SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
After Uber's success, nearly every pitch made by starry-eyed technologists “in Silicon Valley seemed to morph overnight into an ‘Uber for X’ startup" with various companies described now as “Uber for massages,” “Uber for alcohol,” and “Uber for laundry and dry cleaning,” among many, many other things. The conventional narrative is this: enabled by smartphones, enterprising young businesses are using technology to connect a vast market willing to pay for convenience with small businesses or people seeking flexible work. Now Leo Marini writes that the Uber narrative ignores another vital ingredient, without which this new economy would fall apart: inequality.
"There are only two requirements for an on-demand service economy to work, and neither is an iPhone," says Marini. "First, the market being addressed needs to be big enough to scale—food, laundry, taxi rides. Without that, it’s just a concierge service for the rich rather than a disruptive paradigm shift, as a venture capitalist might say. Second, and perhaps more importantly, there needs to be a large enough labor class willing to work at wages that customers consider affordable and that the middlemen consider worthwhile for their profit margins." There is no denying the seductive nature of convenience—or the cold logic of businesses that create new jobs, whatever quality they may be concludes Marini. "All that modern technology has done is make it easier, through omnipresent smartphones, to amass a fleet of increasingly desperate jobseekers eager to take whatever work they can get."
(Score: 2) by strattitarius on Friday December 19 2014, @07:17PM
Self employment used to be very, very difficult. Getting your name out there, securing resources, legal fees, etc. Now you can sign up at Uber and the reality is that the only additional cost for an Uber driver (or any other similar service) is the extra car washes to keep the car nice. You already needed a car and phone, so your overhead is really a personal expense.
I would compare to maid services. Merry Maids is actually quite expensive, based on when I looked into it a few years ago. This is because of overhead and they must pay the cleaner minimum wage. However, you can hire some random person to clean your whole house and pay $50 in cash, coming out to maybe $5/hr. Now there is a service, much like you used to have a phone book, that connects the supplier to the buyer without the need of a full blown company on the supplier's side.
Is it ethical to pay people less than minimum wage to clean your house or drive you home? Is it ethical that a company is formed to connect suppliers and buyers, makes a profit, but the suppliers may not make minimum wage? Personally, I don't think it is but I realize that is a debatable topic.
Babysitters.com is a another good example. Many people on there advertising services at less than minimum wage (some way over too - depends a lot on location).
I just rattled that off so it might seem a bit rambling.
Slashdot Beta Sucks. Soylent Alpha Rules. News at 11.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 19 2014, @07:42PM
> What TFA and you both are getting at, I think, is that smartphones + internet = $60/month overhead for a self employed person.
As a freelancer who makes a buttload more than minimum wage equivalent, I have to point out that obamacare is a fucking game changer for this. Health insurance was prohibitively expensive for anyone who wanted to be self employed. Every single one of my former co-employees cited health insurance as their number one reason for not going it alone. Obviously there is a lot more to it than that, but it was a structural problem that is mostly fixed.