The gig economy is way worse than the author describes.
Gig workers can't advance with the companies they work for.
Gig workers can't build a network with their coworkers because they don't have coworkers...and there's a good chance that they are competing for work with other people working for the same company.
There are dead end day jobs, and then there is gig work.
I think a lot of commenters here are projecting this article onto their work lives as tech office workers, but it's really more about the world of unskilled and semi-skilled service/gig workers, like handymen, furniture assemblers, delivery drivers, and so on.
All these things can be true and they reinforce each other: The jobs suck <-> The people willing to do them aren't very happy, skilled or competent <-> The pay is minuscule. And we can't seem to get out of this Nash Equilibrium.
I’ve had similar frustrations with gig economy services. A while ago, i hired someone from TaskRabbit to set up a standing desk. i thought it would be an easy process, but the assembler showed up late. then he had a hard time following basic instructions, and he also left halfway through, saying he had another job to go to. I finished the assembly myself at the end.
then i realize these platforms don’t support skilled, well-paid workers. they focus on cheap convenience, which often results in poor quality. the issue isn't just that people struggle with their jobs. it's that the system makes it hard for them to do good work.
Now I hire local professionals, even if they cost more. Their experience and trustworthiness save me time and frustration.
> At Fred Meyer, our local Kroger-owned grocery store, a bagger in his 70s put all my frozen items in a normal bag, and my chips in the cold storage bag I’d brought from home.
A) Having to work a job (obviously not done out of passion) 70+ is really disheartening B) I don´t understand why this even is something that has to be done by a worker. I bought the groceries. I know where I want my stuff in my bags. Or I just toss them back in the cart and load it properly at the car.
I recently retired after 45 years in tech. I started out in 1978 at Bell Labs. I have had great jobs and terrible jobs. Great bosses and horrific bosses. And all the things in between. I did not just survive, I thrived and beyond and worked at 3 start ups and a bunch of other companies large and small. What I learned is to not to be afraid. Regardless of what is happening around you. Fear is the enemy. Don't be afraid to be weird or crazy or whatever is causing you to be timid.
I agree with the author's point, which basically boils down to "pay peanuts, get monkeys."
But I think another large issue is a deep lack of respect at these jobs, in every way. They are impersonal, they are short-term, you are a cog in a machine, they don't know your name, the customers don't know your name, they don't care about you, you are replaceable, you don't care about the work, why would you?
Customer service across the board is in free-fall. Just the other day I was met with a Chipotle worker who was visibly frustrated that I ordered a burrito instead of a bowl. A little thing, but holy shit.
I guess when wages don't add up to a viable life, resentment and carelessness spread like wildfire.
Very good and insightful article, but suffers from a weakness: it implies that the problem can be solved by everyone just buying from the ones whose workers are doing the job well.
This is not the case. The evidence that the "free market" does not "regulate itself" (at least not in favor of the many) since the 2008 recession is beyond refutation: we need pro-worker governments stepping in.
Labor laws in the US are outdated, not being updated, and not being enforced.
Companies exist to make money. If the company's environment permits it to exploit people to make money? It'll do it just to not get outcompeted.
Delivery drivers' pay should be higher - the cost of delivery should drive some percent of people choose pickup. Bed assembly being impossible due to the wrong part being sent should cause recourse for the bed assembly company/staff.
Everyone involved is doing their best, but it's a bit dire lately.
The problem is with work ethics, not with jobs.
In Japan, it's impressive to see how people perform even the most menial jobs with dedication. It's the Yoda approach: do or do not. If you do a job, do it well. So, you will see people whose job is to stand in the rain and watch over a construction site exit making sure people in the sidewalk do not get run over by trucks exiting the site, doing their job with utter dedication. Even if it rains. Even if the job is crappy. I'm sure these people would rather have a different job — but as long as this is the one they have, they will sure as anything do it well!
This makes me think of The Sort, coined by the venerable patio11.
The types soft skills it takes to to be effective in the kinda crappy jobs described by the author can command much better remuneration in any number of other roles, and society has gotten much better at efficiently allocating that human capital.
The thing is if someone prepared for an interview and cracked the job, they have to be good at it. I have realised that it's often our perception of them which makes them bad at the their jobs. Similar to how we usually blame motivation when the actual problem is clarity of role or job. If we believe in the motive behind it and have clarity of our role in it, motivation does not remain an issue.
We make the jobs bad by not being able to properly share the incentive behind it, what good it brings and to whom. Most of the time people don't want to work because they don't see the ROI in it.
Except paying more for a service doesn’t guarantee better service. I have hired local handymen at $75 per hour and they have been equally bad with fake reviews.
North Americans (my exp only) value cheap goods and services so highly, they don't care how the sausage is made.
Contributing factors that I didn't see discussed yet are the increasing stratification of job descriptions, along with reduction in autonomy to break out of your stratum (combined with incentive not to). This creates workers with an extremely limited view of the whole picture, and lack of interest or ability to do anything outside their job description to fix your problem.
I've heard that Ritz-Carlton does the opposite: they empower employees at all levels to address any customer's concern. This, I believe, is how it should be. https://ritzcarltonleadershipcenter.com/2019/03/19/the-power...
I used to use airtasker a lot.
One thing I noticed is that the people doing airtasker full time, rushed a lot.
I really don't think the platform is for them.
The 2 - 3 people who did the best work, were already people in that trade, doing professional work (often self employed), but using the app to book up just their slack time.
One time I had a professional lawn care company come through and do all my garden maintenance, just to keep the apprentice busy. The job was just for lawn mowing. But unlike the other people on the platform, these guys never wanted to hear from me again. They dont need my business on an ongoing basis.
Gig economy employment model works great for Amazon’s end product - the other companies have just executed poorly
That Wayfair scenario is very familiar to me. I had a really similar experience with them delivering a table and chairs. They stayed for a shockingly long time to assemble them. I figured it was just really hard to assemble. That was somewhat true.
However, when I looked at them, I was shocked at how shoddy the work was. Cross braces were installed backwards. Seat bottoms had huge gaps from the underlying support. Some screws were literally just missing, with parts that would just flop. A lot of this stemmed from not paying attention to the instructions, which specified really specific sequences for putting in the screws, leveling, then tightening. Those steps were obviously engineered to minimize misalignment, but this crew thought they knew better... sigh
I didn't ask for a new crew, as I didn't trust them to send a better crew. Instead I just spent a good evening redoing quite a bit of the work.
"no one wants to work anymore"
No one ever wanted to work, we just had to in order to pay the bills. Sometimes work can be gratifying, but most of the time it's just a slog and always has been.
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but the article mentioned very low skills jobs as courier, assembler, clerk.
There is a reason why those people are doing job like these instead that better jobs. Some people are just not interested in doing their work correctly, some other are not skilled enough.
In Germany you have quite high minimum wages. Unions and works committees are quite common. Labor protected laws are quite strict. Sure, not every job is fun, but living with low income is not as bad as in the US. So, are people better at their jobs? Nope. Do people work better just because you pay them better? Nope. Should people get paid better, especially those with shirty jobs? Yes - of course. But there’s no reason to believe this would improve quality of work.
This is a nit, but grocery bagging (one of the article's examples) is a no-win situation. I worked it as a summer job a while back--It’s the most bikeshed job in existence because (nearly) everyone understands it, but they all have their own theory of bagging.
To this day I remember a client whose entire purchase was a loaf of bread, a package of fresh raw chicken, and a bottle of liquid drain cleaner. Paper bags, of course. I don't remember how I arranged them but I remember being yelled at.
I’d be interested in a breakdown of Angi’s costs. They paid $85 for assembly and estimate the assembler was paid $25? Where could the money possibly be going, server hosting is incredibly cheap.
People mentioned they had it easier in the past. It's true, it was easier. The world was not as fast as it is now. The world needs to slow down a bit. Slowing down would benefit both the planet and the people.
Amazing I left almost this exact question as a comment a couple weeks ago!
The jobs are bad and people get blamed for it. We've been through a credit bubble where everything was borrowed out of debt, in the hope that it would deliver massive-scale automation in the future.
But reality is that everyone has been rushing out brittle solutions, creating a brittle, fragile architecture... And now people entering the job market have to spend so much time fixing the mess that they can't make progress. Worse, they take the blame for the slow progress and they have no say over foundations. We are asked to do impossible things given the current foundations and so every job becomes about politics; how to foist the impossible/infeasible tasks onto someone else so that they will take the blame. Because it's all political, the people who can actually create value and thus aren't good at politics get wiped out of the market; then all that remains in every company are political operators.
The value creators are forced either to become political or to keep hopping between companies... Who make good use of them... for a short time until they burn out and hop on to the next company. Nobody acknowledges the value they contribute during their brief tenures; in spite of the fact that they're the only ones adding value. Only the political operator can rise through the ranks; getting credit for managing the constant churn of burnt-out value creators.
Worse, as the political operators get into positions of power; who do they help? People who are like them; also political operators who don't know how to add value.
Sturgeons's Law
Yes.
Excellent article, and better than I could do at generalizing the larger problem of outsourcing. From the IT perspective, companies pay far more to outsource than they would by keeping permanent employees on staff and decently compensated (as in, enough for a modest home, a car every decade, a vacation every year, and all necessary medical/dental/vision care, plus some retirement compensation of some form). Outsourcing communicates two things very loudly:
1) To the outsourcer, that you're a cheap client who will fire you as soon as someone cheaper comes along or a KPI is missed
2) To those in the know (colleagues, workers, stakeholders), that you don't intend to be here long enough to deal with the consequences of your actions
Outsourcers will never care about your infrastructure or its actual needs, and won't care about your budget either. An employee is more likely to conserve budget with smarter product choices and more in-house builds, while outsourced workers will just nod and accept whatever you point to as gospel, since they'll never have to fix it anyway. In essence, you're paying more money to have someone else handle it then you would have paid someone else to talk you professionally down or implement it properly.
Similar arguments:
* Public Cloud is a form of outsourcing that can often increase costs, especially for static or non-scaling infrastructure/resources. Yet because it's more convenient and skirts CAPEX budgets, more companies will just outsource to AWS/Azure/GCP instead of buying two to three servers, a storage array, and some network infrastructure to host their internal directories/applications/file shares.
* XaaS is also outsourcing, often doubly so. You outsource the application to an XaaS provider, and then outsource its management or setup to an outsourcing firm/MSP/consultant. Then you leave, and the company is stuck with a product they have to pay for because "it's necessary", don't know how to support it, don't understand what it's for, and can't begin to move off of or away from it for at least a year after they hire new permanent in-house technical staff.
* Outsourcing leads to a dependency on consultants, because you don't understand your own estate anymore (and fired the folks who did, so you could send the labor elsewhere) and need someone else to tell you what's needed, with the pretty slide decks to justify it to stakeholders. Now you're paying for the outsourced infra (often public cloud or XaaS), the MSP to manage out, the consultants to update/implement it, and now additional consultants to integrate it with other systems who also require consultants because - again - you outsourced your technical staff. Before long you're just blindly implementing whatever's in the upper-right Gartner quadrant without understanding function or utility, let alone ROI.
The end result is a bunch of grossly overpaid leaders, a glut of burnt-out MSP workers who only get paid to put out fires but never prevent them (and even if they were paid for prevention, they'll only be able to do it for whoever pays them the most), and a lagging domestic workforce you have to invest in upskilling when you do want to bring technical staff back in house. Congratulations, instead of leaving your engineers and architects on payroll, you've single-handedly saved the company enough money during your contract to get yourself all your KPI-tied bonuses, and left the organization on fire while you parachute off to repeat it elsewhere.
The OP is right - people aren't necessarily bad at their jobs, we've just incentivized the worst behavior as a society to the point most jobs are just bad. Now we're even doing it to technology folks (IT/IS/Devs) with LLMs, racing ahead with ever more outsourcing and banking on the fact someone else will clean up our mess.
The solution is simple; quit jobs, assemble our own shit. In the US, lean in to the 2A and tell the <1 million cops, <700k politicians to eat it.
We peacefully assemble around jobs. Just peacefully assemble around a new meme of telling the walking dead to pound sand.
Education worked to an extent; most will not devolve into dumb fucks. Pretty pathetic seeing the adults kowtowed by the ossified establishment.
I mean, if just hire somebody without any sort of training it should just be expected that they're bad?
Like show me where in the Apple training they teach how to set ringtones?
UPS straight up flies people to training [1]. Of course their drivers are going to be better.
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/UPS/comments/16oizrm/hiring_and_tra...
Some jobs are bad. Some people are bad at their jobs. Sometimes it's both at the same time.
This furniture assembly job sounds like shit. But also, somebody who puts in "several hours" of labor should be able to assemble some off-brand Ikea slop by simply following the instructions and using a little bit of common sense. If the pay is terrible so you don't even want to try, I get it, but you should bail quick not after "several hours", so it sounds like an earnest (albeit incompetent) attempt was made.
This job sucks, not because there isn't training, but because the pay is too low to attract competent labor.
In the software world, managers could and should be replaced by user counts. If a developer's work product doesn't have users, that is not a desirable outcome. In practice, when this happens in the real world, 9 times out of 10 it is the manager's fault.
> Working for UPS is a good job — and that’s part of why UPS workers are good at their jobs.
Are UPS workers really better at their jobs?
FedEx and UPS seem nearly identical in my area, only DHL is competent.
The author dances around the real cause. It's the lack of labor unions and/or decreasing participation. In this neoliberal/neoclassical (aka "orthodox") economy, companies are maximizing profits at all costs and sacrificing quality and customer service.
Then enter "private equity" which has historically extracted/squeezed once profitable businesses for all they are worth. Saddle them with debt, load up them up on consulting fees (paid to PE, by the way), squeeze the labor force/downsize, decrease quality of items. Then when the debt cannot be paid, sell businesses for parts, layoffs across the board, cook the books, and sell to the next sucker.
Small grocery stores -- (too many to name)
Veterinary care -- (too many to name)
Health clinics -- (too many to name)
Electronics -- iRobot
Software -- (too many to name, but nearly any company bought by "Vista Equity Partners" and et al)
Appliances -- Maytag, Instapot, Electrolux
Great names in their industry with amazing benefits to employees. Reduced to numbers. Benefits cut. Pensions cut/abolished and replaced with shitty 401Ks.
Yea everything is getting shittier. Blame the billionaire class, decades of tax cuts for the wealthy that has been a parasitic drain on society as a whole.
Managers are bad and make the jobs bad and then the people get bad. Shit flows downhill
It's a mix. Sometimes a person is bad at their job because the people who hired or trained them are bad at their jobs. But another way to look at it is that our society increasingly values only people who are "good" at the "job" of making as much money as possible while externalizing as many costs as possible.
> The exploitation (of workers, of natural resources) that made that abundant cheapness possible was largely invisible and thus ignorable.
It's not just the exploitation of workers and natural resources, it's also the exploitation of customers and our society as a whole. When you pay for a product and it's crap, you, the customer, were also exploited by the seller.
The key part to me is the invisibility. The theory of capitalism is that companies compete to better satisfy customers. But nowadays the predominant mode of competition is obfuscation: companies compete to be the best at hiding costs, dodging responsibility, and deflecting consequences. The quality of the actual products and services is secondary to the apparatus of delivering them and responding to feedback, and that apparatus is not oriented towards actually improving the products or services, just at finding somewhere to dump the negative consequences.
> But resistance is very possible. If everyone’s good at their job, shop there.
The article lists a few of these "consumer-level" modes of resistance based essentially on the idea of voting with your dollars. The problem is that it's hard to be an informed dollar-voter in this environment of deliberate obfuscation. Spending hours wading through reviews, product descriptions, and so on, just to buy one thing, effectively increases your cost, and there's no guarantee you'll make the right choice in the end anyway. I'd be willing to pay more in many cases for a better result, but there's no way to tell if something that costs a bit more is actually better, or just another clever scam cloaked in verbiage like "artisanal" and "handcrafted" to lure in people just like me, people who are willing to pay more and can be fooled into doing so while getting no benefit for the extra money.
We need more organized and deliberate resistance: laws. Laws and specific enforcement mechanisms that directly penalize, not just companies, but the individuals at the top who are good at their jobs, namely the job of squeezing value out of other people by lying, cheating, and hiding. We need laws that force competition into the realm of actual products and services, and punish engagement in the obfuscation arms race.
> As a society, we have decided that we want more for less: more convenience, more purchases, more technology, but none of it at prices that render it out of reach.
There's an Arcade Fire lyric I heard a long time ago but recently came across again, from "Windowsill": "I don't want it faster, I don't want it free". Too many people these days want things faster and free, and don't understand that the costs are still being paid, somehow, somewhere, often even by the same person who thinks they're getting something fast and free.
Huh? Productivity per worker in the US is at an all-time high and is, I believe, the highest in the world?
Can we please shit-can this notion that US workers are lazy/bad/whatever? That's not the problem. US workers are being squeezed to death. Corporations have gone from 50% tax burden to paying little taxes, the money is flowing almost entirely to the top 1% earners, C-suites, investors, private equity, etc and we're seeing record levels of corporate welfare.
Corporate welfare like..full time or nearly full time employees getting welfare because their employers refuse to give them livable wages, so taxpayers have to step in. Amazon and Walmart are the biggest welfare recipients in the country, and that doesn't begin to count all the sweetheart deals they get on property taxes, the taxpayer money they get for setting up training programs, free infrastructure improvements to support their business.
We have $8BN to give to a lumbering incompetent dinosaur like Intel, $500BN for "AI" crap (which will consume massive amounts of power, land, water...)
...but apparently we can't afford $4BN for LIHEAP which is half as much and keeps elderly people from freezing or broiling to death?
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I have been in the workforce for almost 30 years now and I believe that everybody is getting more squeezed so they don’t have the time or energy to do a proper job. The expectation is to get it done as quickly as possible and not do more unless told so.
In SW development in the 90s I had much more time for experimentation to figure things out. In the last years you often have some manager where you basically have to justify every thing you do and always a huge pile of work that never gets smaller. So you just hurry through your tasks.
I think google had it right for a while with their 20% time where people could do wanted to do. As far as I know that’s over.
People need some slack if you want to see good work. They aren’t machines that can run constantly on 100% utilization.