So the gig economy is one of these the term the gig economy is one of these two are not entirely
clear where the term came from and it's not entirely clear exactly what it's supposed to refer to.
But what I'm going to talk about this evening is primarily these kinds of things, while sometimes called the digital platforms.
So two of the most familiar ones are uncontroversial ones are Uber and Deliveroo, which you probably heard of Top TaskRabbit.
I'm not entirely sure if TaskRabbit does business in the UK. No, it's all service like Airtasker, but the logo's a bit more interesting.
So matter comment on a slide before kind of.
I was curious, have any of you or do any of you were working in the gig economy for any of these platforms?
I know Uber doesn't operate in Oxford. No, but I guess everyone who does go out on the street do their thing.
Right. Okay. So I'm talking about we're going to talk mainly about the kind of platforms that have recently evolved,
given advances in communications technology and which is a subject of some debate out in the in the real world.
But it can be helpful to solving some of Wall Street's generalisations and definitions.
So what I want to say roughly, but I think what I saw on the right track is that good gig work.
When we talk about gig what, what, what we're all talking about,
what we should be talking about is any kind of labour that that sort of soul to order, right?
A kind of rolling basis whereby gig what gig workers are workers who are in the position
of supplying labour according to kind of discrete instances of consumer demand.
Okay.
So in other words, they work when some specific consumer wants to consume the output of that, they okay on that and they just do it by rolling basis.
They start and stop according to when the demand comes up and what the digital platforms do.
But by and large is they just transmit live,
enable the transmission of information in ways that makes this sort of thing happen a lot more readily than it used to.
Okay. So over Deliveroo that they send workers information about demand, but they're in a position to respond to those and where to go.
And they send information to consumers and to workers about about the quality, about the experience that transact is how to impart context.
So Uber drivers and consumers, both in the kind of writing the platforms, enable this to move around.
And that's a large part of their appeal. Right.
But because that's really all because that's mainly what digital platforms are, they're not really about that.
They perform a similar kind of role that has been performed for a long time, but by just older kinds of platforms.
Right.
So and insofar as any information around that, just a success of technologies, older, slower ways of doing that, like newspapers and the phone book.
Right. Big thing that you start to shut off on your doorstep that that's a platform project for these purposes.
I think another example. So really the digital platforms are just the kind of next level in the evolution of communications technology.
So that's one thing. And what's really new here,
the same with the economy of the thing with the digital platforms is we often people often talk about these things as if there's
some kind of revolution in labour markets with respect to the kinds of services I think that they allow people to sell.
This is true to some extent. So things like Uber have made they certainly make consumers better off.
This sort of depends on where you live. I live in Melbourne. Taxi drivers are pretty awful.
I mean I mean, they didn't really they are the new clients of Darwin either didn't know or claim not to know where you were trying to go.
I'm not trying to charge you and I think there's a real although I talk much about this as a go back to the consumer and all of these platforms,
which of course explains partly why they've become so successful.
So that's definitely a new phenomenon, is a revolution now consumer side.
But my feeling is that of the language about this being a new a new wave and a revolution is compared to the revolutions that happened in the past,
like like the invention of the steam engine or the invention of electricity.
It's, you know, it's just not quite left in the narrative.
The revolution is, after all,
being pushed partly by the owners of the platforms who really want to puff them up and to some extent by journalists who are in
the unfortunate position of having to report on something that's really new the whole time that's quite hard for journalists.
And journalists got to have a Brexit that's going to find some way, as I hear something new every day, and that's actually a lot of data.
So we want to be a little bit sceptical about that,
but nevertheless have these these platforms that there was a thing they were saying there are a lot control.
Mercy moral controversy and asked. That's why we're here.
Right. So coming up is what's going to happen.
So I want to go through this to two somewhat distinct mobile concerns about gig work or
about digital platforms that are floating around and that people try and articulate.
I don't want to talk about both of these, but the first one I'm going to talk about and kind of set aside quite quickly and then try to fill
the time talking about the second one is to keep this to a logical focus on the gig economy.
The first one I'm going to set aside, the second one I'm going to try and expand one.
And that's going to lead me to eventually offer some conclusions or suggestions perhaps about what the mobile problem actually is.
I'm saying there is a moral problem and I try to get at it in this way.
Uh, so that's just a heads up. Okay, so start with the first complaint.
So it's very, very popular. People looked like it affected work that they were deliberately and I think it's exploitation.
And what triggers this typically is what this involves when when it's articulated
is some kind of view about people not getting paid what they're entitled to.
For the kind of work I put in.
Some people think Uber is exploitative because while the owners have over cash in a very extreme successful company is worth an enormous amount,
the individual drivers don't typically don't earn very much and possibly don't earn as much.
Many people work as possibly don't earn as much as they used to do doing some of the work before the platforms evolved.
And so this isn't really a point of exploitation. It's worth being aware.
There is a real mechanism here about how platforms might push out wages to two factors here that are of most, not all that well.
What the platforms do is they mean that workers have got to approach consumers en masse.
Right. If you didn't have a digital platform and you were trying to get a ride somewhere,
you wouldn't have a whole load of drivers kind of single tirelessly offering their services to you, and that would possibly be the process.
Okay. So that's one one mechanism.
And also digital platforms, the barriers to entry for workers wanting to sell their these platforms are pretty minimal.
They're pretty minimal compared to some of the barriers that were associated with that kind of labour before the platform was around.
Most familiar here is perhaps that the licensing requirements for things like taxi drivers become a taxi driver.
In the old days you have got to pay good money and pass passports an time as well.
To get your license. And Uber drivers don't really have to do this.
You have to have a driver's license, but they don't have a license on top of that software to sell their life on the platform.
Okay. So there's just two mechanisms that increase the number of workers.
The second one is about accounts. A larger body of work is competing with each other, and the competition is in some ways more direct,
more intense than it might be without the platform.
But in terms of the moral substance of this, the tricky thing of exploitation, so a feeling that some of that exploitation is going on is very,
very intuitive, but hard to sort of get to the bottom of what makes such claims true, if they often.
So generally speaking is there's two kinds of factors that need to be present in order for the feeling that someone's being exploited to take hold.
These are very roughly first of all, the idea that someone is being offered a wage that's just is just too low is just too low for low level to be.
And secondly, people are accepting this offer only because they've got a really bad set of options about alternative options.
Now, both of these conditions are important. I think the reason you need condition two is that.
So I think eventually I'll take over a fair bit in Melbourne and I'll to try and I'll make a
habit of trying to start a conversation with the driver and finding out what they think of it.
And by and large, I think the two cars are driver watchers.
There's there's the migrant workers. Right. Typically who would have been taxi drivers in a previous before the revolution.
And they're they're doing it pretty tough that they don't get enough money.
And they often complain and complain over this.
Congress wants to make it clear that we're not going to give them one stop for saying this, but maybe it's not so much a little bit.
But the other Karnataka is the sort of tends to be middle aged, middle class white guy who just kind of likes driving.
I thought I was like his mom was like, oh, I just love this family car and I just love going around and shooting the breeze.
And it's very unintuitive. That person is getting exploited even though they are getting paid the same as the market work.
Okay, so you need condition two for that.
But it's also true that that the wage level still matters because it's easy to think of cases where someone has a very,
very bad option set apart from the offer they're in fact, accepted.
So and the standard case here is something like imagine a on a star Brazilian soccer player from the favela who was looking down the
barrel of an extremely impoverished life until some scout from Barcelona or whoever he saw them play offered him this big wage.
Again, not really that person to exploit it because the wages, even though not for percent, was really bad.
So in both of these things. And what's hot here is is coming up with song.
I mean, this sort of easy sort of easy to identify cases where two sides find the hard part is giving the substance that really explains this.
So some of political philosophers I've been trying for quite a long time, over 200 years.
It's really very long time philosophy, but it's still quite a long time.
And there is a really good thing you could say that has gotten a lot of flak arms going agree about this because philosophers tend not to agree but.
My assessment. So there wasn't really a good theory of exploitation, of very powerful intuitions about exploitation.
But the problem is no one's ever really been able to come up with a good account of what a fair price for labour is so that you can calculate,
you can say why some offer for wages to low to low relative to some baseline of a fair wage, that's not really being done.
Okay. If you can't set a reference point to calculate the degree to which exploitation has occurred, you haven't really got a theory of exploitation.
There's a strong temptation to fall back on the impression that this is just
exploitative when you look at what people are earning for certain kinds of work.
But I think when when we're dealing with morally problematic market scenarios,
we should at least try and find other means of diagnosing what the injustices rather than just rely on exploitation.
So I don't want to be too dismissive about this, but I'm going to set this approach aside.
Perhaps we can talk about it in the Q&A. All right.
So the complaint I'm going to go for is what we might call what gets called misclassification of work as well.
So the idea here and again, this is a complaint made by good workers,
which is I know these platforms I over deliver and so on and the platforms I've managed to get away with declaring that workers as freelancers,
self-employed or parties as opposed to employees.
And I'm complaining that this is just wrong. This is just not what's going on in in the economy for at least on a wide range of platforms right now.
Paul in the complaint is motivated by some concern about the wages being unjustly low.
Why? Because if you were an employee rather than a freelancer, you'd have certain guarantees.
And in most jurisdictions about minimum wage and certain other benefits that might make the overall package look fair.
All right. But that's not all that's going on.
So the suggestion of all the so I have is that if we can get to the bottom or nearer to the bottom of all of this complaint,
we might have quite an interesting and interesting way of approaching the gig economy.
Okay. So what I want to ask you about asking for an answer in real time is what's all this about this distinction between freelancers and employees?
What is that? What we'll see. Also, distinction fall. Why do we have it?
What do we want from it? What's its moral purpose?
If they want to have a moral purpose, or it might make sense only when you cash out poorly in moral terms.
Okay. So that's that's the that's the harsh that's the suggestion I'm going to try and make good on for carrying on.
I want to go back to this thing about how that this is not as revolutionary as it sometimes sounds.
So gig work meaning the abstract definition.
So remember, the abstract definition is this idea of rolling rolling agreements to perform something like that,
the right to force consumer this is probably the oldest commonwealth in there is which is probably older than employment by firms.
Okay. And it's certainly very familiar kind of think of the phonebook if you if you're old enough.
You've got your electricians, your plumbers, freelance workers.
Right. Everyone agrees. People sell their labour according to their individual instances of consumer demand, often,
often quite short term, and use some kind of platform, maybe an online platform nowadays.
But in the old days, the phone book and passing leaflets through letterboxes or whatever.
Now I think these kinds of cases, these old fashioned paperwork cases,
are actually quite instructive when you're trying to think about the morality of the digital platform cases, because there's various informal,
instructive comparisons we can make when thinking about the conditions that these kinds of workers work as
freelancers and the kind of conditions that typically apply to people selling their labour through the platforms.
So I think we can actually learn a lot from thinking about the the way in which the gig economy is not so much revolutions.
Yeah. Okay.
So let's let's get started on that. Right.
So you got two cars of working in the market, in the market economy.
There's two ways in which you can sell your work, your labour.
You can work for a firm where my firm, we just mean broadly speaking,
any kind of entity that will participate in an employment contract wants to go for a small business.
It can be a charity university. Anyone but a firm is an entity that employs people based on a contract.
Right. And what that contract determines, among other things,
across all sectors is going to be something about how much work you do and something about how much you're going to get paid.
And then it's up to the employment law to add more stuff. Or you can work for your stuff while you're not employed by the firm and where.
The amount of work you do and the amount of money you make is more at the mercy of abstract expression or more determined by that.
The. Okay. Mobile contract. All right.
So this is, again, just a rough outline, but that's the that's really how we can begin to distinguish these two categories of worker.
Okay. The question is, which one? Under what conditions should gig workers be in category to all category one?
I think it's it's really quite a philosophical question. What why we have this distinct.
Well, why do we want such a distinction? And we shouldn't just take it for granted.
I mean, we shouldn't just say, well, such a distinction exists. What does the law say about it?
And we'll take it from there. There's a real question about what's up?
What should such a distinction look like? Okay. So first out of the proposal, I want to make the VFW your second stab.
So what we're trying to do with this distinction between freelance workers and employees is we're trying to,
I think, institutionalise a choice for workers who really want to sell their lives.
We want to give them a choice. Do you want to sell it through the market or take on a certain set of benefits and burdens?
Or do you want to go through employment working for the man and get a different set of conditions?
Yeah. And. And so if you are a freelancer, if you take a freelance option, roughly what you do,
what you're doing is you're preserving certain kinds of freedoms about how you work when you work.
What kind of work to do. But accepting more risk about how much and what guarantees you're going to give up.
Conversely, like if you work for a firm you're buying into, you're signing a contract,
it's going to give you a set of guarantees within minutes of of a payday.
But you're giving up some of the autonomy and freedoms of the firm also around.
Terrific animation. That's not all that Mr. That's not.
I'm not saying that this is all there is to that distinction.
But this is the bit that matters. Okay. So what I want to do is I also want to go through some of these differences between the kind
of package of benefits and burdens that freelancers get and the package that employees get.
I just use these comparisons to say something about where we should place delivery riders, uber drivers.
I'm sorry. Yeah. So, uh.
Well, sir, first of all, these are in no particular order, although it's going to be four days and maybe the fourth one is the most important.
But the other three have got a lot of power, maybe. So if you are a freelancer, you have one, right?
You have is you have the entitlement. Entitlement, right.
Same thing tonight. You can set the price of your labour and negotiate with customers accordingly.
But if you are an Uber driver or delivery rider, you just cannot do this.
Okay. You could call if you want Uber driver. You can. You you charge.
What? Well, we want to say you charge what the market wants to offer.
I'll come back to that. But you don't choose that the app chooses to uses the app.
It depends on the app. What would you charge? Yeah. And what's more, there's a bit more consumer.
I mean, surely the driver is talking about something that varies from locality to locality, but focus on the Uber driver in the States once week.
And he told me, he said when I got them off for a ride, I don't know where I was going.
I just want the distance. I just get a 500 kilometre ride, hop for my ride.
That's where you're not an access point based on that alone.
Okay. And but there's nothing. The thing about the app necessitates concealing that information.
Yeah. Because they choose to have that the people like. Yeah. And want,
I want us to compare this kind of practice what was talking about to a cut and dry freelancer and old fashioned gig work like apply one of attrition.
I mean this was wouldn't fly at all. Right.
If I'm a plumber and I say if I'm a plumber in the 1980s and I go round to the local paper, I'd satellite to advertise my plumbing service.
And the paper says, Sure, but you have to charge what we say. You're going to say, I don't work for you.
I work for me. Right. Then there's no nothing attractive or plausible about the idea that an old fashioned
freelance work and must charge some things right based on what some platform tells them?
No. Nor is there anything in the idea that somehow the phone company would facilitate a consumer
contacting a plumber but somehow conceal what the job was until the plumber got to the location.
Right. But the job is five kilometres away.
You get to know whether it's the washing machine or the toilet or whatever.
So that's that's often the first, right? That tends to accrue to freelancers, but not to employees.
Is this right to decide how much to negotiate freely with the customer about how much is going to change hands?
A little side note here. First with two sidebars which we have to point from position.
Maybe this is beyond the scope of this is touches on a lot of other stuff here
but algorithms I've acquired this kind of status whereby you know a question.
So what he was going to say is that if we don't do take the price the market on the fact that we've developed make some
calculation based on how many people are asking for rides and how many folks are out on the road driving the car.
And there is some truth. It is true sometimes if all that those two factors have an impact on prices.
Beyond that, it's actually quite hard to know what's going on under the hood here.
Right, because you was still the alpha. And so a lot of people will say we don't dictate to market.
Does you want to say, well, hang on a minute, who the [INAUDIBLE] cares? I mean, a newspaper might say to the plumber,
but we've got a way of figuring out how many people are driving Toyotas today and probably think the prices.
This doesn't follow that the person selling the labour must set their price accordingly.
And I think the deeper issue here about the way in which we think about markets versus the people participating in.
We talk about the market price. No such thing as a market price.
But at the end of the day. There's nothing to the market.
The market is a sort of beast or a force of nature that goes beyond the sort of smaller forces and beasts that sort of participate.
Yeah. So in a way, the market price actually just depends on whether farmers feel like the market price for fixing a toilet.
Sure. So depending on what companies want to stop as they negotiate based on rather than just what some of our.
And there are other issues about the way in which algorithms have entered our lives and doing all sorts of damage, if not more.
Talked to me about that. But I think when you stop,
it will be too quick to some kind of you can see ground to algorithms that comes to think about how much a transaction is worth.
Selling flavour. Something else very interesting to compare.
Platforms and platforms that do have this restriction. Like you have platforms that start.
So you've got the gig economy. You want to go what some might call the sharing economy.
The distinction has something to do with whether you're selling labour for a platform like a driver's or plumbers,
or whether you're just sharing an asset like you have that distinction mine of being a bit more complicated than it looks.
Uh. Partly because if you have an Airbnb supply, you have to sort of do some work on the flat before people come out of state.
Now, there was probably quite happy with what they gained,
but it's notable that people don't get upset about Airbnb of the sharing economy apps in the way of the upset over delivery.
I ask because partly because these apps do not try and deny suppliers the right to fix the price.
So if you if you supply for Airbnb, if you see right now the only answer whether it be any of your tell you what they think the market
prices for you feel kind of fine in your town this time of year but you don't have to take photos.
Or maybe you should. This is your face price. Your price.
You perform the price you want and see how you get on. Why do I want to say the same thing about who will offer what kind of price tag on this?
There are more problems in the sharing economy.
If your neighbours are laying a place out on Airbnb and you getting these noisy backpackers coming through the whole time, you know what I mean?
But they're not really about the relationship between the platforms and the people supplying to riots.
That's number two. Hamilton for time. Very good question.
Always a good question. I want to wrap it up in the next 15 minutes.
Oh, great. So number two, now, if you are a freelancer, you should have the right to make choices about what kinds of capital you're going to use,
what kinds of stuff you're going to use to help you refine the service.
All right. Platforms often deny this, right?
Well, they restricted quite, quite significantly. And the best example here is, is something like Uber.
Okay. So according to the if you want to drive for The Economist to make certain kinds of requirements,
typically that's to be within a certain range of models in high schools.
An 811i don't experience is always. Chatting to one of my other drivers.
This is one of the middle aged white guys. And he was kind of livid that he had, you know, to be some kind of BMW, SUV,
which was way better than a two year old Toyota trying to wipe out the two year old Toyota, such as the one he was in.
And the customers not talk about their company behave. Well, let me drive you to Oakland.
Even though you know a six year old BMW, you get the idea.
And so then there are these rules which are. We might be more specific about what you can get us in the photo here.
If you if you go on is that your money? Is that some drivers go quite far in providing the goodies?
I've got seven candies in this picture here and how well you can see it, but there's some kind of hand soap here.
I don't know what this is not about water or some kind of TV,
but often that's something I sort of encourage to do over not necessarily coercively of it in ways that I'll come back to doing wrong.
It's also evidence is also reportedly the saying that please don't talk to your customers about politics and about that.
Again, this is I guess a conversation topic isn't really an investment capital, but, you know, it's a freedom nonetheless.
So just to fill out the comparison again, I mean, I can't draw,
I think work like an electrician or a plumber wouldn't be expected to adhere to these conditions.
Right. If if the person if a platform or supplier of capital tried to say you can
only offer the service using this probably within a certain ranges of eight,
this would not be considered legitimate. I mean, imagine if on a 1980s column and I say look to the local paper and say I want to advertise.
And they said, Well, you mustn't talk about politics when you go out to people's houses.
I would not be considered within the range of reasonable demands on the platform today.
Okay. So if you're a freelancer, renting is kind of up to you.
All right. Because you work for yourself.
You don't have to be a walking advertising for the capital that you use.
All right. At least not not the default.
But if you work for Deliveroo as a freelancer, this is exactly what you've got to do now because you've got a purpose in the picture.
Yeah, the Deliveroo uniform and the box that goes on the back of the bike.
And you've got to purchase these things and wear the marketing plan and be a kind of a walking cycling advert for delivery the whole time.
And this is very much not an appetiser for you. It's an appetiser for the draft.
It doesn't cost me anything about you being a good rider. It's all okay just to go back to the conceptual stuff again.
The contrast that I might be having right now is that we wouldn't expect we would think this was legitimate in classified as a freelance work.
If I'm an electrician, I buy some some tools from some manufacturer and they say, Why are you going to buy this?
I would say, Well, advertising it wouldn't fly.
Right. So that's because you are not the branding is something that a brand is what firm gets to have.
And there's a reason for that.
The default situation is that if a firm is called Francisco, some kind of the feasible right to have employees carry that brand around.
But it hasn't got any kind of right to impose that kind of all on people with whom it has contracts, other kinds of contracts.
So, yeah. And last but not least, lost and maybe lost is the right to continue trading, even if you don't like.
Right? Right. And so the the the who how about platforms often includes this emphasis on writing.
You can write to the drivers and they write you.
And what the platforms can do and they can do this, by the way, they can do this pretty much regardless of what kind of write off.
And they can just expelled from the platform. If you want the driver who decides what is being done before you can be kicked off.
And this is what gives the platforms an awful amount of leverage when it comes to getting markets to comply with a of the other demands.
And they even though they work as a free license. But again, this is not legitimate.
This is not legitimate by all platforms. If I was a plumber, I just can't be good at the newspaper.
Wouldn't that I have a right to expel me, but I. I'm saying from advertising.
This wouldn't have happened if I'm willing to pay to advertise and I'm just a mediocre plumber would not get around the basement getting less gigs,
less jobs. But it is not any platforms right to to stop me from trading.
Of course, sometimes people can be mad, compelled to stop trading,
blocked by law enforcement if they know that from such a bad comment on the health hazard.
And then there's an independent case for me to stop trading.
And importantly, that's that's not done at the discretion of some platform that's trying to get
you to wear a brand is based on a certain authority of some independent body.
Okay. At this point in my thing, I've been quite hard on these platforms.
You might think that platforms or I've got a.
A rejoinder. Well, they'll say what they might say is that, look, if we're labour, we don't force and we want to work.
People work when they want to work. All right. Whoever doesn't say you have to work this money out.
But that's what this is what distinguishes most distinguishes platforms from firms.
Because when you sign an employment contract with someone referred, the firm has the right to say you will show up for work this many hours.
How soon as you will sit down or something? Firms have got this right to say we will do something ourselves.
Okay. Platforms don't have to. And they might say this, this is kind of this.
Why don't you think about all this stuff? This is quite decisive. Two replies to this well is if we decide the platforms are really employers,
there's nothing stopping the platforms from drawing on these kinds of contracts.
All right. It's not obvious that it will be on Viber if whatever platform will be a with such contracts exist.
And perhaps more, more, more persuasively.
It's called open question when when a gig workers working or when they're not.
So one of the problems, one of the complaints about these platforms is workers coming back from Seattle are willing to work.
But not get longer afraid that this is not enough consumer demand.
And this is great for the platforms because what the platforms really want is an oversupply of labour.
They want consumers to be able to log into everything while it's content, but they want to have a supply of labour.
They don't want to absorb the cost of oversupply. So they say, well, you just can't work.
You know, like when you're driving around, like I was, you know, you don't get caught.
Uh, but that that's off the debate.
I mean, if I. If I go to the university to give an undergraduate lecture on how students are still working,
when I still showing up for work, if I work in a supermarket and no one has to come in at night.
As long as there's a firm statement can say all ten so bad you don't get paid.
It's just not the way it works. So if we're arguing that, if the question is, are gig workers, employees or freelancers,
well, you can't just assume you can't just assume the answer to this question. It's possible to issue.
I think it's difficult. It's very difficult to resolve this point.
But I certainly what what platform I call the reason platform owners want to declare workers as freelancers so they don't have to pay them
when their labour is actually being performed or when there's no consumer paying for something some particular performance should say.
All right. So excuse me to second, second stand. So you what?
They want to be a freelancer. I would get those rights right from if I'm correct about that survey, what freelancers get.
You get those at risk because the plumbers, electricians, if they go, you know, they want their backsides off distributing leaflets,
advertising and go back to 1980s again, advertising in newspapers, distributing leaflets, talking themselves out of the problem.
They come in also services. That's tough to back. That's the position of freelancers.
It you get these freedoms but it's not the values the forms of your life.
You're not to pay for it. There's no one to go to. You just don't get paid, okay?
You want to improve or do something to get paid to induce people to pay you.
And so because of that risk, employment contracts have a certain kind of appeal, right?
You can trade the freedoms and get those guarantees. That's what makes the freedoms worth trading us the crucial thing.
That's why it's worthwhile for many people to go to work in a supermarket and go to a uniform, have to work 7 hours because you get paid.
Because no one comes to the shop, you get taxed. That's the difference.
And so firms are right to post workers around and promote the brand.
And by the way, there's a long tradition in the economics of the firm,
has a long tradition of explaining or trying to explain why a hierarchical nature of firms improves the output of firms.
So this sort of independent reason for wanting firms to exist, right?
But having those rights is independently justified.
Rights firms have got to give something back in return, and that's typically by way of the kind of guarantees that we see enshrined in labour law.
Minimum wage, sick pay.
I mean, there's disagreement about what the package of guarantees should be, but there are guarantees that don't accrue to freelancers.
Yeah. And so the point of the freelance employee, in contrast, I think I'm suggesting,
is that it should exist to give workers, people sort of their like these two options.
Do you want to go freelance and have the rights to have the risk or do you want to go,
uh, employment contract with the firm if you have some freedom and get some guarantees?
And the distinction has a small substance only so long as this distribution of rights and duties state is balanced.
And the worry about the gig economy is all about accident.
Okay, so what does this mean for platforms? So what?
The digital platform, the worst of it, absent regulation, what they're trying to do in many cases,
they're trying to give workers the worst of both worlds. Right. They treat them like freelancers on the risk side.
So if you get an injury, if you log onto the app and go Uber app and you tell them no one wants arrived or not enough people want to ride to bad.
You suck up the cost of that. But it was still going to treat you like an employee on the command.
So I'm still going to tell you when you get off this car, you have water in your car.
You can't talk about this or that, etc.
I'm not suggesting that he was the worst kind of platform here to suggest, you know, to some degree he's your platform to try and do.
Yeah, really. Platforms need to be forced to make a choice.
I think the framework is like employees and you give them the guarantees or you treat them like proper freelancers and you back off from some of
this other stuff and you pass behind them more likely the apps and then the sharing of information about that which people often come up with.
Question. There's there's no good reason why should platforms or consumers indeed get to have it both ways.
It's all a question. I think they should just talk about going to the real world.
I mean, what we also hear is most of it is really about trying to get to the foundational foundations of the misclassification complaints of code.
Others are trying to actually apply the complaint by way of litigation and so on.
And it's not evidence of unionisation among writer workers like fruit or delivery riders.
My understanding is that the courts have not really upheld this as well as one might have hoped.
Now there has been a judgement on Uber in the UK that it's an employer as employer, largely because it denies drivers this right to negotiate across.
And that there was an employment tribunal a few years ago which said that.
So remaining questions about the three different digital platforms is a lot.
The gig economy is a lot bigger than the digital platforms, but digital platforms are often assumed to be the biggest part of the economy.
That's largely because there is a growing lot that works without an Amazon brand.
On higher education is one of the industries in which there's a trend away from
traditional employment and more towards a gig like scenario of short term contract work,
but short term contracts that resemble they work.
So there's work to be done in trying to work through how articulate or not articulate certain complaints about the loss of platforms to that.
There's also worries about what the platforms will comment that the court will not make it seem to have a properly positioned parties of it.
In fact, Didi in China, which is the analogue of Hulu in China,
is as strong as time worked out a way to check if its drivers are also selling labour for ever and then expelled once they do.
And I stopped. I stopped over from getting going in China. So Didi's the phone platform.
This is very anti-competitive. I. There's there's room for a lot of discussion about how to make platforms less prone to getting monopoly power.
And if you can do that, chances are quite as powerful just to compete with each other.
They'll have a reason to offer better wages and perhaps better conditions and more rights.
There's a lot to be said about that. I'm running out of time, so I'm not going to say much more, but.
Bottom line is there is a model. There may be many more problems in the economy.
One more problem is better seen. If you're careful about what are you referring to when you talk about freelancers versus employees?
And by careful, I mean if you tend to the philosophical foundation about why that distinction should exist, you might get somewhere.
I don't think the whole problem of the gig economy is a problem of digital platforms,
as such as anything else that really counts in favour of battered platforms.
It counts. If I was thinking more carefully about this freelancer employee distinction and
using our conclusions to tell us what we need to acquire our platforms to do.