same with health industry
In the UK, a report this week about abuses in the “gig” economy suggested there needed to be a new category of worker - “dependent contractor” with more benefits than the zero hours, allegedly self-employed, contractors. Maybe the US needs something similar.
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Don’t you have tachographs in the US?
Welcome to the USA, Today.
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from Steinbeck’s article “A Primer on the '30s.” Esquire, June 1960: 85-93.
"Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: ‘After the revolution even we will have more, won’t we, dear?’ Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.
“I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn’t have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves.”
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Nope - the invisible hand of the market takes care of that - along with two sets of driver logs (as outlined in the original, very sad, article
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GoFundMe ?
It will be much better when the trucks are autonomous, like in Logan
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The people who these companies interact with could care less unfortunately. They want the cheapest haul not the most cared for contract driver. Also many business that do care just hire their own drivers and buy their own trucks (hauling freight is not that complicated a business if you consider it’s mostly a truck, a driver, and a dispatcher coordinating the loads). The outfits hiring these trucking companies do so because they don’t want the liability of the insurance coming back at them and the competition between the truck companies lowers some costs for them. This results in those trucking companies looking for other ways to make money and fleecing the drivers is sadly the most available to them. The clients know the drivers are getting screwed, all they have to do is talk to them (believe me they sometimes have little else to talk about!). But for every driver that loses his truck and his payments another comes along through the revolving door and it starts all over again, the loser never to be seen again.
Disclosure - I used to drive truck, I’ve seen and heard these stories. I insisted I would only be a company driver since the worst that could happen to me would be I’d end up broke, whereas the lease drivers could easily end up working for years and still be in debt. If they were lucky and came out the other end with the truck paid off it would likely be beat up enough you might as well still be making payments given the cost of repairs and maintenance, and suddenly the company isn’t as interested in sending you work since the money no longer is going right back in their pocket.
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He won’t have to. This is a high profile case now, so my bet is that the attorneys will come to him for the publicity, then sue the trucking company for the $60k, lost wages, legal fees, emotional damages, and a giant “your asshole company is run by assholes” surcharge. And the company will settle out of court.
Because if that case ever makes it in front of a jury then the trucking company will get cruicified, and who knows what kind of insane multimillion dollar settlement they might get slapped with.
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I hope USA today has a deal where they promised the driver legal support if he was fired in retaliation. For them it’s a minor cost and a way to keep the story going.
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Probably the kind that gets held up in litigation for too long to be justice.
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Yay capitalism! \o/
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Someone should fire THEM.
Out of a cannon.
Into space.
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Like Uber, you mean?
There’s a legal class for that in Germany: Scheinselbstständige. (Granted, it’s the colloqial term.)
Apparently the English language version of the Wikipedia article is titled “Misclassification of employees as independent contractors“. Yeah, English just rolls off the tongue, compared to German.
Anyway, while we do have a problem with these jobs, it’s pretty well understood that people who basically work for one company and have their jobs handed to them (instead of bidding on them and controlling their own hours) aren’t independent at all. And many employers (not enough, though) have learned that, when after six or twelve months their “independent contractors” who had to sue had been turned into employees, with appropriate back pay to social security, retirement plans, and unemployment insurance.
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“I have known numbers of bourgeois Socialists, I have listened by the hour to their tirades against
their own class, and yet never, not even once, have I met one who had picked up proletarian table-manners.”
Orwell - The Road to Wigan Pier
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One wishes that it would be possible to grab the middle class capitalism enthusiasts of America by the scruffs of their necks and point them at this and yell “THIS! THIS is what capitalism does. And what it is doing to this man it will soon be doing to you, as the waterline of people who Simply Do Not Matter rises ever higher.”
A living wage is a side-effect of capitalism, an inefficiency and such an efficient system is quite keen to optimize it all away. Because, after all, even if the trucking company (which is extravagantly evil) changed its ways and became a decent place to work, its prices for moving freight might increase a fraction and then it’d be out-competed by other, more evil companies. Hell, they might all be staffed by completely blameless people (not likely as such jobs attract people suited for them) and as long as the race to the bottom continues they have to act against their impulses and come up with ever more ingenious methods of grinding the truckers down.
Isn’t that just a lovely state of affairs?
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My first thought.
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