I’m interested in this, and believe it may be possible as well, but have you seen it? The tech is available, cheap, and has been around plenty long enough. Every ‘gig’ app-type ‘independent contractor’ job I have experience with is purely exploitative. I have friends that do a lot of these jobs, and I am a cab driver. Some people literally refuse to believe me when I tell them about pay, work requirements, hours, conditions, etc.
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Indeed, but most co-operatives are smaller groups of like-minded individuals. To make a real difference, we really need solutions that scale to millions.
I don’t so much worry about price - lots of people pay a premium for organic. However. even if customers can be convinced to pay a higher price for a preferable alternative, what they won’t tolerate (in my experience) is less convenience, no matter what the ethical preference.
Producing such an interface isn’t done cheaply, and rolling it out widely can cost millions and millions. By the time that’s done, the interface builders are almost an entirely different organization from the service providers and don’t have anything in common with the members at all, and you’re in danger of simply re-inventing the original problem.
I view the market as a bit like a river. You don’t want to let it run untrammelled as it will happily flood you out and cause all sorts of destruction. But my, is diverting it ever hard. Water is going to keep making its way downhill despite our best efforts. What we must try to do is channel it as best we can to make society just that much better. But it’s going to fight us (and by that, I mean consumers, not just owners) every step of the way.
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You don’t think Uber, Air BNB, PostMates, et al only exist and profit from externalizing true costs? Isn’t that leeching?
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I think there’s some truth in this, but I have to say, I think almost everyone reading this is sitting with me at the front of the train, although perhaps we’re not in the first few rows of seats. I find myself not willing to see my lifestyle drop to something globally appropriate ($10K? $20K?), so it’s hard for me to blame others unwilling to do so either…
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Every single person I talk to says that they find more security in being exploited by somebody else - even when they have no trust for them. It galls me because that’s like saying that one’s own work has no value! So why should you then expect businesses to treat you fairly if all you bring is a warm replaceable body? The middle classes get conned the worst. On the streets where people don’t expect to get those jobs, some hope for them but many are less gullible.
If my work only has value when exploited by the economy of corporatism, then the corporatists are manipulating the economy.
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What external costs are they externalizing?
In a non-cartel situation, pay rates are generally determined by supply and demand. They’ve made it really easy to access supply, which has increased supply and decreased their pay rates, but I don’t know many companies at all that pay more than the market requires.
Not saying I haven’t missed something obvious, so let me know.
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It’s not an issue of value, it’s an issue of money. You have to have money, still, to live in America. It’s one thing to discuss ideas, it’s entirely another when you live in constant fear of losing housing, keeping warm and fed. Multiply this fear by orders of magnitude when one is responsible for children, family, pets, and/or there are health concerns. This system has been honed like a razor to require and coerce participation. But I share your hope that technology could be used to form collectives. For instance, there is nothing stopping anyone from creating an entirely democratic co-operative as an alternative to Uber (if anyone wants to do this, by the way, I have the practical and operational knowledge of the taxi and rideshare industries required to design it. I can and would be willing to design the interface and functionality, including an interface for democratic policy management for drivers and users). I’m just curious why it hasn’t been happening already.
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I’m not talking about dropping incomes to 10k or 20k, I’m talking about the continual expectation of investors to make more off their investments. As profit margins continue to increase while resources decrease, the sustainability of our world plummets. Our culture tells us that more money will make us happy, no matter how much we have, and it certainly provides options, but money can only expand so much before its value falls. If profit margins and money supply increased in line with discovery, it would be ideal, but this runs counter to the short term mind set, and that’s the hurdle.
Wages are stagnant in many sectors because increasing profits attracts more investors, and keeps the ones you have, but if wages continue to stagnate, they will not be able to sustain the profits at all and we enter free fall. The economic collapse is staved off by global markets, but it is inevitable if companies keep squeezing the people at the bottom. You can only stretch a dollar so far
EDIT: Clarification- Investors expect their returns to increase in size each quarter, as opposed to just being sustained by the dividends as they are
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And for those at the bottom, less money has real, instant significance (versus just being an unpleasant number on a printout). It means deciding which bill not to pay, it means $.99 spaghetti and $.69 tomato paste for days at a time, it means turning off non-essential appliances like water heaters and lights, and heating a single room. Some of us at the bottom get so winnowed down that there is nothing left to cut, and tben the streets await, and that’s a hard hole to climb out from. But, these are the powerless, so they get squeezed the most. Even good nice honest people are saddled with the prejudice toward the poor “they must have done SOMETHING to end up like that, drugs, crime, laziness, etc”.
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I know someone who told me of the homeless, that they are only that way because they want to be, any one of them could get a job. The next day they claimed that jobs are being stolen by the Chinese and Mexicans and that it’s left 90 million people out of work. The ability to hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time is baffling for me, but I believe it is a widespread problem in a culture of ‘meritocracy’.
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Ever the pessimist I had assumed that we were using the status quo as a starting point.
Here in Germany we have a number of rather formidable cooperatives. Sure, they lack the grass roots charm of the small ones, but I don’t think scale has to be a deal breaker.
I am not saying that it can’t be done, but that can certainly be a challenge.
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And the appeal to the workers? Is it “Thank God I don’t have to demean myself like that guy” when they pick up the 9-5 corporate worker in his corporate uniform at 10pm to deliver him home from the office and have to listen to him apologizing on the phone all the way home for missing his kid’s birthday party? Or perhaps when the exhausted retail worker who just did a double shift falls asleep in the car on the way to their second job?
At least in theory, the appeal is that people can live their lives first and work to support their lives instead of the other way around. Our standard expectation is backwards to that - everything from having a car (to commute) to having insurance (to be healthy enough to work) to simply sleeping (to be on time) is primarily to support the role of being a worker.
The ‘gig economy’ as it currently is may not solve that very well but shows that there is a demand (among workers) for less-demeaning and less-exploitative work, and a lot of people are willing to accept the trade-offs (or don’t have much choice because they don’t fit the standard expectations).
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I could be wrong, but I see the gig economy as a second job sort of thing. Driving for Uber, part time, can’t really sustain a lower middle class lifestyle, and I’m not sure it could sustain one full time either. So you work your regular job, and then you do some gig economy work too. It’s a bit different for artists and people who work on commission, but that’s a much older business model than what I think of when I think of the gig economy, but like I said, I could be wrong.
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Oddly enough, I extrapolate general beliefs using people I know (who in general are reasonably decent and are trying to get by), rather than attribute malice to nebulous existence of evil people, cackling over the misfortune of others.
After all, an equally realistic narrative is that people like myself who don’t use these services couldn’t possibly contemplate paying somebody some desperately needed income no matter how much enjoyment I might get out of the free time.
After all, if someone was short sighted enough to get in a position where they needed that sort of work, I’m certainly not going to reward them by actually hiring them. Better they starve.
(Of course, I’ll make a brave little speech about how regrettable it is that they’re starving, all the while ensuring I never pay anyone who isn’t skilled enough to be worth $25/hour!)
Mwahahaha!
(And yes, there are no doubt dozens of people who think like either of these absurd scenarios. But pretending that’s the entire customer base is constructing fantasies that don’t help the situation.)
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Thanks for pointing out the existence of these (and shooting down one of my points :-)). I really wasn’t aware of larger scale cooperatives.
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These two positions are not compatible. If there’s room to gouge your workers some more, then you can’t be said to have maximized profits for the owners.
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@frauenfelder is Jaron Lanier part of this IFTF? As I recall he’s written some words on this very topic.
…At a real level, this is because stock prices are too high. The price justified by dividend returns is for most companies much lower than that most stocks go for. So the prices are driven by speculation and fueled by the promise of “growth”
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Why exclusively blame investors for wanting higher profits when we 1%-ers ($34K household income) want higher wages?
It seems just a little hypocritical to insinuate that their wants are “greedy”, while my wants (when I’m making more than 99.2% of the world) are not. Now, I agree with your basic principles, but I’d ditch the self-aggrandizement that goes with it. We too are equally greedy.
Our case is made not on the basis of our moral superiority, but that we believe that our society is better of structured slightly differently. Others believe differently. Fine. Our jobs is to persuade the majority that we’re in the right.
The hypocritical demonization (if even it’s somewhat low-key like yours) of those with different viewpoints is logically wrong, morally fraught, and socially dangerous.
(And sorry, I’m not picking on you specifically, but just using your pose as an example how arguments for principles I agree in can fall into a very enticing ethical trap.)
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Why is that?
There are three delusional “Ws” - Want, Worry, and Waiting - which indicate that somebody confuses their time-binding of future events for their actions in the present.
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