[nickdothutton]

The amount of regulation a company has to comply with to hire and retain a "real" (non-uberised) worker in the UK has been increased to a great degree since the mid 90s. Gig work allows these companies to offer work without commitment, while the worker may offers his labour without commitment. There is no limit to the number of platforms/firms he can sign on with. If company x provides too few hours or undesirable terms then he can add company y and company z. Uberization is a predictable outcome where hiring risk is increased and assigned solely to the employer.

[robtherobber]

It seems that you're framing it as if regulation is some random burden that appeared out of nowhere rather than a defence mechanism that emerged because businesses repeatedly abused workers, cut corners, and pushed costs onto everyone else whenever they were allowed to.

Work, technology, supply chains, data, health and safety, and the whole economy are all far more complex than they were in the 90s, of course regulation increased: we had to adjust to respond to the new challenges and everything else. It increased because the damage companies can do increased significantly too (we are literally discussing about existential threats to humanity and life on earth in the last few years), and because we learned again and again what happens when you leave everything to "the market" and trust firms to self-police.

Also, this idea that gig work is some balanced freedom on both sides sounds nice in theory but falls apart in practice. I'd go as far as saying that it's naive. The company/platform keeps the power, sets the terms, and the worker carries the instability and everything that derives from that. "You can sign up to multiple apps" is not a real solution to insecure income, it's just telling people to juggle several unreliable income streams at once and hope enough scraps appear each week. And whereas for businesses "losing" means lower profits or no profits (with the worst case scenario being that they have to shut down), for workers this can mean huge financial insecurity, depression, lack of control, and potential destitution. I'd say the latter is markedly more dramatic.

Put differently, it's not meaningful flexibility for most people, more like risk transfer. The business gets labour on demand without commitment, while the worker still has rent, bills, and food costs arriving on a fixed schedule and with the threat of actual death if they end up homeless in the winter.

And on the "hiring risk" point: why should that risk be shifted onto workers, who have far less power, money, and protection than firms? If a company depends on labour to function, employing people properly is not some unfair punishment - it's part of the cost of doing business in a civilised society. The only reason private enterprise is tolerated at all is that it is supposed to produce a social benefit. If a business model only works by making workers permanently disposable and pushing insecurity onto society, then that is a criticism of the business model, not of regulation. And it's probably not worth keeping the private sector either.

[lotsofpulp]

>It seems that you're framing it as if regulation is some random burden that appeared out of nowhere rather than a defence mechanism that emerged because businesses repeatedly abused workers, cut corners, and pushed costs onto everyone else whenever they were allowed to.

They appeared because voters want low taxes and they want subsidies. It makes no sense to hold businesses (and buyers in general) responsible for a seller's well being. That should be the role of the government, who has the power to tax.

Holding businesses responsible is convenient for government leaders and the well connected, who can get away with corruption and the government leaders who can point fingers at others. And who is really going to have the manpower to audit all those buyers.

But of course, the voters want lower taxes now no matter what, so it is what it is.

[robtherobber]

This shifts the discussion elsewhere, but I'm happy to address the points you raised.

> [regulations] appeared because voters want low taxes and they want subsidies

Says who? If we move beyond opinion here, do we have something more to inform this conclusion? And how exactly do we connect the two here? - without more information it's a non sequitur situation.

I suggest that there are two separate things to look at here and we should not conflate them: tax politics (how states fund support) and labour law history (why employment protections exist).

On the first point, the claim that regulations appeared because voters want low taxes is wholly unsupported. It wouldn't make much sense either: regulations of all kinds existed long before democracy was a thing, as a general rule.

If we look at regulations pertaining to work in particular, labour law exists because the employment relationship has a built-in power imbalance and requires worker protection. It's really as straightforward as that. The ILO's Employment Relationship Recommendation [0] states explicitly that labour law seeks, among other things, to address "an unequal bargaining position" between parties, and it also notes problems caused when contractual arrangements deprive workers of protections or disguise the real employment relationship. It also says that national policy should clarify and adapt laws to guarantee effective protection and combat disguised employment relationships.

In fact, the ILO Constitution itself from 1919 says labour conditions involved "injustice, hardship and privation" on a scale that threatened social peace, and that improvement was urgently required through measures such as regulating hours, unemployment prevention, wage adequacy, protection against sickness/injury, protection of children, and freedom of association. That is a direct historical explanation of why labour regulation was institutionalised internationally.

Then you have the Treaty of Versailles [2] (the labour provisions) which explicitly state that labour should not be treated merely as a commodity, and list urgent principles including freedom of association and wages sufficient for a reasonable standard of life.

But the history of labour regulations is actually old, if you're into that. [3][4][5]

So let's put to rest the completely unfounded assumption that this is a tax-politics explanation and not a social-protection and industrial-order explanation.

> It makes no sense to hold businesses (and buyers in general) responsible for a seller's well being. That should be the role of the government, who has the power to tax.

Again, you misstate what labour regulation is for. Labour law does not generally make firms responsible for a worker's entire "wellbeing" in the abstract. It sets minimum rules inside a specific relationship the firm controls: wages, hours, safety, dismissal, status, notice, and similar conditions. The ILO framework is explicit that labour law exists because employment relationships involve unequal bargaining power and because protections are linked to the existence of that relationship, including where firms try to structure or disguise arrangements to avoid obligations. [0] Otherwise employment would pretty much be a form of slavery; favoured by employers, for sure, but an altogether shitty deal for the employees.

It is also historically (and morally, if you ask me) wrong to reduce this to tax-and-welfare politics. The foundational international labour-law texts explain the emergence of labour regulation in terms of "injustice, hardship and privation," social instability, and the need for social justice, so not as a response to voter demand for low taxes. The ILO Constitution and related early labour principles are very clear on this. [6]

> Holding businesses responsible is convenient for government leaders and the well connected, who can get away with corruption and the government leaders who can point fingers at others.

This is simply no evidence to support this. It's a simplistic comment about political incentives, not a demonstrated explanation of why labour rules exist, why they are wrong etc. Corruption can exist in any regulatory domain, but that does not establish that employer duties are conceptually invalid. At best, we could frame it as an argument about enforcement quality and governance integrity, but it wouldn't refute the underlying rationale for labour standards (power imbalance and prevention of harm in employment relationships).

I'll stop here, because I need my dinner.

[0] https://wecglobal.org/uploads/2019/07/2006_ILO_Recommendatio...

[1] https://www.ilo.org/sites/default/files/2024-04/ILO%20Consti...

[2] https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/partxiii.asp

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_labour_law

[4] https://law.exeter.ac.uk/v8media/facultysites/hass/law/hamly...

[5] https://formsoflabour.exeter.ac.uk/conference/levels-of-labo...

[6] https://www.ilo.org/resource/other/ilo-constitution

Edit: mixed to order above, but hopefully the points are still clear.

[lotsofpulp]

I should have specified the regulation I was referring to is related to things like being able to let go of employees or pay for them while unemployed or cash when they are retired, etc.

I did not intend to wrap in stuff like minimum ages, maximum hours without supplemental pay, discrimination, sexual harassment, safety, or other quality of life related labor laws.

Only the laws related to the business interaction a labor selling choosing to sell their labor, and a labor buyer choosing to buy labor. It should be as easy as possible, if the goal is to have an efficient market. Which is not antithetical to the goal of also having a society that provides a minimum quality of life.

>This is simply no evidence to support this. It's a simplistic comment about political incentives, not a demonstrated explanation of why labour rules exist, why they are wrong etc.

My evidence is the ever increasing push for "privatization" and loans instead of subsidies. And voters support it, especially in the US. But I believe it is like that in the UK also. For example, I think the UK has reduced its higher education subsidies so that now 18 year olds in the UK also take out student loans, at least borrow much more than before.

Instead of giving people cash to buy homes (which would increase taxes because that cash has to be accounted for), the voters opt to give people loans underwritten by future taxpayers.

And the underlying dynamic of this is that as a society's median age gets higher and higher, it needs to squeeze its young more and more to deliver on the benefits to its largest and most reliable voting bloc, the old and soon to be old.

[robtherobber]

Thanks for clarifying.

> It should be as easy as possible, if the goal is to have an efficient market.

I'd argue that the goal was never to just have an efficient market, for there's absolutely no reason to have a market to begin with, unless society at large benefits from it (not just the employers and the employees, since they don't exist and operate in isolation). The employees, who are real people rather than - or before they are - legal entities, absolutely need protecting. Their bodies can break, their time is limited, and they have tangible and intangible needs that have existed before - and will exist after - businesses were a thing. But once we've adopted this economic model, market efficiency is certainly an aspect to it, agreed. However, it still can't be the most important factor or even one more important than individual rights and their wellbeing.

As such, I'd agree that selling one's own services/skill (labour) should generally be easy, but a fairly long list of failsafes is still unavoidable and necessary simply because businesses are predatory entities by their very nature (a necessary evil, it could be argued), especially after the onset of neoliberalism in the 80s, and there's an inherent imbalance of bargaining power between employers and employees. [0][1][2][3]

Labour is not just a market commodity because the seller is a person embedded in family/community. So I am all for giving employees (but not employers) more control over this relationship (selling labour) for multiple reasons, the two most important being that this is inherently good for democracy and also because what's good for workers/citizens may legitimately override narrow "economic efficiency" metrics. [4][5]

> My evidence is the ever increasing push for "privatization" and loans instead of subsidies. And voters support it, especially in the US. But I believe it is like that in the UK also. For example, I think the UK has reduced its higher education subsidies so that now 18 year olds in the UK also take out student loans, at least borrow much more than before.

I am fairly sure that this push doesn't come from citizens/workers, but from the private business sector, which has all but accaparated the political power in the US and other countries, UK being the closest in terms of mentality and approach (think Thatcher & Reagan). US can now be considered without any exaggeration an oligarchy. It is more or less a consensus among economists and historians that privatisation generally works against the best interest of the citizen and very much to the interest of the wealthy and the business class. [6][7][8][9]

The privatisation of public services and the other mechanisms that you mention have had undeniably negative effects on citizens and workers, and it was very much not a choice they made, but it was forced upon them. US and the UK have been the only two countries that have embraced neoliberalism so fast, blindly, and without guardrails, and it definitely shows. [10][11][12][13][14]

[0] https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-economis...

[1] https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2020/09/16/failing-globa...

[2] https://www.epi.org/unequalpower/home/

[3] https://bclawreview.bc.edu/articles/3109/files/65b9360509de1...

[4] https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/podzim2016/POL401/um/Pateman_Dahl...

[5] https://economicsociology.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/the...

[6] https://aeon.co/essays/privatisation-is-bad-economics-and-wo...

[7] https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/chiara-cordelli-harms-...

[8] https://truthout.org/articles/the-political-economy-of-preda...

[9] https://weownit.org.uk/privatisation

[10] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/the-dark-side-of-e...

[11] https://www.eurozine.com/the-us-and-the-uk-after-neoliberali...

[12] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/21/death-...

[13] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/14/the-fatal-flaw-...

[14] https://www.socialeurope.eu/neoliberalism-still-to-shrug-off...

[philipallstar]

> And on the "hiring risk" point: why should that risk be shifted onto workers, who have far less power, money, and protection than firms

Firms are just other people. They take on more and more risk. These days in the UK HR departments they often say you can't let someone go even in their probation period. Think how a experimental and risky a hire is, and how easy it is to quit a job that might not be any good vs how hard it is to get rid of an employee who isn't any good.

[lordnacho]

> Firms are just other people.

Firms aren't people. They are artificial constructs that we invented to solve an organizational issue a long time ago. Some aspects of natural persons were emulated in corporation law, but a lot of them aren't:

- Firms can't go to jail

- Firms don't naturally pass away

- They have their own taxation

- They can be in more than one jurisdiction at once

- There's more than one type of corporate entity.

It's just a matter of taking the right decisions regarding what rules we think are useful to society.

[philipallstar]

None of that is useful in the sense I'm saying it.

[robtherobber]

> Firms are just other people. They take on more and more risk.

I have to disagree with that, I think it's a very American interpretation on the situation.

A business is an organised legal/economic entity with capital, reserves, insurance, legal advice, hiring processes, and the ability to spread risk across many workers and time periods. It can come into (legal) existence and dissolve without anyone automatically becoming destitute or actually dying. In contrast, a worker has but one body, real health to care for, and far less financial buffer. I think that equating businesses and people not only hides the actual power imbalance, but ignores how reality works.

In terms of risks, sure, hiring involves uncertainty, of the financial order, not a life-or-death kind of thing. And it doesn't justify transferring the cost of that uncertainty onto the least protected party. Like I say above, we allow businesses to operate on the premise that the society benefits from their activities; there are risks associated with running businesses, but there's no point to have them if society stands more to lose than to gain by having them. No one is forcing businesses to ever increase their profits (and shift the risks) once they become stable, but it would be hard to argue that people can afford not eating, having a place to live in, or stop rearing children. We simply can't conflate these two entities here and blur the line between life ontology and legal (that is, made up) concepts.

The risk to the employer is that a bad hire can cost money, time, management effort. To the worker that can mean arrears, debt, eviction risk, food insecurity, etc., including death. In fact the very idea of labour law emerged on the basis of unequal bargaining power, which makes "freedom of contract" a fiction in many cases.

As for probation, from what I know is mostly a contractual/process tool in UK practice, not a magic legal lock-in. ACAS guidance does not say "you cannot dismiss in probation"; it says employers should have a valid reason and follow a fair procedure: https://www.acas.org.uk/dismissals

I see no reason to assume that a business model is entitled to be low-commitment; if it depends on labour, then the cost of employing people decently is part of the model. They are forced to accept it in order to be allowed to operate in society. Conversely, if the model only works by making labour disposable, that in itself works as evidence against the model, not against protections.

We should also try not to fall for the false symmetry between quitting and firing, in my view, because "easy to quit" is irrelevant to whether employers should have obligations or not. For the worker quitting a bad job still bears real costs (income gap, search time, stress, potential destitution), whereas when the employer fires someone it continues to retain the enterprise, assets, and ongoing revenue capacity.

This paper presents some useful details as well: https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp2039.pdf

[philipallstar]

> I think it's a very American interpretation on the situation

I'm not American, but I don't know. America is 300 million people. Is it worth talking about ideas rather than disparaging people-groups?

> As for probation, from what I know is mostly a contractual/process tool in UK practice, not a magic legal lock-in. ACAS guidance does not say "you cannot dismiss in probation"; it says employers should have a valid reason and follow a fair procedure: https://www.acas.org.uk/dismissals

ACAS is just guidance, as you say. But things spread rapidly in the world of HR and the fashions change rapidly. HR is not big on logic, and is big on fashions. I've worked with amazing HR people, who are very fair and compassionate and logical, but it's very unusual. If the latest HR magazine says to not let people go during probation, then a lot of employers will suddenly start doing that.

[PunchTornado]

Yeah right. I beg to differ. I was just laid off by a company in London after 6 years with them. 3 months severance. And thats it.

[philipallstar]

Sorry to hear that. I've been laid off a couple of times myself. I don't know how that changes how much risk companies take on when hiring, though.

[nickdothutton]

In large companies, especially those which do not depend on especially talented or specialised workers, HR is very much just a "people risk" department. People are an input, with them comes some risk, like tonnes of coal which might cause pollution, or sacks of ingredients which might go off and poison customers. Over many years I have come to understand this is how BigCo HR operates.

The risks might be different, they might be a bully, they might do bad work, they might be dishonest, or even just screw up (honestly) when under pressure, it's all risk to HR. I decided not to be an employee of such companies 20+ years ago, although I am not in the "commodity employee" set.

Feel free to adopt your own mental models.

[Leynos]

Colour me sceptical. At the moment you have no protection from unfair dismissal until you have been employed for two years. The change to six months doesn't start until next January.

[louthy]

If HR says that they’re lying. It isn’t true.

[array_key_first]

They might not be lying, they could also be stupid. It's the same way in the US. There's a mass delusion among people that firing workers is hard.

Um... no it isn't. Most states are right to work. No, you don't need to give severance. No, you don't need to announce it. And yes, that's all perfectly legal.

Is there a theoretical risk that an employee can try to sue you and burn a bunch of your money? Yes, but that risk always exists. Someone could try to sue you always, doesn't mean they'll win.

In actuality the risk is so incredibly small it's not worth thinking about.

[tikkabhuna]

Zero our contracts is used far beyond the "Uber"-style gig work where people can choose when they want to work. Often its used in for any sort of minimum wage job where there is a significant imbalance where employers have the power to offer as little/much work as they want and penalise workers who can't/won't take those shifts.

[nickdothutton]

Unfortunately the UK now has an economy which is 83% services vs around 50% in 1970. Services are much more volatile with less certainty than say manufacturing or primary industry. So employment in services is going to be volatile and hard to predict, certainty has declined for all, employers and workers. A given employer only has the power if he is the only, or one of just a few in town. If not then the worker has the opportunity to seek hours somewhere else from someone else, at least if these jobs/gigs are relatively unskilled, which most are.

What I don't agree with, the underpayment of workers enabled by government "subsidies". A barista in London may be offered £21K per year to work all his shifts (I'm looking at a job ad), yet needs double that to live, so government "subsidises" the employer by providing the other "missing" £20K in universal credit, housing benefit, and so on. It's no wonder employers take advantage of this.

Meanwhile the customer thinks his coffee costs him £3, in fact the true cost is a multiple of that because of the ~£20K "subsidy". Meanwhile you can hear the faint sound of laughter, which is the employer, knowing that the taxpayer is picking up half his true wage bill.

[joe_mamba]

>What I don't agree with, the underpayment of workers enabled by government "subsidies".

Wait a second, Isn't this just corporate welfare and goes against capitalism and supply/demand free market economics? Why should other people's taxes subsidize other people's businesses?

If your business is a net negative to the economy due to it only being able to survive on subsidies, then it has no right to exist.

We're not talking about subsidizing national security industries like semiconductor manufacturing, aerospace, renewables, pharma, we're talking about subsidizing someone's cafe/fast food business so they as a business owner can pocket the profits while paying their staff below market and having the taxpayer pick up the tab for the difference.

Or is this just a cloaked form of UBI to prevent mass unemployment?

[em-bee]

are we? are we not also talking about enabling restaurants to exist in order to make our city livable?

i also don't see the issue with housing support. in vienna more than half of the population lives in subsidized housing. the current rate is that 2/3rds of any new built housing is subsidized.

and it apparently works out. instead of paying higher wages so that no one needs subsidies, everyone pays higher taxes to fund the subsidies. it's redistribution of income. yes, i guess you could consider it a cloaked form of UBI. i believe the key feature is that this model makes the whole economy around housing and income less volatile.

[joe_mamba]

>are we not also talking about enabling restaurants to exist in order to make our city livable?

No! Why are privately owned restaurants part of a city's "livability", as if going out to eat food made by an underpaid slave wage class of migrant workers, is somehow a god given entitlement for the western person, and not something beholden to the same supply and demand market rules of any other business? Why should restaurants get special treatment so that their owners can buy another Porsche while they exploit cheap desperate foreign labor and the taxpayer subsidies? What about plumbers, hairdressers, landscapers, web-dev shops, yoga, why aren't those businesses part of a city's livability and entitled to subsidies?

And if you expect restaurants to be a public service for sake of livability, then they should also be state run and not for the profit of the restaurant owners.

> in vienna more than half of the population lives in subsidized housing.

What about the other half who pays for those getting the subsidies but don't get to live in subsidized housing? What's their opinion? I doubt they're happy they're paying market rate rent to a private landlord just so their neighbors can pay much less subsidized rent and beat them at wealth building.

It's always nice and easy when you're the one getting subsidies to justify how amazing subsidies are. I've never met a person complaining about receiving too many subsidies or asking themselves where the money from the subsidizes is coming from and if that's fair to others.

>it's redistribution of income.

Who would agree to this if they'd get to vote on it. I mean to have their income redistributed to others, not to have others income redistributed to them.

Forced income redistribution like in the case of Austria since you brought it up, just creates a vacuum where the most talented most hardworking people leave for greener pastures abroad to escape it, and you're left with a stagnant economy of average or below average people who don't see any point in hard work and will prefer to optimize for a life on getting the subsidies rather than funding them, so the government ends up with a bigger and bigger debt hole funding all this in exchange for votes.

See the Austrian guy who developed Openclaw then left because of the way Austria treats small business success and entrepreneurship.

Central planned income redistribution always leads to failure in the long run. This only worked in the post-WW2 Europe when there were a lot more people paying into the system than receiving, but not in today's world and economy.

[em-bee]

Why are privately owned restaurants part of a city's "livability", as if going out to eat food made by an underpaid slave wage class of migrant workers, is somehow a god given entitlement for the western person

that's the point, it's not an entitlement, it's paid for by taxes. and it is what makes a city attractive. same goes for shopping streets (as opposed to shopping malls) etc.

they make the city desireable and livable. which in turn attracts business, which brings in tax money.

you have never been to vienna, i guess. it's the most livable city in the world it frequently comes out at the top of the most desirable city for expats.

support for entrepreneurship is indeed a problem, not just in austria, in all of europe, but those are two different issues. there is no reason why it could not be improved while continuing to subsidize housing. on the contrary. subsidized housing means that as an entrepreneur i don't have to pay premium salaries in order to hire people like eg. in san francisco.

steinberger got hired by OpenAI three months after he revealed his project. to argue he left because because of how austria treats entrepreneurs makes no sense. did he say that that is the reason? i'd like to know if that's really true.

Central planned income redistribution always leads to failure in the long run

vienna's housing policy is successful for a century now. and i expect it will continue to be successful.

[relaxing]

Capitalism is not a sincerely held belief. The true belief is “my business, at the expense of yours.”

[toomuchtodo]

Very similar to how religion and their associated belief systems are used to control others. I suppose one could consider capitalism a form of religion and "sacred values" that faces an almost autoimmune response when the belief system is challenged, as it also challenges the human's identity (in some cases).

[robtherobber]

Precisely. There are even strong arguments to support this take; they speak about a "free market" that simply never existed, an "invisible hand" that supposedly beneficial, the ridiculous belief that competition always improves outcomes, the equation of price with value, the (HN favourite) that profit proves virtue / merit, consumer choice = freedom, and so, so many other unfounded or partially true beliefs.

[oytis]

> penalise workers who can't/won't take those shifts.

Wouldn't this problem better solved with a normal contract that obliges the worker to take the shifts the employer is interested in?

[scott_w]

0-hour contracts have nothing to do with "Uberised" working arrangements, which are essentially a contracted worker. In a 0-hour contract, the worker does not have the freedom to "offer labour without commitment."

- They have an employment contract, so are an employee, not a self-employed contractor.

- There are limitations on who else they could work for.

- In practice, if they're called up to work last-minute, they can't say "no."

For most 0-hour contracts, like retail, trying to setup your employees as self-employed contractors doesn't work because it's a blatant violation of the law. HMRC will come after you for employer's NI as you have disguised employees.

Uber is a very different model because the way they setup the working arrangements allows them to keep taxi drivers outside the scope of disguised employees.

[nickdothutton]

Non-compete or any kind of limitation on who a zero hours contract person can work for, has been specifically and explicitly illegal since 2016 in the UK. In practice it has been unenforceable since more or less forever. [1]

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/zero-hours-contra... (last para.)

[scott_w]

Thanks for the info. I left retail work in 2011, when I definitely did have it in my contract, so things have changed a little bit since then.

[varispeed]

> as you have disguised employees.

That's such a classist term. Surely little working class person cannot have its own business, it's disguised employment! It's like micro agency with resource of 1. But somehow we don't say agencies run "disguised employment", because the profits are going to the rich shareholders instead of filthy unwashed pleb.

[scott_w]

What on earth are you waffling on about?

Disguised employee is the term used when a person fits into the legal definition of an employee but are contracted, as opposed to being employed. HMRC sets out the conditions it uses to determine this for tax purposes, which you can find on their website.

> But somehow we don't say agencies run "disguised employment",

No, they're not "disguised employment" because the contract terms and working conditions differ to that of an employment contract. It's nothing to do with class.

Plumbers, electricians and joiners will typically run self-employed or private limited companies for their work. We don't call them disguised employees because they're not, they're independent contractors. Because "disguised employee" is nothing to do with class.

[varispeed]

It is classist.

The rule set was sharpened the moment skilled workers realised the agency / consultancy was charging £2k a day for their labour while paying them £60k a year, and decided to leave on Friday and invoice on Monday. Same desk. Same client. Same work. The only difference was that the margin stayed with the person producing the value instead of flowing to partners and shareholders.

That is when it became “disguised employment”.

When a multinational intermediary inserts itself and captures the spread, that is respectable commerce. When a one-person company does the same and keeps the surplus, it is suddenly suspicious and requires a special anti-avoidance regime.

You can hide behind control tests and contractual nuances, but the economic reality is identical. The variable that changes is who captures profit.

If a rule only becomes urgent when labour tries to behave like capital, that is not some sterile legal tidying exercise. That is class politics dressed up as “compliance”.

[scott_w]

> The rule set was sharpened the moment skilled workers realised the agency / consultancy was charging £2k a day for their labour while paying them £60k a year, and decided to leave on Friday and invoice on Monday. Same desk. Same client. Same work. The only difference was that the margin stayed with the person producing the value instead of flowing to partners and shareholders.

Right, so you're talking about IR35 specifically. This has nothing to do with "Uberisation" at all because the working arrangement and contract structure are completely different. It's also got fuck all to do with "classism" because it's 100% about tax.

First off, IR35 does not apply to self-employed workers, it only applies to a worker contracting via a limited company.

Second, it looks at how many "clients" you have. A limited company of 1 contracting to multiple clients is outside the scope of IR35 because, like your plumber, they are a business and not an employee trying to reduce the amount of tax they pay.

Thirdly, IR35 companies are allowed but they must operate in a specific way (that makes them not worth the hassle for the most part).

> That is class politics dressed up as “compliance”.

No, it's just about tax law.

I don't know why you needed to write 6 paragraphs when a simple "I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about" would have been much quicker for you to write and for me to read.

[varispeed]

> First off, IR35 does not apply to self-employed workers, it only applies to a worker contracting via a limited company.

You are using class-loaded language. Nobody says a worker is “operating via” a Big Four consultancy, but when it is a one-person company, suddenly it is framed as some artificial wrapper.

It is a recognised form of self-employment under UK law, where a person runs their own company to contract for work in their own right, on the same legal footing as any other incorporated business.

And IR35 is not confined to one-person outfits either. Its scope extends beyond the caricature of a lone contractor “gaming” the system.

IR35 is not determined by how many clients you have. It is driven by the ownership structure of the company providing the services. The legislation applies where the individual delivering the work has a material interest in that company, typically 5% or more.

> Thirdly, IR35 companies are allowed but they must operate in a specific way (that makes them not worth the hassle for the most part).

It amounts to saying you are free to run your own company, right up to the point where doing so allows you to retain the full commercial value of your labour rather than routing it through an approved intermediary.

Those restrictions are designed around companies owned by the worker delivering the service. The same structural suspicion is not applied to firms owned by external shareholders supplying labour in similar conditions.

When the rule set specifically constrains worker-owned businesses while leaving non-worker-owned ones operating freely, that is not accidental. It is a deliberate design choice that limits upward social mobility.

It is also not accurate to say IR35 has nothing to do with wider labour trends, because tax rules shape how work is structured in practice; many gig and platform workers are required to set up limited companies, and once labour is channelled into that model, the IR35 framework directly affects them, so drawing a hard line between “tax” and “Uberisation” ignores how policy design influences the real-world organisation of work.

[TimByte]

I think this is true for a certain category of worker, but it depends heavily on whether the flexibility is actually symmetrical in practice

[nickdothutton]

For largely unskilled service sector jobs, where one might consider the worker relatively interchangeable, it is particularly bad if your government also has an "infinite immigration" policy in practice.[1]

[1] Inward migration to the UK was 1.3M people in the year to June 2023. UK population was about 67/68M at the time.

[Macha]

Huh, I expected that to be a Ukraine related surge given the time period chosen but actually Ukraine looks to be (eyeballing a graph here) about 150,000 max in 2022 (if it counted for 100% of humanitarian cases) and 50,000 in 2024: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...

Anyway, looks like migration is now down to about 480,000, with the big drop occuring in the second half of 2024.

[jen20]

If this is the reason (I don’t believe it personally) then there should be no problem with an outright ban on non-compete agreements for zero-hour contracts. Somehow I don’t think employers will agree.

[nickdothutton]

Non-compete agreements (or any clause restricting working elsewhere) are generally not enforceable in UK zero-hours contracts. Explicitly since January 2016, and in practice before then.[1]

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/zero-hours-contra... (Bottom para.)

[Forgeties79]

> Gig work allows these companies to offer work without commitment, while the worker may offers his labour without commitment.

This is basically a cousin to “at-will” hiring rationalization in the US. It’s nonsense in that case, and it’s nonsense with zero hour contracts. There is a little to no benefit to employees. It just puts them in an even more precarious situation. The power dynamics are not fair between them and employers, those kinds of systems are inherently lopsided. Yet proponents keep insisting it levels the playing field. I don’t get it.

It’s basically arguing for the fusion of worst parts of being a hired employee and a freelance contractor. Both have advantages, both have compromises, and these “gig economy” jobs make sure that basically none of the benefits of being a contractor exist.

[lotsofpulp]

“Right to work”, in the US, is about being able to work for an employer without joining the employee union.

“At will” employment is the term you are thinking of.

[Forgeties79]

Yes thank you I always do that!

[bartread]

Yeah, that's not how zero hour contracts work.

In practice zero hour contracts mean that if a company wants you to work you often need to work because if you don't they can simply not give you any more hours in future. I.e., the big difference between a zero hour contract and gig work is that in that the company controls the hours, not you.

And this isn't just because the companies are scummy, but for somewhat sensible operational reasons. Zero hour contracts are common in places like supermarkets because they allow companies to flex their staffing levels with, for example, seasonal demand (although there are other solutions to that problem that are better for employees!). On d day to day basis they might still need more shop floor workers on a busy Saturday than on a quiet Monday, so it means they need to be able to control the scheduling rather than workers controlling the scheduling to ensure they always have appropriate staffing levels. If you gave complete control to workers you'd regularly find you had too many people working at quiet times and too few at busy, and even if you put controls in place to avoid too many workers at a time, you'd never be able to guarantee that you'd have enough at busy times which wouldn't really be an acceptable outcome for anyone.

But going back to your point of misunderstanding: zero contracts are perhaps more like the worst aspects of gig employment married to the worst aspects of non-gig employment, which means that they operate quite differently to gig employment.

[Leynos]

What do you see as unreasonable regulation?

[behringer]

Sounds horrifying and you should feel bad for even writing that.

[CalRobert]

Emergent properties of skewed incentive systems is not the author’s responsibility.

[behringer]

The part

> Gig work allows these companies to offer work without commitment, while the worker may offers his labour without commitment.

Makes it sound like employer and employee are on equal footing. That is very much not the case.