a couple of months. That’s what happens when you require employers to make that level of commitment to people. Having a job available that I could essentially just turn up to and start doing immediately, and then stop doing just as quickly, was exactly what I needed. Especially because I was quite young and financially unstable at the time.
It really saved me back then, and if somebody had tried to tell me that they wanted to prohibit me from doing that, because the work I was doing didn’t meet their standards, I would have told them to take a hike. What happens when you try to forcibly impose those standards isn’t that everybody’s working conditions/arrangements magically improve. What happens is the price of labor goes up, the demand for labor goes down, and you end up taking work away from people that were happy to do it, and leaving them with no work at all.
If it had taken me 12 months of working that job to get me by while I found a new permanent one, I would have done it for 12 months, and been quite grateful to have it. I should be the person who has the greatest say in whether I’m a contract worker or not, and exactly what you are talking about is prohibiting me from doing that.
(a) It is self-evident that Uber and Walmart workers are reasonably compensated, because they agreed to their wages in a market transaction; or
(b) There are structural forces that compel Uber and Walmart workers to capture as income an unreasonably low fraction of the benefit they provide the market; or
I don’t think anything can be self evidently reasonable, because reasonable is intrinsically an opinion, and an opinion is intrinsically not a self evident fact. One thing that is self evident is that Uber and Walmart workers have found an employment arrangement that they prefer to have over unemployment, so I’d guess most of them wouldn’t be happy with that being taken from them, and being given unemployment in return.
Your point b also invokes that reasonableness opinion, but makes a further mistake of presuming that remuneration is determined by value provided (by whatever metric it is that you think that should be judged). Wages are set by supply and demand, for a price to be high there needs to be more people wanting to buy something than there is people wanting to sell it. That is why unskilled labor is worth so little. It’s also why oxygen (incredibly valuable) is free, and why some bureaucrats (incredibly not valuable) can end up being paid quite a lot.
But you’re right. That is not a relevant question. What you’re talking about is taking jobs away from people, and replacing them with nothing.
The anti-contractor laws don’t just affect low paid jobs either. Which is why every Vox journalist in California was so surprised to see themselves laid off after AB5 passed. Thankfully I don’t live in a jurisdiction that’s considering such legislation, but if I did, I would leave. I’ve been on an endlessly revolving short term contract with the same organisation for nearly 3 years now. They would love it if I didn’t have the option to contract, because I earn at least 3x what an equivalent permanent team member would. I’m sure they would be very grateful if somebody were to prohibit me from engaging in such an arrangement with them.
You appear to think that people preferring working in Walmart to dying of starvation means that you shouldn't improve their working conditions by associating for them above their extraordinarily wealthy management/owners.
>They would love it if I didn’t have the option to contract, because I earn at least 3x what an equivalent permanent team member would. //
Who is suggesting you can't contract work? If the law stated that contract workers total pay could not be less than the gross business cost of employee workers (+ a percentage?) would that somehow affect you negatively?
That aside: You're seriously going to argue people who can't afford basic healthcare shouldn't be helped financially because you might lose your 3x good income (~$300,000 would be triple the median California programmers wage, apparently)?
The ability to earn some money with zero notice is awesome. The minute you start requiring contracts and working hours, and qualifications, and exclusivity, it has suddenly made life dull. Suddenly you're a drone wearing a suit working 9-5 for 50 years then retiring when you're too old to fulfil your dreams. No thanks!