- The model we have observed in certain parts of the gig economy carries none of the hallmarks of what most of us would think of as genuine self-employment. As a self-employed courier working with DPD set out to us, “The simple fact is this: if you work at the same depot every day, wear a DPD uniform, drive a DPD van, get given a DPD scanner, are told by DPD management what parcels to deliver at what rate, don’t work for anyone else, you should be protected by the government as being employed.”
At present, there is no such protection. Rather, we have noted how companies are able to use the guise of self-employment to dump a whole series of obligations and liabilities onto their workforce, while depriving them of protections enjoyed by the rest of working Britain.
- I had a girl pick me up in a brand-new Lexus. Daddy clearly bought it for her. She was quite clearly doing it until she got a big girl job. She didn't have to work, but she needed to pantomime working. - I had a Hungarian dude pick me up in a Lyft-leased Nissan. He worked 6 days a week, 12 hours a day. He'd been inside sales until his wife died, Cedars-Sinai charged him $25k, and he lost his job, his house and his wife in the space of two months. Driving Lyft was the thing that got him out of sleeping in his Mercedes. - I had a Seattle native pick me up in a Dodge Caravan he was making payments on. He worked 80 hours a week. His kids were grown, his wife didn't work and he had $1m in equity on a house in Pasadena he hadn't finished paying off. - I've been picked up by probably a dozen? two dozen? former truck drivers. The economics are fucking ghastly, and they're pretty complicated. Lyft will give you about 70% of your fares if your car is 2 years old or newer. If it's 3 or older, that number drops to about 60%. Many drivers are covering 800 miles a day around here, or about 50 miles an hour. My rides are generally around 45 minutes and generally cost me about $25 - that means you're grossing around $1800 a week in a newer car or $1600 a week in an older one. Grossing. Gas around here is around $3 a gallon. Let's say you've got a prius getting around 50mpg. You're burning a gallon an hour for 80 hours a week, so you're spending $250 or so a week on gas, in a prius. You're down to $1550 a week or $1350 a week once you've cooked off gas. You're probably paying more for insurance because the insurance companies don't like you driving for Lyft. You're maybe even buying your insurance through Lyft. I hear that's about an additional $200 a month. Let's say you have a perfect driving record and you aren't in the penal categories of being young or male or young and male. You're paying $350 a month or so on that Prius. $1465 a week or $1265 a week. And let's be real - you're putting 4000 miles a week on that car. I was picked last August in a 2016 Honda with 198,000 miles on it. The hubs were shot but the driver didn't understand why his car growled everywhere anymore. You should be doing an oil change a week on the poor car, but you probably aren't. You should be doing the 30k, 60k and 90k services on the thing within the first six months. Shall we conservatively estimate you're $4k in maintenance over the year? We're at $1390 a week or $1190 a week. And I mean, you're killing that car. Inside a year it's got 200,000 miles on it. KBB says your 2016 prius, in very good condition, is worth about $8500. You spent $24k on it. You're taking a $300 a month depreciation on that car. You're at $1100 a week or, if your car is older, you're just going to kill it. You'll need a new one pretty soon. Keep it up and you're at $900 a week. For 80 hours a week. You're effectively working two $28k a year jobs. You're making about $14 an hour before taxes. Hey, at least you're your own boss, right? And nobody says you have to work that much. I've met those guys, too - retirees who are augmenting their pensions. The aforementioned girl in her new Lexus. Plenty to go 'round, right? Lyft lost $130m last quarter. Uber lost $645m. Shit, Uber lost three.billion.dollars in 2016 paying out what I hear is the equivalent of about $11.50 an hour. There's your gig economy. Venture capitalists paying so that immigrants can grind cars into metal shavings for inches above minimum wage.
I've read this a few times now and I like your math for the most part. I'd just want to point out that United States minimum wage is currently set at $7.25, so $14 an hour would be doing pretty good. I think also though, at least from the way it sounds, your drivers would have to get steady work for that math to work out. That might be possible in traffic heavy cities like New York and L.A., but for smaller cities and especially small towns and low population counties, the demand is probably much thinner. My buddy once asked why I didn't try to get a job at Uber. My answer was two-fold then. My car is a two door and you're required to have a four door and I love my car too much to drive it into the ground more than I already am. Now? I have a third reason, I don't have a smart phone. Crazy as it sounds, cause you can get them cheap these days, there are still a handful of people that don't have smart phones (let alone can afford reliable service for minutes/data) and that'd be another barrier to entry right there.
Ain't my math, squier. That's the closest I can get to understanding the economics of a system that comes in at roughly 20% the cab ecosystem. I think Uber/Lyft sets prices at living wage, rather than minimum wage because who the hell is going to drive 800 miles a day for an actualized rate of $7.25. That's just awful. And yeah - in a major metro area, they get steady work. And yeah - in a small town, it ain't a living. It's the sort of thing where you park and do something else with your time and then sally forth when you have a fare. Thing about a job at Uber - it's money, yeah. But there's no advancement. It doesn't look impressive on a resume - it's not like you were selected for that gig. It mostly demonstrates that you had nothing better to do for however long you were doing Uber/Lyft. I wouldn't get in that pipeline for hell or high water. I read in that awful David Wong book that as soon as you become a prostitute, your odds of dying violently go up by a factor of 500. The actual numbers are terrible: It's not like driving Lyft or Uber is the same as prostitution... but it's definitely a pipeline apart. The study showed that the general population had a mortality rate of 1.9 per every 100,000 people, but the mortality for prostitutes was 391 per 100,000 people and active prostitutes have a mortality rate of 459 per 100,000 people.
In school, we always talked about this work model as "precarious labor", which I find very apt. Hard to pick what I dislike most about it, but I think it might be the (largely false) idea that the gig economy is actually attractive to any young folks - or perhaps worse, that this is our preferred way of working, and companies are just adapting to suit our preferences. Idk. I'll take a 9-5 and sanity over "self-employment" and a mountain of Xanax any day.
It's one of those things that sound compelling on the surface, but when you actually get into the gnitty gritty of things, all of the sudden there's a ton of flaws in the logic. Like flat tax. I got into a debate with someone else on here a week back about gig work and we were talking about the more traditional stuff, kind of like what you're doing with the whole making shirts and all. That type of employment by itself is hard enough to get by on. What this article talks about though, is like the worse of both worlds, the precariousness of gig work mixed with being beholden to an employer (whether they want to call themselves that or not).