here we go again with this...
What's wrong with such jobs ? AS mentioned by Amazon you don't need to work 9 to 5, you can just work for extra if you need. Even if you HAD basic income this kind of part-time job could make sense to make a bit more money that the nothing you would get to survive on your own.
The problem with the ongoing commoditization of work is that it causes it to lose value. As a result the economy becomes more efficient. However the question is who benefits from this increase in efficiency?
It certainly isn't the worker, whose labour becomes cheaper every year (there hasn't been an increase in real wages for over a decade now in the US). The consumer certainly benefits from lower prices. However who arguably benefits the most is - as always - the proprietor of the production factors: ie. Amazon, which supplies the jobs, the technology, owns the storage facilities, etc.
Now: As a net result over the whole economy, the efficiency gains achieved with these new work contracts are beneficial. However these gains are unequally distributed between the proprietors (ie. Amazon and it's shareholders) and the employees. While incomes for many employees have stagnated for over a decade, the shareholders of Amazon keep getting richer (https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...) creating more inequality. This is why we need a universal basic income policy. To allow everyone at the very least dignified living conditions.
> However the question is who benefits from this increase in efficiency?
Who benefited from Ford making cars more efficiently ? Their employees as well, since they could buy cars on their own at cheaper prices than the then available cars.
Productivity gains improve life for EVERYONE, even the poorer ones. There's so many examples I don't even know what kind of point you are trying to make here.
Improvements in agriculture make food cheaper as well, which makes it possible for even modest household to have 3 smartphones on top of food of the table, and go on vacation more than 0 times a year.
Sometimes when I read comments here, I get the bizarre impression that nobody has noticed the massive increase of purchasing power that society got in the past 100 years. I must be living in a bubble.
That is textbook trickle down economics which we have had for several decades, and look where it got us. We have some of the worst income inequality in the world, if not the worst.
Inequality is bullshit. Inequality even starts at birth, what are you going to do about that? the only remedy to inequality as a whole is a Communist Paradise, and God we know that people do not like the idea of everyone being as equally poor as everyone else.
Inequality, again, does not matter as long as everyone gets richer, including the poorer ones. Which has been the case. Mass starvations have stopped around the world for like 30 years if you have not noticed, and the only remaining ones are usually due to political or conflict issues. The whole world is getting richer, and that is a Greater Good than worrying about the 1% getting richer faster.
History has shown time and time again that societies can only survive if the difference between the rich and poor stays within certain bounds. The French revolution didn't happen because people were thrilled by the prospects of a democratic system. It happened because the difference between the aristocracy and the peasants grew so large that a few years with a poor harvest were reason enough to topple the whole state. And there are countless other examples in history. If a society wants to survive and remain stable some of the benefits rich people have must also be accessible to the general public (for example health care and education), otherwise social unrest is inevitable (remember occupy wall street?). This does not equate to communism. Neither does it mean that everything is ok just because nobody is starving anymore.
> It happened because the difference between the aristocracy and the peasants grew so large that a few years with a poor harvest were reason enough to topple the whole state.
Pff, looks like you have no idea what you are talking about. Disclaimer, I'm French and what happened is nowhere as simple as you make it sound like. '
> If a society wants to survive and remain stable some of the benefits rich people have must also be accessible to the general public (for example health care and education)
The poor people have never had as MUCH opportunity as NOW to get education and health care compared to the previous centuries before us. Wake up, seriously.
> otherwise social unrest is inevitable (remember occupy wall street?).
Yeah looks like OWS changed a lot of things : a bunch of hipsters camping in NY with no real agenda, big deal.
There are a multitude of things you can do to reduce inequality at birth, from prenatal care to childcare. Statistics show that inequality certainly matters when correlated among other first world countries with social problems such as crime, teenage pregnancy, illiteracy, health, etc etc. If you're open to new ideas, I suggest you watch this TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson?language=en
> There are a multitude of things you can do to reduce inequality at birth
The most egalitarian folks actually dream of a society where it would be forbidden to have your own children (since it's actually VERY unfair to pass your genes down to the next generation... Smart people get smart kids, that's furthering the gap of inequalities) and let the sacrosanct government take care of human race reproduction and ensure it's genetically fair.
Well, the whole inequality issue only matters because we're all locked in a fierce, eat-or-be-eaten competition with each other, where if you fail you end up being miserable and die of hunger or bad health. Hence basic income.
Was your comment a joke based on my previous one? People dying from starvation are very much a thing of the past. and good medical care has never been as widespread as it is nowadays. 100 years ago you could die from a benign infection, nowadays, not so much.
Expectations went up too. In proportion to the increase in efficiency. So people's perceptions of their own lives decrease in value. That's just how people work. You can say whatever you want about these absolutes. No one cares and you noted it yourself.
>"However these gains are unequally distributed between the proprietors (ie. Amazon and it's shareholders) and the employees. While incomes for many employees have stagnated for over a decade, the shareholders of Amazon keep getting richer (https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...) creating more inequality."
Do you own any shares in a fund that tracks the S&P 500? Congrats, you too are an Amazon shareholder getting richer at the expense of said employees.
Nothing is inherently wrong with the job per se, it's that the general acceptance of a commoditized workforce is dangerous in that it circumvents many other protections offered by regular jobs (not that those are that much better) in disguise because it has a relatively high hourly rate. Your effective hourly rate after paying for health insurance plus other company provided benefits is likely much closer to normal rates.
Basic income is a method to prevent wage slavery* as well as many other negative side affects of having to work to try and provide even the basic necessities (shelter and food). This job would be awesome in the world of basic income because people wouldn't have to worry about how they are going to feed themselves, but would be able to work extra to be able to afford the quality of life they prefer. Basic income is about rebalancing the power structures between employer and employee, and giving the power back to the people without it (the employees.)
this is not the place for discussing this here, but the inherent problem with this basic income idea is that there's no way to provide such money in developed countries which are already indebted to the bone. Unless you decide to seize savings and declare the country a communist dictatorship or something.
Well, since you decided to discuss it anyway... :)
Basic income is wealth redistribution function. There is a massive income inequality problem in the US (a trivial google search will reveal, if you aren't aware of already), and a basic income would rebalance taxes as well as replace some other social programs in order to pay for it. See this reddit post for more info about income inequality and taxes.
Well you spelled it, you need a communist like system to do that (i.e. take money through taxes, redistribute it through massive inefficiencies, and make sure politicians get their hefty share when the money flows).
Inequality is a false problem. It's a problem if people get poorer, but all indicators for the past 50 years show that everyone is getting richer, while rich ones are getting richer faster (which is obvious why, when you have more capital you are much more likely to increase it faster). As long as even the modest classes are getting richer every generation, everyone's life is improving.
Actually, if a state does any welfare, it probably has this problem already. Basic income offers significant reductions in those inefficiencies by simplifying the process of selecting eligible people (and retiring the required bureaucracy).
> and make sure politicians get their hefty share when the money flows
That you have under every system, from despotism to socialism to capitalist democracy.
> Inequality is a false problem. It's a problem if people get poorer, but all indicators for the past 50 years show that everyone is getting richer, while rich ones are getting richer faster (which is obvious why, when you have more capital you are much more likely to increase it faster). As long as even the modest classes are getting richer every generation, everyone's life is improving.
Inequality will be a false problem when the bottom level of society won't be starving to death or due to lack of basic health care. Again, basic income proposes turning inequality into a non-problem by securing a decent, humane minimum level for everyone.
> Actually, if a state does any welfare, it probably has this problem already. Basic income offers significant reductions in those inefficiencies by simplifying the process of selecting eligible people (and retiring the required bureaucracy).
Never been proven that UBI would reduce the inefficiencies. The State find ways to be inefficient even when it's not supposed to be.
> That you have under every system, from despotism to socialism to capitalist democracy.
Nope, if you did not have a Big government doing wealth redistribution in the first place you would not have much money being lost in such transactions because the flow would be very limited. Look at the US Federal budget, how humongous it has become.
> Inequality will be a false problem when the bottom level of society won't be starving to death or due to lack of basic health care.
Oh come on. Mass starvation is a thing of the past, check Wikipedia, the last starvations happened more than 30 years ago and the only recent ones are due to conflicts mainly - poor people do not die anymore of hunger anywhere - we have large amounts of excess food, even in the poorest places of the world, like the countrysides of China.
> Again, basic income proposes turning inequality into a non-problem by securing a decent, humane minimum level for everyone.
The advocates of UBI fail to understand that by raising the minimum earnings to everyone, you will probably make prices go up everywhere (increased taxes + prices adjustments based on purchasing power) so it won't result in any meaningful difference.
Got some sources on the 'everyone getting richer' claim? I have never seen a single statistic suggesting that, after accounting for factors such as inflation... maybe I have some selection bias, but everything I have read shows that the middle class has gotten steadily poorer over the last 30 years or so.
Also, not every form of redistribution is automatically 'communist'... I don't see many people who advocate basic income also suggesting that we turn over means of production to the state - just raising some taxes, and trying to make the way that we redistribute wealth more simple/efficient.
I don't know enough about it to really argue either way, but your arguments don't make much sense to me without more context.
> Also, not every form of redistribution is automatically 'communist'...
Well UBI is a welfare kind of policy and needs basically a strong State to actually work in practice. Most strong States lean towards socialism and communism because they justify their existence this way ("if we were not there, you would not have welfare, so let us increase the government budget size further") - a common trope to get folks elected.
They'll be deprecated as soon as self driving cars become viable. The same goes for most jobs like this, technology will catch up eventually and make them obsolote.
I'm still waiting to see cashiers disappear in supermarkets. Or bakers, since bread and cake production could be completely automatized by now. Strangely they are not going away. I wonder why...
People who predict extinction of jobs are usually wrong.
Even in the tiny rural community I live in, cashiers are being replaced by automated systems in large stores. Smaller stores will probably continue to have cashiers until forever, but we're not talking about 100% of cashiers going away, we're talking about some percentage of that. If half of the available jobs in a market vanish, that will have significant and devastating effects, regardless of how they're lost. Especially for jobs like cashiering, because there are limited places for cashiers to go, and this problem will eventually effect lots of jobs that have no up front professional training requirement (and perhaps many that do, but that's its own discussion.)
It's only a matter of time, for example, until Domino's pizza production is automated. The only reason we haven't seen this yet is because hiring humans is cheaper than solving the complex automation problem this presents. But technology continues to get cheaper. When that swings the other way, your pizza will get made by robots. Pizza delivery by robots is already a solved problem, just waiting for the costs to skew the right way. In short: at the speed at which technological problems get solved, it's unlikely we will have even adequately discussed the ramifications of the problem before it arrives on our doorstep.
I don't know how it is in America, I live in the Netherlands, but I haven't interacted with a cashier in a supermarket for a very long time. Every supermarket has self-checkout, and still some cashiers for people who don't want it, of course. But a lot less cashiers than a few years ago.
You grab a scanner at the entrance, scan all your purchages and then you put the scanner away and pay at a terminal. The terminal prints out your receipt, which you can scan to open the exit. You will sometimes (this has never happened to me, but I've seen it to other people) be picked by the system for a random check to see if you're not stealing anything.
In the US, our self-checkout is a machine that stops the transaction and complains if you so much as breathe on the scale. It's terribly awkward to use, and so I much prefer to use a live cashier rather than suffer the incessant blathering of a machine that doesn't even bag my groceries for me.
I've not seen those machines. The ones I've seen you just scan everything as you put it in your bag, and then you pay. No cashier will bag your groceries for you either, and they will laugh at you if you ask. You do that yourself here, either way.
That's interesting about the bagging. One of the bigger issues with this in the US is that people are just really poor grocery baggers most of the time compared to someone whose job it is.
When there are only a handful of these self-checkouts, you end up with a situation where it is often quicker to wait for the line with the cashier and bagger because they just process customers SO MUCH FASTER.
In college I knew someone who was a grocery bagger for a while, and when we'd go to the store he'd bag his stuff and I'd bag mine. The speed and thoughtfulness that went into the placement of various things in his bag was rather humbling...almost akin to watching an expert Tetris player in the zone.
So ultimately more machines could help solve the long line issue, but that is still definitely a factor as it stands today. Given that grocery stores often leave most of their checkout lanes unattended, I'd love to see more converted to self-checkout to increase overall checkout speed.
That sounds like a nice system. In the US we don't have scanners you pick up at the entrance - it's more like you do the part the cashiers used to do. You pull up to a scanner, scan everything in your cart, bag everything, then put it back in your cart and pay at the machine.
A scale underneath the bagging area keeps tabs on everything you can to make sure you're not cheating the system. (Still, I've heard stories of people checking out all produce as watermelons.)
That does sound less pleasant. Now that I'm thinking about that, I've encountered a system like that once. I think that was one of the first supermarkets trialing self-checkout. The system disappeared soon after and got replaced by what I've described.
It is quite easy to cheat the current system, though the random sampling helps some. I think someone somewhere made a decision that it is worth it to improve customer satisfaction and deal with some losses, but I have no idea.
How does that system handle produce? That's one of the big reasons why automated checkout works like it does in the US (using checkout stations and scales).
Most (all?) supermarkets require you to weigh produce yourself, even when making use of regular checkout. There are several scales with a bunch of buttons in the produce section, you put your produce of preference on there and press the button to identify it. Then you get a sticker with a barcode/price based on the produce type and weight.
I scan the item and put it in my bag. This is less work than putting it in a cart, waiting for the cashier to scan everything and then I pack it in my bag. I'm done a lot faster and have never even thought of it being any more work on my side.
It may help that we never had people to pack your bags for you, which some countries seem to have.
Well in Japan the cashier does a lot more things for you. First they scan stuff. Then they place the items in a different cart in a proper order so that nothing is squashed by whatever is up or down, which makes it easier for you to pack things before you go. They also cut the bread in slices if you wish, or cut some extremities of the larger vegetables for your convenience.
Ah. Here the cashiers have only ever scanned your groceries, and put them on a small conveyor belt that moves them to the side. You'll have to pack your bag yourself, and bread usually comes pre-sliced. I've also seen non-sliced bread being sold, but that is usually accompanied by a machine where you can have it sliced prior to purchase.
And people who refuse to see it are usually blind...
The supermarkets I go to have greatly reduced their cashiers. In most cases by at least half, especially in small shops (3 cashiers has become 2-3 machines and one human).
As for bakers, they don't just make bread and cake.
My point is it's a pretty terrible example for you to pick. Baking is not a low-skill menial job. It's certainly not first in line in the "jobs that will get replaced by a machine" domino line.
It's actually a pretty good example because bread making can be completely automatized starting from ingredients mixing, to baking, packing and delivery to your supermarket.
yet bakers do not disappear. What's not valid about this example?
You seem to be under the impression that baker and industrial bread maker are the same job. They are not. And the latter has long been (mostly) done by machine.
This seems relevant: "There isn’t a rule of economics that says better technology makes more, better jobs for horses. It sounds shockingly dumb to even say that out loud, but swap horses for humans and suddenly people think it sounds about right."
> This seems relevant: "There isn’t a rule of economics that says better technology makes more, better jobs for horses. It sounds shockingly dumb to even say that out loud, but swap horses for humans and suddenly people think it sounds about right."
Except that it does not make sense at all.
Take 200 years ago, most folks were farmers. Take 100 years ago, there were now much more folks working somewhat qualified jobs (where they needed some actual skills) in industries. Take 50-60 years ago, with the creation of the service industries and all the jobs that came with it. And now for the past 30 years, hipsters are getting coding jobs and getting pretty good salaries despite the fact we have been living in a past century of technological revolutions.
And we are far, very far from 100% unemployment.
So your horse analogy has no ground in reality. For the most part, humans have been getting more, and better jobs on the whole, and most people commenting here are holding such higher paying, better jobs around. Thanks to technology.
> Take 50-60 years ago, with the creation of the service industries and all the jobs that came with it. And now for the past 30 years, hipsters are getting coding jobs and getting pretty good salaries despite the fact we have been living in a past century of technological revolutions.
The qualitative difference between now and 100 years ago is that those hipsters gave brains to the machines. The shift to service industries occured because machines replaced human muscle power. The hipsters started with replacing human precision, and now they're replacing human cognitive capabilities. Services sector is not safe.
It's also important to note what kinds of jobs are being created nowadays. A lot of them are "bullshit jobs" - make-believe work or elements of zero-sum-games like (big part of) advertising industry. Work has been disconnected from benefit it brings, we're literally (although usually indirectly) inventing nonsense tasks because we need to have something for people to do and not starve.
> It's also important to note what kinds of jobs are being created nowadays. A lot of them are "bullshit jobs" - make-believe work or elements of zero-sum-games like (big part of) advertising industry. Work has been disconnected from benefit it brings, we're literally (although usually indirectly) inventing nonsense tasks because we need to have something for people to do and not starve.
You think bullshit jobs are something new ? Of course not, they have always existed. Even some coders have bullshit jobs - there is probably only a fraction of jobs that actually directly bring value, among a massive amount of noise from other jobs that support the other or have indirect value to the said business.
But on the whole, there are way more "non-bullshit" jobs that there were ever before, that's why I claim you are missing the big picture. There were no scientist jobs before. There were no engineer jobs 150 years ago. There were few doctors (very few) in the same time range as well.
> that those hipsters gave brains to the machines.
and
> now they're replacing human cognitive capabilities.
No, computers are still very much stupid, there is no autonomous AI in sight - we have just been able to make them do some specific tasks very very well and much faster than humans (deep learning and the like), but in terms of flexibility and learning abilities the most advanced computer program and hardware is far behind any life form on Earth. Are you not a member of the Singularity Church ?
> because we need to have something for people to do and not starve.
People don't work anymore to bring food on the table. Food has never been cheaper. Even homeless folks have smartphones these days - the amount of excess cash that people get out of work far exceeds the money needed to get food.
> yet bakers do not disappear. What's not valid about this example?
They transform. "Bakeries" become just a pick-up point, where you buy bread that was baked in scale (probably in industrial ovens) and delivered to the store. Bakery employees nowadays have less to do with baking than McDonald's employees with frying fries (they still do something to them).
cashiers are getting extincted little by little, supermarkets all have self checkin, macdonalds rlies heavily on it, train systems in many countries have automated lines, bakers have long been replaced by industrial ovens and breads in EVERY supermarket and they are now low qualified workers helped by electronic ovens who unfreeze breads instead of workers. don't make any mistake as technology evolves it becomes cheaper to replace a low-skill worker by a robot and this trend will likely raise until it is much much much more cheaper to get a robot than a worker (this is probably already cheaper to have all selfcheckin than cashiers but companies are keeping them for social and ethical reason, my thinking being that those ethical bareers tends to get slimmer when cost difference increase)
> cashiers are getting extincted little by little,
Cashiers are still alive and well in Japan, thank you for asking.
> Supermarkets all have self checkin
Not everywhere and even where there is i see way more people queuing for the cashier queue than going for self checking but maybe it's different the Californian world or wherever you are living.
> ovens and breads in EVERY supermarket
I'm obviously talking about local breadshops in cities. they are alive and well, once again, and not going bankrupt. Quality still matters.
> train systems in many countries have automated lines
Yes, but how many have automated trains ? it's technically possible for a long time yet trains are still driven by people. It's way more simple to automate a train than a car yet it's not happening. Strange, huh ?
I'm just making observations based on real life - the world has not massively been robotised since the 90s (it has certainly happened in many manufacturing plants but the "worker"/"human face" is very resilient when it comes to local services).
You keep making wiiild claims based on "I don't see it happening (as much as you)". Don't you travel?
> I'm obviously talking about local breadshops in cities. they are alive and well, once again, and not going bankrupt. Quality still matters.
There's less. There's less of all these jobs you mention. You say in another post "but it won't go extinct" - well no, probably not, they'll still exist in some form. Horse carts also exist, but nobody's here saying "Cars have not fully replaced horses".
> It's way more simple to automate a train than a car yet it's not happening. Strange, huh ?
This is in effect all over the place. When I went to Berlin I didn't find a single subway train driver.
"It won't happen" is talk from people who didn't want to accept an eventuality a decade ago. Today, it's happening - putting your hands over your eyes is very much unproductive.
> This is in effect all over the place. When I went to Berlin I didn't find a single subway train driver.
I'm not talking about subways, I am talking about normal intercity trains. NONE of them are automated. Anywhere. Check it out.
> "It won't happen" is talk from people who didn't want to accept an eventuality a decade ago. Today, it's happening - putting your hands over your eyes is very much unproductive.
I'm not saying this is not happening, what I am saying is that it's happening at a most slower pace than what all the hipsters on HN claim it's happening, and just like everything else, we are going towards fragmentation and not complete removal of most of these jobs. So the "singularity" dream of some people here that the human race will see all of its jobs done by robots in 20 years, and that we need to think right now about income without jobs (UBI and the like) is pure delirium. Society won't change so fast.
You need to ask yourself exactly why it's not happening. It's not because it isn't possible, or because humans are better at operating trains. There's simply a lot of opposition to such ideas, and a lot of entrenched interests with political power that keep machines at bay - for now.
well france has automated subways for years and they don't automate all only because of syndicates. i believe they will automate all when cost decrease
> I'm still waiting to see cashiers disappear in supermarkets. Or bakers, since bread and cake production could be completely automatized by now. Strangely they are not going away. I wonder why...
You must be (un)lucky to have avoided the wave of self-service checkout points :). As for bakers, I don't remember when was the last time I saw a bakery that acutally baked anything - the ones I see all have bread and cakes delivered several times a day by whoever owns the franchise.
Also, automation is not a binary proposition - if your central bakery uses big dough machines and industrial baking ovens, it already counts as half-automated, as it employs much less personnel per unit of output as bakeries used to few decades ago :).
I would also like to add that large scale bread production is already mostly automated. You will still have local bakeries because fresh bread is nice, and the automation needs large factory halls that are unlikely to be near your home or match your schedule.
Indeed, but the point is that man-made bread > industrial bread in the end. It's not because you can automate something that it create better goods in the end.
If that was the case we would replace cooks with robots for a long time as well.
And of course the list goes on for many, many other professions.
It's obvious that the ones who predict massive automation of most jobs are thinking WAY AHEAD of their life. It's not going to happen anytime soon, no matter how much software and hardware is "eating the world". Making predictions is always a risky business... after all we were all supposed to have flying cars by 2015 and whatever, yet the best piece of tech we have is just a tiny computer in our pockets - that's a great achievement, but it's a little short of the dreams we had 30 years ago.
It's also more expensive, and I am fine with industrial bread. I know many, many people who only buy their break from the supermarket and that is all industrialized. Bakeries still exist, but many less do than several years ago.
For automation to be a success it doesn't have to replace 100% of the market, and it's unlikely for it to ever truly reach 100% for the reasons you mention. But that's fine, it'll just slowly keep growing.
Then I hope you will also agree that "extinction" is too strong of a word, and we use it too often around here while in reality most jobs have a hard time disappearing completely, if at all.
On top of that, not sure about where you live, but some supermarkets also have reversed their trend about industrial bread and hire "baker-workers" who actually bake bread on-site (from industrial paste) instead of it being purely delivered for consumption, which is slightly better and fresher, and require human workers.
To be fair, I never did use the word extinction. I used deprecated and obsolete, which I stand by. Deprecated jobs may still exist because some people prefer it that way, they'll just become specialists. And they may also be obsolete for the primary market, but as we already discussed some people prefer a higher quality which these specialists might provide.
I'm from the Netherlands, and I haven't heard about the industrial paste thing. I don't think it happens, but maybe it does. In any case, if they do do that, there is no doubt in my mind that they need less workers to perform these tasks than to bake the bread from scratch. So that is still a win for automation.
I've seen that reversed trend, and it's the reason I go to bakeries - the bread in bakery shops is fresher and better even though they don't bake it on-site, but get it delivered from somewhere (I assume a big industrial bakery providing for the entire city) two-three times a day! The supermarket baked-on-site bread is much worse, and looks like a desperate attempt by supermarkets to keep people buying bread there.
Are they? Two local markets near me that bake bread on-site use the already employed staff. Putting dough into oven and setting a timer isn't much work, so usually the person behind the meat counter does that.
That's part of the appeal of UBI - we just accept that we are moving into a gig/freelance economy and these new jobs (and old jobs that have new conventions, like 3 day workweeks) are there to supplement UBI.
As a believer in capitalism, I see UBI as equalizing the labor side of the equation without economy-smothering alternatives like unions or excessive labor regulations.
It does by decoupling the need for a person to have a stable job. I think the effects of this would be almost as big as the shifts that happened during the Industrial Revolution. Once workers are truly free to choose their employers, we will see a massive shift in workplace norms.
Poor job security transfers costs that normally borne by the employer, and externalises them to society.
You've got cancer? Partner just died? Unplanned pregnancy? Not your fault, and in a regular job needing a week or two off won't leave you destitute.
Workers in the gig economy are still going to have these things happen - the expenses don't go away. If the employer isn't doing their bit, the expense will be borne by family, charities or the taxpayer. Good for Amazon's bottom line, bad for you and me.
here we go again with this... What's wrong with such jobs ? AS mentioned by Amazon you don't need to work 9 to 5, you can just work for extra if you need. Even if you HAD basic income this kind of part-time job could make sense to make a bit more money that the nothing you would get to survive on your own.