
In the Sharing Economy, Workers Find Both Freedom and Uncertainty - kanamekun
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/17/technology/in-the-sharing-economy-workers-find-both-freedom-and-uncertainty.html
======
clairity
this article is a bit better at considering the economic impacts than the one
i commented about here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8187487](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8187487)

my concern is that the value "created" by startups like uber and taskrabbit
come not from displacing large and slow incumbents (e.g., taxi dispatchers &
courier services) but from shifting economic risk onto disempowered
individuals.

the people who pay (largely the top 20%) see value in at least two ways: (1)
greater certainty of commodity products & services and (2) lower prices.

the startups themselves are shielded from market risk, particularly on the
supply side (labor), because they have disproportionate power over labor,
which then smooths out profit by automatically matching costs to revenues.

taskers bear all the market risk while also giving up traditional employment
benefits. the value of this shift is passed on to the consumer and to the
startups themselves (capital), leaving taskers in even more volatile economic
circumstances.

by the way, i'm distinctly _not_ condemning the startups here, because they're
only part of larger economic trends that they have little control over. now
that the structure is in place, they can't do much individually (e.g., if one
tried to raise prices to raise wages, they would be competed out of the
market).

~~~
rayiner
Not only are they shifting risk onto workers, but they are replacing small,
local, owner-operated businesses with Wall Street funded national
corporations. They're seeking to put people like my cleaning lady (who runs a
small business with a couple of employees) or the local Chinese laundromat out
of business. I'm not saying that's a bad thing (frankly, big Wall Street
funded corporations are much more efficient than small local businesses), but
I do detect some cognitive dissonance in people who rail against big
corporations but also support companies like Uber.

~~~
sfk
Efficient for whom? Starbucks and Mc Donalds sell worse and more expensive
products than local places. Amazon is cheap, but I'm constantly getting
damaged books (bent pages, water damage, single pages that are printed in
light gray instead of black ...) and scratched DVDs. I've never seen any of
this in a physical bookstore.

~~~
raverbashing
I have a theory about the success of McD and Starbucks

You're absolutely right it's worse than a local place. But it's predictable.

It makes the process of choice easier: I can go to McD and I know what I'm
getting or I'm trying this new place, with unpredictable results.

~~~
coldtea
I think it's mostly a herd need. Going to this place that is all around and
everybody else is going.

Not necessarily having to do with the predictability of the coffee or the
experience of drinking a coffee in a place.

~~~
avz
I would't know about McDonald's, but at least where I live Starbucks offers a
lot better and in many ways different service than local cafes. It's also very
different from what I have seen in the US.

I made a real effort to go to the local places, but they just don't offer what
I need. In a Starbucks you can come in and sit for a few hours reading
magazines, studying or working. Nobody bothers you. The place offers a variety
of couches, chairs and tables which you can pick based on what you plan on
doing. In a local cafe once you're done with your coffee or tea you get
pressured into leaving by constant questions about your other orders. Local
cafes offer uniform seating which often is completely unsuitable for a laptop
or a stack of books.

~~~
raverbashing
Ah yes, there's that as well

Starbucks is a good Wi-Fi provider, worldwide.

------
dougmccune
I find it amazing that these companies have gotten "sharing economy" to stick.
I seriously don't get it. People are buying and selling services, and
companies like AirBnB, Uber, and TaskRabbit are the middlemen facilitating
these transactions. Nobody is sharing anything any more than Starbucks is
sharing a cup of coffee with me in exchange for money.

~~~
avz
"To share" means "to use or enjoy something jointly or in turns" (source:
[http://thefreedictionary.com/share](http://thefreedictionary.com/share)). I
hear Starbucks customers generally receive their own coffee each.

Note also that sharing does not imply "for free". It simply implies more than
one person using a given resource.

~~~
Wilya
That doesn't explain why Uber is more about sharing than taxi companies, nor
why Airbnb is more about sharing than the old way of renting your flat.

~~~
avz
Taxi service doesn't allow you to easily share your car and hotels don't allow
you to easily share your flat. Traditional renting of an apartment is a long-
term proposition which again inhibits sharing.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Taxi service doesn't allow you to easily share your car and hotels don't
> allow you to easily share your flat.

Sharing your car or home (whether the latter is rented or owned) is very easy
without apps and people have been doing it for just about as long as cars and
homes have existed. What the apps facilitate is making money from arms-length
rentals to strangers. This may be _a form_ of sharing, but even if so its a
fairly specific one with its own name, its just that using an accurate and
specific label rather than a misleadingly general one doesn't make as good
marketing copy -- "sharing" sounds warm and friendly and positive, "rental"
not so much.

~~~
avz
Sharing your car or home involves a substantial risk and requires trust so
people have traditionally been doing it mostly within their private networks
of friends and family. What Uber, Airbnb and the like have achieved is the
application of technology, reviews and rating schemes to build and scale these
trust networks up to sizes that are more practical for a society.

------
graeme
I think programmers should remind themselves how fortunate they are, to have
skills that are both enjoyable and in demand.

It's an entirely different economy out there, for most people. Average
citizens would love to have recruiters as a "problem".

I think the sharing economy is a net benefit – I doubt it's preventing the
creation of stable jobs. But we would do well to remember that we live in an
economic bubble, a tiny pocket of prosperity amidst much harder time.

(Not a programmer personally, but I run an online business)

~~~
larrys
"to have skills that are both enjoyable and in demand."

Well that's now, in this slice of time, and if you have the skills that are
hot at the given moment. If not, assumes that a programmer can easily pick up
the new thing and get a job (with age bias) which I don't think is necessarily
the case.

Is there a hot job market for perl programmers? That was the big thing in the
90's when I first went online. Can a 50's perl programmer learn the next new
thing and be in high demand?

(Edit: More of a statement than a question as I think "probably not an easy
task")

~~~
brandonmenc
> Can a 50's perl programmer learn the next new thing

A programmer who can't learn the next new thing in their 50s, probably
couldn't learn the next new thing in their 20s, likely just learned the first
new thing and never deviated.

------
apozem
I worry sometimes about Uber, TaskRabbit, AirBnB and the like. Sometimes it
seems like too much of their success rests on their Walmartesque avoidance of
benefits, the kinds of benefits which blue-collar folks have relied on for
years. If too many people get caught out in the cold, the government might
start pushing back against those companies to protect the workers.

~~~
BrainInAJar
> If too many people get caught out in the cold, the government might start
> pushing back against those companies to protect the workers.

That seems unlike the government, they've done nothing to address the
shrinking of the middle class, the dismantling of unions and the shift from
stable employment towards mcjobs, so why would they do anything about the
uberization of the workforce?

~~~
sliverstorm
Just as last time this happened, when unions were created, government did not
push back of its own accord- the workers had enough and lit a fire under their
government's a __.

~~~
BrainInAJar
the last time this happened, when unions were created, the government was
basically forced in to supporting the unions by virtue of the fact that
communist revolutions were happening all over the world

------
timedoctor
The quality of the jobs on these platforms is proportionate to the level of
employment in the economy and the general strength of labour in the economy.
In Australia the situation seems to very different to the US. There is a
competitor to Task Rabbit - Airtasker - and my experience is that it's really
expensive to hire people on this platform. In most cases I decided to do the
work myself because the rates that people charge are so high in Sydney at
least (for many tasks $30/hour to $50/hour as a minimum) that I would prefer
to save the money and do it myself.

This is a function of the strength of the Australian economy and labour
market.

------
baddox
Is working in the sharing economy more uncertain that _the same people_
working somewhere else?

------
joelrunyon
Isn't this a bit obvious? Getting both complete freedom is at odds with
certainty. There's an inherent tradeoff in the two commodities.

~~~
_delirium
There are some attempts to combine them, which is gradually becoming one of
the preferred EU strategies (though countries vary widely in their opinions):
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity)

The basic idea is that it should be easy to hire/fire people ("flexible labor
market", vs. the traditional less-flexible European model), but social policy
should smooth out some of the economic uncertainty that produces.

~~~
tormeh
It's considered a very good idea over here, I think, but it requires the
government to redistribute money from people who work to people who don't, so
everyone gets security without needing predictability. I don't think it's very
popular in southern Europe, though.

~~~
BSousa
In southern Europe, at the moment the idea is to give as much flexibility to
hire/fire people and at the same time reduce as much as possible any benefits
for people that fall on hard times.

Quick example, unemployment used to be at 75% of net income (give or take).
Then they changed it to 70, then 65%. Then they capped it at 1600 euros, then
1200. Now it is capped at 1000 euros for the first 6 months, and then 900
afterwards (and the length has also been shortened).

Doesn't matter if you were earning 10,000 euros a month or 2,000, now you both
get max 1000 euros unemployment, even thou one of you paid 5 times as much in
social security payments.

(quick note, values are approximate as I remember this from 2 years ago).

~~~
tormeh
It's easier to save on that than it is to save on tax dodging and stimulate
the economy with less regulatory capture and corruption, unfortunately. It's
the tragedy of austerity, that the wrong measures seem to get taken.

------
Futurebot
In the US, think of how different these services would be if we had both a
guaranteed income to give these people a baseline of safety, plus a real
universal healthcare system to sidestep that entire issue. It would turn this
class of people from a 'precariat' into a fluid, task-oriented labor force
with few/none of the current negative implications (around both the jobs and
the companies supplying them.) I wonder if the attitude towards these services
in countries with UHC systems or more generous safety nets is less negative
and stigma-ridden.

~~~
sliverstorm
Of course if we had universal healthcare, some of these startups loose half
their competitive advantage...

