In my experience as an IT guy 1099 contracting is really rare.
People are "contracted" in that BigCorp contracts with an IT services company who provides the IT workers, but those workers are definitely employees (just not of BigCorp). AB5 isn't addressing that kind of relationship... which has its own problems for sure but isn't nearly as exploitative as 1099ing everyone.
Even if a company was 1099ing everyone and didn't want to hire them on properly then there will absolutely be IT service companies offering to hire all of BigCorp's 1099s and play man in the middle so BigCorp has less of a disruption.
Phone support is the same way, I've never ever heard of a 1099 phone monkey.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Frankly, my money is on Uber and co geo-fencing their apps to not work in California, rather than taking any measures to actually abide by this new law.
Assuming that just ignoring the law entirely and continuing to work within the area is not an option.
If the IT is contracted out (which it probably isn't at a company that large), then they're probably contracted out from another company that DOES employ the IT guys full time.
Frankly, my money is on Uber and co geo-fencing their apps to not work in California, rather than taking any measures to actually abide by this new law.
Assuming that just ignoring the law entirely and continuing to work within the area is not an option.
i don't think uber and such apps can willfully give up such a huge customer base.
i guess shutting off CA in a power play in an attempt to cause enough backlash to make the law get overturned by proposition is their best bet here, since the government itself seems super done with the gig economy. 7 billion a year missing from various safety net programs like unemployment due to the gig economy is insane.
Frankly, my money is on Uber and co geo-fencing their apps to not work in California, rather than taking any measures to actually abide by this new law.
Assuming that just ignoring the law entirely and continuing to work within the area is not an option.
i don't think uber and such apps can willfully give up such a huge customer base.
i guess shutting off CA in a power play in an attempt to cause enough backlash to make the law get overturned by proposition is their best bet here, since the government itself seems super done with the gig economy. 7 billion a year missing from various safety net programs like unemployment due to the gig economy is insane.
So I think if CA were a separate nation it would be something like 6th in GDP worldwide? It'd be economic suicide to cut them off.
Nevermind the instant the Uber/Lyft did that a butt load of venture capital would rain down on anybody who could mimic the service under a legal framework. (Some sort of near automated auction based system would be my first guess at viability.)
My first QA position was contract. I was technically an employee of a staffing group (A), but realistically I acted exactly like an employee for the company I was contracted out to (B) with no real or actual ability to be contracted to another company. Group A was pretty much silent. They determined nothing about compensation or benefits or work tasks company B determined everything while group A just made a bunch of money off my employment. How would that fit into the current consideration?
My first QA position was contract. I was technically an employee of a staffing group (A), but realistically I acted exactly like an employee for the company I was contracted out to (B) with no real or actual ability to be contracted to another company. Group A was pretty much silent. They determined nothing about compensation or benefits or work tasks company B determined everything while group A just made a bunch of money off my employment. How would that fit into the current consideration?
Wouldn't be affected.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Frankly, my money is on Uber and co geo-fencing their apps to not work in California, rather than taking any measures to actually abide by this new law.
Assuming that just ignoring the law entirely and continuing to work within the area is not an option.
i don't think uber and such apps can willfully give up such a huge customer base.
i guess shutting off CA in a power play in an attempt to cause enough backlash to make the law get overturned by proposition is their best bet here, since the government itself seems super done with the gig economy. 7 billion a year missing from various safety net programs like unemployment due to the gig economy is insane.
So I think if CA were a separate nation it would be something like 6th in GDP worldwide? It'd be economic suicide to cut them off.
Nevermind the instant the Uber/Lyft did that a butt load of venture capital would rain down on anybody who could mimic the service under a legal framework. (Some sort of near automated auction based system would be my first guess at viability.)
To be fair, Uber and Lyft's business plan all along was economic suicide. This is just pressing down the accelerator on the dumb game of Venture Capital Chicken that they are playing.
So, as you may or may not know, Amazon has been in the process of moving their shipping from using large shipping conglomerates with heavily unionized staff to small contractors who are very much under Amazon's thumb. If you think that's a recipe for disaster, you'd be right:
Valdimar Gray was delivering packages for Amazon at the height of the pre-Christmas rush when his three-ton van barreled into an 84-year-old grandmother, crushing her diaphragm, shattering several ribs, and fracturing her skull.
“Oh my god!” screamed Gray as he leaped out of his van. It was a bright, clear afternoon on Dec. 22, 2016, and the 29-year-old had been at the wheel of the white Nissan since early that morning, racing to drop Amazon packages on doorsteps throughout Chicago. He stood in anguish next to Telesfora Escamilla as she lay dying, her blood pooling on the pavement just three blocks from her home. After the police arrived, Gray submitted to drug and alcohol tests, which came up clean. He would later be charged with reckless homicide.
The officers who investigated the crash didn’t ask Gray about the constant pressure for speed he faced as a driver for Inpax Shipping Solutions — one of hundreds of small companies that make up Amazon’s gigantic delivery network across America. If they had, they would have discovered that the company’s drivers worked under relentless demands to deliver hundreds of packages each shift — for a flat rate of around $160 a day — at the direction of dispatchers who often compel them to skip meals, bathroom breaks, and any other form of rest, discouraging them from going home until the very last box is delivered.
Amazon issued Inpax hand scanners that could monitor the progress of its drivers as they delivered their packages and dictated the routes they drove. It had sent Gray’s bosses at Inpax a memo just days before the accident, criticizing lackluster delivery rates in the area and instituting a “no package left behind” policy during the critical holiday week. The number of deliveries drivers were expected to make each day was way up, and dispatchers were urged to keep as many of their vans on the road for as long as possible — even if it meant driving long into the bitter winter night.
But when Escamilla’s grieving family sought redress — suing Amazon, Inpax, and Gray for wrongful death — the e-commerce giant refused to accept any responsibility. “The damages, if any, were caused, in whole or in part, by third parties not under the direction or control of Amazon.com,” its lawyers said in a court filing.
Inpax had by then been repeatedly cited by the Department of Labor for withholding pay from its drivers. Its owner had several cocaine-related felony convictions and had previously declared bankruptcy after missing insurance payments, failing to pay taxes, and defaulting on loans and other obligations amounting to $15 million. And the company was struggling to make ends meet on the razor-thin margins of a system set up by Amazon to squeeze contractors while minimizing its own costs at every turn.
I wish that story had surprised me. As soon as I read the first line my brain filled in the rest and I was disappointed with being right.
Calling someone a contractor so you can treat them like a rented mule is unregulated capitalisms wet dream. I wonder how many people would be willing to pay another $2 for a widget just so delivery isn't a health hazard.
When she started working for Instacart two years ago, Heidi Carrico typically made between $600 and $900 each week from the grocery-delivery app. That was several app updates ago.
“My income has fallen by at least 50 percent, likely more,” Carrico, a Portland, Oregon-based Instacart shopper, told The Daily Beast. “I’d have to really sit down and crunch the numbers. It’s a good week if I make $300.”
Tip cuts, a mystifying new algorithmic pay system, and longer driving distances mean Carrico is working fewer hours for Instacart and making less money per hour, she said. And she’s not alone. From Nov. 3 to 5, Instacart workers nationwide are going on strike to protest what they say are worsening working conditions. It comes on the heels of strikes by rideshare app drivers and unionization efforts by workers for food delivery apps across the world.
These gig workers don’t have centralized factory floors where they can organize. Many can’t even unionize in the U.S. because their companies classify them as contractors, not employees. But through a rolling series of strikes, these workers are determined to make the gig economy work for them.
Frankly, my money is on Uber and co geo-fencing their apps to not work in California, rather than taking any measures to actually abide by this new law.
Assuming that just ignoring the law entirely and continuing to work within the area is not an option.
i don't think uber and such apps can willfully give up such a huge customer base.
i guess shutting off CA in a power play in an attempt to cause enough backlash to make the law get overturned by proposition is their best bet here, since the government itself seems super done with the gig economy. 7 billion a year missing from various safety net programs like unemployment due to the gig economy is insane.
So I think if CA were a separate nation it would be something like 6th in GDP worldwide? It'd be economic suicide to cut them off.
Nevermind the instant the Uber/Lyft did that a butt load of venture capital would rain down on anybody who could mimic the service under a legal framework. (Some sort of near automated auction based system would be my first guess at viability.)
Yeah there's literally no reason you couldn't. It ups your payroll costs but the payroll costs are part of business. Charge an appropriate rate, voila, you can now stay in business.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
Unregulated hotel provider AirBnB has a slight scam problem. Basically, because it's unregulated, it's easy for someone to buy up a bunch of cheap nasty properties, put cheap nasty furniture in them, then advertise a much better property that suffers plumbing problems just before anyone wants to use it. Such an unfortunate(ly common) occurrence. But not to worry, they have a second property nearby that's just as good....
The interior was dusty and literally there were cobwebs full of dead flies in the corners of the living room and bedrooms. The doors for the closets were off their hinges, the coffee table in the living room was gone and the rug was stiff and curling on all the edges. The beds and blankets are from Ikea about 10 years, I had the same bed spread in my college dorm. Also why you enter through the side next to garbage is beyond me. It was full of flies, rats ran across our path as we were coming home and it smelled until they finally took the trash.
Because the second property isn't the one advertised, they can avoid most "property doesn't match the pictures" complaints, and because it's so difficult to get a room on such short notice, it's likely that the renters will need to stay there overnight, which means they no longer have the ability to get a full refund.
They combine that with having a bunch of different accounts (so that it looks like people are dealing with individuals instead of a commercial multi-state operation), fake reviews, the ability to leave retaliatory negative reviews on any renters who complain (thus ensuring that people are kept in the dark), a good knowledge of AirBnB's policies, and an unwillingness on the part of AirBnB to actually do anything.
Anyway, the FBI is talking to Vice about this article now, so that'll be fun.
Tweet thread has details, Sasha Perigo is a twitter rando who's a writer for SF Examiner.
tl;dr - Instacart employees went on strike. Gig Economy employees, so "contractors." Company responded by cutting pay. Employees wrote an article which was posted to Medium, Instacart flagged it and their article was taken down.
I heard about that. I've used AirBnb a decent amount, never had that experience at all! I've booked pretty last-minute in a variety of places, too...
I've experienced just about all levels with airbnb from the extraordinary to the extraordinarily shitty. The retaliatory review mechanic is a serious problem which skews the review process greatly in favor of the renters. No one I know is wiling to give a sub 4-star review even when it's warranted because they don't want to get a bad user review back from the renter. I can't think of a single other service I use where I get reviewed by the service provider.
I heard about that. I've used AirBnb a decent amount, never had that experience at all! I've booked pretty last-minute in a variety of places, too...
I've experienced just about all levels with airbnb from the extraordinary to the extraordinarily shitty. The retaliatory review mechanic is a serious problem which skews the review process greatly in favor of the renters. No one I know is wiling to give a sub 4-star review even when it's warranted because they don't want to get a bad user review back from the renter. I can't think of a single other service I use where I get reviewed by the service provider.
That's because AirBnB still thinks of itself as a place connecting users with other users, rather then a clearinghouse for unregulated short-term rental properties.
Probably not. It's a flaw of the business model. A broker app (which is really what it is) does not add enough value to the labor involved for the kind of ROI concentrated capital expects. So the model *becomes* reducing the cost of labor.
This, I think, hits on the fatal flaw of gig economy startups.
Taking venture capital means you must make hockey stick money (“up and to the right”) SOMEHOW - and since brokering isn’t valuable enough, you end up extracting it from the gig workers.
The vast majority of gig economy firms are fundamentally brokerages, and let's be honest - brokerages make money, but not VC unicorn money (see also: WeWork.) To make the money that Silicon Valley VCs demand, it requires leaning on the workers more and more.
Rev, a transcription service, adjusted its payment model to "more fairly compensate Revvers for the effort spent on files". Because it pays different amounts based on a bunch of different factors, it's difficult to tell at a glance whether or not they actually decreased pay, but they totally did, dropping real hourly pay to less than $5/hr through the magic of piecework done by independent contractors. The change was announced on their official forums, but most workers found out after the changes went into effect.
EDIT: Can I just say that calling your employees "Revvers" is just terrible? I know it's not even the worst thing this company has done this week, but...ug.
Rev, a transcription service, adjusted its payment model to "more fairly compensate Revvers for the effort spent on files". Because it pays different amounts based on a bunch of different factors, it's difficult to tell at a glance whether or not they actually decreased pay, but they totally did, dropping real hourly pay to less than $5/hr through the magic of piecework done by independent contractors. The change was announced on their official forums, but most workers found out after the changes went into effect.
EDIT: Can I just say that calling your employees "Revvers" is just terrible? I know it's not even the worst thing this company has done this week, but...ug.
I actually know someone who does work for them.
A summary of the payment situation.
They're paid based on 'audio minutes'. So if an audio file they're typing up is 10 minutes, that's 10 audio minutes. The thing is, files can take wildly different amounts of time to work on, depending on things like audio quality, number of speakers, background noise, people talking over each other, and a whole host of things. So a 10 minute file could take 15 minutes, or it could take a couple hours.
Their pay used to be around 50 cents per audio minute. Sometimes it could go a bit higher (usually for more difficult files, or a few other factors), with some going as low as 45 cents per audio minute.
Without any real warning, the floor was dropped from 45 to 30 (as low as 23 for new workers in the trial period), and numbers dropping across the board. 50 has gone from the standard to a rare sight. The 'higher paying jobs' that were supposed to exist on the high end to balance things out haven't really materialized, with the few that have being legitimately unworkable.
Their workers also have to keep up certain quality standards, so really tricky files aren't exactly desirable, especially if they don't pay appreciably more. Rather than pay more for the hard files, they've slashed pay on the easy and medium ones.
Long story short, it's a significant drop in pay, with next to no warning.
Fuck the gig economy.
Yeah, that screwed over one of my friends as well, and she's one of those people whose general situation means work like that is (1) otherwise ideal and (2) nearly the only thing easily available to her.
Thirty cents a minute for audio transcription is downright obscene, and feels like they expect people to transcribe in realtime.
A museum I was at for several years had a huge oral history collection and they had some people transcribing some of the interviews, which would run about an hour in length assuming the talk didn't run away from the participants. Trained specialists with physical equipment specifically for handling audio for transcription, etc, and it would take one of them going flat out a few days to properly transcribe one interview, assuming there isn't anything odd like multiple languages, thick accents, some loud event in earshot, etc.
Meanwhile there's this company, who seem to think that kind of work is worth less than twenty bucks per interview.
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
I’ve done several years of caption/transcribing for a living before and in my experience, doing it right usually means spending an hour of work per 5-10 minutes of audio. Those pay rates are awful.
Rev, a transcription service, adjusted its payment model to "more fairly compensate Revvers for the effort spent on files". Because it pays different amounts based on a bunch of different factors, it's difficult to tell at a glance whether or not they actually decreased pay, but they totally did, dropping real hourly pay to less than $5/hr through the magic of piecework done by independent contractors. The change was announced on their official forums, but most workers found out after the changes went into effect.
EDIT: Can I just say that calling your employees "Revvers" is just terrible? I know it's not even the worst thing this company has done this week, but...ug.
"The goal is not to take pay away from Revvers but to pay more fairly for the level of skill required."
According to their own pricing page, they charge one quarter of what their cheapest competitors charge ($1/m flat rate). Maybe take a look at that.
Also: the second link notes that even an 80cpm job is a white whale. How the fuck are they justifying taking a minimum finder's fee of 20%?
If I paid you your rate and you guaranteed me a 12 hour turn around, I'd better not find out that no one took the job for four days because you tried to pocket half the money.
my mom is a court reporter, and in comparison these rates are basically embarrassing. i can only imagine how terrible the transcripts are.
the gig economy deciding that the only way to hockey stick is to grind their "employees" to dust needs to be regulated yesterday.
This isn't necessarily fair to the workers. Hearing numerous accounts from my friend who works for them, at least prior to this latest slash in pay, while most of the workers knew they were under-paid, they still made a point of doing a good job (both out of personal work ethic, and accuracy requirements).
Now, this latest change could have an impact, as most of the better/more experienced workers are refusing to take jobs below the previous rates.
Basically, Rev became big by advertising an insane price of $1/min, and refuses to acknowledge that the price may be too low, out of fear that they'll lose market share - so it's the workers who get shafted.
We've seen this pretty much with every other gig economy firm, hence Mei's observation that this is a standard playbook. What's also revolting is how none of these companies seem to be able to focus on anything but price as a differentiator.
my mom is a court reporter, and in comparison these rates are basically embarrassing. i can only imagine how terrible the transcripts are.
the gig economy deciding that the only way to hockey stick is to grind their "employees" to dust needs to be regulated yesterday.
To the best of my knowledge, the transcripts are actually pretty good. Like many other "Gig" jobs, their employees are doing this because of the flexible hours and lack of the hiring roadblocks that keep them out of traditional jobs. (If you can only manage a few hours of work a day at most, and have bad days when you can't manage any, you are going to have trouble with regular employment. Being able to sign in only when you're feeling up to it is a really useful feature, it's just the below-minimum pay and the lack of benefits that's an issue.)
my mom is a court reporter, and in comparison these rates are basically embarrassing. i can only imagine how terrible the transcripts are.
the gig economy deciding that the only way to hockey stick is to grind their "employees" to dust needs to be regulated yesterday.
This isn't necessarily fair to the workers. Hearing numerous accounts from my friend who works for them, at least prior to this latest slash in pay, while most of the workers knew they were under-paid, they still made a point of doing a good job (both out of personal work ethic, and accuracy requirements).
Now, this latest change could have an impact, as most of the better/more experienced workers are refusing to take jobs below the previous rates.
then they're doing far better work than they're being compensated for, and that's wrong too.
a lot of transcription is fucking hard. as someone who's been around it my whole life because of my mom, you'll sometimes spend ages going back to one sentence trying to figure out what this guy who stomped all over his own words said. to say nothing of impossible accents or technical language or people talking over each other or a thousand other things.
my mom is a court reporter, and in comparison these rates are basically embarrassing. i can only imagine how terrible the transcripts are.
the gig economy deciding that the only way to hockey stick is to grind their "employees" to dust needs to be regulated yesterday.
This isn't necessarily fair to the workers. Hearing numerous accounts from my friend who works for them, at least prior to this latest slash in pay, while most of the workers knew they were under-paid, they still made a point of doing a good job (both out of personal work ethic, and accuracy requirements).
Now, this latest change could have an impact, as most of the better/more experienced workers are refusing to take jobs below the previous rates.
then they're doing far better work than they're being compensated for, and that's wrong too.
a lot of transcription is fucking hard. as someone who's been around it my whole life because of my mom, you'll sometimes spend ages going back to one sentence trying to figure out what this guy who stomped all over his own words said. to say nothing of impossible accents or technical language or people talking over each other or a thousand other things.
I'm pretty sure that's the main complaint here, yeah
It's not really surprising to me. Abstractly (and somewhat inaccurately) speaking:
Profit % = (Revenue / Cost) - 1 where
Revenue = Number of Units * Price of Units and
Cost = Labor Cost + Capital Cost
Gig business generally win market share by advertising a price lower than is sustainable by non-gig businesses. So price is capped, and capped low. It is difficult to increase number of units sold past a certain point, so you can treat revenue as relatively constant. Especially when you're looking at things like a quarter-to-quarter finance evaluation.
Capital costs for gig businesses are much lower than non-gig business and are mostly driven onto the laborers. In the transcription example, I'm sure that a computer is required for the work and I'm sure that Rev isn't providing the computer. So the major cost piece is the labor cost, which because of the nature of the gig economy turns into a race to the bottom. Because gig workers are treated as interchangeable.
Price is the only differentiation, because they assume that work quality is the same regardless of supplier, and in the gig economy the labor force is unlimited and can grow or shrink as needed.
*edit* Also, a major business driver for gig employers is to try and drive out all competition so you can build up a monopoly and charge whatever you want. Except this never works, because it's so easy to enter into the gig economy as an employer. All gig businesses will eventually fail because they will either be undercut, or undercut so hard that they are unsustainable. The entire business model is built to fail, and the people who've realized that are like Adam Neumann, who get out before the entire system implodes and take millions or billions with them.
Basically, Rev became big by advertising an insane price of $1/min, and refuses to acknowledge that the price may be too low, out of fear that they'll lose market share - so it's the workers who get shafted.
We've seen this pretty much with every other gig economy firm, hence Mei's observation that this is a standard playbook. What's also revolting is how none of these companies seem to be able to focus on anything but price as a differentiator.
None of these companies seem to actually be able to do the traditional monopolistic practice of undercutting competition with absurdly low prices and then jacking them up when they get better market share.
Probably because they chose markets where that does not really work well because it is not that insanely costly to get into like much manufacturing is nor is there a ton of ways to readily nickle and dime people to death once they are in the ecosystem like cheap printers with horribly overpriced ink.
Basically, Rev became big by advertising an insane price of $1/min, and refuses to acknowledge that the price may be too low, out of fear that they'll lose market share - so it's the workers who get shafted.
We've seen this pretty much with every other gig economy firm, hence Mei's observation that this is a standard playbook. What's also revolting is how none of these companies seem to be able to focus on anything but price as a differentiator.
None of these companies seem to actually be able to do the traditional monopolistic practice of undercutting competition with absurdly low prices and then jacking them up when they get better market share.
Probably because they chose markets where that does not really work well because it is not that insanely costly to get into like much manufacturing is nor is there a ton of ways to readily nickle and dime people to death once they are in the ecosystem like cheap printers with horribly overpriced ink.
In the end, none of these business from Uber to Rev to whatever else have actually created a more efficient business model, so they advertise themselves on price and then have to find some way to make the business sustainable once the investment money runs out and they need to start actually turning a profit.
At best they hope to use their low price to become enough of a monopoly they can dictate terms to the market once they've destroyed their competitors.
my mom is a court reporter, and in comparison these rates are basically embarrassing. i can only imagine how terrible the transcripts are.
the gig economy deciding that the only way to hockey stick is to grind their "employees" to dust needs to be regulated yesterday.
This isn't necessarily fair to the workers. Hearing numerous accounts from my friend who works for them, at least prior to this latest slash in pay, while most of the workers knew they were under-paid, they still made a point of doing a good job (both out of personal work ethic, and accuracy requirements).
Now, this latest change could have an impact, as most of the better/more experienced workers are refusing to take jobs below the previous rates.
then they're doing far better work than they're being compensated for, and that's wrong too.
a lot of transcription is fucking hard. as someone who's been around it my whole life because of my mom, you'll sometimes spend ages going back to one sentence trying to figure out what this guy who stomped all over his own words said. to say nothing of impossible accents or technical language or people talking over each other or a thousand other things.
Yes, it's a difficult job and these people are being severely under-paid. None of that is in question.
My point is, if someone is already doing difficult work for low pay, heaping undue criticism on the workers for their output seems a bit meanspirited, especially when by all accounts they're actually doing very good work, despite unfair pay and conditions.
That said, I'm confident that wasn't your intention here.
The California Trucking Association on Tuesday filed what appears to be the first lawsuit challenging a sweeping new labor law that seeks to give wage and benefit protections to workers in the so-called gig economy, including rideshare drivers at companies such as Uber and Lyft.
The legislation violates federal law and would deprive more than 70,000 independent truckers of their ability to work, the association said. Many would have to abandon $150,000 investments in clean trucks and the right to set their own schedules in order for companies to comply with a law it says illegally infringes on interstate commerce.
“Independent truckers are typically experienced drivers who have previously worked as employees and have, by choice, struck out on their own. We should not deprive them of that choice,” association CEO Shawn Yadon said in a statement.
The law set to take effect Jan. 1 makes it harder for companies to classify workers as independent contractors instead of employees, who are entitled to minimum wage and benefits such as workers compensation.
“We expect big corporate interests — especially those who have misclassified their workers for years — to take this fight back to the place they know they can delay justice for workers: the courts,” the bill’s author, Democratic Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez of San Diego, said in a statement.
Her office said it’s apparently the first such lawsuit, although Uber, Lyft and DoorDash have said they will spend $90 million on a 2020 ballot measure opposing the law if they can’t negotiate other rules for their drivers. Uber also said it will keep treating its drivers as independent contractors and defend that decision in court if needed.
"The court set a new, three-prong test for companies to use when determining how to classify their workers. To be labeled a contractor, a worker must be free from control of the company; performing work “outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business”; and engaged in an independently established trade, occupation or business of the same nature as the work they are performing."
For a lot of trucking companies who use owner operators they're going to fail the first and second tests hard.
"The court set a new, three-prong test for companies to use when determining how to classify their workers. To be labeled a contractor, a worker must be free from control of the company; performing work “outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business”; and engaged in an independently established trade, occupation or business of the same nature as the work they are performing."
For a lot of trucking companies who use owner operators they're going to fail the first and second tests hard.
The middle prong especially. Free from control of the company is easy to argue...if the company merely contracts out a load and a delivery time and leaves the specifics to the driver, that might fly? But yeah, if we decide that Uber is a taxi/livery company not a broker and thus drivers are employees, that’s gonna apply in logistics as well. That middle prong is gonna apply to basically everything and everybody.
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People are "contracted" in that BigCorp contracts with an IT services company who provides the IT workers, but those workers are definitely employees (just not of BigCorp). AB5 isn't addressing that kind of relationship... which has its own problems for sure but isn't nearly as exploitative as 1099ing everyone.
Even if a company was 1099ing everyone and didn't want to hire them on properly then there will absolutely be IT service companies offering to hire all of BigCorp's 1099s and play man in the middle so BigCorp has less of a disruption.
Phone support is the same way, I've never ever heard of a 1099 phone monkey.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Assuming that just ignoring the law entirely and continuing to work within the area is not an option.
i don't think uber and such apps can willfully give up such a huge customer base.
i guess shutting off CA in a power play in an attempt to cause enough backlash to make the law get overturned by proposition is their best bet here, since the government itself seems super done with the gig economy. 7 billion a year missing from various safety net programs like unemployment due to the gig economy is insane.
So I think if CA were a separate nation it would be something like 6th in GDP worldwide? It'd be economic suicide to cut them off.
Nevermind the instant the Uber/Lyft did that a butt load of venture capital would rain down on anybody who could mimic the service under a legal framework. (Some sort of near automated auction based system would be my first guess at viability.)
Wouldn't be affected.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Calling someone a contractor so you can treat them like a rented mule is unregulated capitalisms wet dream. I wonder how many people would be willing to pay another $2 for a widget just so delivery isn't a health hazard.
Yeah there's literally no reason you couldn't. It ups your payroll costs but the payroll costs are part of business. Charge an appropriate rate, voila, you can now stay in business.
Because the second property isn't the one advertised, they can avoid most "property doesn't match the pictures" complaints, and because it's so difficult to get a room on such short notice, it's likely that the renters will need to stay there overnight, which means they no longer have the ability to get a full refund.
They combine that with having a bunch of different accounts (so that it looks like people are dealing with individuals instead of a commercial multi-state operation), fake reviews, the ability to leave retaliatory negative reviews on any renters who complain (thus ensuring that people are kept in the dark), a good knowledge of AirBnB's policies, and an unwillingness on the part of AirBnB to actually do anything.
Anyway, the FBI is talking to Vice about this article now, so that'll be fun.
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Tweet thread has details, Sasha Perigo is a twitter rando who's a writer for SF Examiner.
tl;dr - Instacart employees went on strike. Gig Economy employees, so "contractors." Company responded by cutting pay. Employees wrote an article which was posted to Medium, Instacart flagged it and their article was taken down.
I've experienced just about all levels with airbnb from the extraordinary to the extraordinarily shitty. The retaliatory review mechanic is a serious problem which skews the review process greatly in favor of the renters. No one I know is wiling to give a sub 4-star review even when it's warranted because they don't want to get a bad user review back from the renter. I can't think of a single other service I use where I get reviewed by the service provider.
That's because AirBnB still thinks of itself as a place connecting users with other users, rather then a clearinghouse for unregulated short-term rental properties.
The vast majority of gig economy firms are fundamentally brokerages, and let's be honest - brokerages make money, but not VC unicorn money (see also: WeWork.) To make the money that Silicon Valley VCs demand, it requires leaning on the workers more and more.
MWO: Adamski
The second link contains a very thorough analysis of the situation from the perspective of a worker.
https://gizmodo.com/transcription-platform-rev-slashes-minimum-pay-for-work-1839784941
https://gizmodo.com/there-is-a-point-where-a-person-cant-do-anymore-1839808189
EDIT: Can I just say that calling your employees "Revvers" is just terrible? I know it's not even the worst thing this company has done this week, but...ug.
I actually know someone who does work for them.
A summary of the payment situation.
Their pay used to be around 50 cents per audio minute. Sometimes it could go a bit higher (usually for more difficult files, or a few other factors), with some going as low as 45 cents per audio minute.
Without any real warning, the floor was dropped from 45 to 30 (as low as 23 for new workers in the trial period), and numbers dropping across the board. 50 has gone from the standard to a rare sight. The 'higher paying jobs' that were supposed to exist on the high end to balance things out haven't really materialized, with the few that have being legitimately unworkable.
Their workers also have to keep up certain quality standards, so really tricky files aren't exactly desirable, especially if they don't pay appreciably more. Rather than pay more for the hard files, they've slashed pay on the easy and medium ones.
Fuck the gig economy.
Thirty cents a minute for audio transcription is downright obscene, and feels like they expect people to transcribe in realtime.
A museum I was at for several years had a huge oral history collection and they had some people transcribing some of the interviews, which would run about an hour in length assuming the talk didn't run away from the participants. Trained specialists with physical equipment specifically for handling audio for transcription, etc, and it would take one of them going flat out a few days to properly transcribe one interview, assuming there isn't anything odd like multiple languages, thick accents, some loud event in earshot, etc.
Meanwhile there's this company, who seem to think that kind of work is worth less than twenty bucks per interview.
"The goal is not to take pay away from Revvers but to pay more fairly for the level of skill required."
According to their own pricing page, they charge one quarter of what their cheapest competitors charge ($1/m flat rate). Maybe take a look at that.
Also: the second link notes that even an 80cpm job is a white whale. How the fuck are they justifying taking a minimum finder's fee of 20%?
If I paid you your rate and you guaranteed me a 12 hour turn around, I'd better not find out that no one took the job for four days because you tried to pocket half the money.
the gig economy deciding that the only way to hockey stick is to grind their "employees" to dust needs to be regulated yesterday.
This isn't necessarily fair to the workers. Hearing numerous accounts from my friend who works for them, at least prior to this latest slash in pay, while most of the workers knew they were under-paid, they still made a point of doing a good job (both out of personal work ethic, and accuracy requirements).
Now, this latest change could have an impact, as most of the better/more experienced workers are refusing to take jobs below the previous rates.
We've seen this pretty much with every other gig economy firm, hence Mei's observation that this is a standard playbook. What's also revolting is how none of these companies seem to be able to focus on anything but price as a differentiator.
To the best of my knowledge, the transcripts are actually pretty good. Like many other "Gig" jobs, their employees are doing this because of the flexible hours and lack of the hiring roadblocks that keep them out of traditional jobs. (If you can only manage a few hours of work a day at most, and have bad days when you can't manage any, you are going to have trouble with regular employment. Being able to sign in only when you're feeling up to it is a really useful feature, it's just the below-minimum pay and the lack of benefits that's an issue.)
then they're doing far better work than they're being compensated for, and that's wrong too.
a lot of transcription is fucking hard. as someone who's been around it my whole life because of my mom, you'll sometimes spend ages going back to one sentence trying to figure out what this guy who stomped all over his own words said. to say nothing of impossible accents or technical language or people talking over each other or a thousand other things.
I'm pretty sure that's the main complaint here, yeah
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Profit % = (Revenue / Cost) - 1 where
Revenue = Number of Units * Price of Units and
Cost = Labor Cost + Capital Cost
Gig business generally win market share by advertising a price lower than is sustainable by non-gig businesses. So price is capped, and capped low. It is difficult to increase number of units sold past a certain point, so you can treat revenue as relatively constant. Especially when you're looking at things like a quarter-to-quarter finance evaluation.
Capital costs for gig businesses are much lower than non-gig business and are mostly driven onto the laborers. In the transcription example, I'm sure that a computer is required for the work and I'm sure that Rev isn't providing the computer. So the major cost piece is the labor cost, which because of the nature of the gig economy turns into a race to the bottom. Because gig workers are treated as interchangeable.
Price is the only differentiation, because they assume that work quality is the same regardless of supplier, and in the gig economy the labor force is unlimited and can grow or shrink as needed.
*edit* Also, a major business driver for gig employers is to try and drive out all competition so you can build up a monopoly and charge whatever you want. Except this never works, because it's so easy to enter into the gig economy as an employer. All gig businesses will eventually fail because they will either be undercut, or undercut so hard that they are unsustainable. The entire business model is built to fail, and the people who've realized that are like Adam Neumann, who get out before the entire system implodes and take millions or billions with them.
None of these companies seem to actually be able to do the traditional monopolistic practice of undercutting competition with absurdly low prices and then jacking them up when they get better market share.
Probably because they chose markets where that does not really work well because it is not that insanely costly to get into like much manufacturing is nor is there a ton of ways to readily nickle and dime people to death once they are in the ecosystem like cheap printers with horribly overpriced ink.
In the end, none of these business from Uber to Rev to whatever else have actually created a more efficient business model, so they advertise themselves on price and then have to find some way to make the business sustainable once the investment money runs out and they need to start actually turning a profit.
At best they hope to use their low price to become enough of a monopoly they can dictate terms to the market once they've destroyed their competitors.
Yes, it's a difficult job and these people are being severely under-paid. None of that is in question.
My point is, if someone is already doing difficult work for low pay, heaping undue criticism on the workers for their output seems a bit meanspirited, especially when by all accounts they're actually doing very good work, despite unfair pay and conditions.
That said, I'm confident that wasn't your intention here.
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"The court set a new, three-prong test for companies to use when determining how to classify their workers. To be labeled a contractor, a worker must be free from control of the company; performing work “outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business”; and engaged in an independently established trade, occupation or business of the same nature as the work they are performing."
For a lot of trucking companies who use owner operators they're going to fail the first and second tests hard.
The middle prong especially. Free from control of the company is easy to argue...if the company merely contracts out a load and a delivery time and leaves the specifics to the driver, that might fly? But yeah, if we decide that Uber is a taxi/livery company not a broker and thus drivers are employees, that’s gonna apply in logistics as well. That middle prong is gonna apply to basically everything and everybody.
Unintended consequences.