News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
Not surprising. These apps work on an on-demand basis. It's just not feasible to pay somebody an hourly wage when you can't guarantee any work to be available for them to do at any given time. And you could then make the argument of "if they can't afford to pay them like employees, they shouldn't be in business", and I'd like to agree, but ultimately there is a huge demand for this line of business to exist and that isn't going away any time soon, especially as car ownership is decreasing in some areas these days. Most of these apps have yet to ever turn a profitable quarter, as is it, so increasing their cost of business isn't exactly going to result in everybody getting raises.
Also, there's generally a pretty big reason why people take these jobs over a traditional 9-5 in the first place; a large amount of these workers prefer working their own hours and not having to report to a superior. Or due to whatever life circumstances they might be experiencing (mental health issues, homelessness, disability, criminal history, etc) may prevent them from securing a "normal" job. A majority of the people working on these apps would find themselves unable to keep their jobs because they couldn't be available on time for whatever reason they may have. Ultimately, classifying them as employees would hurt a lot of them, and will likely drive them to another gig business (like food delivery or handyman/TaskRabbit, etc) where they'll be exploited the exact same way all over again, but now without any of the stability they had with their previous work.
I'm not saying all this in defense of these apps. But I do work on the corporate side of this industry and talk to the contractors on a daily basis, so I'm pretty familiar with the motives people typically have for signing up to work for these apps. As odd as it may sound, many of these people want to be contractors; they just want a better cut of the payment.
It would be great if there was an alternative that could cut (or at least reduce the need for) the middleman and allow users to be paired with a contractor directly. I'm surprised that there hasn't been any real attempt to make one yet.
Of course you can! Every store does it every day. I take Xrays in a hospital. Some days we are absolutely slammed. Others we sit around twiddleing our thumbs on Lemmy. Either way we get paid the same hourly rate.
This is all complety normal and common.
Yes, but that assumes the workers are at where they will be working. That's not the case with gig work like ride sharing. With a store or a med lab, you know where everybody needs to be, and when they need to be there. But with a gig job, your driver may be coming from the other side of town. A driver can be waiting all day for a request to come in, but if there's just no business in their part of their city that day, there's no work available.
While you can plot for trends on what areas will be busy at what times, the core function of these apps is that they're on-demand, so there will always be a matter of randomness. Sometimes business will spike or plummet in a city for no apparent reason.
The issue stems from the lack of predicability in a volatile market that relies entirely on the whims of the users. People want a service that's available as soon as possible, at all times of day, with zero advance notice. "It's 3am and I want this specific burger from this specific restaurant and I will pay somebody to go right this minute to pick it up for me". That is not easily predicted, and impossible to properly schedule for. It's a flaw in the way these businesses are designed, but ultimately unavoidable based on what users of the platform want the platform to be.
Another factor to consider is that to make it work, the service would need to cost more. Remember, these companies are generally not profitable as it is, so its not as if they're making bank on the fees to begin with, so increasing fees for the users would be an unavailable certainly if drivers were to be considered employees. But there's a limit to what most users are willing to pay, and these apps have all pretty much capped out at those limits already. So upping the fees means pricing out large swaths of their customers, which means less available funding to pay drivers. Now you're introducing layoffs to workers who were previously immune from being laid off.
It's a very complicated and chaotic situation to untangle, and one that doesn't have a simple, punchy solution.
None of that is special or different. EMTs are paid hourly. You never know where a call will come in. It's literally the same business.
Yeah, they're engaged to wait. They work specific shifts. Uber drivers work when they want to, and setting your own hours is one of the characteristics of an independent contractor.
Uh, Uber drivers are also engaged to wait. And it's not like the hospital is specifically paying people to wait - they're paying people to be available to provide a certain consistent level of service.
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted, you’re not wrong. Do I think the gig economy is ultimately a profitable enterprise for rideshare drivers? I do not, and I think the business model is problematic at best. However much of what I have seen is that the drivers want it this way. So ok.
What you are saying is "It's okay to keep exploiting them because we need the service they provide, and cheap." Fuck you.
You realize that's on purpose, right? It's accounting magic to pay less taxes and to feed people like you propaganda to parrot. There definitely is enough money to pay the executives fat bonuses. (But those are "expenses".)
Everyone deserves fair pay, job stability, HEALTHCARE and other benefits. If YOU can't afford the LUXURY of an Uber unless the guy who drives you is being fleeced because otherwise he can't feed his family, the solution is not to exploit the workers. It is to not take an Uber.
That's absolutely not what I'm saying, and fuck you for insinuating it. I'm saying it's more complicated than some eye-grabbing heading will have you think, especially when you're not taking the actual workers' motives into consideration.
I agree completely. But some people need an Uber. Ride sharing has offered a lot of people some amount of independence they might not otherwise have, given the state of transit options in their area. In fact, I'd argue that most Uber users do so out of need instead of desire, given how outrageous the prices are.
In my opinion, your "some uber drivers prefer contracting" argument has merit. But your customer arguments don't. Taxis have existed and did the same things uber does from the perspective of the customer for decades. Ubers are now often more expensive than the taxi. There wouldn't be a change from the customer's side.
Okay bro it's not like the text is right there. Lol
Then feel free to point to it.
This is precisely why the concept of a grocery store, convenience store, clothing store, post office, tech support line, airline, pizzeria, or literally any other business is impossible to get off the ground.
Gosh, I wish our society had commerce merchants but it's just infeasible to provide any service that isn't constantly guaranteed to be in use... even mail order services are a pope dream!
Your point, if you didn't catch on in the first two paragraphs, is so utterly and insanely wrong.