Post · bonfire.mavnn.eu

Drivers aren't paid for time they spend waiting for a job or time they spend getting to the job. This is the majority of time that a gig driver spends working for the platform, and by excluding the majority of time a driver is on the clock, the company can claim to pay a generous wage while actually paying peanuts.

Now, at this phase, you may be thinking that this is only fair, or at least traditional. Livery cab drivers don't get paid unless they have a fare in the cab, right?

@pluralistic

This link worked better for me:

"Forget UBI, says an economist: It’s time for universal basic jobs

Economist Pavlina R. Tcherneva, author of 'The Case for a Job Guarantee.'"

By Cory Doctorow
June 24, 2020 7 AM

Link around paywall to Los Angeles Times:

https://archive.ph/Ar5hg

That's why politicians like Avi Lewis (who is running for leader of Canada's New Democratic Party) has call for a jobs guarantee: a government guarantee of a good job at a socially inclusive wage for everyone who wants one:

https://lewisforleader.ca/ideas/dignified-work-full-plan

(Disclosure: I have advised the Lewis campaign on technical issues and I have endorsed his candidacy.)

@pluralistic - Wish I could become an advisor to my local MLAs. I literally have tried, but found no purchase.

They're too stuck in growth economics and trying to coopt the regional conservative power structure as it is lying dormant between the election cycles.

Despite being NDP, they are failing to make good on the support people showed them. They seem more interested in settling in as technocrats than actually effecting socialism.

If that sounds Utopian or Communist to you (or both), consider this: it was the American jobs guarantee that delivered the America's system of national parks, among many other achievements:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps

The idea of a wage for everyone who wants a job is just one interesting question raised by the concept of a "minimum wage." Even when we're talking about people who *have* wages, the idea of a "minimum wage" is anything but straightforward.

Take gig work: the rise of Uber and its successors created an ever-expanding class of workers, misclassified as independent contractors by employers, seeking to evade unionization, benefits and liability. It's a weird kind of "independent contractor" who gets punished for saying no to lowball offers, has to decorate their personal clothes and/or cars in their "client's" livery, and who has every movement scripted by an app controlled by their "client":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/02/upward-redistribution/

@pluralistic When kids read about the Pullman porters, they will pause on certain details about the working conditions, such as having hours of sleep deducted from the porters’ pay, or the precarity of tips, it’s the little indignities, like being required to purchase Pullman-branded shoe shine, that sticks in their craw. You’ve mentioned the porters in other contexts, but the similarity of their conditions is all I can think about when you describe gig workers having to kit out their vehicles in self-financed corporate logos. Thanks for bringing that connection home. Thank you also for including the finding about how Seattle’s PayUp has “moved the needle” because these days, the one thing people ask me for, again and again, is a win they can read about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_porter

@pluralistic

I've long said that UBER is an acronym for Unethical Business Evading Responsibility.

The pretext that a worker is actually a standalone small business confers another great advantage on their employers: it's a great boon to any boss who wants to steal their worker's wages. I'm not talking about stealing tips here (though gig-work platforms do steal tips, like crazy):

https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/01/mayor-mamdani-announces--5-million-settlement--reinstatement-of-

I'm talking about how gig-work platforms define workers' wages in the first place. This is a very salient definition in public policy debates. Gig platforms facing regulation or investigation routinely claim that their workers are paid sky-high wages. During the debate over California's Prop 22 (in which Uber and Lyft spent more than $225m to formalize worker misclassification), gig companies agreed to all kinds of reasonable-sounding wage guarantees:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/14/final_ver2/#prop-22

When Toronto grappled with the brutal effect gig-work taxis have on the city's world-beatingly bad traffic, Uber promised to pay its drivers "120% of the minimum wage," which would come out to $21.12 per hour. However, the *real* wage Uber was proposing to pay its drivers came out to about *$2.50* per hour:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

How to explain the difference? Well, Uber - and its gig-work competitors - only pay drivers while they have a passenger - or an item - in the car.

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