
Gig-Economy Workers Are the Modern Proletariat - koolhead17
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-09-25/gig-economy-workers-are-last-of-marx-s-oppressed-proletarians
======
elvinyung
I have a pet theory that goes one step further.

In _Discipline and Punish_ , Foucault talks about how in the early modern era,
the actions of subordinate individuals (workers, students, soldiers, etc.)
became increasingly regimented through more and more precise specifications of
procedures as sequences of elementary actions. Then in the 19th and 20th
centuries, we started to see "rationalist" economic efficiency projects like
scientific management/Taylorism, which essentially tried to deskill factory
workers by fragmenting their work based on time and motion studies.

The gig economy is the neoliberal revival of these scientific management
principles, plastered over with the neoliberal ideals of marketization and
entrepreneurialism. Just like before, it aims to improve efficiency by
quantifying and compensating work at finer-grained scales than ever before.

It has the potential to drastically increase economic efficiency, but at the
expense of financial security and the psychological wellbeing of entire
generations.

~~~
pmorici
What do you mean by economic efficiency? It seems like the model of a lot of
gig jobs encourages the employer to waste the worker's time.

This happens because the employer pays per job. For example, Bird and Lime
waste workers time by letting them all chase after the same scooters to be
charged so a worker might spend time going to pick-up a scooter only to be
beat to it by another by a few moments. It seems highly suspect that this is
the most efficient way to get this done unless your idea of efficiency only
means lowest cost to the company.

~~~
elvinyung
I meant something like "fraction of the employee's time spent on what the
employer considers to be productive/useful work".

Contrast it with a typical salaried job. In such a position, people basically
get paid to take bathroom breaks, chat with coworkers, check social media, eat
lunch, etc. and they might not even be in the office for the full 40 hours a
week. They get to eat up even more resources by participating in benefits like
health insurance, paid time off, and pensions. Isn't that _such_ a waste of
resources?

~~~
bicubic
Marx discussed this thoroughly. The same thing is happening to salaried jobs,
just to a lesser extent. This phenomenon was one of his bigger objections to
capitalism.

All productive labour is being broken down into pipelined work streams where
any individual worker performs as simple and as well defined a task as you can
give them, and performs that task all day every day. This increases the
economic efficiency of the worker, at the expense of depriving their work life
of any meaning and turning them into an unremarkable, disposable, exchangeable
cog in a machine.

Pretty much every industry in the developed world follows this trend,
including tech.

~~~
rubyfan
I can say this absolutely exists in Corp tech shops.

I worked in an environment where the CIO would frequently refer to the tech
staff as “the factory”. I often encouraged this CIO and others in the
management team not to because it was demoralizing and not true - the work was
highly skilled, highly dynamic and not repetitive.

Oh and if you treated tech work like a factory it looked like lots of
management overhead, poor execution from low skilled workers, predictable
timelines (long timelines), and last but not least higher cost.

~~~
kopo
Well it has existed throughout history.

We haven't discovered great ways of winning wars or building empire without
being inefficient and treating people like pawns.

Our history books don't spend time making us think about the morale of the
front line soldiers in Alexander/Genghis Khan/Napolean/Stalin's armies.
Instead we have entire shelves of books devoted to the mindlessly ambitious
guys at the top of the food chain.

We make Edison an icon and give Marconi a Nobel, but if you know your history,
these guys ended up at the top of the food chain because they were ruthless.
It hardly mattered what Oppenheimer/Einstein/Feynman thought about the nuclear
bomb. Because they were the "factory".

Much like the "factory" of people at the pentagon/wall st/google/facebook etc.

We still haven't figured out a good way to keep "factories" running or
expand/defend empires without propping up mindlessly ambitious people. The
inequality rates suggest our faith in them is at an all time high.

Our current default method much like the cold war or a chimp troupe, is to
keep mindlessly ambitious people at the top of the food chain constantly
paranoid about each other. Ofcourse we can do better. But the agency isn't
there yet. For example, Facebook could turn into a Wikipedia type entity by
tomorrow if the "factory" of workers revolt.

~~~
rubyfan
I’m not sure Oppenheimer/Einstein/Feynman would have been referred to at the
time as “the factory” nor would I imagine anyone consider their work needing
to be highly efficient nor would I imagine anyone would dream the appropriate
management style to be to eek out all the efficiency in what they were
building.

I don’t disagree with your thoughts on charismatic leadership but the response
seems misplaced or slightly off topic.

I think factory management and motive is slightly different than
dictatorial/power leadership.

------
unknown_apostle
I know it pays little and is repetitive. But my question with this kind of
analysis is always: why do they keep finding people to do it?

There is another problem which I find more worrisome: we are expecting gig
workers (and most other workers) to subject to hardcore competition for their
jobs, wages and terms. The argument (also my argument above) is that it leads
to efficient and honest outcomes because it involves little to no coercion.

But at the same time, governments are colluding with and bailing out the
financial elites with every market crash. We did it with LTCM, in 2001, in
2008 and who knows when again. The bailout involves mass coercion of savers
and an implicit punishment of those who were careful.

It may have profoundly changed the mentality of the wealthy. For the last 10
years, "if it gets bad enough, there will be a bail out" has become standard
investment wisdom.

Socialism for those who own, free markets for those who don't. This
contradiction is what'll ultimately do us in.

~~~
choot
It's because some people have low IQ so they are not able to navigate through
the meandering job. All they want is a simple job with a well defined task on
which they can speed up and later achieve more objective output and not have
to please a boss for subjective remark.

~~~
Illniyar
Actually from what the study says a sizable chunk does this because they
prefer work from home or unable to work in an office. Some anecdotes are
provided of people with sick parents or young children who for them taking a
full time caretaker would be a net loss.

~~~
choot
The reason they give is based on self evaluation.

People are particularly bad at self evaluation.

Keep in mind, most people don't know what their IQ is. And most don't consider
themselves to posses less intelligence as they don't know what more
intelligence feels like.

See this video for relationship between job expectation and IQ:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjs2gPa5sD0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjs2gPa5sD0)

------
choot
Gig economy isn't bad if state ensures universal healthcare, food, housing
etc...

Entire economy should be setup this way so that no one is tied to a specific
career outside of the limited number of professions like doctors etc...

~~~
crdoconnor
If the state ensures healthcare, food, housing so few people will want these
jobs that the business model will break.

~~~
swiley
No, plenty of people would do gig economy jobs if they knew they wouldn't have
to worry about rent and food. The flexibility is way worth it. I'm pretty sure
I even would and I get paid way above the median income.

~~~
crdoconnor
The 'gig' economy is new in the west because a pool of desperate labor has
reappeared (after a hiatus of many many decades). It never really went away in
countries like India.

People, on the whole, would prefer to have more meaningful jobs rather than
delivering burgers to office workers.

~~~
StanislavPetrov
I don't think full-time jobs are, in general, any more "meaningful" than gig-
economy job, but they are almost universally more stable, predicable, and
better-paying - which is what is of primary concern to most workers.

------
fogetti
Yes, the proletariat disappeared. That's true. Enter precariat instead.
Awesome change isn't it!

~~~
prolikewh0a
The proletariat did not disappear, it didn't go anywhere. The working class
does not own the means of production, and gig economy workers do not own their
means of production either. The majority of the country are wage slave
proletariat.

~~~
ozim
As you can notice parent introduced _precariat_ , which in turn is new type of
proletariat.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precariat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precariat)

------
Illniyar
"In that classic form, Marx’s favorite class doesn’t really exist in the rich
world today, except in the so-called gig economy."

What? how? What about service workers (which constitute a major section of US
workforce)? Do burger flippers at mcdonald's own their means of production?
Cleaners? Waiters? Heck even truckers don't own their truck.

On the contrary, in the classical sense most gig-economy workers (at least
those we associate with the gig economy) are not Proletariat - uber drivers
own their car, AirBnB own their houses, Marketplaces (etsy, fiverr etc...
which Amazon turk is nominally a part of) own the tools and knowledge to make
whatever they sell.

Amazon Turkers are really not representative of the Gig Economy (a term that
came much later then Amazon's Mechanical Turk) and at least for me I don't
really think of them as part of the Gig Economy.

~~~
CapacitorSet
Crucially, gig workers do not own an important part of their means of
production: the platform that processes rides/rentals/etc, payments and users,
which allows the traditional bourgeois to extract surplus value (Mehrwert) in
the usual way, and the workers fit the definition of proletarians.

~~~
Illniyar
True, but they own some of it, and there is competition between platforms for
them (I.E. lyft vs uber). In fact many people "work" for multiple platforms.
It's similar to a farmer selling his ware in a marketplace, which he must pay
rent for. Would you say that because he doesn't own the marketplace (or store)
he doesn't own his means of production?

Now the question is whether they must own all of the means of production to be
considered bourgeois? I would say no, especially in today's world, where most
production is a complicated multi-tiered process.

But even if you do think so, they are still much better off, Marxist-wise,
from virtually every service worker, who own no means of production.

In any case, that doesn't mean that there is no exploitation or that the gig
economy should not be regulated, but it really doesn't have anything to do
with Proletariat.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
What means of production do they own? Surely that's the platform app and
backend, which offers a price?

A farmer on a market stall can price however he likes.

~~~
Illniyar
The car (Uber,Lift), the house (AirBnB), the tools for making what they sell
(Etsy,fiverr).

Only Uber (and other ride-haling apps I suppose) forces a price, all other
marketplaces the price is set by the seller - AirBnB, Etsy, fiverr. In Amazon
Turk the seller and buyer roles are reversed and Turkers only accept work that
pay enough for them.

I would say it's more a product of the industry they are in - transportation
is usually regulated to have a fixed price almost everywhere - then the nature
of marketplaces in the gig-economy as a whole.

~~~
billyggruff
Uber does not force a price.

It is up to the driver to accept the fare.

~~~
swiley
I've been told that uber hides some of the information (either the price or
the distance the driver has to go or both) which makes that not quite true.

~~~
jesuschristHD
I currently drive for Uber and both of these are 100% true When a request pops
up all I see is the estimated time it'll take me to get to the pickup point, I
also have exactly 10 seconds to accept a request.

~~~
billyggruff
Is this also true for Lyft?

------
emayljames
Plot twist: There is no such thing as "the middle class".

~~~
fallingfrog
Exactly right! The reason that politicians talk about there being 3 classes is
that 3 is a nice, round number that just sounds nice, and also it allows
everyone to pretend that they're middle class.

~~~
geezerjay
There's a collosal social difference between living paycheck to paycheck
without any disposable income, thus depending on retaining your job to be able
to keep a roof over your head, and being economically self-sufficient to the
point where you are free to take multiple holidays throughout the year and
even be free to quit your job and live off your savings through long stretches
of time.

Middle class does exist, and it's existence is rather obvious. Trying to
conflate middle class with low class or poverty makes no sense at all, because
the plight of a low class worker has absolutely nothing in common to the
problems and challenges faced by middle class workers.

~~~
113
The rights you have as a member of the 'middle class' have much more in common
with the lower class than the highest class.

It is also a lot easier to move from middle class to poverty, than it is to
fall from the upper class.

Yes, it feels like there is a 'colossal difference', but it's not nearly as
big as the difference between middle class and the ultra-wealthy.

------
rectang
Where would the employment rate be if you eliminated "gig economy" jobs?

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atrilumen
I'm building _magic software_ that will require humans to operate and train. I
really want them all in house for security, so I'm going to start hiring
locally here in Colombia, and fill houses as necessary.

But anyway, I am hoping to make this role of teaching and babysitting AI as
fun and rewarding as possible. Like a fun video game, along with a sacred duty
to take care of users and protect their privacy.

I will also ship some form of this to end users eventually, so that it can run
entirely offline, or at least without our services.

I'm thinking that systems trained with interactive learning might create an
entirely new category of job, _operating AI_. Sure, trained domains will
require less babysitting over time, but that just frees up the labor force to
expand to more domains.

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stillbourne
Proletariat? I think the proper word is Precariat.

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ferongr
Imagine getting paid a salary to recite tankie nonsense.

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jimnotgym
I have deleted my whole comment. I didn't mention the Labour party, and I
don't think party politics belongs here, but commenters tried to make it about
the Labour party. I hope the mods kill the whole thread

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Not really, they are constantly raising the issue of zero-hours contracts.
Nobody in the Labour Party talks about coal miners because there are none
left.

~~~
jimnotgym
I didn't specifically mention the Labour party (because they are not the only
socialist group, and also within my life-time were considered a centre-left
party) and don't like party-politics on HN, but it seems to me that coal
mining is still a big part of their identity[0].

I also wasnt talking about zero hour contracts at all???

I hope HN doesn't become yet another arena where you can't discuss broad
categories of political theory without being savaged by Corbynites.

[0]:[https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jul/07/corbyn-
crit...](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jul/07/corbyn-critics-
banned-durham-miners-gala-reception)

------
ilaksh
Mechanical Turk and Uber are likely to be taken over by AI in the next 10
years or so.

So the situation will probably get worse.

