In New York, we have Caviar [1][2], a mid-tier to premium food-delivery company. They differentiated based on premium food. I haven't heard any complaints from their delivery staff, though this may be on account of their size.
Is there a premium player in the grocery delivery business? Something like FreshDirect, but with better service?
> I haven't heard any complaints from their delivery staff, though this may be on account of their size.
This is probably the key part. Does Caviar pay their drivers more than other sites? The cynic in me suggests that no, they don’t. Maybe, maybe, they get better tips as a result of delivering premium food.
In my experience as a food courier, tipping amount do not correlate with the category of food delivered. You could get tipped more for a hamburger than a sushi.
In fact the only correlation I've noticed is when the recipient seems like a decent person, combined with you having to go trough an extraordinary amount of trouble, like getting on a hill at the edge of the city, or having to navigate trough a confusing maze in a giant office complex.
But then again sometimes you deliver in the night trough a thunderstorm an orbital amount of stuff for a party, and get nothing.
In NYC the high-end restaurant supplier Baldor just started doing home deliveries for individuals... Prices aren’t great, think like high end Costco delivered.
Me too, but neither you nor I represent the market.
If there was a sufficient market for all of this to work out, it probably would have existed before Instacart. Instacart provides no innovation, other than dumping investor money on the market, and externalizing a lot of cost and risk onto gig workers, thereby making the price of delivery somewhat worthwhile ... for now. The moment the workers are paid reasonably and/or the VC subsidy runs out, what then?
Since when do the unit metrics on this business add up?
> Since when do the unit metrics on this business add up?
Never. Without VC money or gig workers who do not understand the costs of depreciation this model does not work for something as low margin as groceries.
At 10% margin, which is insane for groceries, you’d need a $100+ order to breaking even the cost of delivery. Forget actually making a profit. And real margins are closer to 2-3%.
The 10% margins are what’d be insane. Not an individual bill of $100. At 2-3% the profits on that bill drop down to nowhere near enough to cover gas, mileage, health insurance, unemployment tax, and everything else tacked on for the true cost of delivery.
> At 2-3% the profits on that bill drop down to nowhere near enough to cover gas, mileage, health insurance, unemployment tax, and everything else tacked on for the true cost of delivery.
I don't understand how most of those things are "true costs" at all.
This type of work is ideal for college students, who are typically still on their parents health insurance, or as supplementary work for someone who already has a full time job and wants to work a few extra hours.
Unemployment doesn't even make sense in this context because you work whatever hours you want and they don't really do layoffs. Even if the company went out of business, there are several others offering the same type of work immediately to anyone.
Gas costs money, but how much is highly dependent on vehicle type and people doing this type of work have the obvious incentive to use higher efficiency vehicles where the gas for this kind of trip would cost less than $1, and for the same reason to choose more reliable vehicles with below average maintenance costs.
The way you get really gnarly cost estimates is by using the same depreciation models that corporations do when they buy new vehicles for the sole purpose of making deliveries -- because you then lose $10,000 or more in value over the first few years of ownership regardless of mileage or anything else you do. But for someone using a personal vehicle they would need regardless, that huge reduction in value due to age is already a sunk cost.
And it is a bad deal for anyone who is trying to make a long-term career out of it, but the people expecting to do that should look elsewhere for employment. Not every job is a career, and why should it have to be?
It is better for jobs with high flexibility and low compensation to exist for the people who want them. The people who need less flexibility and more compensation should choose different jobs.
Well yeah, you can make the numbers square up if you ignore/offload a bunch of costs, but not everyone who is delivering for one of these companies is a student or has another income stream, and wear-and-tear on a vehicle will manifest as a mechanical fault one day.
This argument sounds like a lot like the argument against raising minimum wage ("it's not meant to be enough to survive on"), however the reality is that large numbers of these gigs/jobs are worked by adults who depend on it as a primary source of income, and in the face of the massive and sudden job losses we're seeing, it's quite callous to say they should "just choose different jobs".
If the Instacarts and Ubers of the world cannot afford to pay these people appropriately then their business model is a failure.
> Well yeah, you can make the numbers square up if you ignore/offload a bunch of costs, but not everyone who is delivering for one of these companies is a student or has another income stream
Given that it's sustainable if they do, what's wrong with letting those people be the ones who do it? Why is anybody who needs a long-term full-time job required to do this instead of working at Walmart or going to college or learning a trade? Why should we even want to encourage that? It's low-paying work open to anyone who needs immediate income with flexible hours. Let it be what it is.
> and wear-and-tear on a vehicle will manifest as a mechanical fault one day.
Which, for a modern reliable vehicle, you amortize over many thousands of miles. If you're doing this in a 1980s Land Rover, you're doing it wrong.
> This argument sounds like a lot like the argument against raising minimum wage ("it's not meant to be enough to survive on"), however the reality is that large numbers of these gigs/jobs are worked by adults who depend on it as a primary source of income, and in the face of the massive and sudden job losses we're seeing, it's quite callous to say they should "just choose different jobs".
How is it any less callous than saying that most of them should lose their jobs and the rest of them should lose their flexibility? That's what happens if you start requiring a bunch of recurring insurance costs, which increases hiring costs and reduces demand for workers (which lowers overall wages across the economy), and induces the company to schedule the remaining workers during the hours that maximize returns to cover the higher costs instead of letting them work when and how long they actually want to.
I mean, suppose you have millions of college students who need some income. For example, Bob has class from 9AM to 10:30AM, drives for five hours, then has another class at 3:30PM. He drives 30 hours a week like this. You force insurance on him and that job becomes 40 hours scheduled at the company's convenience, which doesn't fit his class schedule, so he needs a different job. The different job is working a contiguous 8 hour shift in an office from 6PM to 2AM -- which fits into his schedule, and actually pays better than driving did, but he preferred driving even with lower pay because the hours for the better-paying job stink. He doesn't get home until 2:30AM and has class at 9AM, and it's 40 hours instead of 30 when he had been using the other 10 hours to study. The people using the better paying job as an actual job also prefer that a million Bobs not need it, because Bob will work for $15/hour when that job used to pay $20/hour, so now half of them lose their jobs to Bobs and the other half get paid less.
Constraining choices pretty much always makes workers worse off. It's worse for everybody. The choices they're forced into in the alternative already exist and they're not choosing them to begin with because the alternatives are not actually better.
I see you’re being downvoted, just wanted to add that our family of 3 also regularly spends over $100 weekly on groceries. We live in a fairly high cost-of-living area as well (Los Angeles, SF before that). A mix of prepared foods and raw ingredients, trying to source responsibly, for ~20 feedings adds up quickly.
I rarely spend $100 in one go at the grocery store. During normal times I visit the grocery store about 4-7 times per week and only buy whatever I feel like having for the next day or two. There have been many times that I had everything else I needed and walked out with a single potato.
It helps that I live 2 blocks from the grocery store, but I very much prioritize grocery store distance when choosing apartments.
Of course, during these epidemic times I've flipped my habits around and buying 1-2 weeks worth at a time to minimize exposure, but that's not my normal way of buying groceries. I'm not usually good at predicting what my stomach feels like having 2 days later.
Next up: InstaCart adds a $2 "safety" fee to every order, then pockets the money. Kinda like Uber added a $1 to every ride, but without actually spending the money on background checks, etc.
Unfortunately for these workers, with the unprecedented spike in unemployment [1] I suspect Instacart will be able to find a lot of desperate people willing to cross the picket line.
It's unfortunate that labor organizing has been anemic for so long I am guessing a lot of adults are not aware of what crossing a picket line even is. I can't blame people who need to work but those of us who could just use some other app should do so.
Certainly the instacart workers helped me the last two weeks shut in, it's the least we can do.
Instacart should be considered a last resort by anyone actually thinking about this. To start with, the whole way they distribute work is a complete shitshow (first come, first serve after jobs are posted at a preset time-- so in many markets, you have to login at exactly the right minute or all the worthwhile jobs get scooped up, yes literally within one minute).
Also the pay is crap, and you sometimes end up with orders of multiple cases of bottled water that are very difficult & time consuming to wrangle, and you'll get paid the same as if they bought the equivalent dollar amount worth of breakfast cereal. Customers frequently don't tip.
I found Uber & Lyft to be a far, far easier job for probably twice as much pay. Of course, right now I'm doing none of it. Fortunately my S.O. finally found a decent job and is able to work from home.
'No requirement' as long as you can live on poverty-level benefits, you aren't afraid of losing skill competency, and you think future employers won't kind the gap on your resume?
These workers would be dependent contractors in Germany or Canada, I think. Defining that in-between category in the US would allow for some useful compromises. Especially because full employee comes with so much baggage here, e.g. health insurance.
>"As we previously shared, we’re offering up to 14 days of pay for any hourly employee or full-service shopper who is diagnosed with COVID-19 or placed in individual mandatory isolation or quarantine, as directed by a local, state, or public health authority."[1]
So there is no benefits for workers who develop symptoms and self isolate? This statement reads like you have to go a hospital and be fortunate enough to be able to get a test. In many hotspots there is a shortage of tests. There also seems to be any mention of providing hand sanitizer, gloves, masks etc to these workers.
If you read the "previously shared" link in the above it states:
>"All Instacart part-time employees now have access to sick pay, an accrued benefit that can be used as paid time off if you are absent from work due to illness or injury. We’ve previously offered sick pay in select states — now, all part-time employees across North America, including in-store shoppers, will be able to accrue sick time to use as needed in the event that they become ill. All sick pay accrual will be backdated from the start of the year, so all hours worked by our in-store shoppers since then will count towards their current, individual sick pay balance."
An "accrued" benefit that will be backdated to the beginning of the year(we're only in month 3 of the year.)I'm guessing this would yield maybe 2 or 3 days max. That barely puts a dent into two weeks of self-isolation and no work.
It’s a joke. I know people who have been to the ER with severe symptoms who were turned away without testing (mostly because they’re young and “expected” to recover).
Every company that’s using testing as a precondition for benefits, when testing has been widely reported to be unavailable, is despicable.
I’m in Sydney Australia. Last Wednesday I woke with a sore throat and stuffy head. I drive a public bus and was concerned that I may have picked the virus up, and may be spreading it.
In the evening that night I went to the local hospital emergency. They had an area specifically for covid testing.
With 30 minutes I was tested, and told I needed to have 5 days off work. If the test was negative the government would pay for the sick time. If I was positive my company’s normal sick leave would need to cover it. I was negative and back at work, no cost to me.
I went to Stanford last weekend with a slight fever and sore throat and was tested and had results in about 16 hours. You could go right now and get tested there if you have symptoms. It’s an anecdote, sure, but the idea that people can’t get tested isn’t completely true.
I donated blood at MGH yesterday, which is how I checked. I'm just hoping to I don't fall down ill in two weeks' time from having set foot, even masked and hand-sanitized, in a hospital.
I know multiple people personally who called in experiencing COVID symptoms and were told to not even come to the hospital. If you aren't above a certain age or don't have preexisting conditions, they're likely not going to test you.
I had symptoms, and had even been traveling in Europe, but since I'm not elderly and haven't recently been to China, no test for you. Stay home and get bed rest. OK, I guess we're still pretending you only get it from China? This is a major health care provider in the Bay Area. Still coughing after 3 weeks...
Other delivery services don't have the problems of Instacart. My CSA delivers me a custom food order once a week. They leave a box at my door, stand across the street, call me, and wait until I come out and grab it. And their workers are getting paid fairly. And they don't screw over local businesses. And they get me what I actually ordered. I just have to wait a whooole week for this amazing convenience, and pay less than Instacart charges for delivery.
Gig working will continue to exploit businesses, workers, and consumers until we solve the problem that made it a viable business model: income inequality.
If people didn't need multiple part time jobs to survive, they wouldn't be working these terrible conditions. And when that stops, businesses (like restaurants) will also stop being abused by predatory gig-fueled companies (like grubhub). And if people didn't need to make extra cash with Uber, there'd be enough tax money to fund better public transit, which further levels the economic playing field.
It’s great that gig workers were included in the CARE bill. Hopefully this starts a trend of more bills including protections for gig workers. I fully support these workers striking for basic rights.
No. Gig workers are "self employed", who traditionally do not pay unemployment insurance such that traditional employers do (as a sole proprietor; if you incorporate and pay yourself as an employee, you would then be eligible for unemployment insurance; I imagine this is very rare as a gig worker, and unsure if any platforms support such a configuration).
This legislation doesn't change that, but it likely pulls some of those gig workers out of the system, as they might collect more on unemployment than working limited gig work available. TBD if this puts supply pressures on platforms.
Personal opinion: The stimulus is generous enough it's going to cause gig platforms to bleed out, as the stimulus is directed at the workers, not at the platforms. Bird is already performing mass layoffs. [1]
I think you took this question too literal. Uber et al. have not paid unemployment and other benefits for these "contractors" that are now supposed to receive exactly these benefits. It is literally a bailout for their workforce.
Which I'm happy that we are doing, these are real persons after all, but then we must necessarily dismantle them afterwards to make sure it doesn't repeat.
> It’s great that gig workers were included in the CARE bill.
This was specifically advocated for by Senator Sanders. He threatened to tighten the restrictions even further on the $500 billion bailout of corporations if this condition was not met.
Is there a source for this that isn't random twitter accounts?
Looking at the Senate record[0] I can't see anything about the Senator and there doesn't seem to be any news coverage of his involvement in the bill other than the fact that he missed procedural votes for the initial draft.
The negotiations were certainly not on the record, but we know who was at the table from reporting and where many provisions came from.
* Senators Hoeven and Stabenow secured the $9.5 billion and other aid for the agricultural industry.
* Senators Thune and Warner pushed for the new tax benefit for employers helping employees pay off student loans.
* Senator Shelby got a cap on funds being used for dredging work on harbors removed.
* Senator Leahy ensured every state got a minimum of $1.5 billion in funds so small states weren't left out.
* Senator Booker got the Bureau of Prisons to making videoconferencing free for inmates.
Obviously Secretary Mnuchin and Senator Schumer did most of the heavy lifting.
I can't find anything about Senator Sanders, and that clip is from after the unemployment provisions were already in the bill. The Senator didn't mention anywhere in that speech that he pushed for the inclusion of the unemployment provisions. He actually said "this isn't the bill I would have written," which I personally would have followed up on with an explanation of what I did to make the bill better if I had worked on it.
I want to admire him for that, but then I re-read that "$500 billion bailout of corporations" part. This movie was terrible the first time I was forced to watch it...
At least some of those desperate people remember the time they were underwater on their mortgage, and then the bank took their house at the same time the bank was getting bailed out and its execs were getting big bonuses. Well, maybe they bought too big a house, and were rightly punished when real estate crashed? This time around, we'll have to be pretty heartless to blame them for getting fired because of a pandemic. When their house goes up for auction this time, somehow it will be the same people bidding for it again, using free loans from the government. I may be out ahead of this with my cynical take, but the public will catch up with me, just like they did last time. (Actually I have to give a lot of credit to Dylan Ratigan; he figured it out before I did this week.)
Bailouts don't have to go mostly to politically connected rich turds. Somehow they always do...
Does that seem likely to be effective? I don't imagine I'm a better, more politically appealing, or more capable person than e.g. Tulsi Gabbard. She has a great story, and she has been right about everything, every time there has been a political question. Yet she is demonized by the war media and even many Democrats. As long as Gabbard and good people like her are frustrated in their efforts to end our stupid wars and use the trillions saved thereby to help regular people, I doubt my running for anything would contribute anything.
Besides, the fix for the corrupt broken system does not exist in the corrupt broken system.
Speaking as a former employee with many friends on the front lines of this event, the lay-offs have very little to do with the team that (previously) wanted to unionize, and much more to do with COVID financial impact and the retail team, of which many many more are now out of a job (vs the team where some percentage of the members previously wanted to unionize).
Whoever the person running that account is, they are not interested in you knowing all of the facts. I assure you.
Interesting, did not know that. There is a reddit thread in malefashionadvice you may want to comment on as well as there is no contradicting perspective there.
The amount of vitriol directed at Everlane for this Union thing is astounding.
There never was a union. Some people on the team wanted to form one, but most did not. It caused huge cultural issues and tension across the team, and the pro-union employees were very loud and went to VICE pretty much any time they had any minor complaint about the company (which VICE would of course eat right up).
Now Everlane is being framed as union-busting... when it was their own employees that couldn’t form or didn’t want a union. Everlane has always been fine with it, if that’s what the team wanted.
Why don’t they have enough cash on hand to weather a few months of no sales? Why are american businesses so vulnerable to a downturn after two decades of discussing “black swan” events and “antifragility”? I am honestly bewildered.
Because a competitor business will instead use that cash to offer a better product and customers will flock to them.
If you see a new or renovated hotel next to an old one, which one will you stay in? If an airline keeps flying old planes and the other airlines invest in new, nicer planes, which one will you choose to fly on?
We see this story play out on these very Hacker News forum, where the common mantra is businesses that don’t invest in the future, that don’t spend on R&D, that don’t take risks deserve to die out and new businesses that did take risks deserve to take their place.
Your implication being that the average American who is negatively affected by a public employee union strike takes the side of the government and blames workers for inconveniencing them?
Jealous because they get benefits private companies don't offer anyone below a certain level. This is accepted because top level pay is so mucher higher.
Unionized employees realized it is better we get more now and take less if/when we make it to the top(which won't happen anyways).
Because we see incompetent employees constantly protected by unions and unions themselves become corrupt money making operations that become a business into themselves with a focus on self service and self preservation over that of their members long term interests. Very similar to politicians.
That still isn't an excuse to completely destroy unions tipping the business vs labor competition completely in favor of business. We don't completely dismantle businesses whenever they exhibit "corrupt behavior".
Sending these people into work, in the middle of a pandemic, without appropriate protective gear, health benefits, or paid time off is criminal and I’m glad they’re organizing to protect themselves. Hopefully other frontline employees in grocery and delivery services will follow suit.
The CDC recommendation to not wear a face mask in public is insane!
This is a pulmonary infectious disease. Meaning that the virus is airborne.
If you are infected, then every breath you exhale, every laugh or word you speak, every sneeze or cough you make, can transmit the virus into the air, inside the room that you are in. And it may take 3 hours before the virus particles settle on the ground.
And you don’t know who is infected.
The only way to be safe, and conduct some sort of normal transactions in public, is if everyone wears a mask while in public, and maintain some distance between each other. That way, the mask keeps the virus relatively contained to yourself, while providing some minimal barrier of protection from others.
The reason why the CDC does not recommend this, is because of the mask shortage. They want to keep enough available to the health care workers. Which I understand, but if the public also uses a mask, then it would also minimize or slow down the infection rate.
If you are working in public, or even if you are doing grocery shopping for yourself, then I highly advise to protect yourself, to take this issue seriously, and wear a mask.
If the public used cotton masks, it would help and wouldn't take masks away from health care workers. If this were more normalized, the rate of spread could be lowered.
> Isnt the whole point of gig work that the worker can choose whether to pick up a gig and go in or not?
“Lol”- these gig workers don’t have the same choices your typical google or Facebook or even Fortune 500 IT guy have.
In fact I would suspect many have been pushed to the margins of society and are only “choosing” gig work because the only other option is that their families face hunger, homelessness, or worse.
It always amazes me how the discussion can go so quickly go from "The mighty market solves all problems!" to, "The market is an incredibly fragile flower, and the slightest worker protections will result in mass unemployment and starvation!"
Before Instacart, people went to the grocery store just fine. If Instacart has to pay workers a living wage, some people at the margins might return to shopping themselves, but I doubt it would make a huge difference. And if it did, that just means Instacart would have been a business built on worker exploitation, meaning it's a bad allocation of labor.
> It always amazes me how the discussion can go so quickly go from "The mighty market solves all problems!" to, "The market is an incredibly fragile flower, and the slightest worker protections will result in mass unemployment and starvation!"
The market will continue to function just fine. It is just that the outcome of manipulating it is usually not what the manipulators intended.
Suppose I thought that Instacart workers were all lovely people who deserved to be millionaires. So, I'll make a law requiring that every Instacart worker be paid one million dollars a year. Do you think this will create my intended outcome? Probably not. The market will continue to function and determine that Instacart is no longer a service that people are willing to pay for, as the cost has become too high.
If there is a collective need to provide paid sick time, health insurance or other benefits, then let's collectively provide it for everyone via taxes. The cost will be cheaper the more we spread it out instead of concentrating it all on this company or that company.
I'm all for providing health care (not insurance) via taxes. I think the burden of (mandatory) sick time should fall on the company, because otherwise you create an enormous parallel bureaucracy and require a one-size-fits-all solution to a problem that requires a lot more nuance. As to other benefits, it depends, but a lot of those are probably best left in the hands of the company in that they're another form of compensation. E.g., places like Google and Twitter provide staff meals, but I think it makes little sense to have a federal Department of Lunch. Better to leave it to employees and companies to jointly work out locally optimum solutions.
As far as I understand, in other countries that provide, say mandatory maternity/paternity leave, there is a benefit provided by the government that covers at least part of that (not sure about sick leave). Otherwise you kill small businesses. Google can easily afford to cover someone's pay if they are out sick or on parental leave or whatever. A five person shop might not be able to afford to continue paying 20% of their workforce without the work getting done.
The harder you make it to start and run a small business, the fewer small businesses there are, which means everyone works for and is a customer of the same increasingly small pool of ever larger businesses. Which means that money and power continue to concentrate in the small group of people that run and own those businesses.
There are second and third order effects to things like "just make everyone offer paid sick time" that need to be considered.
> The harder you make it to start and run a small business, the fewer small businesses there are, which means everyone works for and is a customer of the same increasingly small pool of ever larger businesses. Which means that money and power continue to concentrate in the small group of people that run and own those businesses.
I don't necessarily agree with this. To attack this argument from another angle, there are many European countries out there that have a thriving small business economy while also placing a lot more societal burdens on them.
In America as we're seeing with the coronavirus, a lot of these small businesses are barely solvent. That's even in spite of us giving them almost no responsibility to their workers, so theoretically the barrier to entry for a small business should be as low as possible. Yet the coronavirus is causing some hefty damage to those smaller businesses because as it turns out, many of them were one crisis away from dying.
I don't think the issue has anything to do with the difficulties of starting a small business but rather the difficulties of having to compete with larger companies which have a lot of their costs negated by the economy of scale they operate at.
I think it's a mistake to confuse parental leave and other forms of extended leave with paid sick days. Any small business should be able to handle a worker out sick for a few days. I agree that when we reach the scale of months, that's a cost better addressed collectively.
That’s a possibility. Another is sector wide unionization, rather than worksite as we have in the US. Then one company is never granted that card to cry about.
> It is just that the outcome of manipulating it is usually not what the manipulators intended.
Citation needed on the "usually". Regulation sometimes goes wrong, but not "usually". Just look at things we take for granted like 40hr work weeks, no child labor, and health and safety protections for examples.
Look at the industries where those regulations are most relevant and notice how most of the jobs in them have moved to countries where those regulations don't exist.
That's not to say we should go back to having children sewing our clothes in sweatshops (oh, we don't have to go back to to it, they still are, just in a different country now), but collectively people have decided that they don't want to pay what it costs to provide those benefits for workers.
It can be exploitative and also better than the alternative at the same time. Those things are not in conflict.
I understand the moral satisfaction of punishing the evil profiteer. I don’t see how you can claim to be acting on behalf of the worker when you trade off her livelihood in exchange for that satisfaction.
If you can prove the tradeoff, fine. But until recently, the economy was doing great. There's no reason to think that significant numbers of people would have been totally idle if we required people to be paid living wages. Indeed, we can look at other countries that do require that and see low unemployment rates.
Your bogeyman in particular has been brought up with every advance in worker protections. But the 8-hour day and the 40-hour week did not mean mass starvation due to lack of jobs. Reasonable minimum wages don't appear to harm employment significantly.
The truth is that as a society, we a) create plenty of stuff, and b) have plenty of work that needs doing. The problem is one of allocation, and increasing worker exploitation doesn't solve that at all.
The consumers who place the orders already have the option, today, of paying them as much as they think the service is worth or should be additionally paid. It’s called tipping.
Nothing is standing in the way of them being paid better other than consent.
Forcing people to pay for things to which they do not consent is deeply immoral.
I think it's hilarious that you are deeply concerned about the shocking immorality of setting a fair price. But have absolutely no moral problem with large-scale worker exploitation.
For those not quite so consumed by their ideology, let me point out that a market economy can only work when relevant factors are included in the price.
E.g., if we want clean rivers and oceans, we could make everybody who ever makes a purchase study the manufacturing process and supply chain and let them decide as individuals to trade off global pollution against sticker price. But even if companies were incredibly transparent about this, it wouldn't work. We'd all be paralyzed with information and analysis overload every time we tried to buy so much as a pack of gum.
So instead what we do is use regulation to force people to price in the no-brainers, and then try to enforce clear labeling at the margins. E.g., there are legitimate disputes about the environmental impact of farming, so you can pay extra get produce that aims to be lower-impact under the regular "organic" label. Or one way we could solve our global CO2 problem is just to put a price on CO2 emissions and then let pricing adjustments flow through the supply chain.
Here, we already have long societal agreement on what reasonable labor standards are. E.g., the 40-hour work week and the 8-hour day go back more than 100 years. We have worked hard to reduce labor exploitation, and for good reason. So rather than absurdly insisting that each person try to calculate a non-exploitative wage adjustment every time they want a pizza delivered, I think we should just require fair wages and then let companies price that in.
And in countries where children need income to eat, we've seen that banning child labor pushes children into the sex trade, because they don't stop needing to eat when you make it illegal for them to work. Hardly a good example of why the argument is wrong.
Actually it is. The labor market on its own cannot ensure a dignified existence—if the supply is to big people will stoop. Banning jobs doesn't help much yes, but that doesn't mean the market on its own is good.
The action that does help is shrinking the supply. UBI so less need to work, or need to work as much.
Further, it's not like the only two options available are "exploit children in factories" and "exploit children in brothels". Things like the bolsa familia, for example, have been very effective.
The canonical citation there is the UNICEF report on children and families from 1997 (I think that's the year -- it's been a while since I was immersed in that literature) following the Bangladesh child labor ban.
Also, it's generally parents who provide food for their kids.
And if they can't, governments ought to do so.
So "sex trade" ought never to be an option.
Edit: A boy in my wife's family died in ~1900, working as a breaker boy in eastern Pennsylvania.[0] Or at least, there's a note to that effect in her family Bible.
> Nobody is "sending in" gig workers. Isnt the whole point of gig work that the worker can choose whether to pick up a gig and go in or not?
Oh yes, the US economy, in its majestic equality, allows the rich as well as the poor to expose themselves to a dangerous, novel virus in exchange for low wage work.
It's an ideal I wish we would shoot for more consistently. It's wonderful when it works that way, but it's hardly the default norm for gig work.
I'm pro gig work. I've done it for about eight years and it made it possible for me to have earned income at all under enormously difficult circumstances (while ill and homeless).
But I'm also aware that it only works that way when the system is designed to allow for that. Many platforms aren't designed that way.
It's nonsensical to assert that someone has a choice when they need income.
The actual cost of living (food, utilities, and home maintenance) is quite low compared to the amount that just gets funneled upwards as rent. This rent treadmill has been created by decades of artificially low interest rates, an explicit government policy.
Sadly most of this surplus doesn't even go to Scrooge Mcducks swimming in vaults of wealth, but rather gets wasted in a distributed fashion on fake office jobs.
Needing an income is not the same as needing one particular specific source of income. It is nonsensical to assert that any particular gig or even gig work itself is the sole available source of income.
It is when the options are limited and tend to move in lockstep - this is likely the best job these workers can find. If this were a functioning market, we'd see undesirable jobs commanding higher salaries than most desk jobs.
Thanks for the example, looked into them a bit. Sounds like they're negotiating for some benefits amid the current pandemic: http://www.ufcw.org/coronavirus/workers/
Wishing them the best of luck.
That's unfortunate that they don't cover gig workers. A good chunk of our employment is now in "gig work".
There was a sign at my local grocery store saying it's a union store, in fact there was one at most of the stores where I used to live (I live outside the US now). I've seen the workers striking outside the store. There were also news articles late last year where the union had won increased benefits / pay through a recent strike.
I appreciate you taking the time to reply, but this is hardly proof. It's all anecdotal. I was hoping you might provide some articles or citations backing up your point.
I'm sure entering "grocery worker union" or similar terms into your favorite search engine will turn up ample evidence of the fact that unions for grocery workers do indeed exist.
Funny, but that's not the question I asked. I'm not trying to start a fight here, I simply asked for evidence that the unions are "strong" as you said.
There has been informal labor organizing going on behind the scenes at most of these companies for years and many gig workers do work for more than one platform. The org may be new, but the unrest isn’t.
Imagine the capitalistic (!) opportunities that would exist if we had universal healthcare and basic safety-nets. "Gig economy" jobs could actually function as a reasonable and real system for working, instead of being something dystopian and abusive. As a society we've hung so many things off of this framework of "being an employee" (healthcare, retirement, the ability to not work for a small part of the year), that there's no room for any other paradigm without having people forego fundamental needs. Unfortunately times are dire enough that people do so anyway, but that's a separate question.
I know I'll get downvoted for exposing my point of view, but I'm one of the many people who do not tip the delivery man, so I really hope that they obtain better wages from their employers.
Society might be better if tipping were not baked into the system, but there it is: wage scales, labor and tax codes have completed normalization of tipping, at least in the US.
Your principled act of rebellion will produce not reform of commercial culture, but only distress for those who serve you -- and for yourself.
I think it's awful what is happening to Instacart and many other workers.
I hope that eventually there will be successful push back. That may be part of what Bernie Sanders' movement is about.
But I think that within a decade or so the reality is that we will have more advanced robots (combined with warehouses designed for automation) that can do most of these jobs, including driving and delivery. Not saying it isn't incredibly challenging or that we are anywhere close, but there is progress and also massive, massive financial incentive.
At some point UBI will be the obvious option to everyone. It seems obvious to me that income should not start at absolute zero even now.
Instacart's Web UI does not work. The search feature is completely broken and always shows a picture of the sad milk bottle, as is the update cart feature (before the shopper starts shopping) where you can search for an item and add it to your cart. I tried the same update cart feature in the app and while it is able to find items, tapping add to cart just shows the button depress animation and the item never gets added to the cart.
Not only that, they're using enterprise signed ios apps for their shoppers and deliverers which requires them to do the settings -> trust app thing to run the app. Seems similar to what made Apple revoke Google and FBs enterprise cert for a while, very sketchy. You're only supposed to use enterprise signed apps for actual employees. It seems these "gig workers" aren't considered actual employees by the company but when it comes to abusing the cert it's ok? Apple should revoke their cert until they get an actual deliverer/shopper app.
Edit: Seems I've angered some Instacart folks, care to respond about the issues on the web ui, app, and usage of the enterprise cert for signing your deliverer/shopper app?
The whole way delivery works is broken right now.