Gig workers are a genuine and serious regression in workers rights and employer vs. employee power balance. These "jobs" should not be allowed to exist, at all.
Tech companies have figured out a way to subvert the protections all other employees are subject to. I see absolutely no reason why they should be allowed to do this.
I really do not understand why governments aren't working hard to make this kind of gig-economy illegal.
This is true. it also hurts the public, as the drivers are dependent on the number of deliveries the succeed making, thus hurrying up and constantly stressed. This hurts not only their health and quality of delivery, but also increases the risk for traffic accidents.
It is in the best of interest of everyone that these people would get a normal salary.
Have you seen the discourse about this on social media? People are furious that the price of delivered food has gone up recently. They're not going to vote for increased prices. That and heavy astroturf campaigns by the middlemen guarantee that this situation will remain.
And so long as there's more cheap workers available who can easily be replaced, it's hard for the workers to do anything about it.
I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with the gig economy model - it's a way of working that suits some workers and clients. But the balance of power needs to be shifted towards the workers (and clients) and away from the platforms.
I think this article is spot on. Platforms obfuscate their algorithms, and use that secrecy to play workers off against each other, and against their clients. Regulation would really help. There ought to be a right to...
1. An official explanation for each decision the algorithm makes. That could then be used as the basis for mandatory arbitration, if a party believes it's unfair.
2. Effective, and timely support from a human being, if that's required.
Together those would force the platforms to make their systems fairer (else be swamped by dealing with arbitration decisions), and easy to navigate (else be swamped by costly support calls).
In CA at least, Uber effectively bought the protection through an effective ad campaign to pass by popular vote an effectively unrecoverable law to protect themselves.
You tell the truth. That said, every other special interest already had a carve out from the authors of the bill. Uber/Doordash/Lyft just wanted the same special treatment.
I voted against the proposition but I also understood why Californian consumers would vote for it.
I recently learned that a courier in Panama can earn around $1,400 a month. Yes, you likely have to work six days a week, but that's well above the average salary in the country.
I'm not sure how the sentiment is in developed countries like the US and the UK. Still, here in Latin America, this presents an opportunity for poorer communities to provide dinner for a family.
In most of the western world the sentiment is that basic worker rights are a necessary element of social stability. And that just because a job "presents an opportunity for poorer communities to provide dinner for a family" it should not be excluded from receiving basic labor protections.
How did you learn that? Did someone tell you or is there something we can read? I appreciate you mentioning it, I just want to know more about it. Thanks.
Because it provides an extremely convenient service that has made life better for most people? People seem to forgot that this class of job used to not exist in our lifetimes. Was it better to be a low-skill worker on the job market in 2010 when these apps didn't exist?
If there are specific labor violations you think are taking place, the appropriate remedy is regulation, not banning.
> I really do not understand why governments aren't working hard to make this kind of gig-economy illegal.
Because there's a large number of people who take the writings of Ayan Rand and the policies of Ronald Regan as the best way to run government.
Workers' rights are being eroded because we've slowly dismantled and privatized as much of the government as possible.
Workers' rights are incompatible with small government and or libertarian ideals. Much like other rights such as civil rights. Or rights to clean water, air, and food.
Big government isn't perfect, but for its flaws there are benefits having a large organization with a bigger stick to beat in line robber barons whose entire goal is to undermine rights as much as possible to leach maximum profit from society.
> I really do not understand why governments aren't working hard to make this kind of gig-economy illegal.
It makes money and the current governing/legal doctrine says the government should give a lot of leeway to that. Biden has been touted as the most pro-labor president since about LBJ, but a lot of this is just letting the NLRB mediate every individual starbucks that unionized.
Not sure if Uber Eats falls under gig work (think so) but I'm glad to have it, I can just turn it on and go. Granted in my case it's not my only job. I usually get $20/hr I know I'm destroying my own car in the process, get in a car crash I'm on my own. But again it's extra money on demand.
The other thing is the instant pay out, being on a bi-weekly pay schedule and unfortunately living check to check, being able to get money the same day as I worked is nice.
You only get to say this if you stake the strong libertarian claim that it's impossible to exploit adults. Make sure you're okay with the most extreme exploitation.
e.g. Why should anyone else get between a literally starving person and an employer asking to sign a contract of lifetime servitude?
>These "jobs" should not be allowed to exist, at all.
Piece work is nothing new in the economic landscape of history. I'm not saying I absolutely defend it or think it shouldn't be subject to some sorts of protective rules for workers, but you saying it shouldn't exist at all begs the question of what exactly these many, many workers should do instead to make extra, necessary money instead.
If you're of a mind to answer, don't mention something from some neat ideal you have in your mind, describe something practical and accessible in the real world of the present, right now, that could replace their gig wages under existing market dynamics.
It's easy to dislike something and say it should be made to go away, but it helps to know how that will affect those who depend on it, and also to ask what they think of its disappearance in their practical lives.
>but you saying it shouldn't exist at all begs the question of what exactly these many, many workers should do instead to make extra, necessary money instead.
The exact same thing they are doing now, except as employees.
I do not think this is some utopian vision. Worker rights are a very real thing in other low skill jobs.
Once you actually read the article .. you see a similar kind of thing to complaints about Youtube or bank demonetization. People are accused of fraud, and have their access withdrawn - but nobody will explain what they allegedly did, because that would leak information about the fraud detection.
It's a kind of automated low trust economy. The drivers don't trust the apps, and the app doesn't trust the drivers, so the thing has to be held together by surveillance and micromanagement.
I am currently in a nightmare scenario at a new job. I just finished building their website, and it got flagged as a phishing website by Google Safebrowsing because Google seems to think that our analytics subdomain which is a self-hosted instance of Umami Analytics is a phishing attempt.
I requested a review once, they removed the flag. It came back a couple of days ago. I then had to move Umami to its own domain because I couldn't risk this ever happening again (visitors to our root domain were also getting the huge red warning, and our business was coming off as a scam).
Then they flagged the new domain as well. They've removed it again at my request, but I am just counting down the days until it happens again.
There is no way for me to get through to a human to talk about why this is happening.
What's fun is you can still do black box probing. And guess what, spammers have done this.
I get these emails that look like classic spam like a link to a home depot or wallmart giftcard, but they're addressed to someone who isn't me. After getting a bunch of these I decided to look at the original email. They are being sent to an outlook (e.g. notmyname@biggerish.someShortName01.shortname.outlook.com) and appear from something that looks like a store (e.g. contact_support.csz@fakestore.fr>). It passes SPF and DMARC but fails DKIM.
The content?
It used to be PAGES of stuff like "here's your email password reset link" or "thank you for signing up <legitimate place>". I was confused at first but then realized that yeah, this stuff likely bypass a ML filter. But the spammers have gotten better at it and now they can do it with only a page of content.
Of course, I can easily filter these by just parsing the "To Address" (I use Thunderbird). But I reported tons of these and was deleting them. But in middle of last year I decided to just start collecting them. I have over 50...
This is low hanging fruit stuff... Like a Naive Bayes could handle this. The current solution could probably handle it if they started actually fucking labeling the examples as spam and assumed that the labeling process was noisy (dear god I hope they use at least "legit" "unknown" "spam" and don't assume legit if it isn't marked as spam...)
I have EVEN TALKED TO A PERSON and the issue couldn't be escalated... Which IMO is being complacent in spam.
It's called criminalisation of compliance and pre-crime. It exists because there is a compliance-industrial complex selling software to create compliance. More compliance, more revenue. Social discussion does not matter, because what's good and what's bad is determined by software and compliance companies.
I disagree with using "debanking" as an example. At least in the US, banks are required by law (the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), et al) to not divulge certain information. As far as I'm aware, YouTube et al are not under such a legal requirement.
While we did not divulge your certain information, we regret to tell you that your certain information was access in a hack that was discovered (9 months later).
if they intentionally or unintentionally were the source of that certain information, there's little recourse for you after the fact
low trust economy is basically techno fascism. This is what a pre-cyberpunk distopia looks like, and while the first impacts appear towards progress, it's unlikely going to be about progress but cementing the technocrats and oligarchs.
There's more egregious cases though that I think illustrate the problem at large: no one wants accountability.
A very famous and egregious example is the XBox user who got banned for listing "Fort Gay" as their place of residence[0]. This is a problem that was caused by automation and honestly, could have entirely been resolved with automation too[1]. But it was also a problem that could have been resolved in under a minute were a human given real power to do anything (or recognize that the cheapest labor usually isn't the cheapest labor).
Another is how there's a family suing Google for directing a man to drive off a bridge[2]. Hold your reservations because this is kinda like the McDonald's Coffee lawsuit[3]. The bridge had collapsed in 2013 and the man drove off in 2022. There's multiple parties that share some fault here (like city for not marking and barricading the bridge[4]), but the issue was reported many times and what kind of live map system isn't updating their maps within a decade?
I frequently report spam, phishing attacks, and all sorts of stuff. Nothing gets through. Same with Google maps. Same with literally any app. I can even send to dev channels with patches and things often do not go through. I can sit on a PR for months while others are asking for a merge and then a dev comes back and says "oh, change color to colour" or something, I'll repatch that night, and then the dev goes radio silent (seriously, it is more work to ask me to make that change than it is to do it yourself...).
I have so many frustrations, but the root of it all is that I can't fix problems I find. Even if I can create the fix myself, I can't get them upstream so I don't have to patch every fucking patch that comes down. I think a lot comes down to our mentality of "move fast and break things." This is fine for learning but not fine for production. Who cleans up all the mess left behind? The debt just grows and compounds. I know mitigating future costs is "invisible" but often we're talking about 15 minutes of work. If you don't have that kind of slack in your system then you're doomed. It's like having exactly the number of lifeboats on a ship such that you can accommodate every passenger. That's dumb. You have to over accommodate. Or else you get the Titanic (which underaccommodated, despite being capable of overaccomodating).
[1] Step 1: Check user's location. If they aren't masking it, you'll find that they are located in "Fort Gay". Step 2: If it is masked, plug the fucking location into Google Maps or some database with a list of cities and check for a match. Done. Yay. 30 minutes of programming and you saved the company hundreds of dollars in customer service fees and millions of dollars in reputation rebuilding "fees".
[4] I highly advocate citizen action here. If you live near there, put a pile of rocks or anything in the way to make a barricade. Law comes after you? Fuck the law. Besides, I'm sure it'll make a great news story. We have those for people filling in potholes, this seems much more sensational.
XBox Fort Gay was a classic example of the Scunthorpe Problem[0]. I suppose we need a formal Scunthorpe Test, but this seems like you could solve the Problem with a popup checkbox and text field whenever your filter flags an account.
The seminal Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names[1] looks at similar territory from a different perspective.
There is room for a food delivery horror game. Procedurally generated delivery instructions that never make sense. Contact support, have a real voice chat with a LLM that leads nowhere. Don’t make quota? Get hunted and eaten by The Manager. All for tips that don’t pay your crippling medical bills nor allow you transition into better jobs. The horror writes itself.
There's no workplace to speak in hushed tones. There's no manager or de facto leader to make first contact with union representatives. There's no way to know when you've reached a quorum of local drivers.
Make no mistake, I sympathize with you. Rideshare/third-party delivery drivers have become America's new techno-feudalist underclass.
“It’s not unusual, except that Manna is telling you exactly what to do every second of every day. If it asks you to go to the back and get merchandise, it tells you exactly where to walk to go get it. And here is the weirdest part — I never see another employee the entire day. The way it makes me walk, I never run into anyone else. I can go for a full shift and never see another employee. Even our breaks are staggered. Everyone takes their breaks alone. We all arrive at staggered times. It’s like Manna is trying to totally eliminate human interaction on the job.”
The reality is that a large proportion of app workers are undocumented. Worker accounts are rented or sold to people who do not have the legal right to work. We can't reasonably address the issue of working conditions on these platforms if we don't acknowledge that fact.
There's no way to know when you've reached a quorum of local drivers.
SMS. When I drove for Uber, there were massive group chats amongst the drivers. They even organized planned shortages in certain parts of the city when rates got too low.
I’ve often felt like there would be a lot of value for an app that’d simply let gig workers in an area find each other to talk and actually create a “workplace”.
But I’m not sure how you’d fund its creation. No VC would want it and there’s not a wealthy user base to bootstrap it.
The much greater problem is that they are not employed. They are just self employed people, who take on gigs from various platforms.
They can, by definition, not unionize. Even striking is basically out of the question, as organization is near impossible and most of these people could not sustain months with zero pay.
This needs to be just made illegal, it is just a subversion of labor laws.
In the UK you can (and usually do) unionize without a workplace.
Many are industry-specific such as the "Communications wokers' union", but there are also general workers' unions such as GMB [1] or Unite.
It would be possible, indeed probably preferable, to form a "Delivery workers' union". It would be a union of delivery drivers who would pool resources to fight for common rights.
i'm surprised that more gig work delivery folks haven't tried to 'go independent' and become a new sort of personal assistant: select a handful of good clients and get them pay a retainer for you to drive around doing their busywork all day.
for the driver, consistent pay and the ability to weed out bad clients.
for the client, you'd get a trustworthy assistant that should be able to take on a wider range of things that a single app wouldn't do. it may not be as fast as an on-demand delivery apps, but for most things that doesn't really matter.
My (wealthy) father in law does this, he has a handful of people he can call upon day or night to do whatever he needs, anything from pick something up two hours away to put some additional overnight security on one of his sites/properties... most of them are ex-military Eastern European. I've no idea how he compensates them but they seem happy with him and stick around, and the couple I've spoken to over the years seem nice enough.
To be honest I wouldn't want to know more details, he's a dodgy fuck
My father in law (not so wealthy), has a few people near his beach rental that will do various different things. Including one handyman who will help with whatever.
There are whole management companies who do this type of stuff for vacation rentals. I’d bet there are similar ones for rich people’s primary and secondary homes.
Some years ago, I met a guy at a bar in New York who said that he was Donald Trump's personal courier. He rode a bike around the city, and he'd deliver things to Trump in person, who would always give him at least $100 cash on the spot. I didn't believe the guy's story, and it offended him. Maybe he was telling the truth.
These are primarily people delivering food orders at lunch time for less than $10.
The people paying for these services will not pay what it would cost to have a “personal assistant”.
Also they can only deliver so many orders at a time. If all of your clients order lunch around the same time, it’s not possible to deliver in a reasonable amount of time.
most of the folks getting ubereats delivery are not the target demo for being a PA client. but you don't have to be super wealthy for the economics of it to work out.
most tech employees make enough that they could pay 10-15 hrs of low wage work every week to do stuff like pick up your laundry/groceries, pick up a food order that you've called in, take stuff to the post office, etc.
It depends on the gig. Attempts to farm out housecleaning as a gig fail in exactly that way - people find the cleaner they want, and they arrange to make it permanent. Making the gig app as a discovery mechanism.
That's why none of the attempts at making housecleaning part of the gig economy have succeeded.
It depends on the gig. Attempts to farm out housecleaning as a gig fail in exactly that way - people find the cleaner they want, and they arrange to make it permanent.
That used to be considered a success, not a failure.
When agencies like Kelly place someone in a position like that, the person is required to work for Kelly for x number of months/years. Once that obligation is complete, they are free to jump to working directly with the Kelly client. Been there. Done that.
This is a solved problem. And solved a hundred years ago.
> i'm surprised that more gig work delivery folks haven't tried to 'go independent' and become a new sort of personal assistant: select a handful of good clients and get them pay a retainer for you to drive around doing their busywork all day.
I think you might be over-estimating how much of a personal connection gig work delivery drivers have with the people they deliver to.
How many do you recognize? How many do you even know the names of? I'm not even sure if I've ever had a repeat delivery person, except from one restaurant that does delivery in-house instead of farming it out to one of the services.
they don't have connections to them because they're still gig workers going through the app.
but all they need to do to start those relationships would be to drop off a business card if doordash/ubereats/etc sent them to somebody that seemed pleasant/tipped well/etc. then network effects from their as they recommend among their (presumably wealth) friends
Probably because the gig worker's client is Doordash, not the individuals ordering delivery, to which they have little to no contact and most likely wont ever see them again. As a delivery-orderer in NYC, I cannot recall ever having the same delivery person more than once, let alone so often that we developed a client-relationship.
big companies care more about how easy it is to automate the labels, the accounting, the scheduling, ... Saving 2 euro per delivery but requiring a few hour of human effort is typically not worth it
This has been the game of capital since the 1700s. What's new with AI is actually a novel apex of irrationality, wherein the efficiency and profitability is being abandoned somewhat in favor of preservation and control over production (businesses are electing to sacrifice efficient deterministic modes of analysis in favor of less reliable stochastic approaches just because these technologies will allow them to continue to divest the laboring masses of any power over capital)
> A few hours later he received an email explaining that the app company had “taken the decision to revoke access” to his account because he had been elongating his journey to the pickup point, taking longer than reasonable. It didn’t add up, but there was no straightforward way to find out more.
>It wasn’t until weeks later, when he exercised his legal right to request data held about himself, that he was told something completely different: the app company believed he had tried to manipulate the system to undeservedly earn extra fees for waiting at restaurants to pick up orders.
>This had been spotted by team members, the app company claimed. An apparent algorithmic intervention was now being described as a human one. But when Myron looked back at his pay records, he could see none of the fees he was accused of taking. It was discombobulating.
On top of putting the risk of demand for the business changing onto employees… it seems these companies can pass on the risk of even being accurate or honest with those employees.
I don't know if food delivery apps will be here to stay long term, their economics just don't work. It seems that everyone involved looses, the tech companies are constantly running in the red, the restaurants get screwed and the drivers get screwed.
Long term, food delivery will still be a thing but likely run by restaurants and smaller local apps.
It reminds me of the early days of Uber - the value add over taxis wasn’t in the ride itself*, it was the app and the fact that a car would actually show up. I suspect DoorDash et al are similar - the value add is the restaurant selection and the app ordering, not the actual delivery.
(* yes, yes, I too have stories about taxis. I now have stories about Uber drivers, too.)
Yes. Though at least in my market, that used to have delivery fees or minimum orders that made it unlikely you would order a single sandwich for lunch and have it delivered. The food delivery app services really emphasize that model of consumption but I'm not sure it's viable.
Here in the UK, food delivery companies are required to itemise their fees. The amount they take per order makes no sense to me. Their marginal cost should be tiny. Presumably they have investors and marketing fees to pay, but these aren’t costs that are fundamental to the business model, only to their growth model. Long term I think things will settle down as competition trims out this fat.
Swiggy and Zomato in India show inflated costs on items and lists a small fraction as delivery charges, which is waived for members. Does the UK law ban this trick?
When I think about what a reasonable hourly wage is, I don't see it working in my country at all. My understanding is that the main portion of drivers in Copenhagen is made up of exchange students, who have to work some hours per week to qualify for student aid, so it makes sense for them because the state basically tops up their wages.
It is not complicated why this is happening. Even very low wage jobs in wealthy countries pay 10x what people can make in poor countries. The gig economy advances a race to the bottom for wages, in particular because there is zero identity verification or language skills needed for most of these guys.
Of course the number of deliveries that must be completed in an hour increases. Of course the pay per delivery decreases. Of course the delivery bikers are constantly running red lights and getting killed. Of course the shoddy ebikes are burning down the tenements. That is the logic of the market: more, cheaper, all the time.
The one lesson companies refuse to learn from Apple and Nvidia is that a race to the bottom isn't the optimal strategy in the short, medium, or long term. It only hold both in the super long term in which you assume that innovation is dead or that innovation can be done at no extra cost.
If people had a slightly different perspective on this we would already have drones delivering food, but because of this mistaken belief drones won't be economically viable for the foreseeable future.
It wasn't a matter of lack of vision but cold constraints of reality resulting in the person fueled plan B. If I recall correctly they (the industry) already tried flying drones and wanted to have trucks as mobile hubs. Regulation said no to it. Because of the risks of delivery drones or their packages falling from the sky. Ground drones aren’t quite there yet just like self-driving cars (plus issues with where they would be allowed to travel).
I don't consider myself a xenophobe but it feels somewhat strange the first thing I ask when interacting with the new servant class is "do you speak Dutch". It's already considered normal that the delivery guy or Uber driver is an immigrant.
Very few locals want to do these jobs and maybe there is something wrong with that I don't know.
Unfortunately, multi-tiered societies ("those people do THAT work") have been a thing ever since people got the idea to settle down. Maybe for a brief period of time, these tiers could be in entirely separate hemispheres, but things tend to diffuse over time.
I was really hoping one of the P2P apps would take off. There's no real reason why we need a middle man injecting themselves and taking fees. The apps just get better marketing.
We literally just need an app to connect restaurants to couriers.
3. be liable for orders not delivered, or orders fraudulently placed
With a P2P app, wouldn’t you be engaging with a courier directly? That would mean that any problems would have to be taken up with the courier, I would think. It makes sense for restaurants to engage directly with couriers because they may have enough volume and repeat business that they can vet the couriers. But it does not make sense to me for individuals to engage with couriers directly, not for small-value items like meals.
Also payment processing. One charge to credit card or whatever is much simpler than having to individually send payment to first restaurant and then to courier.
In principle, you could have independent review services that publish ratings for couriers. Perhaps they could even make money insuring orders. But then this would run into just the same levels of frustrating opaqueness from the couriers' perspective.
P2P app could display (orders taken ever), (orders successfully delivered) for every courier. That would be good enough for 90% of costumers, but wouldn't cover the cost of actual fraud for the client.
Slice is a delivery platform that focuses on mom-and-pop pizza places. At least when I was involved years ago, they only charged a flat $1/order fee. They helped stores get their menus into the system, and then stores did their own deliveries. This model worked well because a lot of pizza places already had their own delivery drivers—probably more so than any other restaurant type.
I used to use Slice to order because the extra cost was nominal, and the drivers were local and worked directly for the pizza place. Issue with your order? Tell the driver, or tell the store, and it'd be addressed immediately, by real humans. Need to make last-minute changes to your order? Call the place directly and talk to a human. Get to know your driver because it's the same person most nights. Lots of upside.
Except everyone used DoorDash and GrubHub, even though Slice was both a better user experience and a far better experience for the restaurant owner. Slice cost restaurants less, cost consumers far less, and was a better solution in every way. But because the vast majority of the restaurant's deliver business came through DoorDash and other large delivery companies, most small restaurants have gotten rid of their own delivery drivers.
Slice still exists, but I expect it won't experience much growth. The big guys are dominant.
The competitors might have had better profit margin and therefore more ad spending, and more opportunity to expand area. Still, it's better to be akin Slice than to succumb to inevitable enshittification.
But it takes time to make actually compelling alternatives to platforms that have BILLIONS of dollars behind them, a huge network effect already, and if needed, monopoly lock-in where they can say “it’s either us or them” to market participants.
> Applications of Intercoin: Making Crypto Mainstream
> Combining Web 2.0 (social) with Web 3.0 (transactional) we call it Web 5.0
I'm sure you mean well, but things like this will never speak to the working class performing the gigs/work itself. You already alienate them by naming the project *Coin ("cryptocurrency is only for the rich to get richer"), and the more flowery language about technology you use, you alienate them further.
If you're aiming to get those folks onboard you need to 1) skip any details about the technical internals, the organization-side internals are much more important to non-tech people and 2) target a specific audience and write specifically addressing their specific needs/problems.
As a customer, I need a middleman/market maker to select participants and provide quality control.
There’s not a good reputation system so I would not use p2p cabs or food delivery because I don’t trust the drivers. At least with Uber, they will give me a refund, etc etc
In my area we have FB marketplace. People have been doing grocery shopping, delivery, etc for a long time. Heck there's a whole underground restaurant system as well.
I worked as a courier, running anything, sometimes it was this crazy route, picking and dropping envelopes, businuses and banks, in a set order, othertimes some little box, or a 10000gallon water tank, hot asphalt anyone?
Had an ancient 1 ton dully, with hoist, built 390 that would set off car alarms, if I dropped it back a gear and made it jump.
Never did meet the people doing dispatch, payed cash, wierd rules on getting paid.Liked my truck, didnt like doing courier so much.
It was very strange before someone tried to automate it, what I am saying.
The behavior of service work employers only makes sense when we consider that it's all geared towards the profits of owners and shareholders. There are few or no worker-owned companies, nonprofits or even corporate charters that make workers a priority. So without viable competition, profit-driven (as opposed to wage-driven) companies will continue to dominate.
We need a new mental framework for organizing companies to be worker-owned:
Worker-owned companies would receive a seal of approval from employees so they know where to apply, and companies that exploit workers would risk losing their seal and having their employees jump ship.
To use courier apps as an example: since there is little complexity in matching vendors with delivery workers, then a worker-first app should be able to compete. After all, it's pretty easy to save millions of dollars when employees vote on who gets bonuses and their sizes, rather than just paying the board (CEO, CFO, etc) whatever it skims for itself.
There's still the chicken-and-egg problem of needing users in order to scale. But I think we've been looking at it as a tough sell for too long, instead of offering a product (consistent employment and income with low constraints and commitments) that workers are eagerly looking for already.
what or how would such a company form in the first place?
The initial capital would essentially be from the workers themselves. Then, what about the newly hired workers - do they have to pay to get in? or do they get a share of the equity once they're hired?
What about the initial workers who have paid capital - do they get it back if they choose to leave? or do they now own equity, regardless of being an employee there?
You make a good point, that raising capital is the central problem.
It's particularly difficult today when wealth inequality is so high. When so many corporations have vacuumed up trillions of dollars of market cap, and billionaires sit on dynastic wealth that only gets spent through the lens of their ego, slowing innovation in sectors of the economy that aren't traditionally profitable like education, healthcare and the environment.
It seems odd that workers don't have much capital these days, while company owners and investors have millions or billions of dollars. It's reminiscent of the Gilded Age and robber barons collecting businesses into monopolies before regulation, or selling off their parts like private equity firms do today with companies like Toys "R" Us. It leads to feelings that the most likely future is one of megacorps and striking workers, with widespread suffering and violence while productivity is at an all-time high. Case in point:
In other words, we live in a rigged economy that hasn't catered to workers since 1980s trickle-down economics and austerity brought neoliberal policies that aren't recommended by macroeconomic principles into widespread adoption.
I believe that's a result of former colonies gaining their independence, so colonizer countries like the US and UK began colonizing themselves. Rather than investing in shared prosperity by nationalizing their means of production, or at the very least incentivizing the creation of worker-owned cooperatives, they chose to privatize them to maintain existing power structures.
Just like in the game of Monopoly, eventually a lucky few end up owning everything if they get an early win. When traditionally 90% of businesses failed in their first year, today we might have 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000 startups dominating sectors of the economy due to above-the-fold and long-tail effects.
Multiplied wasted effort under rugged individualist culture eventually grows to consume the entirety of workers' time as they scrape to make rent. Potential tires into wasted talent and widespread underemployment over lost decades as capitalism consumes itself in the end. Eventually driving populist movements that could shift the US's capitalist democratic republic and even Europe's social democracies into authoritarianism or even fascism. Books like Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty go into great depth exploring the inevitabilities of this late-stage capitalism.
Wow am I such a bright-eyed optimist this morning!
> Why, when the restaurant is busy and crying out for couriers, does the app say there are none available?
Good thing they test their developers so hard on DS&A. We don't want to let in those substandard developers who don't have a grasp on the advanced theoretical underpinnings on how to bring food to people.
Got denied for a car insurance company, one of the questions I bombed was "what is the topological sort algorithm make uses to build headers, and how do you implement it". The company doesn't use C.
I'm in the US, if these apps are going to depend on customers tipping for their drivers to get a reasonable wage, then tipping/delivery fee should be required. If people aren't willing to pay the drivers for their labor, they shouldn't place the order.
Lots of people get paid a normal wage to do subpar work. Why should delivery drivers be any different? If those jobs actually pay a decent wage, then better quality employees will be interested in doing them and the lower tier workers will get pushed out. It should naturally drive up the quality.
Won’t happen. It’s the perfect way to underpay people. You can overpromise and underdeliver without breaking the law. When your workers get upset about poor pay, they’ll mostly direct their ire at your customers rather than at you.
I would be happier to do it if there was transparency about how much of the delivery costs the restaurant is covering. Delivery services benefit both producers and consumers. I'm not willing to be on the hook for the whole thing.
The developers who freely, voluntarily, and willingly work on these projects, min-maxing human suffering to add 0.01% to a cell in a spreadsheet somewhere, deserve everything that's coming for them.
Gig workers are a genuine and serious regression in workers rights and employer vs. employee power balance. These "jobs" should not be allowed to exist, at all.
Tech companies have figured out a way to subvert the protections all other employees are subject to. I see absolutely no reason why they should be allowed to do this.
I really do not understand why governments aren't working hard to make this kind of gig-economy illegal.
This is true. it also hurts the public, as the drivers are dependent on the number of deliveries the succeed making, thus hurrying up and constantly stressed. This hurts not only their health and quality of delivery, but also increases the risk for traffic accidents.
It is in the best of interest of everyone that these people would get a normal salary.
Have you seen the discourse about this on social media? People are furious that the price of delivered food has gone up recently. They're not going to vote for increased prices. That and heavy astroturf campaigns by the middlemen guarantee that this situation will remain.
And so long as there's more cheap workers available who can easily be replaced, it's hard for the workers to do anything about it.
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I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with the gig economy model - it's a way of working that suits some workers and clients. But the balance of power needs to be shifted towards the workers (and clients) and away from the platforms.
I think this article is spot on. Platforms obfuscate their algorithms, and use that secrecy to play workers off against each other, and against their clients. Regulation would really help. There ought to be a right to...
1. An official explanation for each decision the algorithm makes. That could then be used as the basis for mandatory arbitration, if a party believes it's unfair.
2. Effective, and timely support from a human being, if that's required.
Together those would force the platforms to make their systems fairer (else be swamped by dealing with arbitration decisions), and easy to navigate (else be swamped by costly support calls).
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As long as they get tips, they will continue to speed.
See: pizza delivery people for decades.
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In CA at least, Uber effectively bought the protection through an effective ad campaign to pass by popular vote an effectively unrecoverable law to protect themselves.
Voters have no agency? Kind of a dim view on democratic processes.
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You tell the truth. That said, every other special interest already had a carve out from the authors of the bill. Uber/Doordash/Lyft just wanted the same special treatment.
I voted against the proposition but I also understood why Californian consumers would vote for it.
I recently learned that a courier in Panama can earn around $1,400 a month. Yes, you likely have to work six days a week, but that's well above the average salary in the country.
I'm not sure how the sentiment is in developed countries like the US and the UK. Still, here in Latin America, this presents an opportunity for poorer communities to provide dinner for a family.
In most of the western world the sentiment is that basic worker rights are a necessary element of social stability. And that just because a job "presents an opportunity for poorer communities to provide dinner for a family" it should not be excluded from receiving basic labor protections.
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How did you learn that? Did someone tell you or is there something we can read? I appreciate you mentioning it, I just want to know more about it. Thanks.
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Because it provides an extremely convenient service that has made life better for most people? People seem to forgot that this class of job used to not exist in our lifetimes. Was it better to be a low-skill worker on the job market in 2010 when these apps didn't exist?
If there are specific labor violations you think are taking place, the appropriate remedy is regulation, not banning.
>Was it better to be a low-skill worker on the job market in 2010 when these apps didn't exist?
If you had a job certainly. Basically any job is superior, as you actually do have some rights.
>If there are specific labor violations you think are taking place, the appropriate remedy is regulation, not banning.
The whole concept is a violation of labor laws. Every aspect is bad.
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> I really do not understand why governments aren't working hard to make this kind of gig-economy illegal.
Because there's a large number of people who take the writings of Ayan Rand and the policies of Ronald Regan as the best way to run government.
Workers' rights are being eroded because we've slowly dismantled and privatized as much of the government as possible.
Workers' rights are incompatible with small government and or libertarian ideals. Much like other rights such as civil rights. Or rights to clean water, air, and food.
Big government isn't perfect, but for its flaws there are benefits having a large organization with a bigger stick to beat in line robber barons whose entire goal is to undermine rights as much as possible to leach maximum profit from society.
>Because there's a large number of people who take the writings of Ayan Rand and the policies of Ronald Regan as the best way to run government.
Are these people currently running e.g. the UK?
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The best thing for the people is hard, actual systematic competition where the ruling class lifes in constant fear.
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> I really do not understand why governments aren't working hard to make this kind of gig-economy illegal.
It makes money and the current governing/legal doctrine says the government should give a lot of leeway to that. Biden has been touted as the most pro-labor president since about LBJ, but a lot of this is just letting the NLRB mediate every individual starbucks that unionized.
Not sure if Uber Eats falls under gig work (think so) but I'm glad to have it, I can just turn it on and go. Granted in my case it's not my only job. I usually get $20/hr I know I'm destroying my own car in the process, get in a car crash I'm on my own. But again it's extra money on demand.
I thought you were covered by Uber's car insurance when you were on their clock?
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The other thing is the instant pay out, being on a bi-weekly pay schedule and unfortunately living check to check, being able to get money the same day as I worked is nice.
Why someone other than me and my employers should decide whether my job is allowed to exist?
You only get to say this if you stake the strong libertarian claim that it's impossible to exploit adults. Make sure you're okay with the most extreme exploitation.
e.g. Why should anyone else get between a literally starving person and an employer asking to sign a contract of lifetime servitude?
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Gig workers are a perfect example of how inhumanly ruthless our capitalistic overlords are.
>These "jobs" should not be allowed to exist, at all.
Piece work is nothing new in the economic landscape of history. I'm not saying I absolutely defend it or think it shouldn't be subject to some sorts of protective rules for workers, but you saying it shouldn't exist at all begs the question of what exactly these many, many workers should do instead to make extra, necessary money instead.
If you're of a mind to answer, don't mention something from some neat ideal you have in your mind, describe something practical and accessible in the real world of the present, right now, that could replace their gig wages under existing market dynamics.
It's easy to dislike something and say it should be made to go away, but it helps to know how that will affect those who depend on it, and also to ask what they think of its disappearance in their practical lives.
>but you saying it shouldn't exist at all begs the question of what exactly these many, many workers should do instead to make extra, necessary money instead.
The exact same thing they are doing now, except as employees.
I do not think this is some utopian vision. Worker rights are a very real thing in other low skill jobs.
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Once you actually read the article .. you see a similar kind of thing to complaints about Youtube or bank demonetization. People are accused of fraud, and have their access withdrawn - but nobody will explain what they allegedly did, because that would leak information about the fraud detection.
It's a kind of automated low trust economy. The drivers don't trust the apps, and the app doesn't trust the drivers, so the thing has to be held together by surveillance and micromanagement.
I am currently in a nightmare scenario at a new job. I just finished building their website, and it got flagged as a phishing website by Google Safebrowsing because Google seems to think that our analytics subdomain which is a self-hosted instance of Umami Analytics is a phishing attempt.
I requested a review once, they removed the flag. It came back a couple of days ago. I then had to move Umami to its own domain because I couldn't risk this ever happening again (visitors to our root domain were also getting the huge red warning, and our business was coming off as a scam).
Then they flagged the new domain as well. They've removed it again at my request, but I am just counting down the days until it happens again.
There is no way for me to get through to a human to talk about why this is happening.
Have legal send Google a C&D and shoot an email to the FTC about anticompetitive behavior. That's how you get a human involved.
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They've clearly implemented prejustice, but not correctly. Find that class action lawyer and go fishing!
Clearly you should move to google’s analytics product.
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> The drivers don't trust the apps, and the app doesn't trust the drivers, so the thing has to be held together by surveillance and micromanagement.
Exactly. And a large dose of gaming the system (or trying to), which reduces trust even further. Why play fair with an unaccountable algorithm?
That and the use of black box models whose predictions are not explainable.
What's fun is you can still do black box probing. And guess what, spammers have done this.
I get these emails that look like classic spam like a link to a home depot or wallmart giftcard, but they're addressed to someone who isn't me. After getting a bunch of these I decided to look at the original email. They are being sent to an outlook (e.g. notmyname@biggerish.someShortName01.shortname.outlook.com) and appear from something that looks like a store (e.g. contact_support.csz@fakestore.fr>). It passes SPF and DMARC but fails DKIM.
The content?
It used to be PAGES of stuff like "here's your email password reset link" or "thank you for signing up <legitimate place>". I was confused at first but then realized that yeah, this stuff likely bypass a ML filter. But the spammers have gotten better at it and now they can do it with only a page of content.
Of course, I can easily filter these by just parsing the "To Address" (I use Thunderbird). But I reported tons of these and was deleting them. But in middle of last year I decided to just start collecting them. I have over 50...
This is low hanging fruit stuff... Like a Naive Bayes could handle this. The current solution could probably handle it if they started actually fucking labeling the examples as spam and assumed that the labeling process was noisy (dear god I hope they use at least "legit" "unknown" "spam" and don't assume legit if it isn't marked as spam...)
I have EVEN TALKED TO A PERSON and the issue couldn't be escalated... Which IMO is being complacent in spam.
With regards to bank demobilization here is an interesting article.
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...
About Fetlife from 2017, 8 years ago.
https://pastebin.com/FFSQUML9
With the movement to a cashless world .. many people will loose there whole life because banks will close there accounts.
It's called criminalisation of compliance and pre-crime. It exists because there is a compliance-industrial complex selling software to create compliance. More compliance, more revenue. Social discussion does not matter, because what's good and what's bad is determined by software and compliance companies.
Here is a book about it:
https://www.amazon.com/Compliance-Industrial-Complex-Operati...
I disagree with using "debanking" as an example. At least in the US, banks are required by law (the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), et al) to not divulge certain information. As far as I'm aware, YouTube et al are not under such a legal requirement.
While we did not divulge your certain information, we regret to tell you that your certain information was access in a hack that was discovered (9 months later).
if they intentionally or unintentionally were the source of that certain information, there's little recourse for you after the fact
The effect is the same, though.
low trust economy is basically techno fascism. This is what a pre-cyberpunk distopia looks like, and while the first impacts appear towards progress, it's unlikely going to be about progress but cementing the technocrats and oligarchs.
I don’t think we need to use the pre prefix anymore. This is legit with all hallmarks.
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There is an old Charlie Chaplin movie about turning factory workers into an extension of machines.
If an app pretty much tells you how to do your job there's no place for personal expression and you become a zombie.
Sounds pretty close to the dystopian predictions…….
There's more egregious cases though that I think illustrate the problem at large: no one wants accountability.
A very famous and egregious example is the XBox user who got banned for listing "Fort Gay" as their place of residence[0]. This is a problem that was caused by automation and honestly, could have entirely been resolved with automation too[1]. But it was also a problem that could have been resolved in under a minute were a human given real power to do anything (or recognize that the cheapest labor usually isn't the cheapest labor).
Another is how there's a family suing Google for directing a man to drive off a bridge[2]. Hold your reservations because this is kinda like the McDonald's Coffee lawsuit[3]. The bridge had collapsed in 2013 and the man drove off in 2022. There's multiple parties that share some fault here (like city for not marking and barricading the bridge[4]), but the issue was reported many times and what kind of live map system isn't updating their maps within a decade?
I frequently report spam, phishing attacks, and all sorts of stuff. Nothing gets through. Same with Google maps. Same with literally any app. I can even send to dev channels with patches and things often do not go through. I can sit on a PR for months while others are asking for a merge and then a dev comes back and says "oh, change color to colour" or something, I'll repatch that night, and then the dev goes radio silent (seriously, it is more work to ask me to make that change than it is to do it yourself...).
I have so many frustrations, but the root of it all is that I can't fix problems I find. Even if I can create the fix myself, I can't get them upstream so I don't have to patch every fucking patch that comes down. I think a lot comes down to our mentality of "move fast and break things." This is fine for learning but not fine for production. Who cleans up all the mess left behind? The debt just grows and compounds. I know mitigating future costs is "invisible" but often we're talking about 15 minutes of work. If you don't have that kind of slack in your system then you're doomed. It's like having exactly the number of lifeboats on a ship such that you can accommodate every passenger. That's dumb. You have to over accommodate. Or else you get the Titanic (which underaccommodated, despite being capable of overaccomodating).
[0] https://kotaku.com/xbox-live-gamer-suspended-for-living-in-f...
[1] Step 1: Check user's location. If they aren't masking it, you'll find that they are located in "Fort Gay". Step 2: If it is masked, plug the fucking location into Google Maps or some database with a list of cities and check for a match. Done. Yay. 30 minutes of programming and you saved the company hundreds of dollars in customer service fees and millions of dollars in reputation rebuilding "fees".
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/21/us/father-death-google-gps-dr...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...
[4] I highly advocate citizen action here. If you live near there, put a pile of rocks or anything in the way to make a barricade. Law comes after you? Fuck the law. Besides, I'm sure it'll make a great news story. We have those for people filling in potholes, this seems much more sensational.
XBox Fort Gay was a classic example of the Scunthorpe Problem[0]. I suppose we need a formal Scunthorpe Test, but this seems like you could solve the Problem with a popup checkbox and text field whenever your filter flags an account.
The seminal Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names[1] looks at similar territory from a different perspective.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
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The Scunthorpe effect
There is room for a food delivery horror game. Procedurally generated delivery instructions that never make sense. Contact support, have a real voice chat with a LLM that leads nowhere. Don’t make quota? Get hunted and eaten by The Manager. All for tips that don’t pay your crippling medical bills nor allow you transition into better jobs. The horror writes itself.
Sorry We're Open is a similar idea except focused on working retail rather than the gig economy. I recommend it!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2161450/Sorry_Were_Open/
The real challenge would be how you soften the game enough that players don't immediately lose all hope and go outside to touch grass.
Make that the victory condition. Secret ending after N hours of inactivity. You lose when you sign in next, though.
In game crypto currency betting!
What could go wrong?
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Unionize. Collective action is the only way to stand up to Uber and co.
How?
There's no workplace to speak in hushed tones. There's no manager or de facto leader to make first contact with union representatives. There's no way to know when you've reached a quorum of local drivers.
Make no mistake, I sympathize with you. Rideshare/third-party delivery drivers have become America's new techno-feudalist underclass.
“It’s not unusual, except that Manna is telling you exactly what to do every second of every day. If it asks you to go to the back and get merchandise, it tells you exactly where to walk to go get it. And here is the weirdest part — I never see another employee the entire day. The way it makes me walk, I never run into anyone else. I can go for a full shift and never see another employee. Even our breaks are staggered. Everyone takes their breaks alone. We all arrive at staggered times. It’s like Manna is trying to totally eliminate human interaction on the job.”
All described in prescient classic: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
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The ADCU has been representing app drivers and couriers in the UK for years, but they're probably not the best model.
https://www.adcu.org.uk/
https://www.wired.com/story/adcu-gig-economy-union-toxic-rep...
The reality is that a large proportion of app workers are undocumented. Worker accounts are rented or sold to people who do not have the legal right to work. We can't reasonably address the issue of working conditions on these platforms if we don't acknowledge that fact.
https://inews.co.uk/news/deliveroo-uber-eats-just-eat-illega...
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There's no workplace to speak in hushed tones.
There's no way to know when you've reached a quorum of local drivers.
SMS. When I drove for Uber, there were massive group chats amongst the drivers. They even organized planned shortages in certain parts of the city when rates got too low.
I’ve often felt like there would be a lot of value for an app that’d simply let gig workers in an area find each other to talk and actually create a “workplace”.
But I’m not sure how you’d fund its creation. No VC would want it and there’s not a wealthy user base to bootstrap it.
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I’m guessing there a discord server somewhere with 90% management agents just waiting to honeypot potential union workers.
Seems like digital workplace should be easier to organize with all the community tools we have.
The much greater problem is that they are not employed. They are just self employed people, who take on gigs from various platforms.
They can, by definition, not unionize. Even striking is basically out of the question, as organization is near impossible and most of these people could not sustain months with zero pay.
This needs to be just made illegal, it is just a subversion of labor laws.
In the UK you can (and usually do) unionize without a workplace.
Many are industry-specific such as the "Communications wokers' union", but there are also general workers' unions such as GMB [1] or Unite.
It would be possible, indeed probably preferable, to form a "Delivery workers' union". It would be a union of delivery drivers who would pool resources to fight for common rights.
[1] https://www.gmb.org.uk/campaigns/deliveroo/
Well, those companies have a CEO, Director of Something, etc...
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They already have: https://www.gmb.org.uk/campaigns/deliveroo/
The critical industry of McDonald's delivery will never pay a living wage. There's not enough value. Folks will have to self-select out.
McD’s has doubled prices with rising profits
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i'm surprised that more gig work delivery folks haven't tried to 'go independent' and become a new sort of personal assistant: select a handful of good clients and get them pay a retainer for you to drive around doing their busywork all day.
for the driver, consistent pay and the ability to weed out bad clients. for the client, you'd get a trustworthy assistant that should be able to take on a wider range of things that a single app wouldn't do. it may not be as fast as an on-demand delivery apps, but for most things that doesn't really matter.
My (wealthy) father in law does this, he has a handful of people he can call upon day or night to do whatever he needs, anything from pick something up two hours away to put some additional overnight security on one of his sites/properties... most of them are ex-military Eastern European. I've no idea how he compensates them but they seem happy with him and stick around, and the couple I've spoken to over the years seem nice enough.
To be honest I wouldn't want to know more details, he's a dodgy fuck
I think those kind of assistants are called henchmen ;-)
My father in law (not so wealthy), has a few people near his beach rental that will do various different things. Including one handyman who will help with whatever.
There are whole management companies who do this type of stuff for vacation rentals. I’d bet there are similar ones for rich people’s primary and secondary homes.
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Don't even think about cheating on your wife
Startup idea: TaskRabbit but for ex-military Eastern Europeans who will do whatever a dodgy fuck wants.
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> My (wealthy) father in law
> I've no idea how he compensates them
I'm going to guess with a lot of money. That likely doesn't get reported to relevant tax authorities.
this sounds like the kind of thing you shouldn't post on the internet :)
Some years ago, I met a guy at a bar in New York who said that he was Donald Trump's personal courier. He rode a bike around the city, and he'd deliver things to Trump in person, who would always give him at least $100 cash on the spot. I didn't believe the guy's story, and it offended him. Maybe he was telling the truth.
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These are primarily people delivering food orders at lunch time for less than $10.
The people paying for these services will not pay what it would cost to have a “personal assistant”.
Also they can only deliver so many orders at a time. If all of your clients order lunch around the same time, it’s not possible to deliver in a reasonable amount of time.
For food delivery, I imagine going back to pre-apps and have restaurant employed couriers for local takeout could be beneficial for both parties.
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most of the folks getting ubereats delivery are not the target demo for being a PA client. but you don't have to be super wealthy for the economics of it to work out.
most tech employees make enough that they could pay 10-15 hrs of low wage work every week to do stuff like pick up your laundry/groceries, pick up a food order that you've called in, take stuff to the post office, etc.
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It depends on the gig. Attempts to farm out housecleaning as a gig fail in exactly that way - people find the cleaner they want, and they arrange to make it permanent. Making the gig app as a discovery mechanism.
That's why none of the attempts at making housecleaning part of the gig economy have succeeded.
It depends on the gig. Attempts to farm out housecleaning as a gig fail in exactly that way - people find the cleaner they want, and they arrange to make it permanent.
That used to be considered a success, not a failure.
When agencies like Kelly place someone in a position like that, the person is required to work for Kelly for x number of months/years. Once that obligation is complete, they are free to jump to working directly with the Kelly client. Been there. Done that.
This is a solved problem. And solved a hundred years ago.
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> i'm surprised that more gig work delivery folks haven't tried to 'go independent' and become a new sort of personal assistant: select a handful of good clients and get them pay a retainer for you to drive around doing their busywork all day.
I think you might be over-estimating how much of a personal connection gig work delivery drivers have with the people they deliver to.
How many do you recognize? How many do you even know the names of? I'm not even sure if I've ever had a repeat delivery person, except from one restaurant that does delivery in-house instead of farming it out to one of the services.
they don't have connections to them because they're still gig workers going through the app.
but all they need to do to start those relationships would be to drop off a business card if doordash/ubereats/etc sent them to somebody that seemed pleasant/tipped well/etc. then network effects from their as they recommend among their (presumably wealth) friends
Don't get on Uncle Enzo's bad side though.
> select a handful of good clients
Probably because the gig worker's client is Doordash, not the individuals ordering delivery, to which they have little to no contact and most likely wont ever see them again. As a delivery-orderer in NYC, I cannot recall ever having the same delivery person more than once, let alone so often that we developed a client-relationship.
UpWork would let people do this today.
That's already a thing, it's a just a normal courier service.
big companies care more about how easy it is to automate the labels, the accounting, the scheduling, ... Saving 2 euro per delivery but requiring a few hour of human effort is typically not worth it
Could even make an app for that.
That's AI working as intended. Your labor isn't considered, only efficiency and profitability. We all better get used to it.
This has been the game of capital since the 1700s. What's new with AI is actually a novel apex of irrationality, wherein the efficiency and profitability is being abandoned somewhat in favor of preservation and control over production (businesses are electing to sacrifice efficient deterministic modes of analysis in favor of less reliable stochastic approaches just because these technologies will allow them to continue to divest the laboring masses of any power over capital)
The true paperclip problem is done with human hands, enslaved by the efficiency algorithm holding Damocles.
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That can be fixed with more capitalism, for example there is a business opportunity right there:
> Why, when the restaurant is busy and crying out for couriers, does the app say there are none available?
Let the restaurant know they can call you.
> A few hours later he received an email explaining that the app company had “taken the decision to revoke access” to his account because he had been elongating his journey to the pickup point, taking longer than reasonable. It didn’t add up, but there was no straightforward way to find out more.
>It wasn’t until weeks later, when he exercised his legal right to request data held about himself, that he was told something completely different: the app company believed he had tried to manipulate the system to undeservedly earn extra fees for waiting at restaurants to pick up orders.
>This had been spotted by team members, the app company claimed. An apparent algorithmic intervention was now being described as a human one. But when Myron looked back at his pay records, he could see none of the fees he was accused of taking. It was discombobulating.
On top of putting the risk of demand for the business changing onto employees… it seems these companies can pass on the risk of even being accurate or honest with those employees.
I found this firsthand account of a gig worker trapped by the algorithm pretty compelling: https://zerohplovecraft.substack.com/p/the-gig-economy
> we’re pointless argument vegetables growing in walled gardens, harvested for the benefit of robots that serve us ads.
That line hooked me
This is fascinating writing, but there's no way it isn't fiction.
Spoiler!
I didn’t open that, but I love the domain name.
I don't know if food delivery apps will be here to stay long term, their economics just don't work. It seems that everyone involved looses, the tech companies are constantly running in the red, the restaurants get screwed and the drivers get screwed.
Long term, food delivery will still be a thing but likely run by restaurants and smaller local apps.
Food delivery run by restaurants has existed fine for decades for pizza and chinese food. I guess the delivery app puts too many fingers into the pie.
It reminds me of the early days of Uber - the value add over taxis wasn’t in the ride itself*, it was the app and the fact that a car would actually show up. I suspect DoorDash et al are similar - the value add is the restaurant selection and the app ordering, not the actual delivery.
(* yes, yes, I too have stories about taxis. I now have stories about Uber drivers, too.)
Yes. Though at least in my market, that used to have delivery fees or minimum orders that made it unlikely you would order a single sandwich for lunch and have it delivered. The food delivery app services really emphasize that model of consumption but I'm not sure it's viable.
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Here in the UK, food delivery companies are required to itemise their fees. The amount they take per order makes no sense to me. Their marginal cost should be tiny. Presumably they have investors and marketing fees to pay, but these aren’t costs that are fundamental to the business model, only to their growth model. Long term I think things will settle down as competition trims out this fat.
Swiggy and Zomato in India show inflated costs on items and lists a small fraction as delivery charges, which is waived for members. Does the UK law ban this trick?
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When I think about what a reasonable hourly wage is, I don't see it working in my country at all. My understanding is that the main portion of drivers in Copenhagen is made up of exchange students, who have to work some hours per week to qualify for student aid, so it makes sense for them because the state basically tops up their wages.
That actually sounds like an ideal system for providing opportunities to low-wage workers without locking them into low wages indefinitely
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It is not complicated why this is happening. Even very low wage jobs in wealthy countries pay 10x what people can make in poor countries. The gig economy advances a race to the bottom for wages, in particular because there is zero identity verification or language skills needed for most of these guys.
Of course the number of deliveries that must be completed in an hour increases. Of course the pay per delivery decreases. Of course the delivery bikers are constantly running red lights and getting killed. Of course the shoddy ebikes are burning down the tenements. That is the logic of the market: more, cheaper, all the time.
The one lesson companies refuse to learn from Apple and Nvidia is that a race to the bottom isn't the optimal strategy in the short, medium, or long term. It only hold both in the super long term in which you assume that innovation is dead or that innovation can be done at no extra cost.
If people had a slightly different perspective on this we would already have drones delivering food, but because of this mistaken belief drones won't be economically viable for the foreseeable future.
> because of this mistaken belief drones won't be economically viable for the foreseeable future.
i dont think it's mistaken.
A crashed drone is a capital loss for the delivery app company. A crashed driver is not.
It wasn't a matter of lack of vision but cold constraints of reality resulting in the person fueled plan B. If I recall correctly they (the industry) already tried flying drones and wanted to have trucks as mobile hubs. Regulation said no to it. Because of the risks of delivery drones or their packages falling from the sky. Ground drones aren’t quite there yet just like self-driving cars (plus issues with where they would be allowed to travel).
I don't consider myself a xenophobe but it feels somewhat strange the first thing I ask when interacting with the new servant class is "do you speak Dutch". It's already considered normal that the delivery guy or Uber driver is an immigrant.
Very few locals want to do these jobs and maybe there is something wrong with that I don't know.
Unfortunately, multi-tiered societies ("those people do THAT work") have been a thing ever since people got the idea to settle down. Maybe for a brief period of time, these tiers could be in entirely separate hemispheres, but things tend to diffuse over time.
I was really hoping one of the P2P apps would take off. There's no real reason why we need a middle man injecting themselves and taking fees. The apps just get better marketing.
We literally just need an app to connect restaurants to couriers.
I see the reason for the middle man is to:
1. develop the platform
2. set standards for what “delivery” is
3. be liable for orders not delivered, or orders fraudulently placed
With a P2P app, wouldn’t you be engaging with a courier directly? That would mean that any problems would have to be taken up with the courier, I would think. It makes sense for restaurants to engage directly with couriers because they may have enough volume and repeat business that they can vet the couriers. But it does not make sense to me for individuals to engage with couriers directly, not for small-value items like meals.
Also payment processing. One charge to credit card or whatever is much simpler than having to individually send payment to first restaurant and then to courier.
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In principle, you could have independent review services that publish ratings for couriers. Perhaps they could even make money insuring orders. But then this would run into just the same levels of frustrating opaqueness from the couriers' perspective.
P2P app could display (orders taken ever), (orders successfully delivered) for every courier. That would be good enough for 90% of costumers, but wouldn't cover the cost of actual fraud for the client.
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Slice is a delivery platform that focuses on mom-and-pop pizza places. At least when I was involved years ago, they only charged a flat $1/order fee. They helped stores get their menus into the system, and then stores did their own deliveries. This model worked well because a lot of pizza places already had their own delivery drivers—probably more so than any other restaurant type.
I used to use Slice to order because the extra cost was nominal, and the drivers were local and worked directly for the pizza place. Issue with your order? Tell the driver, or tell the store, and it'd be addressed immediately, by real humans. Need to make last-minute changes to your order? Call the place directly and talk to a human. Get to know your driver because it's the same person most nights. Lots of upside.
Except everyone used DoorDash and GrubHub, even though Slice was both a better user experience and a far better experience for the restaurant owner. Slice cost restaurants less, cost consumers far less, and was a better solution in every way. But because the vast majority of the restaurant's deliver business came through DoorDash and other large delivery companies, most small restaurants have gotten rid of their own delivery drivers.
Slice still exists, but I expect it won't experience much growth. The big guys are dominant.
The competitors might have had better profit margin and therefore more ad spending, and more opportunity to expand area. Still, it's better to be akin Slice than to succumb to inevitable enshittification.
I have been posting about cutting out the middleman for all sorts of ecosystems. Drivers and Passengers for instance.
For that we need an open decentralized source platform with no profit motive.
That’s what I built: https://intercoin.org/applications
https://qbix.com/communities
But it takes time to make actually compelling alternatives to platforms that have BILLIONS of dollars behind them, a huge network effect already, and if needed, monopoly lock-in where they can say “it’s either us or them” to market participants.
> Applications of Intercoin: Making Crypto Mainstream
> Combining Web 2.0 (social) with Web 3.0 (transactional) we call it Web 5.0
I'm sure you mean well, but things like this will never speak to the working class performing the gigs/work itself. You already alienate them by naming the project *Coin ("cryptocurrency is only for the rich to get richer"), and the more flowery language about technology you use, you alienate them further.
If you're aiming to get those folks onboard you need to 1) skip any details about the technical internals, the organization-side internals are much more important to non-tech people and 2) target a specific audience and write specifically addressing their specific needs/problems.
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QBix link returns response in a format not for humans
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As a customer, I need a middleman/market maker to select participants and provide quality control.
There’s not a good reputation system so I would not use p2p cabs or food delivery because I don’t trust the drivers. At least with Uber, they will give me a refund, etc etc
That's a job for the government, it already has a lot of reputation data about everyone.
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In my area we have FB marketplace. People have been doing grocery shopping, delivery, etc for a long time. Heck there's a whole underground restaurant system as well.
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I worked as a courier, running anything, sometimes it was this crazy route, picking and dropping envelopes, businuses and banks, in a set order, othertimes some little box, or a 10000gallon water tank, hot asphalt anyone? Had an ancient 1 ton dully, with hoist, built 390 that would set off car alarms, if I dropped it back a gear and made it jump. Never did meet the people doing dispatch, payed cash, wierd rules on getting paid.Liked my truck, didnt like doing courier so much. It was very strange before someone tried to automate it, what I am saying.
The behavior of service work employers only makes sense when we consider that it's all geared towards the profits of owners and shareholders. There are few or no worker-owned companies, nonprofits or even corporate charters that make workers a priority. So without viable competition, profit-driven (as opposed to wage-driven) companies will continue to dominate.
We need a new mental framework for organizing companies to be worker-owned:
https://www.noemamag.com/overthrowing-our-tech-overlords/
Worker-owned companies would receive a seal of approval from employees so they know where to apply, and companies that exploit workers would risk losing their seal and having their employees jump ship.
To use courier apps as an example: since there is little complexity in matching vendors with delivery workers, then a worker-first app should be able to compete. After all, it's pretty easy to save millions of dollars when employees vote on who gets bonuses and their sizes, rather than just paying the board (CEO, CFO, etc) whatever it skims for itself.
There's still the chicken-and-egg problem of needing users in order to scale. But I think we've been looking at it as a tough sell for too long, instead of offering a product (consistent employment and income with low constraints and commitments) that workers are eagerly looking for already.
> Worker-owned companies
what or how would such a company form in the first place?
The initial capital would essentially be from the workers themselves. Then, what about the newly hired workers - do they have to pay to get in? or do they get a share of the equity once they're hired?
What about the initial workers who have paid capital - do they get it back if they choose to leave? or do they now own equity, regardless of being an employee there?
You make a good point, that raising capital is the central problem.
It's particularly difficult today when wealth inequality is so high. When so many corporations have vacuumed up trillions of dollars of market cap, and billionaires sit on dynastic wealth that only gets spent through the lens of their ego, slowing innovation in sectors of the economy that aren't traditionally profitable like education, healthcare and the environment.
It seems odd that workers don't have much capital these days, while company owners and investors have millions or billions of dollars. It's reminiscent of the Gilded Age and robber barons collecting businesses into monopolies before regulation, or selling off their parts like private equity firms do today with companies like Toys "R" Us. It leads to feelings that the most likely future is one of megacorps and striking workers, with widespread suffering and violence while productivity is at an all-time high. Case in point:
https://apnews.com/article/amazon-warehouses-quebec-union-jo...
In other words, we live in a rigged economy that hasn't catered to workers since 1980s trickle-down economics and austerity brought neoliberal policies that aren't recommended by macroeconomic principles into widespread adoption.
I believe that's a result of former colonies gaining their independence, so colonizer countries like the US and UK began colonizing themselves. Rather than investing in shared prosperity by nationalizing their means of production, or at the very least incentivizing the creation of worker-owned cooperatives, they chose to privatize them to maintain existing power structures.
Just like in the game of Monopoly, eventually a lucky few end up owning everything if they get an early win. When traditionally 90% of businesses failed in their first year, today we might have 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000 startups dominating sectors of the economy due to above-the-fold and long-tail effects.
Multiplied wasted effort under rugged individualist culture eventually grows to consume the entirety of workers' time as they scrape to make rent. Potential tires into wasted talent and widespread underemployment over lost decades as capitalism consumes itself in the end. Eventually driving populist movements that could shift the US's capitalist democratic republic and even Europe's social democracies into authoritarianism or even fascism. Books like Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty go into great depth exploring the inevitabilities of this late-stage capitalism.
Wow am I such a bright-eyed optimist this morning!
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> Why, when the restaurant is busy and crying out for couriers, does the app say there are none available?
Good thing they test their developers so hard on DS&A. We don't want to let in those substandard developers who don't have a grasp on the advanced theoretical underpinnings on how to bring food to people.
Currently in an idle search of a new position.
Got denied for a car insurance company, one of the questions I bombed was "what is the topological sort algorithm make uses to build headers, and how do you implement it". The company doesn't use C.
My assumption would be that the orgs aren't quite sure how they work either.
Searching for deeper meaning in some javascript gluecode bug made by an intern, now thats whathehackernews worthy.
I'm in the US, if these apps are going to depend on customers tipping for their drivers to get a reasonable wage, then tipping/delivery fee should be required. If people aren't willing to pay the drivers for their labor, they shouldn't place the order.
If tipping is required it is no longer tipping. It’s a tax/fee.
I don’t get why people are expecting to receive tips even if the service provided is fine at best.
It’s not about people being entitled it’s about employers recognizing an opportunity to subsidize their labor costs.
The employer is the one building in the expectation for tips.
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Lots of people get paid a normal wage to do subpar work. Why should delivery drivers be any different? If those jobs actually pay a decent wage, then better quality employees will be interested in doing them and the lower tier workers will get pushed out. It should naturally drive up the quality.
Won’t happen. It’s the perfect way to underpay people. You can overpromise and underdeliver without breaking the law. When your workers get upset about poor pay, they’ll mostly direct their ire at your customers rather than at you.
I would be happier to do it if there was transparency about how much of the delivery costs the restaurant is covering. Delivery services benefit both producers and consumers. I'm not willing to be on the hook for the whole thing.
Why should the restaurant cover any of the cost of delivery?
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"Hundreds of delivery riders injured as food app boom creates 'deadly cocktail'"
https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/hundreds-of-deli...
The developers who freely, voluntarily, and willingly work on these projects, min-maxing human suffering to add 0.01% to a cell in a spreadsheet somewhere, deserve everything that's coming for them.
As long as they have a deep bench of zero barrier to entry replacements this likely wont change
This is a feature, not a bug. The goal of the algorithm is to reduce the labor cost of delivery.
Welcome to our shiny AI future, folks.
Eh, I feel the same way about google search
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