[kop316]

Serious question: If the conditions are just that bad, why even bother to work for them? There seems to be some sort of equilibrium to me where if it gets bad enough, no one will simply want to do this job, and choose to take some other low paying job (e.g. retail, fast food, etc.).

[roel_v]

That's true to a certain extent, but experience (19th century beginning-of-industrialization) has taught us that the floor (i.e., the equilibrium) is bad enough that we don't want that sort of circumstances. In other words, it turns out that people want to work to eat so badly that they'll put up with working 14-hour days and letting their 10 year old children work in factories that literally kill 10's of them per year.

I'm not saying gig workers' circumstances are nearly as bad as those in the 19th century, I'm just illustrating the principle. The discussion then continues at 'what is an acceptable equilibrium'. Of which certain people, unsurprisingly, find that today's is not OK.

Note that I'm not saying here which side of the discussion I side on (that's a political question not worth rehashing here I think), just pointing out the (rather obvious) argument against total market freedom in this particular market (labor).

[labourcurious]

Concretely though, in London, it takes under a day to find a "real" job in a restaurant or a bar just by walking around and handing out CVs, even if your English is very bad.

Deliveroo bikers have chosen Deliveroo over those, and there must be a reason for that, which the article fails to mention.

I'm also not taking sides, I just want to point out it's flat out wrong to say "if they're doing this in these conditions, it is probably because they don't have a choice".

[kennydude]

> it takes under a day to find a "real" job in a restaurant or a bar just by walking around and handing out CVs

Have you done this?

[lhorie]

Anecdata, but I have seen it happen many times. My cousin came to Toronto for a few months and wanted some under the table income. I was buying some pastries in a bakery I liked around that time, and noticed they had a hiring sign. I told her about it and she was working there a couple days later.

A former coworker had a similar story. He got into a fight with his wife because she was spending all day in facebook instead of finding a job, so out of frustration and spite he went out to pretty much the first pizza joint he could find and talked to the manager. 30 mins later she now had a job.

Heck, I have another cousin with schizophrenia who managed to land a security job (he didn't last unfortunately due to his condition worsening), but it goes to show finding a low pay job isn't some insurmountable task.

[Karrot_Kream]

Opposing anecdata, my SO's sister had an ivy league degree and spent 3 months looking for jobs until she got the only job she could, front of house work at a bakery. Every other job, service jobs included, turned her down.

Another friend with a strong public school degree who floated around for months interviewing until she moved back with her parents, then finally got a job at the local library.

[lhorie]

I wonder if over-qualification in resumes plays a role. In the book Nickel and Dimed[1], the author explicitly hid the fact she had higher education even from colleagues. And whereas she complained a lot about working conditions, finding a job per se wasn't a challenge at all (to the point she could even decide between two options at one point), even being restricted to non-intensive labor jobs due to health reasons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_and_Dimed

[mercer]

Actually, I'd say your anecdata can also support how alternatives might be difficult for many people.

In your first example you mentioned a 'she'. From what I've been told from friends in the service industry, that's a plus (even somewhat if you're not considered attractive, but obviously much less so).

In your second example it didn't last, so it's quite possible a number of these "didn't last" experiences lead to doing deliveroo-style work.

Furthermore, I've been shocked by how terrible some people are at 1) considering alternatives to whatever choices they think they have, and 2) doing okay in an interview.

I get the impression lots of people are just not rational actors in these matters, and there are all sorts of hidden factors that can prevent someone from going for the 'better' jobs. I don't have strong opinions on what we should conclude from that, but I am at least inclined to think making the shittiest option as good as possible might be an all-round good thing to pursue.

[n4r9]

> in London, it takes under a day to find a "real" job in a restaurant or a bar just by walking around and handing out CVs

That's a lot faster than I would predict. What are you basing that on?

[rorykoehler]

For me personally riding my bike around delivering food would be far preferable to working in a restaurant or bar. Depends on your personality I guess.

[parliament32]

"Far preferable" enough that you'd settle for under minimum wage and a variable paycheque? If so, you are exactly the reason companies like Deliveroo exist. They appeal to the whole "but you'll be so free cruising around on your bike delivering food at your own pace!" mentality.

[jstanley]

And there's nothing wrong with that! If people find that "far preferable", that's up to them, not you.

[eropple]

There's a lot wrong with that when society--us--have the duty and obligation, which we do, to help when that Deliveroo driver gets doored and can't pay a medical bill because the job is comedically penurious.

Employers have a duty to their employees and to the society and community that grants them the right to the fiction of their existence, and that is being shirked.

[rorykoehler]

Yes still far preferable. The wage in a restaurant often comes out below minimum wage too anyways.

[lokedhs]

Can you explain how a salary can come out below minimal wage? Isn't the point of the minimum that it's that, a minimum?

[menacingly]

This is a reasonable position and well-stated, but my concern is the implication that you will be vilified if you start a business that can't maintain a full time workforce with benefits.

So, let's say you're an investor. You've got the choice of:

1) invest in a business with traditional happy lifer employees

2) invest in a business that treats its workforce like disposable contractors and may eventually become an Enemy of the People's Press, but offers higher potential returns, and may be able to eke out an existence in a niche that #1 could never serve.

3) invest in some less active financial instrument alchemy that employs zero local people and threatens no publicity waves

There is (maybe) an argument that #1 is preferable to #2, but it's at least complicated. However, I think it's general agreed that both #1 & #2 are preferable to #3.

If we're already talking Unions and unfair treatment of contractors 5 years into the existence of a type 1 here, one that no one knows could even exist under traditional employment circumstances, we may very well be driving funding into the reduced hassle of #3.

That's certainly what it would do to me, though granted my "fuck it" threshold is 5-10x lower than the average person's.

[noelwelsh]

I very much do not like the argument you are making, as the implication is that no employer, or indeed anyone with power, should be criticised.

Society should work for the benefit of society, not just those in a position of power. We are seeing a change in how employment works, and we (i.e. society) need to work out how to handle this change. This article is part of the debate. You should not try to shut down the debate.

[menacingly]

I regret that I came across that way, because the debate is great. Criticism is important.

I just think before you fight for something, you should be certain that what you're after is worth winning.

[tinbucket]

In scenarios #2 and #3 very few people are winning. I think you'd be hard-pressed to get majority support against #1, which would be more generally beneficial for society than the other two.

[menacingly]

Except that it almost by definition employs fewer people, so the people hypothetically employed by #2 may prefer it to the unemployment of #1

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

4) invest in a business that employs slaves

I think it is generally agreed that #4 is preferable to #3. Because local jobs!111

I mean, seriously? That is your argument?

[menacingly]

It's unfortunate that a frequent response is "so what? who wants those jobs? I sure don't, so I'll decide for these other people who I assume need me to"

This is the thinking that leads to the shuttering of harsh garment factories in the developing world so the employees can go back to child sex work.

[pitaj]

So which is better? People not eating, or people working in bad conditions?

Keep in mind that early industrialization was mainly subsistence farmers moving into cities to hugely improve their lives. Child labor was the norm, especially on farms, so children working in factories was an improvement. Do you think that accidents didn't happen to kids subsistence farming with their families or starving to death in central Europe?

[roel_v]

"Do you think that accidents didn't happen to kids subsistence farming with their families or starving to death in central Europe?"

I take it this was a general rhetorical question and not something you're specifically asking me - but either way, it's irrelevant. The fact is that 'we' (wherever I say 'we' here, I mean 'we as a society') didn't care enough about those children dying in the field or mud huts, but we did care when they started dying in factories (while that may not be 'rational' for a Less Wrong definition of 'rational', experiments on the trolley problem have shown in the past that there might be wide spread ethical intuitions that make this situation 'understandable' - but I digress).

I wasn't stating how things 'ought to be', just 'how things are'. 'How they ought to be' is in this case a trite discussion (at the level and within the means we have here). The OP however asked a facetious or naive question about 'how things are', one for which there is a simple, factual answer.

[kop316]

That's understandable, your principle makes sense with that. An acceptable equilibrium and how much of it is regulated is a very political thing.

[finebalance]

You don't need to go back to the 19th century for that. Any modern sweatshop, of which there are many, will do.

[jMyles]

> You don't need to go back to the 19th century for that.

If you're white, you do.

It's easy to forget that today's industry is (still) built on slavery or near-slavery in the third world.

[maze-le]

The 'equilibrium' might be a nice theoretical model, but realistically, it fails, since not all people are in the same circumstances.

In any society there will always be people, who don't have the resources/skills to take another job. Either its geographically located elsewhere any you are tied to certain location (there might be plenty of reasons for this). Or the job is above your skill level, and you cannot afford an education. Or you are in a position where you just cannot survive some weeks of financial insecurity.

Thats why "workes rights" are important, its not just about you and me. Its mainly about people who don't have the means to say: "Fuck it I'm outta here!".

Basic income could be societal anchor, that creates the conditions for such an equilibrium.

[Certhas]

If we had a universal income, and people would be free to sell or not sell their labor, we could talk about a meaningful equilibrium based on individuals preferences and choice.

In that situation I doubt we would see many people taking on these jobs (including the parentheticals you mention) with these conditions.

[darkerside]

I posit that, in that case, a new "normal" baseline would be established by social consensus (perhaps, owning a home, smart phone, access to media, high quality medical care, and organic food) that is above what is afforded by the UBI. Falling below that threshold would then be deemed just as unacceptable as the poverty line today. And people won't solve it by taking on these undesirable jobs, they'll rail against an unfair system instead, just like we do today when things are already better than they've ever been.

Such is human nature. Always has been, always will be. We just do the best we can to balance between indulging it with socialism, and leveraging it with capitalism.

[mlthoughts2018]

If we imagine that "life goodness" can be measured by a single real number, and we model it with a normal distribution with a mean somewhere on the positive axis, then one way to say what you describe is that we create a threshold somewhere along the left-hand tail of that distribution, and we declare anything below the threshold as morally unacceptable, in need of social constraints that prevent the permissibility of outcomes falling further to the left than our threshold.

As technology enables expansion of the right-side tail for the relatively most wealthy, it seems like a reasonable utilitarian goal to say that we should adjust the left-side threshold more and more to the right, in a "optimize the well-being of the least well off" sense.

So I'd view this ever rightward moving threshold as a very good thing that represents exactly what we want in terms of progress.

If we ever got to a point where we said, welp "poor people" are now above the magic threshold (e.g. because the people on the left tail of the distribution mostly have hot showers, cell phones, and Netflix), so what more do they want? ... why are they complaining? ... this would be incredibly frightening. Essentially the wealthy would be deciding at which threshold upward human progress gets to stop, in favor of creating skewness in the distribution that concentrates more wealth into the right-side tail, as long as that left-side threshold stays above the "hot showers, cell phones, and Netflix" line.

[turc1656]

"Essentially the wealthy would be deciding at which threshold upward human progress gets to stop..."

No, that's not what that would mean. It means the producers of society get to determine at what point they wish to stop providing government mandated subsidies through either taxation or deficit spending to the non-producers or those who produce far less value.

There should be absolutely nothing wrong with people deciding that they do not wish to handover any more of their wealth. If your opinion is that the "system" is the culprit and these people are being squashed by bad laws, policies, etc., the proper recourse is not to legally rob others to help those people - the solution is to fix the bad laws and policies that may benefit the rich unfairly.

Underlying your claim appears to be some baseline assumption that the poor have some sort of legitimate claim on the productivity of other citizens. I strongly disagree with this assumption. I personally do not believe that anyone has a right to the fruits of my labor. The government, however, says otherwise and demands that I fork over non-trivial amounts of money to other people - individuals, to be clear, not public goods. I'm fine with the idea of taxation to provide for public goods like roads, military, etc.

The modern poor in developed nations (and especially the US) have a standard of living that exceeds what the average family experienced in most of the 20th century. This concept of poor is obviously relative and it is the Keeping Up With The Jones' mentality that drives this nonsense of ever-increasing handouts.

There was a great video I saw once by a guy who used to be homeless and on welfare. He said that when he was on welfare he was never grateful for anything he received because he was just mad others had more. He gave the analogy of imagining that your boss came over and said you did such a fantastic job you are getting 100k for a bonus. You're ecstatic and grateful. Then you find out that everyone else in your office got 200k bonuses. You immediately turn to anger and resentment, despite the fact that you are now 100k wealthier.

Helping thy neighbor is great. But legally mandating it is a terrible idea and has been terrible in practice.

[grasshopperpurp]

>There should be absolutely nothing wrong with people deciding that they do not wish to handover any more of their wealth. If your opinion is that the "system" is the culprit and these people are being squashed by bad laws, policies, etc., the proper recourse is not to legally rob others to help those people - the solution is to fix the bad laws and policies that may benefit the rich unfairly.

How do we fix bad laws when the wealthy are paying good money for those bad laws?

>Every piece of the pie picked up by the 0.1 percent, in relative terms, had to come from the people below. But not everyone in the 99.9 percent gave up a slice. Only those in the bottom 90 percent did. At their peak, in the mid-1980s, people in this group held 35 percent of the nation’s wealth. Three decades later that had fallen 12 points—exactly as much as the wealth of the 0.1 percent rose.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-bir...

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/without-the-right-p...

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/amazon-...

[turc1656]

"How do we fix bad laws when the wealthy are paying good money for those bad laws?"

The wealthy only account for a small percentage of the overall population. It is very easy to change the law if and only if people care enough to do so. But they don't. Because that involves work like protesting, writing to representatives, organizing community events, and maybe recalling mayors of congressional reps with votes of no confidence. They'd rather pretend to be outraged on Twitter, so that they don't have to actually do anything and instead watch Dance Moms or binge watch Netflix.

The fix is simple conceptually, but it is society's collective refusal to demand that laws be changed or for existing laws that are being broken to be enforced. If society really, truly wanted to fix the whole "paying good money for those bad laws" issue, it could do so relatively easily. But it's much easier for people to pretend it's not that big of a problem since things are relatively stable and people have what they need for the most part. Why rock the boat, right?

The problem isn't just the wealthy - it's all of us in our refusal to demand the law be enforced, as-written, without exceptions given based on wealth or size of the company/organization. Why was Wells Fargo, for example, allowed to just pay a fine for millions of fake accounts that were created which ripped people off? Those are clear cut felonies. If I opened a small, local bank and did that I'd be rotting in Federal prison right now, guaranteed. The only reason the employees that engaged in this and/or the Wells Fargo executives are not in jail is because society didn't demand the DoJ do it's damn job and indict them at the individual level. Hell, society at large didn't even withdraw their funds in bulk. Why would any retail customer hold deposits with an institution like that when this is a proven, admitted fraud, and was well-publicized? That's the real question. And it's the heart of the matter. And that's just one outrageous scam upon the people that comes to mind. There are many more.

[philwelch]

> Every piece of the pie picked up by the 0.1 percent, in relative terms, had to come from the people below.

Economics is not a zero-sum game.

[philwelch]

Here's the thing, though. On a global level, poverty is measured by a threshold of whether or not you can sleep through the night without getting bitten by malaria-infested mosqitoes. Gig workers in Western countries aren't anywhere near the left-hand side of the tail. Most of these distributive justice arguments have a nationalistic bent where the global poor don't matter at all.

[mlthoughts2018]

I agree with you completely, and spent a lot of time in the past decade reading around 80000 Hours, Giving What We Can, Peter Singer, etc. But I do think there are other forms of suffering, for example severe mental suffering that co-occurs with extreme addiction-related problems, combined with poverty conditions that are surprisingly quite bad, even on a world scale, in parts of the US. In general, I think far too little attention is paid to the way overall quality of life degrades in the presence of psychological trauma. You can have plenty of first world resources and still be living one of the worst lives on the planet, in terms of experienced suffering.

My comment was couched in terms of creature comforts that we have in most parts of the first world, but that's not necessarily the specific standard I'm advocating for, and the more general idea is just that people towards the left of the distribution should never be made to feel like they "shouldn't have" the comforts further to the right -- basically that we all should see progress as somewhat tied to both driving the mean to the right, and reducing the variance so that people at least in the far left tail are continuously brought closer to the far right tail.

[darkerside]

But that existential psychological suffering will ALWAYS be there. No matter how we move lines and curves. Some people will always be missing out, and giving them more won't fix it if we provide the same benefit to all their peers as well.

There are other better ways to resolve the vicious psychological cycle you describe, but they're not material.

[darkerside]

Trying to move that line is laudable. Just don't think we'll ever be done moving it, regardless of whether indeterminate progress is sustainable or not.

[Certhas]

I'm not entirely clear on what you mean by "won't solve it by taking on jobs just as today". Today people take on these jobs, and in most countries that I know of, the social welfare net is contingent on actively looking for work. Today your (legal) options are: Try to work or die.

Do you think you can get a fair price if the other side knows you have to sell with a gun to your head?

I suspect most people would work for reasons you mentioned, but I also suspect that the price for undesirable unskilled labor would be much much much higher than it is today.

Which would incentivize automating this type of labor first. As it should be.

[kazagistar]

Are you saying that "food, heat, and a roof over your head" is an arbitrary social construct?

[darkerside]

A cave with a fire and a dead pig satisfy that. I'm pretty sure that's not what you're really advocating for a baseline lifestyle.

[DanBC]

The UK system of benefit conditionality forces people into these shitty jobs. The don't have a choice. They need to take the work or lose their benefit. There's an assumption from the Department for Work and Pensions that any work offered in the UK is legal. That's a reasonable assumption, but they could do with being a bit more proactive at protecting workers at the scummier end of the market.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/may/22/benefit-sanc...

> For those people interviewed for the study who did obtain work, the most common outcome was a series of short-term, insecure jobs, interspersed with periods of unemployment, rather than a shift into sustained, well-paid work.

[pfortuny]

Read Dickens to get an idea of what human beings can “accept” to make a “living” for their families.

[conductr]

I think optionality is a key difference. In Dickens' day, every job was a factory job and they all sucked. I'm pretty sure Deliveroo riders have other min wage options if they disagree with how Deliveroo wants to run it's business. Not to say that I fully agree with Deliveroo's choices if they are represented correctly, but I do agree with their ability to make those choices

[pitaj]

Yet more and more people kept moving into cities because the factory jobs that "all sucked" were better than subsistence farming.

[jeffreyrogers]

The world is quite different now than in Dickens's time. Even in less progressive countries like the US.

[smsm42]

> If the conditions are just that bad, why even bother to work for them?

Because nobody hires them on positions that have "minimum wage, paid holidays, pensions, protection from discrimination, and trade union rights" because these things cost money and the value they can deliver is below the cost of those things?

Or because flexible hours and flexible employment schedule is worth for them more than trade union rights?

[davidhyde]

I think that this is a failing of the author of the article itself. Did they interview a couple of random deliveroo contractors and to build up some statistics or did they simply interview the union representative and a handful cherry picked others and conclude that this was the consensus of all deliveroo contractors.

[isoprophlex]

A slippery slope-style argument, as described at the end of the article (the rise of zero hour contracts): some workers will accept even the worst possible conditions, and this will shift the entire economy towards seeing this as acceptable.

[dbuder]

Lack of options, obviously.

[trevyn]

Consider: It’s in both the workers’ and reporter’s best interest to make it sound worse than it is. Many would go so far as hyperbole, or straight up deceit.

[menacingly]

Furthermore, it doesn't stop. Once the press decides an arrangement is unfair on behalf of these adults, the articles will continue.

[menacingly]

Agreed. I can swallow these "the company owes us something" arguments for businesses so large they make up the entire employment for a city, but not cases like this.

It's unsettling that now every business has a big moral obligation to make sure employees make the best choices for themselves.

[shabble]

Alternatively, every business (or rather, the people who operate and control that business) have a moral obligation not to unreasonably exploit their employees.

I would expect that to be a fairly common sentiment/belief (though I might be wrong).

It comes down to the particular definition of 'unreasonably' that is being used, which different groups can and do disagree about.

[menacingly]

That's fair. For instance, company stores in mining towns were clearly designed to trap employees into a lifetime of debt with almost no personal choice in the matter.

It's the choice aspect I focus on. No one is forcing them, and it's borderline elitist of someone with a nice job to say "that's gross work and I think it should go away so things are less gross", along the lines of thinking families straddling the poverty line should simply "eat more quality food"