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posted by janrinok on Friday December 19 2014, @06:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the for-richer-for-poorer dept.

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."

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday December 19 2014, @09:03PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Friday December 19 2014, @09:03PM (#127589)

    That doesn't last very long, for two reasons:
    1. People flock to the area looking for decent jobs, and those local conditions are eliminated.
    2. Whoever the dominant employer in town is can play hardball with those who have committed to living there and start cutting pay once they've started working. If you have a choice between a pay cut and moving halfway across the country, which do you choose? It's at least a difficult question, right?

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  • (Score: 2) by dry on Saturday December 20 2014, @04:22AM

    by dry (223) on Saturday December 20 2014, @04:22AM (#127663) Journal

    In Canada they use the foreign worker program to keep wages low. Tim Hortons (donut shop) cries that it can't afford to pay much above minimum wage and still sell coffee for $1, import workers from the Philippines where work is mostly non-existent and who consider $10 an hour good money, abuse them including putting them to work in a location where they aren't supposed to and then threaten to tell the government so their work visa would be cancelled and keep wages low in some of the most expensive places in N. America to live. (Canada is about 30% more expensive then the States to begin with and much more expensive up north in the oil towns)