The Gig Economy

[Dill]

(05-09-2019, 09:28 PM)SunsetBengal Wrote: I understand the point you're making, and will reflect back to my own example, once again.  Prior to the last "big recession", I had a semi-successful career as a self-employed contractor in the skilled trades.  I did quality work, I climbed up the ladder of shops to subcontract from, and was pretty much near the top.  I worked in Beach Houses, people's retirement palaces on Golf Courses, did store renovation work for good name brands.  When the recession hit, it was like someone pulled the plug on a light.  I toughed it out for a few years, hoping the work would come back.

Along the way, I blew every dollar I had stashed away, had to cancel health insurance, allow student loans to go back into delinquency, was falling behind on simple truck and house payments.  All that, just hoping that the work would come back, the way it used to be.  Finally, my father sat me down and told me it was time to think about doing something different.  He said "You've already got a degree that you don't use (Mass Comm), why don't you think about going back and studying something that gives you a better skill set?  Being 40 at the time, this seemed most daunting, the idea of going back to school at 40 sounded more like a joke than a solution.  But, I took a couple weeks and started checking out options.  I eventually settled upon Land Surveying Technology, as the nature of the profession appealed to me, and the folks I asked around the community told me that Surveyors had work, even in tough times.

Along the way to getting where I am currently, the work from my previous profession started to come back.  However, I noticed a stark difference.  The work that I used to do for "X" amount of dollars per square foot, was now cut in half.  When I took a look around, I quickly saw why.  The Latino crews had taken all of the work, at a much lower price, just to secure the work.  They would flood a job with bodies, and get it done in half the time, and move onto the next one.  I don't dog them for that, they work hard.  But, the motto of construction is still;  Cheap, fast, good.  Pick any two..  I took pride in high quality work, and could not compete with lower cost, "speed crews", so I am glad that I chose to learn a skill that less people are capable of doing.

I guess the moral of my story is that even though I was studying a new profession, my old work did come back.  I took a look around and saw how flooded the market was, and decided to stay the new course.  Perhaps those ride share drivers should consider doing something similar?

Yow Sunset! I admire your character. Also, this may be the best description of how the "Gig Economy" works from the bottom up that I have seen so far.

But here you are not describing some natural adjustment of markets to supply and demand. You are describing a recession which followed two decades of (engineered) financial deregulation, and was no more "necessary" than the Iraq War.  You are describing how quality work done for a quality wage devolved to shoddy work done for a shoddy wage--how the same amount of labor still went into building the same size house while the pay for that labor (and probably the quality of the house) went down. If that house was sold for the same price or more on the market, then the "savings" from lowered wages flowed upward, to the big corps and banks and their stockholders--while you used up your own hard earned and thriftily preserved resources to retrain.

The resulting wage gap is not accidental, and will  only grow ever wider until enough people realize that it is not "Latino crews" who preside over the gig economy, though they may seem the face of it at ground level.

If you went back to college at a public institution, maybe you noticed tuition costs had doubled between 1985-2008, while many classes were being taught by part-time professors (in some places by administrators who would certainly use "Latino crews" if they could get away with it). If you were listening to the news back then, you heard something of contracting scandals in the Middle East; hundreds of millions of dollars disappeared into the black hole of private contracting, appropriations justified before Congress on grounds that "big government" would be inefficient at rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan. (Give me a moment. Just had a flashback of grimy, dangerous FOBs in Afghanistan where Pakistanis locked into two-year contracts earned 200 bucks a month doing my laundry, and of 24 laptops, $2,000 bucks a piece, which sat on a row of tables in tent for 6 months without ever being used or even turned on, before they were sent back to the US, and of KBR employees, many who had never fired a weapon or were not allowed to carry one, but promised an incredible 50,000 dollars a year to "guard" an Army base full of combat vets in Qatar.)

I could offer more examples of this process from the health care field, but its early in the morning (for me) and I am going back to bed.

Once last comment though. Retraining, of which many are no longer capable, is not a national solution. Voters need to stop blaming other workers for trying to maintain/regain control of their labor and start looking at who really runs the economy, and how. They need to pay attention when the people who think money is free speech want you to ban Muslims, build a wall, outlaw abortion--and cut their taxes.

PS my last last comment.  Was just watching season 4 of Orange is the New Black last night, dramatizing what follows when a private corporation takes over management of a state prison for women. Anybody here watch that series? Remember what happens when they cut the professional guards to half time and start hiring untrained part-timers, start buying prison food already prepped (and cheaper), then bring in bunk beds to double the head count in the same living space and covert an allocation for a GED education program to "on the job training" in a "life skills" program--which turns out to be construction labor for a new dorm to pack even more bodies onto the prison ground at $30,000 a head, labor which the corporation doesn't have to pay for since it is categorized as "Education"?  Lol one of the guards becomes an Lyft driver to make ends meet.