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I think this makes a much deeper point. You can't create an app that will pay people badly because it will pay people badly. We (society) have traditionally massively underpaid people who are time rich and cash poor, but who have basic life necessities provided outside of their income - teenagers, most obviously, but historically the same applied to middle-class married women (look up "working for pin money"). But that involved discrimination - either only offering these jobs to people who were not relying on them for basic life necessities, or paying people who were actually trying to make a living much more (at least minimum wage, and in some cases far more). That discrimination has usually been illegal, but paying a local teenager a few dollars to mow your lawn (when you would pay a much more substantial fee to a proper lawn-care firm) is the sort of informal small-scale law-breaking that no enforcement body would ever bother with. But you can't, intrinsically, aggregate this sort of thing. That takes the human being out of the loop, which means there is no one to discriminate. It makes the law-breaking large-scale and formal, rather than small-scale and informal. This happens to all sorts of things - there are plenty of informal payments made to people in exchange for small amounts of their time (lots of us have paid a bit more than the fuel costs for a friend to give us a lift to the airport), but when this starts to scale up (ie Uber), you have to turn it into formal business and employment arrangements, and that changes the nature of the relationship. You can't scale it up without changing it in kind. I know that a lot of people on HN don't like the idea that there are some things that can only be done one-to-one, personally, and informally, and therefore cannot be automated, done many-to-many, impersonally, and formally. But there are. For the specific case, surely the solution is to assess how long the job will take, check the minimum wage or living wage, and then aggregate multiple bounties until there's enough to pay for the job to be done. As for health benefits, the likely approach is something like how SAG health benefits work - you pay a percentage of your income into the plan; if you earn more than $X per year, then you get health benefits. Someone should organise this across all "gig" jobs and employers can then require people working gig jobs to sign up for this (and deduct the percentage at source). That someone would be a labor union, of course. |