Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mschuster91 1688 days ago
Classic short-term fallacy. Yes, you get more net payout as a "contractor" - but you don't get paid sick leave or pension contributions unless you care for these on your own.

This is why this model is very frowned upon by European societies as it inevitably leaves taxpayers to pick up the tab in the form of basic social security.

2 comments

You don't even get paid more. The apps have been circulating this myth in the press, but it's based on obfuscating of the numbers at best, and outright lies at worst.

There's a reason most of their couriers are immigrants: anyone else can get paid more stocking a supermarket or driving a cab.

After they freed the taxi market even that is somewhere on level of gig-work. Still, there is good amount better paid untrained work around.
> After they freed the taxi market even that is somewhere on level of gig-work.

Certainly the freeing could have been done better, but the system before wasn't exactly healthy either. There was a fixed number of taxi licenses, and taxi companies were of course heavily lobbying against increasing the number. Since there were so few of them, good luck getting a taxi on a weekend night. Then again, if you were lucky and got a taxi, it was a shiny clean Mercedes (which perhaps tells something about the profit margins they were running at).

On other hand good luck getting taxi now during weekday night, specially outside cities. Prices have gone up and from what I have heard quality of service has gone down.

I think licensing system we had made sense, prices were capped, service was at least controlled and availability during all times was guaranteed. Ofc, this lead to some issues when there was extreme demand...

Maybe. But remember that the employees themselves voted on this. This was done by an independent auditor.
People are really bad with long term planning. Your average 20 year old doesn't know anything about pensions and considers themselves to be indestructible.

It would be ridiculously easy to just copy the US and do away with the social welfare system. See how many will actually save for their retirement lol.