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by kuschku
3046 days ago
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> 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. |
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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.