[egypturnash]

If you were in an office then your employer - or the building's landlord - would arrange for someone to fix the furnace. But your employer has now commandeered your home as your workspace during the pandemic. It's probably seeing a lot more wear and tear because of this. Are they going to pay someone to come out and fix your furnace? Probably not.

[aaron-santos]

It's the same equation at play in the Uber/Lyft/auto+gig realm. A portion of the means of production[physical space, electricity, plumbing, etc.] has been shifted from being employer-owned to employee-owned while keeping other parts of the equation constant. Rather than employers bearing the cost of purchasing or maintaining these means, employees find themselves paying for these out of their wages. It might be tempting to respond with "yes, but employees have or were going to buy these anyway." But consider effects beyond the surface level, additional wear to heating and cooling machinery because the machinery would otherwise be idle while the employee was away at work, the wear of home office furniture, and the change in monthly data usage w.r.t. data caps. Some employers have recognized this shift in burden, but have most? How does this shift affect incentives?

[blurbleblurble]

Keep in mind that a lot of this stuff is really owned, at the end of the day, by capitalists... in the literal sense, by institutions and individuals who command capital. Auto gig workers typically rent or lease the cars, then work to pay them off, living on precarious margins. Sure, they're responsible for maintenance, but at the end of the day, the cars will vanish if they don't make their payments. Most of us rent our houses or have mortgages on them, but they're not paid off.

Which is why people are working so much in the first place! There are payments to be made, on a strict schedule. You could lose your home and burn bridges if you don't keep up. Quite a few people actually do lose their homes and burn bridges. It's common to think of this as being their fault for being lazy.

But this whole arrangement is unsustainable for the people and for the planet.

And this is the whole point of Thomas Piketty's famous book a few years back that caused a big stir but is all but ignored by political and economic leaders in the US.

There are very good reasons why cultures before banned usury. Sure, rent and debt are powerful economic tools, but with great power comes great responsibility, and I'm still waiting for the lawmakers and business leaders where I live (the US) to go ahead and exercise that responsibility by creating sensible countermeasures to protect people from exploitation.