[cryoshon]

their entire business model is making sure that their users never get a fair deal by communicating directly with the people they find via upwork.

is it really so surprising that they are fucking abysmal at customer service?

my experiences with them are 100% bad, but nowhere near as bad as what the OP article discusses.

[dvfjsdhgfv]

I never used Upwork and and wondering - how on Earth can they make sure that I deliver the code to the client, and that there is no information in the code that could be used to identify me. Apart from that, the identity of the person is their unique brand, it guarantees integrity (or a lack of it), it allows to check one's portfolio and verify the skills of the developer - for example by looking at their public contributions. When you take all this away, what are you left with?

[kuschku]

> When you take all this away, what are you left with?

A "mechanical Turk", as amazon would call it, a "Code Monkey" as Jonathan Coulton sang in his song.

A completely exchangeable person, an employee as a service. How the code is written, who does it, is entirely irrelevant. Entirely replaceable, with no recourse for the "contractor".

The main component of the gig economy is exactly this, completely disenfranchising the worker by commoditizing work. You try to negotiate higher pay, you simply get replaced.

[crankylinuxuser]

> The main component of the gig economy is exactly this, completely disenfranchising the worker.

It's even more insidious than that. Previously, it's workers came together to create unions, to prevent abuses by the company owners. Go back far enough, and companies hired hit squads in part of the US government to kill union leaders and bust strikes.

Then, unions were demonized. They "enabled lazy and bad workers, and punishing good workers" - I thing I got the root of the arguments used.

Then comes the gig economy. We have a company, who "hires" employees, but then pits each employee against each other. Doing so then puts each employee in the position of "I'm against employee #2, and #3, and #4". This poisons the pot for any chances of coming together, and fixing wrongs. And it also easily allows what we would have called "scabs" to immediately enter if there is a union forming.

[kuschku]

Yeah, that’s a major issue – it’s interesting how this gig economy is going to play out, because in Germany a lot of foodora drivers actually unionized, and of course foodora simply blacklisted them, which employment law forbids. So now it’s playing out in the courts.

[dvfjsdhgfv]

> So now it’s playing out in the courts.

It's because it's in Germany, in the USA they would be laughed at.