That's a great point. I was mostly speaking about a common line of rhethoric specific to the US situation. There are certainly many interesting models outside of north america that ought to come to light more.
The employment security thing is something I sometimes see being argued as a weakness in the sense that it reinforces incumbents as opposed to promoting entrepreneurship (and indeed, the US being the polar opposite does show anedoctal evidence of strong entrepreneurship).
Even in the US, there are relatively common ways that companies provide stakeholdership (equity programs, for example). But I'm not convinced that this type of stakeholdership is necessarily aligned with the interests of the population at large. Unions, for example, are notorious for disruptive strikes.
IMHO, the gig economy falls into a weird area: drivers are technically independent and ought to be free to set their own prices, much like say freelance programmers can be sole proprietorships who are on the hook for their own healthcare expenses, but the ridesharing industry is extremely price sensitive, to the point drivers could easily put themselves out of work by increasing prices.
There are many lines of thought about how that dynamic ought to play out, ranging from "side gigs are just hustling between real jobs", to sacrificing some drivers in favor of allowing a subset to earn a higher minimum income, to the socialist "it's only fair if everyone gets the same treatment, even if it's not ideal for everyone", to the "this industry is important enough that government should subsidize no matter what" sort of thing you see in agriculture and many public transit systems. I'm not sure there's a right answer there.
> one guy in charge of the entire thing throws a tantrum
I think the model that makes the most sense here is the one in the name of the social safety net in Canada: employment insurance. Insurance in the traditional sense of the word: a collective pool of money from a diversified population which can be deployed systematically to bail out some subset of said population in rare emergencies. Naturally, in real life, that's not exactly how it works, especially in such large scale prolonged emergencies, but still, it's a model I like.
The employment security thing is something I sometimes see being argued as a weakness in the sense that it reinforces incumbents as opposed to promoting entrepreneurship (and indeed, the US being the polar opposite does show anedoctal evidence of strong entrepreneurship).
Even in the US, there are relatively common ways that companies provide stakeholdership (equity programs, for example). But I'm not convinced that this type of stakeholdership is necessarily aligned with the interests of the population at large. Unions, for example, are notorious for disruptive strikes.
IMHO, the gig economy falls into a weird area: drivers are technically independent and ought to be free to set their own prices, much like say freelance programmers can be sole proprietorships who are on the hook for their own healthcare expenses, but the ridesharing industry is extremely price sensitive, to the point drivers could easily put themselves out of work by increasing prices.
There are many lines of thought about how that dynamic ought to play out, ranging from "side gigs are just hustling between real jobs", to sacrificing some drivers in favor of allowing a subset to earn a higher minimum income, to the socialist "it's only fair if everyone gets the same treatment, even if it's not ideal for everyone", to the "this industry is important enough that government should subsidize no matter what" sort of thing you see in agriculture and many public transit systems. I'm not sure there's a right answer there.
> one guy in charge of the entire thing throws a tantrum
I think the model that makes the most sense here is the one in the name of the social safety net in Canada: employment insurance. Insurance in the traditional sense of the word: a collective pool of money from a diversified population which can be deployed systematically to bail out some subset of said population in rare emergencies. Naturally, in real life, that's not exactly how it works, especially in such large scale prolonged emergencies, but still, it's a model I like.