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I spent two weeks delivering for Uber Eats and made $4.40 per hour

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383 points imartin2k | 6 comments | 13 May 17 10:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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FrozenVoid ◴[13 May 17 15:21 UTC] No.14331408[source]▶
"Gig/Contract economy" is the analogue of outsourcing, except for the cheap workers being drawn from local population. Its a logical consequence from corporations wanting to reduce wages and legal trickery to avoid work liabilities and benefits for the workers. Its exploitative and ruthless example of what "capitalism" becomes when law doesn't hold the punch, companies just figured out the necessary mix of legal and tech means to avoid the system being labeled as "work" and pay fair wages/expenses per worker. Expect this type of "work" to increase and subsume new sectors of economy as they figure out how to transform them into uber model.
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1. joshu ◴[13 May 17 16:11 UTC] No.14331634[source]▶
Outsourcing just means using another entity to do the work. Did you mean offshoring?
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2. Sebguer ◴[13 May 17 16:27 UTC] No.14331720[source]▶
If you're going to be pedantic, at least be correct. The commonly understood meaning of 'outsourcing' is to use foreign labor. So commonly understood that even Webster includes it as part of their definitions:

: to procure (something, such as some goods or services needed by a business or organization) from outside sources and especially from foreign or nonunion suppliers : to contract for work, jobs, etc., to be done by outside or foreign workers (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/outsource)

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3. joshu ◴[13 May 17 16:35 UTC] No.14331751[source]▶
That does not jibe with common usage I hear in the field, despite what Webster says.

For example, young startups frequently outsource CFO functions to someone up the street.

To be truly pedantic, your definition doesn't say remote workers, just foreign, without specifying their region. OP talked about local workers in contrast.

Not only does the definition not say I am wrong (it includes the thing I said) but I was speaking in context of OP's comment (about location)

So you complained about my lack of precision and to do so you lost even more and didn't actually understand the context.

4. FrozenVoid ◴[13 May 17 16:51 UTC] No.14331816[source]▶
Outsourcing is the overarching concept to which offshoring and nearshoring belong. Obviously its much cheaper to outsource work to countries where wages are fraction of work rates in developed world. Startups use it agressively to reduce costs.

https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2016/01/12/startups-use-gig-econom...

Now we have some economy sectors where offshore locations don't make sense(work is service-oriented & local) and bringing foreign workers is more expensive/legally complicated than a job is worth for the company.

Thats where "gig economy" model comes in: it allows exploiting local workers for much cheaper wages, without bringing foreign labor. The outsourcing part is what work there was(regular food delivery jobs) made into granular contracts and "gigs"/"tasks", which divide the labor into independent segments(e.g. deliveries) where task distributed into local labor pool(as some kind of cloud computing with the humans being servers).

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5. yunoe ◴[13 May 17 18:13 UTC] No.14332208[source]▶
Much of the "gig economy" seem to basically be "urban day labor".
6. greenyoda ◴[13 May 17 20:41 UTC] No.14332897[source]▶
From my understanding (and Wikipedia agrees with me[1]), "outsourcing" simply means paying someone to perform work outside your company that the company would otherwise perform. For example, my employer outsources payroll to ADP, and outsources office cleaning to a service company rather than hiring its own cleaning staff.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsourcing - "In business, outsourcing involves the contracting out of a business process (e.g. payroll processing, claims processing) and operational, and/or non-core functions (e.g. manufacturing, facility management, call center support) to another party."