To be fair, this was when they were just coming into London and offering crazy bonuses to steal market share from Deliveroo, but still, this isn't controversial - if someone pays you bad wages, don't work for them...
If you can't find work elsewhere, you'd rather work for pennies than for nothing.
You could say the same about any regulation, if you cannot manufacture something at a reasonable price without polluting more than allowed, you need to change your prices or adjust your business model.
Out would be better if kfc rained from the sky, but that's not an option.
Why is their business model "poor"? If prices go up, so will what is considered a "reasonable" wage. What's a "reasonable" skillset that an employee must offer to get such a wage.
Difference with pollution, is that its fine to just not pollute. Just not employing makes the situation worse.
In the article the author tries two options: Uber Eats and Foodora. So, yes, in theory there are probably some people who would rather have the Uber Eats "work when you want" schedule rather than Foodora's but that very much falls within the realm of what fastball was suggesting with "if someone pays you bad wages, don't work for them."
Just because you don't value that type of flexibility doesn't mean someone else won't value it. It seems like the more options there are for people looking for jobs the better.
Because it relies on exploitation. It offers pennies for work that ha real risks involved. No insurance, not even bike maintenance is offered. You're on your own and if you happen to be the unemployed, unprivileged youngster from the outskirts of Stockholm (quite common) and anything happens while you're riding for one of these companies (car hits you, pedestrian walks out in front of you, etc.), at best your bike is busted and you can't even pay back the money you borrowed to buy it just to get the job. At worst you'll have serious injuries and you'll need treatment that you'll get for relatively little cost only because this is Sweden not one of those fucked up countries where health care is terrible and you'd go bankrupt if such a thing happened to you.
That's why the mode is poor. It makes me sad that all these delivery companies build thir business on exploitation.
Why should be corporations be given a free hand to act in ways that increase costs, increase personal risk, and lower opportunity for all but a tiny subset of the population?
At the level of an economy, the burden is on you to show that minimum wage results in lower risk/higher opportunity for employees.
Just "imagining" there is a better way isn't a plan.
Whatever. If ppl in this thread wants to argue magical economics and down-vote anyone that disagrees, go ahead.
Sure, people want gig, part time work. They aren't the issue.
Over 40 percent of workers make minimum or below on gig wages.
The vast majority of new jobs pay these wages and they aren't enough. People work at a net loss, the impact being we, who can make it, subsidize the business models by social spending, and or people live terribly.
We aren't bankrolling good jobs lost. A majority of Americans struggle economically today, and those numbers are climbing.
The usual argument is it becoming cheaper to live. The reality does not align to that expectation.
We need to fix this. Either is fine. It really does become cheaper to live, or very large numbers of people need more from their labor, or we accept a much lower standard of living and tepid demand that goes along with all that.
Which is it, and how can we improve?
Because they are making the situation worse for everyone.
This is quite obviously a false dichotomy. Its not necessary bad when a job doesn't exist (e.g. the job 'head of slave labour team' doesn't exist anymore), and the obvious best outcome appears to be a fair wage for a (therefore existing) job.
Uber doesn't seem to follow local laws. For example [and this is really one of the many examples], in The Netherlands you need a license to drive a taxi which made UberPop illegal. Uber didn't care, they launched it anyway. This appears to be the modus operandus of Uber: shoot first, ask questions later.
The way they try to get drivers for Uber as documented here (again, in The Netherlands, article in Dutch use Google Translate) [1], underpaying them after they're in, is also disheartening and only benefits Uber; neither the customers nor the drivers. So what Uber did there was invest in driving their competition away. Of course, people don't wanna pay for pennies, but that's why they have the Uber brand. They use this branding together with state of the art technology to get customers (workers and clients).
The more this information gets out, the less victims Uber is able to make.
[1] http://www.taxibelangen.nl/ervaringen-ex-uber-chauffeur/
One thing it has going for it is that as with a lot of jobs you get better with practice. You learn to take your breaks, you get better muscles (as with any physical labour job), etc. However, what happens if you retract a muscle one day? In a normal job you'd call sick, and in EU if you're on contract that means benefits.
What we need is two things: one we need laws structured to make this type of self-employment illegal (since the relationship between contractor and contractee is clearly top-down, and requires near to no expertise), and two we need active enforcement of this law.
Minimum wage exists for a reason. Minimum wage is per hour. What we need is to have this type of employment to be illegal, and we need to have this actively enforced.
I find it mind boggling it still exists, and I suspect it is because of illegal immigrants falling for it. Incidentally, that's also why the reporter was so easily hired: there's a huge demand for low paid workers, but actually this is illegal competition with minimum wage workers.
If that cannot be worked with without increasing the cost of delivery the solution is very simple: increase the price of the food in combination with delivery. Let the customers pay a fair price for their food plus delivery instead.
Someone should also look into Amazon Mechanical Turk. It has the very same issue we discuss, but it has a benefit (for Amazon): its not specific to the physical world (like delivery) and is world-wide, and therefore can also exploit world-wide.
Would you be jumping on the chance to supplement your income after a long 8 hour day? especially if i told you that you first needed to buy a shovel out of your own pocket, even though I'd let you dig up to four ditches a day?
So in reality all you're doing with an underpaid gig economy is allowing corps to indirectly make money off of taxpayers instead of just the customers / companies involved in the service.
TLDR; You're paying a tax for someone else to get their food delivered.
If they had offered flat 4.40$ rate probably noone would take the job.
Would people take the job if they were presented with a distribution of hourly rates among already employed workers?
As this prohibits very low paying jobs (i.e. better than nothing) then it would be fair to offer unemployment benefits in return.
What you don't understand is that whike "existence of poor costs money", underpaid jobs do not made people poor - you'd have to assume that if companies where held to a minimum wage, that they just pay that (and/or raise prices), rather than employ less.
Now the same poor immigrants that would have suffered from a low wage, suffer from never entering the country in the first place, and suffering a low wage in their home country with no benefits.
This is a very elitist view, as it benefits only high-margin businesses, usually catering to the richest parts of the society.
It just so happens that margins generated by Neiman Marcus, Whole Foods Market, or a white-cloth Michelin-starred restaurant will allow it to survive. Margins generated by a clothing thrift shop, corner bodega or a taco stand - not so much. Scores of businesses in the latter group are shut down, some are exempted (US conveniently does not enforce minimum wage laws on self-employed or family operations), some rely on undocumented labor and cash economy.
Economists who advocate this, meanwhile, find the nest hot topic for conferences and panel discussions: "Food deserts in poor neighborhoods - root causes and possible solutions".
Is my tax burden as a taxpayer going up or down?
Rich people don't buy more stuff in proportion to what they make. So the more money that moves from the lower and middle class, the less business opportunity you have. I'm not going to use 10 times more uber eats than someone who makes 10 times less than me.
It's not a hard problem to solve in theory. Just figure out how to move money the opposite direction and business will boom! It doesn't even have to be a socialist structure. Maybe we just tax companies for their external negative effects?
That one we do know without a crystal ball - taxi medallion systems and hotels.