How quickly we accepted that it’s normal to pay someone to go get our groceries for us. To drive us around when public transportation is available. To run errands for us. To bring us fast food.
Covid capitalized on it.
People don’t want to give up that luxury now that they’ve had it. Even if it makes things cost 2x-3x as much.
Even when we all know its exploitive labor.
It’s true delivery and driver services have been around for hundreds of years but now instead of companies with full time employees (with benefits) , the gig employee gets paid less while taking on risk that aren’t compensated by the employer (car accidents, gas, car repairs, injury or attacks).
Gig work is a much worse thing than maybe a lot of people realize. And it’s also making more people servants to others.
It’s moving full time employees with benefits and using company property to no benefits and using their own property that they have to pay for.
I don’t understand the people paying $50+ to get McDonald’s delivered.
The poor class has always been servants, don’t let a office job fool you
I think you are missing my point.
Servants with zero benefits using their own “tools” they pay for (like a car), are different from labor jobs with benefits and a living wage. Not that there are many of those so called benefits for minimum wage workers either.
I mean it all sucks under capitalism. But gig work is ramping up end stage capitalism. It takes more, and takes it more aggressively from the working class.
Gig work is exasperating the inequality that already existed. It’s robbing and exploiting people far more aggressively than seen before.
I think people don’t realize how harmful these systems are.
Capitalism crash is inevitable. Through a few possible routes. But the suffering it will inflict and how widespread can be curtailed by stopping these predatory practices.
Gig work is absolutely fantastic if you get into the right type of gig work. And it allows people that wouldn’t be able to work to actually work and make money. If you’re paying for a service you’re paying for a service you have to think about it that way every business out there is some sort of service every business out there turns somebody else into a servant. You really think going to a restaurant and having a waiter take your order and bring you your food is not making them into a servant? You really think going to a grocery store and having somebody scan your groceries and bag your groceries for you doesn’t mean that you have two servants sitting there. What an idiotic thought to think that somebody working a job and doing something that they can do creates a servant out of them. Grow the fuck up.
“Grow the fuck up”? Relax, retard.
I’m not saying people who do gig work are at fault here or should feel bad about doing gig work. I think you have misunderstood
I’m saying the business model of gig work is predatory towards its employees and its customers.
And that people are forced into gig work because better paying practical jobs are being phased out. They are manipulated into believing it’s a great option when it’s not. It’s just the only option.
When you consider the additional cost and risk that gig workers take on, you surely see how these companies are predatory.
They don’t exist to help people get work. They aren’t there to help you out. They exist to make you dependent on them so they can profit.
Acknowledging this doesn’t mean you are a fool for doing gig work. Acknowledging it means you are aware of how you have been manipulated, even if you realize you don’t really have alternative options.
Most of us work for shitty companies. Some are worse than others. We all have bills to pay. We are all trapped in the system. But that’s no excuse to ignore what’s going on even if we don’t have alternative options and have to stay with these companies.
You don’t owe them anything. Certainly you don’t have to talk them up. They aren’t there to help you out. They lobby to pay you the least $ and screw you over as much as possible.
A full time employee isn’t a servant?
The economy is bifurcating into haves and have-nots. The haves paying for more services from the have-nots closes that gap. Maybe not by much, but at least in the right direction.
Just because gig work makes inequality more visible, doesn’t mean it’s causing it.
During COVID, wages for the lowest paid people increased more than other classes. I think it was partially the rise of gig work giving alternatives to people who were otherwise stuck working at Walmart because that’s the only job in town.
Supply and demand. Unemployment benefits were extended. People didn’t have to work. To attract employees they had to increase wages. But they fixed that by increases in cost that far exceeds wage increases.
Plus rent went up for everyone.
Some people using their cars for gig work are barely making more than the value they are depreciating from their car through wear and tear.
People rent cars to do it, which just blows my mind. I don’t get how they can be making any money at all.
Wouldn’t renting be the ultimate way to know if it was profitable as there’s no hidden costs?
No insurance, no depreciation, no maintenance, no repairs.
You do a shift and whatever you make you make.
Renting doesn’t mean no insurance. If you’re operating a vehicle, you need to be an insured driver. Where you get the insurance is up to you.
Depreciation, maintenance, those are lumped into the cost of the rental. Whomever you are renting from isn’t giving you the car and taking a loss on it.
Insurance comes with the rentals or your credit card in most cases.
And duh. Thats my point. You pay, and that’s it. No more hidden costs.
Any given day is profitable or not, and you immediately know.
edit: we even have a car share service here that includes gas in the rental.
Please don’t duh.
Renting a car for use as a ride share is not covered under any rental agreement, nor under whatever your credit card may provide, which as far as I know covers damage to the vehicle at most. Liability insurance is a whole separate animal and the one that’s most necessary.
If you’re allowed to rent the car for gig work, they’ll almost assuredly offer the insurance for it, and not all gig work is ride share.
Depreciation, maintenance, those are lumped into the cost of the rental.
And the duh was about that, I handled the insurance comment separately.
edit: e.g
https://www.hertz.com/rentacar/misc/index.jsp?targetPage=delivery_rentals.jsp
They offer the rental and insurance. They don’t let you carry another person though, so not all gig work, at least on this specific plan.
So Avis, for example, offers an insurance from Uber for rideshare via Rasier and Portier, and so you’re basically renting and insuring cars from the company you’re being paid by. Yes, Avis is an intermediary there, but the whole idea is crazy to me, that you’d pay your employer to work.
So are they having profitable days? I guess I’m as curious as you are, but I just can’t imagine a scenario where you’re making decent money in exchange for the time you put in. I suppose reliance on tips makes the difference, but Uber is over here cleaning up, charging you and the customer.
Not only that, but basic liability usually doesn’t cover gig work either, you need a special and more expensive policy for that.
There are limited exceptions where you can self insure, I think New Hampshire is the only place you can do that in the US. However if you can self insure then you probably aren’t doing gig work.
You can add gap to your regular insurance to cover your job as a rideshare. You just need to tell your carrier.
The thing is, if you’re renting, you’ve added someone in between you and the insurance carrier. Uber does not self insure. I see them often using Progressive. So you rent a car from Uber, pay for the insurance from Uber, but there’s also Avis and Progressive now taking their cut.
It’s just scammy, and the fact that they’re getting people to rent cars to do so is just crazy to me.
A lot of gig workers just treat it like a paycheck and don’t compare revenue to expenses like the independent business it really is.
Edit: poor wording, I don’t believe it’s entirely an independent business but that is how they are paid.
It’s essentially an independent business, but you can rent the car and get insurance and get paid all by the same entity, essentially. At least that’s what I’ve gathered listening to the testimony of some of the drivers.
The funny thing is gig work (proportionally) makes a lot more in plenty of 3rd wold countries because the business owner isn’t taking a massive chunk of the income, and because it started out with everyone paying cash so there’s no shoehorned services fees at every transaction.
Its so lucrative that I’ve seen office workers run it as bonus income on their way to and from work if they travel by car or motorcycle.
I always thought about making a free equivalent platform to stuff like Uber, but I think people would be too scared of the individual liability, despite Uber offering the absolute bare minimum.
I recently saw a presentation form Uber executives panicking because Indian government launched an Uber competitive app, but that takes no cut at all, 100% of what customer pays goes to driver.
Did you know, the government of any country can do this for any service? Government sponsered amazon anyone?
Yeah Uber (thankfully lol) actually died in a ton of countries because of this.
Either government sponsored or just local competition that actually pays well.
There’s even tiered niches for each app that go for quality/speed etc, so no one app becomes supreme.
I know right? How easy would it be to tie open street maps into a fiverr style so run this errand for me and make it almost free?
But the second someone gets hurt, molested, their house broken into, or carjacked, you’re going to need some huge legal team and have a good chance at getting fucked in the process
Wonder if you could add an arbitration clause or something so they can’t sue you. Like how Disney did when someone died from food allergies at one of their parks but the husband had disney+ so they couldn’t sue or something crazy
They have the luxury of owning a large building full of lawyers. You can make it so that it’s hard for people to win, but it’s impossible to stop them from suing you. Getting your own lawyer just to defend you from the lawsuits gets expensive really quickly.
I’m driving Uber and it’s been a real struggle to hit $20/hr gross (NOT NET) the past few weeks since gas prices skyrocketed.
The best part is Uber just invested like $10 billion in driverless cars. So not only is there no plan to pay better, but we’re directly funding our own replacements.
Both Uber and Lyft have made no secret of their plan to replace all their drivers with a driverless fleet. It’s right on their website.
Gross would include money made before gas spent. But you’re absolutely correct taking a huge pay cut because Trump is beholden to foreign powers is awful
Right, thus I’m netting even less than that.
I just couldn’t stomach paying someone for nearly all the gig work option. The exception was uber. The taxi companies always pissed me off. Using a credit card was harder than it needed to be for a long time, and they just didn’t bother to try new things to improve the experience. And of course there are the ones that controlled the supply so they could drive up prices. But I still only used it when on vacation, like in vegas. But shopping for me, and all that. Just couldn’t do it.
They wanted cash so they could not pay taxes on it. They rode that one all the way into the sunset.
I’ve also had some bad experiences with taxi services. So I totally get that. It’s just too bad that instead of improving their service and fees, that they just got replaced with gig work .
I’ve always heard it said that you can’t really be an ethical consumer in capitalism.
We often don’t have ethical alternatives.
Yeah, very true. Even when I spend money at a small business, I think about how often I have seen owners kids sitting at a table or something. Either doing schoolwork or playing on a tablet. And that reminds me that they often are living on small margins and working tons of hours. We can do better as a society.
Yes, you are completely right, it’s yet another step away from the hard-won labor rights. Capitalism makes these kinds of changes inevitable, and must be abolished.
How does capitalism inevitably lead to fascism?
Basically, the issue with capitalism is that the more wealth you have, the easier it is for you to make more money. And since money can be used to buy goods, services and influence, there is always a way to use money to gain more political and social power. With that political and social power, you can push society and the legal system in the direction you want to go. So you can use your wealth to gain power, and then you can use your power to change laws and society so that you can make even more wealth and power. It’s a positive feedback loop.
Obviously, though, if the billionaires and ruling class are accumulating more and more of our society’s wealth, that inevitably means that there’s less for everyone else to go around - therefore, working class people feel poorer and poorer. Meanwhile, the economy is going absolutely great for rich people, so inflation continues to go up - everything gets more expensive, but wages don’t increase. The wealthy just keep more and more of the wealth for themselves. To accumulate more and more wealth, they change the laws so that they can avoid paying taxes, so public services collapse. Politicians are lobbied to ensure that public funds are diverted away from where it is most needed - housing, healthcare, transportation, infrastructure - and instead into industries where their class interests most benefit from it, such as weapons manufacturing and extractive industries such as fossil fuels and mining.
The working class are bound to notice that their lives are getting shittier and shittier, and if that situation is left unchecked, the working class would realize that the ruling class are fucking them over, rise up, and overthrow their rulers. Obviously, the ruling class need to do something about this, but there’s no solution that the ruling class can offer. They’re causing all of the problems, to fix them they’d have to give up some of their wealth and power - and that’s not something they’re going to do. So they need to find someone else to blame the problems we have in society on. Unfortunately, though, no matter who they blame the problems on, and no matter what they do to “fix” it, the issue will continue to persist, because the material conditions underlying the issues are, very intentionally, never addressed.
So, the conundrum returns: The ruling class said that minority A caused all of the problems, minority A is persecuted and oppressed, but society doesn’t actually get any better. Either the problem wasn’t minority A, or minority A just hasn’t been oppressed enough yet. So the ruling class can either escalate the oppression, or they can shift the focus to another minority group. The division continues to escalate in terms of how vitriolic and extreme it is, and it also continues to divide the working class into smaller and smaller groups.
To get the working class to buy into this hateful message, they need to take advantage of our worst instincts, and one of those instincts is the in-group bias. The majority are manipulated into being suspicious, then intolerant, then hateful, then violent, then genocidal, towards whatever the targeted minority of the day is. Anything that can be used to divide the working class - sexuality, nationality, immigration status, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender identity, age, all of these will be used as wedges to keep the working class split apart and not working together, because they know that if the working class actually unite against them, they are completely and truly fucked.
That’s exactly how fascism manifests. It’s because it’s possible for people to accumulate power through wealth. This is why capitalism must be abolished. If we do not abolish capitalism, fascism will always return. It’s just a matter of time.
But can't capitalism can be reformed?
While, of course, some laws to reform capitalism can be passed, and would definitely alleviate the worst harm caused, over the long term, capitalism cannot be reformed.
Any attempts to reform, democratize or socialize capitalism may yield short term improvements to quality of life of the working class, but if capitalism is not abolished, it will always reassert itself, and capitalism inevitably leads towards fascism.
The New Deal prevented the US from sliding into fascism in the 20th century, so that’s ultimately a good thing, but it did not go far enough, and that’s why we have the resurgence of fascism in the 21st century America.
Gigwork is the piece-work system, 2.0
What a fckn sh*thole the US is.
The only things I have delivered to me are packages and envelopes through the mail.
Granted, I am GenX, but I can’t recall a single time in the last half a decade where I’ve had anything like food delivered. Or used the services of any kind of gig company.
And I simply can’t think of any benefit of doing so. It’s horrendously expensive, and simply not worth the expense.
You’re GenX and have never had a pizza or Chinese food delivered!? Do you live in the sticks? Town I live in now has never had a delivery restaurant (weird for a tourist town) and nobody runs Uber eats or whatever, but when I was a kid in suburbia delivery food was super common, mostly pizza and Chinese.
No, I have always phoned ahead to order, but I have always picked up the order personally.
The savings having done so have always been more than the fuel spent to retrieve the order.
I found out my family were having fast food delivered by some service, and stomped on that immediately. Walk your lazy ass the two blocks to the pizza shop.
I’m not against delivering services. Just gig jobs.
Lots of people really need these. Like disabled people and the elderly.
But those two groups are least able to afford it.
There are definitely use cases for delivery services, like the whole family having COVID and such.
Even at my sickest, I was always able to make something to eat, even if it was simple like cracking open some of my own canned spaghetti sauce and boiling some noodles.
Being sick has always been a wholly inadequate argument for not making something healthy to eat.
Now, an evening where a sit-down supper would be impossible - Halloween being our only consistent pizza night - that is a different story. But those happen only a few days a year.
For me at least, the people at my city’s taxis are sometimes quite rude to me, whereas I’ve never had an issue with getting Uber. I feel a lot safer with them than with the regular taxis.
Getting food delivered is handy when I’m looking after my kids by myself, but not something I’m in the habit of using, probably use it once per year
I had to use uber once in the last year when the taxi failed to turn up and I needed to get to the airport.
I avoid them for the most part as I can find other ways of doing things cheaper
I mean food delivery is a totally legitimate good thing to have, getting food when you can’t is whats what its for.
The problem is people who absolutely have the means to get their own stuff relying on it almost exclusively just because they are lazy.
Uber bought the biggest taxi company in Denmark and the only one operating in my city. There’s no way around them…
Backstory is that Uber was banned from the market due to their gig model (and lobbying from taxi companies), so they returned half a decade/decade later in the only way they could. Funny how other gig models like food delivery isn’t outlawed the same way.
I honestly don’t see how people do this and in a way that is in the black.
If you’re the kind of person who holds onto your car for 10 years, The accelerated maintenance and fees don’t burn quite as hot. you get your oil change to any way you get your tires changed anyway, they just don’t see it coming out of their pocket the same way the tires wore out because the tires wore out, not because you drove the piss out of it.
They’re making less they just don’t see it happening.
Step one is to not live in or close to a major city or high cost of living area. Step two is to buy an old compact car with good mpg in the $600 range. The insurance will be dead cheap. Then you work, not in a city, but a heavily gentrified suburb. I would average a net (yes, including costs etc.) $30 an hour before I got too ill to do pretty much anything. I have some good days where I can get stuff done, but it takes me way long to do it.
Around me its impossible to get a car that runs for under a grand at this point. I mean its been that way for awhile really.
The only way these platforms hold together is through VC funding and tipping. They’ll all inevitably enshittify more and more, get bought out and eventually absorbed by some megacorp that just wants data to train AI on or some shit. Many such cases.
no I mean the people doing the work. I realize that initiailly thye places ran at such a loss it was kinda doable. especially if it was just supplement. Now though it seems like people do it as a main thing and with the wear and tear on the vehicle it just seems like its a loss long term. Its like the more you do it the less it should return. Once there is a car repair or such.
Yeah I wasn’t sure if you meant for the workers, the platforms or the consumers, haha. But, yeah, tips are the only thing that makes it viable for drivers, I think any delivery without a tip is at best break-even, but they need to accept any delivery they’re offered to keep their ratings up high and so on. Cyclists can probably make more too, at the cost of higher risks of getting hit by a car…
There’s a reason why these jobs are so popular with people who might not be able to find other jobs for various reasons.
problem with cycling is now you have what is made goes over a longer period lowering any rate manageable. I think it wins if the density is high enough where you can be as fast or faster than the cars.
Just to tag onto this, you should use the option to add the tip after the delivery. If you don’t then the app will just subsidize themselves with your tip.
For example each delivery is an offer to the delivery driver so a delivery will be 10 dollars. Well if you tipped 8 dollars on that order then the service will pay you 2 dollars and the 8 dollar tip will be the rest. But if you start by tipping zero then the service will pay ten dollars for the delivery and then if you add the tip the gig worker will get 18 dollars for the order.
They won’t initially offer it for $10 without a tip ever.
I do DoorDash for extra money, and the initial offer in my area is always $2 if there’s no tip (for food delivery, shopping can be more), and since tips added after delivery are almost nonexistent, I never take these orders.
When I turn that down, they offer it to the next driver for $2.25, or $2.50, and keep going around until they find someone to take it. They’ll also try to bundle a couple of low paying offers together ,or find a higher paying offer to bundle it with.
But they don’t offer it for $10 unless they absolutely have to.
It really depends on the area, usually it depends on the distance. Generally an order like that would probably start at like 4 dollars or something. I have noticed that I can’t really get over like 17-18 dollars per hour when I did doordash, like they would always give you a good order and the bad orders to even it out. I do think doing no tip and then adding it after the fact does make dd pay the drivers more but it would only work if everyone did it
We’re in a kind of small city in SC, with a lot of rural areas around, so that’s probably why we get $2 per offer. We get offers for $2 or $3 dollars with 10+ miles all the time.
I generally average $20 an hour, but I do a lot of grocery shopping, and my wife often goes with me and drives (and helps shop on very large orders), so that speeds the process up. But I also don’t take anything under $5, and nothing less than $1 a mile ($1.50 with gas prices the way they are now).
I agree that tipping after would put pressure on DD to raise the base rate, but with almost 4000 orders over the last few years, I bet less than 5% of the no tip orders have ever added anything after the fact.
People don’t want to give up that luxury now that they’ve had it.
Maybe people should also take some responsibility there?
Yes. But too few will change their habits even when acknowledging the damage it’s doing.
How quickly we accepted that it’s normal to pay someone to go get our groceries for us. To drive us around when public transportation is available. To run errands for us. To bring us fast food.
Speak for yourself!
I have delivered more food myself than I’ve paid to have delivered to me, and that was a job I had in college (working for a restaurant directly, as it was long before the rise of third-party delivery) that I quit after one shift because it sucked.
And even in the few times when somebody else (e.g. an employer) insisted on getting a grubhub or uber for me at their expense, I wasn’t happy about it! It always just feels incredibly wasteful – and slower/worse – than just doing it myself.
I mean as a country. Not you or me personally.
I even know a few families who are getting into debt because they want to have a lifestyle of having others do everything for them. This is so crazy.
THe worst is that it makes people less likely to want to change our economic system in favor of reducing inequality, because in a system without inequality, it will be impossible to have people doing small things for us like that
