I wonder if this hours figure is calculated the same way the gig companies calculate minimum wage.
I.e. that 28 hours represents only time spent in performing the delivery task. Any waiting around beforehand when not assigned a task is not counted as working hours for the purposes of min wage calculation. If this is true (and that needs verifying) then this 28 might be a 40 hours where the person was unable to get on with their other life duties even if they weren’t technically working.
According to the study it includes hours spent logged on waiting for jobs, which I think is a correct and meaningful way to measure it. I guess this is mostly people trying to top up their primary income.
I'm not sure that I agree that it is. You can be logged into both Uber and Lyft awaiting rides. Good luck trying to be employed at both McDonald's and Burger King awaiting compatible schedules. What makes gig work so different is that your "employer" can't demand you to work when you don't want to.
You're not going to get fired from Uber for being unable to cover a Friday night shift since you're at working at Lyft Friday night. Can't say the same about McDonald's and Burger King.
It all depends on how risky you want to play the game. Do you log off from one while doing a ride for the other? Do you log on 5 minutes away from drop-off to start looking for your next ride? Do you actually accept rides while doing a ride for the other? From many anecdotes I've read, this one is apparently extremely common. I'm sure Uber has some heuristics to discourage this behavior, but ultimately, unless Uber doesn't want the driver's business entirely, then drivers who are driven will find a way to game the system as best they can. Like always, the sweet spot is somewhere in-between.
If you're only counting one set of hours, sure, but do you count your hours by looking at your clock or by looking at the summary view inside each app?
I agree on the spirit of your take but then you should count the commuting hours for the rest of workers as well. If you need 1 hour to get to work and 1 to get back, you are already working (or giving your time to your work place) 50 hours a week
I don't think this is quite the same, because a gig worker would also have commuting costs to populations that have enough of a customer base. It would more be like you have 4 30min meetings today all with 20 minutes apart (so not enough time to really switch tasks to anything useful) and somehow your workplace doesn't count those waiting periods as work and therefore only pay you for 2 hrs work, even though you had to also wait 1 hr collectively during the in-between meetings.
This. It’s kind of like how, for office workers, the IRS/your company will reimburse you for travel between offices and meeting places, but not from your home to your main office
Okay, you're at home and you want to be downtown. Open the app, wash the dishes from last night, take out the trash, by then someone near you wants a ride downtown. You get paid, and then you're downtown where you can get paid again right away.
But that doesn't make any sense. You're in some residential area, it's rush hour, you need to get into the downtown where the action is, and so does everybody else. There isn't one person who also wants to go where you're going? Unlikely.
Ironically, it's demands for minimum compensation that make efficiencies like that go away. Maybe there is some demand for that but not a ton, and only at low prices. Low is better than none when you're making the trip either way. But if you're prohibited from working for less than a threshold amount of money, then you get nothing.
There's a big difference between a salaried 40ish hours (plus or including commute), where the commute forms part of the decision to take the job, and you know you're getting paid vs hanging around, unable to commit to other tasks, in the hope that a gig appears for you.
If it doesn't, you not only don't get paid, but you've missed the opportunity to potentially earn elsewhere too.
I think the op here was pointing out that in some gig jobs, you only get paid whilst doing the task (eg delivering the food) rather than the time they are available to work, such as waiting for a food order. The worker can't do anything else whilst waiting, but still doesn't get paid.
Yes, but the same apply to a non-gig jobs with commuting. I understand perfectly that a gig-worker situation is worse and needs more protection, but commuting time, especially when long enough, cannot be just ignored. In fact in many jurisdictions if you get injured while commuting to work, it's a work accident.
Absurd. If you don't like the commute distance then find a different job so your (pay / (time spent commuting + time spent working) is something you agree with. Or move closer to the job.
All that is in reality is employers subsidising people's decision to live somewhere with an outrageous commute (ie generally far away from urban centres). People who chose to live in urban centres close to where they're likely to work with shorter travel times are now being effectively penalised for making a responsible decision.
Alternatively we could force employers to pay for commutes but allow them to factor that into hiring decisions. If I have to pay you as if you worked 60 hours because you have a ridiculous 2 hour each way commute I'm just going to hire someone who lives 30 minutes away instead.
"Just pay your employee to drive 3 hours" is equally absurd. Or what if I decide to take a greyhound or amtrak even longer, please pay me to sleep! You also have the choice of not taking the job, or not moving away from your job so its hardly a fair comparison.
You're thinking about this like an engineer instead of a human and not applying any sort of reasonableness test. You can take as long as you want to get to work but you'll be paid for a reasonable commute time and distance just like how mileage reimbursement and per diem works.
You think in the world of business travel someone hasn't already thought about this?
So then you don't actually get paid based on how long your commute is and the people stuck commuting 3 hours a day go uncompensated for the time because a 3 hour commute isn't reasonable -- which was the original point.
For simplicity we could just abstract that average commute and other factors(some days being busy or slow, some days having challenging/easy tasks, cost of living, etc.) and wrap that all up in a single compensation. Maybe call it a wage or salary, and then let workers choose the job with the best "wage" for their specific scenario.
But how are you supposed to set price controls on wages if some jobs are easy and right near where you live and others are hard and far away from affordable rents? Wouldn't the calculation have so many variables in it with such subjective valuation that only the person themselves could decide if it was worth it?
The moment you make commute a cost for the employer they're going to start discriminating based on your commute. You don't live within 5 minutes of the job? Go find another job.
Or better yet - employer offered housing! You don't want to live on the workplace-campus? Sorry! We need somebody to buy from all the businesses we contracted for our workplace campus.
Awesome. My commute time is now 5 hours each way. Please pay me.
Hyberbole aside, how would that even work? The further away from work someone lives, the more "commute time" they get paid? That has perverse incentives:
* I no longer take mass transit because driving myself is slower and I get paid more.
* I move further away, and take longer to get to work, and spend that time listening to audio books. My employer pays all that time, I'm doing a leisure activity, and I'm having a greater negative impact on the environment.
in the UK, commute in and out of work is not paid time. But any transport between places of work is paid time, so the argument is that "self-employed" gig workers miss out on paid transport time between gigs.
> I move further away, and take longer to get to work, and spend that time listening to audio books.
I like audiobooks and it would be nice to get paid to listen when I do. I would not trade even two hours of my day, every day I commute, by moving further away. You would have to be paid more than you value that time for it to make sense.
That's you wishing you got paid more, not you valuing your time at more than they pay. Needing the money is valuing the money more than you value the time.
Sure, sure, but that's why you might take a commute which is two hours each way instead of one which is eight hours each way. That doesn't remove the perverse incentive, it just attenuates it. Eventually. And generally not before you're doing something quite inefficient.
Notice that you're also e.g. screwing around on the internet on the train instead of screwing around on the internet at home. People regularly already do that for four, five, six hours a day. Who wouldn't choose to get paid for it?
Then everyone has to spend more of their income on housing because the supply constraint hasn't been lifted but if you don't outbid your coworkers on nearby housing you get fired.
I genuinely don't understand the downvotes. Y'all really be simping for your employers. Any time spent doing anything you wouldn't be doing if it weren't for your job should be paid and it's dumb that we pretend it shouldn't be.
This is how every salaried person's pay already works and it should apply to hourly workers too.
It sounds good. I understand your fire behind the idea.
But in reality, in just doesn't work.
If I don't value my time, and my employer has to pay for my commute, then why wouldn't I choose to move an hour away from work, or take a job an hour away, to make more money without actually working?
How would you solve employers discriminating against people that live an hour away or paying a lower hourly wage to someone that lives farther away?
Usually in this kind of scheme you would not be paid your normal hourly wage but a low rate. If you still think that sitting in a car for a small return is better than just being at your desk or job site making full pay for actual work, that's on the employer for creating such a shitty job->pay match that it's better to endure traffic for peanuts than work.
Also, right now plenty of companies put out voluntary overtime that people don't end up taking, despite higher pay and literally the same work. Plenty of people would rather not be under someone else's command for an extra hour just to make a few bucks, and in fact, when you pay people adequately they largely don't want to do that. You always have weird outliers that think life is an idle game and try to make the bank account go as high as possible, but building systems around dumb outliers is not good systems engineering.
On average, people don't want to spend extra hours in their car, even if you pay them full wage. This is why when Uber started out they basically had to push subsidized high pay, so people would be willing to drive around all day.
Right now you can, with little experience, go make like $80k or more a year driving around all day, by being a trucker, and yet the industry is constantly struggling to keep people working, because the job is awful. If you have an employee that decides to move five hours away and waste ten hours of their day to make an extra hundred bucks, there are probably other things that make them a mediocre employee that you can fire them for.
They’d obviously do it by total hours worked vs the amount Uber/etc pays out each paycheque, not going through thousands of Uber receipts, calculating the percentages paid out + time spent doing the delivery, and totalling them up. That’d be pretty hard/impossible at scale.
I wonder if this hours figure is calculated the same way the gig companies calculate minimum wage.
I.e. that 28 hours represents only time spent in performing the delivery task. Any waiting around beforehand when not assigned a task is not counted as working hours for the purposes of min wage calculation. If this is true (and that needs verifying) then this 28 might be a 40 hours where the person was unable to get on with their other life duties even if they weren’t technically working.