[dx034]

Or they could hire them as employees. This is not temporary work, they only use agencies to save money and circumvent workers protections.

I get that there are freelancers who like not being employees but that's not the case here. I bet most Temps at Google would love getting employee status and there's no reason most of them shouldn't. It's not like Google couldn't afford the extra payroll.

[anvandare]

It's not that they could not afford doing it. It's that it's more affordable to not do it. Companies are not people, they have no ethics, they have no morality, they have only simple stimulus-and-response behavior, based on profit.

Make it more expensive to have long-term 'temporary' contractors, and they'll transform them all into employees overnight.

[randomifcpfan]

Or they could not hire them at all.

This is a version of a minimum wage, and runs into the same tradeoffs between economic growth and social fairness.

[scoopdewoop]

And who would keep the data centers running? The invisible hand of the market? Labor does stuff.

[qwytw]

They They could hire a smaller of more qualified and invest more into automation.

The only reason Google is doing this is because they don't want to spend the same amount on benefits and other overhead on 15$ per hour worker as they do for a 30$ per hour one.

[ClumsyPilot]

"invest more into automation"

Like they were sitting there and paying for all this work they could automate, but now they are gonna wake up and autonate it all in a day

[qwytw]

Yes, as long as paying somebody 15$ an hour is cheaper.

[gkop]

They have the $15/hour contractors lugging batteries, hell yea they should invest in automation, but unfortunately as you point out the legal environment does not incentivize them to do so.

[Aunche]

Why should they be incentivized to automate? That just places even more downward pressure the price of low-skill labor.

[gkop]

$15 is already equal to the proposed federal minimum wage under the current administration. They should automate because lugging batteries isn’t a healthy fit for many of the humans that they are attracting at this low wage.

[fernandotakai]

>Or they could hire them as employees.

some people don't want to be employees, they want to be contractors.

[usr1106]

> some people don't want to be employees, they want to be contractors.

Highly educated, well-paid people much more likely than people doing physical jobs. If you can negotiate your rates, your projects and can skip some corporate bullshit that fits some people. With a physical job where the wage is hardly enough until next pay day, I doubt that is a preferred option for many.

[coryking]

I've done the 1099 thing before. I had an accountant and my own LLC. I made sure to have a separate bank account that I dumped 30% of my billable time into. Each tax season I'd cut a giant check to the IRS.

I mean no disrespect to the "gig economy" people, but 1099 requires a lot of discipline. Most of them probably don't need to pay estimated taxes and instead will be cutting giant checks to the IRS each year. It requires a hell of a lot of discipline to stare at thousands of dollars of money sitting in your own bank account knowing you cannot spend that no matter what--that is uncle sam's money.

I wonder how many gig economy people wind up owing the IRS a ton of money. Especially when they have to pay self-employment tax on top of normal tax.

Plus I bet very good money 99% of them aren't paying state or municipal taxes. As a 1099 I had to pay Washington State B&O tax every year as well as some token amount to Seattle.

[pc86]

But this argument presupposes that employee v. contractor is a choice that the worker or the company is allowed to make. It's emphatically, objectively not. It's a tax designation. There are lines and rules that define which of those you are.

[cregaleus]

Or they could keep them as contractors and discontinue their contracts every two years. You can't have your cake and eat it too.