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from the work-like-a-dog-/-fingers-to-the-bone-/-nose-to-the-grindstone dept.
Mary’s story looks different to different people. Within the ghoulishly cheerful Lyft public-relations machinery, Mary is an exemplar of hard work and dedication—the latter being, perhaps, hard to come by in a company that refuses to classify its drivers as employees. Mary’s entrepreneurial spirit—taking ride requests while she was in labor!—is an “exciting” example of how seamless and flexible app-based employment can be. Look at that hustle! You can make a quick buck with Lyft anytime, even when your cervix is dilating.
[...] It does require a fairly dystopian strain of doublethink for a company to celebrate how hard and how constantly its employees must work to make a living, given that these companies are themselves setting the terms. And yet this type of faux-inspirational tale has been appearing more lately, both in corporate advertising and in the news. Fiverr, an online freelance marketplace that promotes itself as being for “the lean entrepreneur”—as its name suggests, services advertised on Fiverr can be purchased for as low as five dollars—recently attracted ire for an ad campaign called “In Doers We Trust.” One ad, prominently displayed on some New York City subway cars, features a woman staring at the camera with a look of blank determination. “You eat a coffee for lunch,” the ad proclaims. “You follow through on your follow through. Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You might be a doer.”
[...] At the root of this is the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system. The contrast between the gig economy’s rhetoric (everyone is always connecting, having fun, and killing it!) and the conditions that allow it to exist (a lack of dependable employment that pays a living wage) makes this kink in our thinking especially clear. Human-interest stories about the beauty of some person standing up to the punishments of late capitalism are regular features in the news, too. I’ve come to detest the local-news set piece about the man who walks ten or eleven or twelve miles to work—a story that’s been filed from Oxford, Alabama; from Detroit, Michigan; from Plano, Texas. The story is always written as a tearjerker, with praise for the person’s uncomplaining attitude; a car is usually donated to the subject in the end. Never mentioned or even implied is the shamefulness of a job that doesn’t permit a worker to afford his own commute.
(Score: 1) by mechanicjay on Friday March 24 2017, @06:21PM (3 children)
I disagree with TMB in general on the "just get a better job" point and do feel that Lyft, Uber, etc are engaging in some shady labor practices; but seriously that your fry-cooker analogy is beyond useless to illustrate the point you're trying to make. After reading it over several times, I still have no idea what the hell you're talking about.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by urza9814 on Friday March 24 2017, @06:44PM (2 children)
It's a perfectly good analogy. If you need a piece of equipment to perform some work, you have to properly supply that equipment. A fryer needs a certain amount of electricity to function. A person needs a certain amount of food/clothing/shelter to function. If your business requires that person to function every day but you do not supply a wage sufficient for them to meet those needs, it means you're forcing taxpayers/parents/spouses/friends/etc to pay for your office supplies. I despise Walmart, I don't shop there, I wish they'd go bankrupt...yet every year I end up paying part of the salaries for their employees solely because they refuse to do so. That should not be legal.
How about instead of deciding that people whose jobs have been automated must be worthless and should just roll over and die (but only once some corporation has managed to suck every last drop of marketable labor from their corpse), maybe we could try to celebrate the fact that automation has reduce the demand for human labor and re-calibrate our economy accordingly?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @06:48PM
Please, see here [soylentnews.org] and here [soylentnews.org] for why that's not happening automatically.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday March 24 2017, @11:46PM
The trouble with the analogy is that, disregarding variation of the fryer's resistance with temperature, the voltage should be set at 85 V if 5 kW is desired. At 60 V only 1250 W will be drawn. Who can live on that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohm's_law [wikipedia.org]