[slipheen]

That's a really harmful outlook.

If company A decides that they are going to pay their workers (say) $3/hr, and illegally bypass the minimum wage, it _DOESN'T MATTER AT ALL_ if they can find workers willing to work for that amount.

As a society, we've decided that certain offers aren't acceptable, even if you can find someone desperate enough to take the offer.

You shouldn't get to just ignore the law because you're big enough.

(And Yes, in practice big companies do ignore laws more than they should. That's a bad thing, and a reason to do better, not a reason to give up).

[twblalock]

There is a floor to what people will be willing to accept -- if they can make more money from unemployment benefits than from working, they won't work.

Many Uber drivers are facing a choice between gig work and unemployment, and they chose gig work. If they had better options they would have chosen those instead, but they didn't. Clearly they prefer gig work to unemployment, and for most of them, those were the only two options.

Taking away gig work does not help gig workers. It removes the only option they had, and it forces them into unemployment. If that is the outcome they wanted, they would have chosen it already.

[newacct583]

That's not the way UI works. Benefits must be qualified for; you generally have to have had a job that you lost (gig economy jobs complicate this severely and often disqualify people). You can't just "quit" and pick up benefits. And there is a time limit in all states after which the benefits terminate.

Very, very few people at any given time have a "choice" as to whether to get unemployment or work a gig job.

[lhh]

> That's a really harmful outlook.

Harmful how, exactly?

I don't agree that the government should be deeming any type of agreement that adults voluntarily enter into as illegal. The notion that the government should be doing that strikes me as very condescending to the governed. Shouldn't people be allowed to make their own decisions on what is best for their own lives? If someone is in a position where a $3/hr job is their best option, I think it's a pretty bad idea to then remove that option from them too.

> You shouldn't get to just ignore the law because you're big enough.

Seems to me that the opposite dynamic is at play here - these companies have become large enough to be the target of legislation.

[enraged_camel]

>> I don't agree that the government should be deeming any type of agreement that adults voluntarily enter into as illegal.

You cannot legally own slaves, even if both parties are consenting adults. So clearly, your premise is flawed: there are absolutely things that the government can determine to be illegal. In California, this includes exploitative labor relationships (again, even if both parties consent to the agreement).

>> Seems to me that the opposite dynamic is at play here - these companies have become large enough to be the target of legislation.

No, they got large enough by ignoring the law. We know this because Uber's only real "moat" is the size of its network. From a technology standpoint, it's fairly easy to replicate, and we have indeed seen this happen across the board. The problem of course is that Uber benefited from first-mover advantage, and quickly got so large and so well-funded that it could litigate and stonewall any local government or other party that raised issues with its labor practices.

That is coming to an end, now. And to that, I say: it's about damn time.

(I don't want to single out Uber either. Airbnb is the exact same: they became massively successful mostly by ignoring local zoning and hotel laws.)

[lhh]

> You cannot legally own slaves, even if both parties are consenting adults. So clearly, your premise is flawed: there are absolutely things that the government can determine to be illegal. In California, this includes exploitative labor relationships (again, even if both parties consent to the agreement).

If someone wants to sell themselves into slavery, I say let them (though perhaps there should be an exception if they're not of sound mind). Or alternatively, maybe slavery is just the degenerate case that removes your agency, and should be disallowed on that basis.

I challenge your premise that it's possible to consider a labor relationship exploitative if both parties voluntarily enter into it.

> No, they got large enough by ignoring the law.

Sure, but I think this is unrelated to my point. I still contend that any voluntary agreements should be allowed, with size of company involved having no bearing on the matter.

[claudiawerner]

>I challenge your premise that it's possible to consider a labor relationship exploitative if both parties voluntarily enter into it.

This is a philosophical point, and there are scholars working in economics and economic philosophy who have argued that some kind of mutual benefit is does not preclude exploitation. See for example J.E Roemer, Roberto Veneziani, and Nikolos Vrousalis, three economists on the matter. See also here[0]. In addition, slavery may not only be problematic because of the 'degenerative case' mentioned.

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/exploitation/#ConcExpl

[lhh]

I'm not arguing that "because they benefit they're therefore not being exploited". I'm arguing that "because they voluntarily enter into the agreement with full information they're therefore not being exploited". Or have I misunderstood your point?

[claudiawerner]

Some of the economists/philosophers I mentioned do not make the point that ignorance is sufficient and necessary for exploitation, rather, even with all the information (and perhaps even with perfect information), some such situations can still be said to be exploitative. This is because interesting cases of exploitation actually arise out of lack of means or institutional pressures, not a lack of information about one's means or ignorance of the institutional pressures.

[e12e]

> I challenge your premise that it's possible to consider a labor relationship exploitative if both parties voluntarily enter into it.

This seems to overlook the long fights for Sundays off, Saturdays off, a 60 hour work week, a 40 hour work week and so on. When options on one side is "be evicted from home, leave family to starve" and the other side is "postpone additional revenue until someone more desperate signs up" - you have to consider what "voluntary" means.

[dimgl]

I really don't understand why people are so afraid to let the free market decide what works and what doesn't. Government intervention very often leads to poor outcomes.

[vExLiz4r08]

If it was for just the free market to decide, we would never have gotten rid of child labor. The government also tries to ensure that its citizenry are lifted out of poverty etc., things that free market isn't really incentivized to care for. As the op said, "As a society, we've decided that certain offers aren't acceptable, even if you can find someone desperate enough to take the offer."

Am not sure if this situation with uber/lyft calls for this, but there definitely is a line that as a society we do not want to regress. Though, I do agree it is a very hard job to intervene because of unforeseen side effects, many times adverse, so if possible I would also prefer to avoid government intervention and let the market decide.

[lhh]

If what you care about is lifting citizenry out of poverty, free markets have the best track record by far, despite countless attempts otherwise.

[kunai]

Free markets are excellent for lifting the baseline level of wealth among a nation's people (Marx admitted this as industrialization rapidly increased the wealth of Western Europe at the time of his coming of age). It does not solve the issue of wealth inequality, and exacerbates it to an extent to the point where an individual's wealth and the labor they expend to create that wealth are completely non-correlating -- you can work four times as hard as a laborer than an investor and not see any return while capital ends up with most of the value extracted from your labor.

Even the most pro-market economists acknowledge this critical, showstopping bug in the free market. Adam Smith acknowledges it. Friedman acknowledges it. Where opinions diverge is the solution, or whether the issue of inequality is even worth solving or worthy of government intervention. If you exit the toxic and obnoxious Silicon Valley Bay Area bubble, look out the window into an actual working class individual's life, I think you'll find plenty of evidence for that answer to be a resounding Yes.

The situation with Uber is similar, and California has decided that it is indeed worth the effort to allow drivers to keep more of the wealth they generate for the company. It's not communism, it's literally the first principle of commerce that individuals providing labor receive full compensation for their labor in return. There is no more a capitalist concept than that.

[brippalcharrid]

No; capitalism is a system based upon property rights and as such it requires that contracts are voluntary and mutually consensual. The USA doesn't have capitalism, it has a Mixed Economy, which combines aspects of capitalism and socialism.

In a relatively unregulated marketplace, an Uber driver comes with their time, equipment and skills, ready to trade them for money. Uber in exchange offers money and the use of its infrastructure and relationships. Together they potentially agree a price, but neither side, nor the government nor some other external entity can dictate terms of their agreement.

Wealth inequality is only an issue if your world-view demands that you makes it into one. In a free market, wealth inequality in itself does not affect a person's life in any tangible way. Your comment about the wages of laborers seems to relate to the Labor Theory of Value; this concept is often used in conjunction with a claim that labour is inabstractable in an attempt to dismiss the interchangeability of human labor for automation, but that's patently absurd, because we're talking about this on a messaging board for computer programmers. Our economic system, even with its burdensome and overweening regulation, still does a good job of allocating resources to productive enterprises and people, and I'm afraid that in the laborer-capital-investor example that you gave at the start, the worker is only gaining from the deployment of capital in proportion to what they themselves have deferred the consumption of and then risked in the deployment of capital (vice versa with the investor and their labor). And of course, that example is less applicable these days, because people generally have pensions and own shares.

(But don't worry, if I'm wrong, you can go ahead and make a ton of money proving it)

[Jommi]

However, if company A is in a free market industry they would not be able to sustain that 3$/hr.

Uber has been able to sustain their policies for close to 10 years now. Its pretty clear that drivers are being paid an amount close to their actual value. If they werent, they would be working for some other job.

[mdorazio]

You're assuming two things that aren't true:

1) Other, better, jobs of the same type (hours/entry requirements/pay) are available to drivers. Reality: Uber created a class of "job" where the bar for entry is so ridiculously low that anyone with a basic driver's license can do it. At the same time, real incomes for primary jobs currently or previously worked by Uber drivers are often not high enough to actually cover cost of living where they live. There are multiple market distortions on both sides going on here that are too long to discuss in a comment, but saying "well if it was so bad they would just work somewhere else!" is a pretty bad argument. If getting black lung was so bad, why didn't coal miners just work somewhere else?

2) Other companies can pull the same legal and financial shenanigans as Uber to offer those opportunities. Reality: Uber has never been profitable - if it wasn't VC funded it would have to pay its drivers even less than it currently does, so acting like it's a cost competitive business is incorrect. Uber also does not adhere to laws, as in this case with CA - other companies (like taxi companies) that do adhere cannot compete (and thus cannot provide alternative opportunities) because running in adherence is expensive.

[Jommi]

Really? You are really going to assert without any evidence these completely wrong points?

I can tell you straight out, from experience and data, that both of your points are completely incorrect.

1) Its 2020. The "gig economy" is REAL. Its actually a terrible situation for Uber, as competing jobs are more abdundant than ever, and new starts with fresh VC-fueled incetives are popping up left and right.

I can promise you that in nearly every market Uber operates in, the drivers are signed up on every single ridehailing competitor, every single food delivery service, every single grocery delivery service, and every single last mile delivery service.

And they will be constantly looking at where the best bang for buck is. CONSTANTLY.

2) Uber's ridehailing business is profitable in the US. Go check their publicly available investor data.

Uber does have a finnicky relationship with "the law" for sure, in multiple countries. That is completely true. However at some times "the law" is protecting a service that is not in the best interest of the consumer, as has been with most over-protective taxi regulations.