The legit concern is whether Uber or any other freelance company misleads its gig workers on their earnings, and to me the best solution to that is not to force reclassify them as employees or prohibit gig work, but to regulate transparency in compensation. For example, require freelance employers to include expense tracking and calculate workers earnings after expenses. That by itself would fix most of the problems for the percentage of gig workers who don’t realize they’re extracting depreciation from their car more so than getting paid by Uber.

The other issues of healthcare, etc., the US needs to solve at a societal level, not an employer level. I think humans have a right to health care. But I don’t think people have a right to a particular job, nor an entitlement for that employer to provide a particular mix of benefits.

This idea that we need to provide our social contract / safety net exclusively via employers is so strange to me, compared to simply owning that if we want these to be rights of our citizens then the government should be providing them as tax-paid services.

What's not OK is when the company wants all the advantages of having contractors but still wants to dictate all these things.

Personally, I think OP is calling out that most of the issues with current Uber (and similar companies) is the asymmetry of information. Only Uber knows where all the riders are, what they are paying, and where they are going. They also are the only ones that know where all the drivers are and how much they are expecting to be paid. This information asymmetry allows them to expose just enough information to both rider and driver to facilitate the outcome Uber wants. In my mind, when Uber (or anyone else) starts controlling the flow of information they cease to be simply a platform/market place.

The majority of issues (in my mind) resolve themselves when this data asymmetry is removed. Driver's have more freedom of choice if they can see all available fares rather than just a yes/no prompt on an individual basis, for example.

I also think there is far more gray area to these types of employment relationships that is generally acceptable when it comes to things like how you do the job, how you dress, etc. For example, if you are an independent delivery driver but enter into a contract with FedEx it is acceptable for FedEx to stipulate that you wear a FedEx uniform while delivering FedEx parcels. If you don't find that stipulation acceptable, you can decline the contract. Likewise, if FedEx discovers you aren't following contractual obligations they can terminate the relationship.

What does set your own hours look like? If I hire someone to mow my lawn, and want it to happen while I'm at the store, am I setting that person's hours?

What does decide how you want to do the job look like? If I specifically want them to use an electric mower for noise reasons, am I deciding how they do the job for them?

Ultimately I feel like we are trying to shoehorn a fundamentally new model into preexisting paradigms, and as a result we waste time haggling over who is what. It feels like instead we should just say this is a new thing, and create a new set of laws to regulate it in the way that we think is best.

Generally, contractors should have expertise, use their own equipment, decide how the job should be done, and have a risk of losing money.

If you insist they use your lawnmower, that's a very quick employee classification (from what I've experienced). My gardener refuses to use any soil/mulch/whatever we own - likely for this reason. I've worked with real estate folks, and when they do a flip, they're very careful not to buy raw materials for the contractors lest some of them sue to be classified as an employee and collect benefits. They'll even use SW to set up an order with Home Depot, which emails the contractor's a simple way to place that order at HD and pick up, and then they'll ask the contractor to add the raw materials cost to the invoice. But they will not buy the materials for them.

Also, if I screw up my current job, I'll merely get fired. My employer cannot demand I repay wages (generally). If your situation with your contractor is comparable, he will be classified as an employee. They must take on risk of losing money if they negotiate poorly or screw up a job.

> It feels like instead we should just say this is a new thing, and create a new set of laws to regulate it in the way that we think is best.

I don't think anyone is disagreeing with this.

In WA State (https://esd.wa.gov/employer-taxes/independent-contractors), there is a three part test. If you force someone to mow your lawn with specific equipment, and at a certain time, they would be en employee; they are not free from control.

When I order an Uber I can never get a ride from a 1980 Ford truck or a snowmobile because those vehicles don't meet Uber's standards and I'm actually scheduling a gig with a representative of Uber who adheres to Uber's standards and acts in line with Uber's policies and takes pay from Uber that is disconnected from what I pay them. There is virtually nothing "independent" about the driver except they independently chose to work for Uber. Yet the driver still bears the costs of equipment maintenance and liability, which happens to be the exact costs that business newbies overlook the most. It's exploitative.

> If I specifically want them to use an electric mower for noise reasons

The fundamental difference is you, as a customer, can want these things, but the person doing the mower is self-employed and they can negotiate and figure out whether or not they can come to a mutual agreement with you. They could also just simply not come to an agreement with you and the worst that would happen is they don't get your money, and move on with their work and life.

It's different than if there was Uber Mowing Co. that managed them and forced them to forgo their lunch and mow your lawn while you were at the store or be fired.

These two things are in fundamental conflict, which is part of the issue.

Are you even hearing how ridiculous this sounds.

The important thing is them passing on not doing your job won't affect their next one, unlike what happens if an uber driver declines too many rides.

But I don’t think your examples are relevant. The customer should be able to request as much as they want on the gig worker, as long as there is no middle man employer forcing the worker to agree to subpar conditions.

I don't think it's that clear - it's more like people are still arguing about a) is it really a new paradigm and b) if so, is it on net enough benefit to be worth doing.

Majority of tech contractors are actually employees of contracting company, so that is one way to get around it. At one point, I was freelancing, and I had only one client. My/their accountant had me open an LLC for this reason.

Now there are a lot of gig workers who are on all of the platforms and probably earn equal amount of money from each platform. But there are plenty who are only on one platform, so they will need to be classified as employees.

You're not setting your own rates. You can't choose which rides you take. You can't follow your own rules.

Remember when Uber was giving back to back rides to drivers that had Lyft driver app installed so they couldn't effectively drive for both? That doesn't sound like freelance work to me.

Much of the pay structure is based on hitting a certain number of rides per week. So to get "decent" pay rate you need to work a certain number of hours.

Sometimes the company even owns your car and leases it to you contingent on doing a certain number of rides.

And you have no input on which rides you get once you go online.

It's nothing like traditional freelance work. It's more like high tech pizza delivery driver. And those workers are all considered employees.

> You're not setting your own rates. You can't choose which rides you take. You can't follow your own rules.

As of a few years ago you can choose which rides you take without penalty. This is effectively how you negotiate rates as well. Only drive during busy times and accept high rate rides.

> Remember when Uber was giving back to back rides to drivers that had Lyft driver app installed so they couldn't effectively drive for both? That doesn't sound like freelance work to me.

The back-to-back ride thing has nothing to do with having the Lyft app installed or not. It's a great feature that allows you to have your next ride lined up while on the current ride. It dramatically increases profit and efficiency (which also means less dead-miles -> less gas wasted -> less emissions). You can decline these "back-to-back" rides just like any other ride request.

> Much of the pay structure is based on hitting a certain number of rides per week. So to get "decent" pay rate you need to work a certain number of hours.

If you drive when it's busy the incentives don't matter. My take home-profit (even after depreciation of vehicle) is $15-30/hr for about 20 hours per week.

> Sometimes the company even owns your car and leases it to you contingent on doing a certain number of rides.

I don't know any Uber drivers in my city who lease their cars from Uber. Never heard of this happening.

> And you have no input on which rides you get once you go online. You get all the ride requests near you. You can decline at will with no penalty.

Apparently, that was harming Uber’s business and they are considering removing that feature from the driver app.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Uber-may-stop-l...

That wasn't there before and I have no reason to believe it now without evidence. Turning down rides always had negative effects such as less rides being assigned to you.

> The back-to-back ride thing has nothing to do with having the Lyft app installed or not

You should look this up in older news articles. AFAIK that's just not true. Maybe it's changed, but at one point Uber was changing their app behavior when you had Lyft driver app installed.

> If you drive when it's busy the incentives don't matter.

So you're implicitly agreeing with me that the incentives are perverse and encourage you to drive during peak times?

> I don't know any Uber drivers in my city who lease their cars from Uber. Never heard of this happening.

Then I encourage you to read about this. There's a large fraction of people who don't believe anything unless it's happened to them or their friends personally. And I think this is a shame given how available information is with today's internet. This definitely 1000% happens. I've seen it with my own eyes.

-------

There are also lots of Barbers who have to basically come in at certain hours to keep the barbershop open. Barbers however, are largely "gig" work by technicality. You're technically an independent contractor.

Etc. etc.

These sorts of positions are only "gig" because the companies are exploiting those workers. You really can't choose your hours in sales and/or barbershops. You gotta come in when the customers come in. You gotta close up shop and/or open up in the morning, (kinda like open / close employees / managers).

But they're "gig" because the companies want to avoid paying social security taxes, among other taxes associated with proper employment.

----------

Freelancing probably is a "proper gig". That's not the segment of the economy that people are talking about. There are true gig workers. And then there's the huge number of "non-employee / gig-work" where its just a collection of companies avoiding social security taxes.

Source: I like to get to know my barber's and every shop was run different.

Employees are taxed 6.2% by the government, and 6.2% to the Employer.

Gig workers are taxed 12.4% by the government ("self employed" tax). So in US-law, the government gets its money either way.

That's why a "gig-worker in name only" is such an advantage to companies in the USA. It allows companies to cut out 6.2% of its taxes and shove it to the gig-worker instead.

Gig worker sees the whole .124, which is probably why govt wants more classed as employee.

TANSTAAFL

that extra 6.2% isn't a tax on the employer at all! it is a tax on employment, and it really is part of the employee's taxation (in fact that 2 * 6.2% is a "socialized" part of the employee wage, that fraction of wage goes to the Social Security Administration to be put in a fund used then to pay out retirement pensions). Hiding this fact is the best part of tax: a tax you do not feel is the best kind of tax from the point of view of the tax collector... of course it is the worst kind of tax from the point of view of the taxed entity.

"Gig worker sees the whole .124, which is probably why govt wants more classed as employee." <-- that's right! however one could argue that everyone should see the whole .124 so that they know better how they are taxed (I'm not saying this level is too high, on the contrary I think it's too low, but what irks me is that it is done under the covers...).

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch

Except the ads posted in your local bulletin board / signposts are "Want a job for $10/hr?!??"

So what happens in practice, is that the gig-worker is paid $10 (costing the company $10), vs the employee who'd be paid $10 (costing the company $10.62 + other bits, like health care and various insurances)

Why not both? If a problem is identified with our culture, its not exactly a strong argument to say "Well, here's another problem I'm more concerned about".

All I'll say is: lets solve both problems simultaneously. There's many problems in the world, and we should work on solving as many of them as possible.

I've got friends (who were with me in that knife salesman gig work) who didn't understand the difference at all, no matter how many times I explained it to them. People's brains just don't work the way you say. Sure, I understood the difference and how to do my own taxes, but not everyone has that capability unfortunately.

Because they're alternatives to each other. You don't need both.

If people don't understand how to compare their alternatives, they're going to get screwed left and right, not just in the difference between employee and contractor. So we have to fix that more general problem if it exists.

And solving that problem means not only that you don't need to prohibit people from being classified as contractors but that doing so is a net harm. Because prohibiting it for the benefit of the person doing the math wrong (solvable the other way) is a harm to the person who benefits from the arrangement, e.g. because they want the more flexible hours that come from being a contractor instead of an employee.

Sure we do.

Our education system sucks (as proof by my friends who were unable to grasp this basic arithmetic). AND we have a Gig vs Employee issue that also needs to be clarified through the law.

Lets fix both. I don't see any problem working towards the problem you suggested, nor the problem I suggested. I'm sure our failure in education is also causing issues in other aspects of our society unrelated to this particular issue.

Fixing the education system solves both of them, because then people aren't fooled into becoming a contractor when it doesn't benefit them. Then you don't need the government to force them into being an employee including in cases where they're better off as a contractor -- you only need to do the first one.

Also, if you tried to explain it multiple times to them, maybe it isn't the education's systems fault? Like you said above, their brains are unable to grasp it. No amount of education reform is going to fix that.

Can you expand on this? Is it that employers don’t really contribute an equal amount to the employee withholding? Or is it an acknowledgment that absent this withholding, one would expect the money to show up in the regular paycheck?

Which means saying that the company pays this amount and the worker pays that amount doesn't really mean anything. In the case where the worker nominally pays less of the tax, the company doesn't have to pay as much to the worker to make the job equally attractive. It doesn't really change who pays.

Of course this is theoretical and real systems have friction and stupidity in them, so people who are lazy or bad at math may end up taking a worse deal because it was framed in a particular way. But that's an information problem -- it has information solutions.

Instead of spending all this time campaigning to classify people as employees, just send out pamphlets to all the Uber drivers with a cost breakdown of what the equivalent employee wage would be compared to what Uber is paying them. Maybe some of them will quit and then Uber will have to pay the others more. Maybe the people doing the job aren't as dumb as they're made out to be and have their reasons. Either way, you solve the information problem with information, not prohibition.

We came up with this agreement as a society that people should be able to survive and have their basic needs met, and then we forced businesses to actually make it happen through minimum wage (and to a lesser degree insurance, pre-Obamacare). If we came up with it as a society, our society (as represented by our elected government) should be the one actually charged with making that agreement a reality.

If UBI helps people do useful things like caregiving or job training, then it has achieved something.

If UBI just causes less (useful) work to get done, then it is a net harm to society.

Maybe it's good if it shifts investment towards automation that eventually improves productivity. For example, if paying Uber drivers becomes less attractive, maybe researching self-driving or investing in mass transit becomes more attractive; maybe that's good.

But things still need to get done, and money by itself doesn't do anything. In the extreme case you end up like Kuwait, where citizens get (in that case oil) UBI, and guest workers outside the UBI system do all the actual work.

The US could do that, and it might reduce inequality among US citizens, but new outgroups would become painfully apparent.

I suspect this instead leads to companies determining "nobody is willing to work at the prices we're happy to pay. Therefore there is a labour shortage; we need more immigrants, and we're happy enough to sponser them for a time"

Note they don't raise prices, they instead increase the applicant pool.

Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that's why I shit on company time. If I got paid fairly and had a seat at the table for discussions about profit sharing then I would plan my shits to not impede my work. Until then, big capital can keep blowing their hot air, workers don't care what these suits think and are realizing the suits don't even care about the health of safety of the workers themselves, let alone their ability to afford a family or house.

This is the big problem that no policymaker wants to address, because there is a huge amount of money being made off of the status quo. And decades of bad-faith "big government" rhetoric plus "starve the beast" policy have soured the public on it.

The people trying to pass things like Medicare for all would disagree with the “no policymaker” part. Not a majority but they exist and are generally vocal about mentioning this exact point.

Just wanted to note that there are systems which are not tax-paid and still avoid the problems that you have in the US.

E.g. in Switzerland health insurance is private, but the variables that can be used to determine the price are regulated. The employers cannot directly provide health insurance as a benefit (some provide a cash supplement, but that's effectively a higher salary). This way big companies don't get preferential treatment. You can be a freelancer and have the exact same health insurance as people in big tech.

Freelancers doing gig work are a drain on society if they fall back on to social safety nets when not employed. It's not in society's interest to have these people paying taxes only when they feel like it, especially if it ends up cannibalising slightly less efficient industry which reliably keeps people employed and paying taxes.

Not entirely serious - I do have sympathy for the position that gig work puts otherwise idle labour to good use - but I do think Uber and many similar companies are extracting efficiencies that hadn't been locked out with laws only because the tech to extract them hadn't been invented yet, a kind of regulatory arbitrage on a functional status quo.

In response to your second paragraph, regulatory arbitrage is efficiency seeking. I'm sure you're familiar with the phrase "vote with your feet". It's not like people move to a new job out of a state or out of country with the expectations that the laws remain same. In a similar fashion, Uber isn't obligated to base it's behavior on laws or regulations that don't exist. The same could be said of Paypal, Youtube, AirBnB and more recently with cryptocurrencies and NFTs. The way you phrase your sentences seems to suggest you classify pursuing economic freedom as a preemptive regulatory evasion.

This is completely irrelevant. I'm talking about policy-making. I'm talking about the motivations behind making the rules, not how you work within the rules.

> regulatory arbitrage is efficiency seeking

That's right. I think that's what I said.

> economic freedom as a preemptive regulatory evasion

No, but policy-makers are free to take that approach, because they create the rules. If the rules don't cover new behaviour, the motivation - the original political will - behind previous rules often, and in fact usually, creates political will to introduce new rules. That's ok, it's the system working. It's why we have governments on an ongoing basis, and don't just stop once we have one set of laws.

Should that be up to the freelancer? Ever Uber driver I’ve ever known knows their costs down to the cent. That’s what freelancing is all about.

What would be more valuable is required financial literacy courses as a condition of high school graduation. And restricting predatory student loans. But the Big University lobby would stomp that effort out quickly. Education has had higher inflation than even health costs — due almost entirely to the funny money from essentially unlimited student loan availability.

Look at the current situation where there is a 50-50 tie in the Senate, but existing rules create a 60 vote threshold for most legislation. There are a whole lot of issues that I'd like to see reform on, but right now the votes are not there for either party to do so.

Effective lawmaking is not some impossible feat under our current system, it was commonplace until very recently. All that has changed is that we've grown complacent and now continue to vote for those who refuse to do their jobs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_option

In my small shop of guys, we ended up having to all independently form our own corporations just so that we can share work amongst eachother to better serve the various clients we each bring in without having to do stupid things like write 3 separate contracts with the client. We don't meet the new ABC test because we all perform a similar scope, so whereas before, it was trivial to just write a 1099 for eachother at the end of the year, now we have to have all the corporate infrastructure which is a huge PITA.

It's not unlike the gun laws in CA... People that don't like guns and know nothing about them write meaningless and often incredibly arbitrary legislation that doesn't address the problem they are really meaning to address but makes things a pain for everyone else.

So, I don't really buy the argument that these types of complaints should just be dismissed. The reality is it's really hard to target "gig" work very specifically without roping in a BUNCH of other contractors that aren't really of interest but will have to comply with the law anyway.

If the worker does a good job does that impact their marketability -- enable repeat customers and advertising for them specifically (such as via word of mouth) or does it reflect more on the company they are "contracted" to?

In the case of Uber and Lift and Instacart, the platform practically prohibits customers from preferring certain providers that have provided good service in the past, so all of the reputation goes to the platform provider. Things would be a lot fuzzier if these platforms provided matching services and would depend on how competitive these markets effectively are. The market for transportation from point A to point B with pickup in the next 10 minutes is inherently limited by providers that can be at point A in the next 10 minutes, so this market may not be competitive for all sources and destinations.

In general, contractors should not be interacting with their hiring company's customers on the company's behalf. Only employees should represent the company, since the benefits of those interactions reflect on the company and not on the worker performing the interaction.

It is a good thing for the leader of a government department to have ideological goals broadly aligned with the mission of the institution.

The man heading state labor policy is a "product" of the labor movement. Is that supposed to be a scandal?

> easier for the AFL/CIO and Teamsters to unionize them

Good.

If unions aren't doing that because they are compromised or sclerotic or whatever, then they aren't much use. Who would argue.

(new account, long time reader, victim of poorly self-managed passwords)

Instead, platforms like Uber dictate rates, dictate how, where and when the work gets done, and penalize workers if they don't take the clients Uber wants them to take. Uber even dictates what cars they can and can't use.

Uber does not let you choose your clients because they discovered discrimination occurred based on who the client was and where they were being picked up from. You are free to cancel but repeatedly cancelling means Uber will remove you from the network (you aren't putting in anything good to the system...so maybe the system isn't for you)

The work gets done when someone requests it, you don't get to negotiate that as a driver. You are able to look at customers who want future work done (scheduled rides) and book those at your convenience. If you are working in an on-demand contract role, the work has to be done...on-demand.

The ride has to be done in the same way as every ride as that is the expectation of the product. Uber doesn't tell you how to drive, doesn't tell you to set your car up in a certain way, but it does tell you some basic ground rules for doing the work.

Dictating what car you can and can't use is like regulating the equipment on the platform. You can't use 2-door cars, cars past a certain age, and a few completely reasonable restrictions (https://www.ridesharingdriver.com/uber-vehicle-requirements-...)

These are all completely reasonable things to require from a company/customer point of view. It’s completely unreasonable to demand these things of independent contractors.

Large scale marketplaces like this are quite unique and probably deserve a look at how we employ/give work to folks in them.

If you need to either be at the edge of the law and discriminate or be the edge of the law and misclassify employees as contractors, to make your business work, then maybe your business model is flawed.

It was pretty well known that getting a cab from certain (non-white) neighborhoods and just hailing one as a PoC was very hard pre-Uber.

You could always lodge a complain at the centralized taxi authority where some bureaucrats would input it in "the system". But in the end it achieved nothing. Uber kicking out racist drivers probably did more than decades of complains.

Uber has no inherent right to exist and do business. If the existing laws preclude your prefered business model, you need to get the law changed BEFORE you go into business.

This assumes that the only solution for Uber is to stop drivers from selecting who they pick up and where they pick up from.

Another would be for Uber to allow drivers to make the choice, but subsidize rides from discriminated areas using money from desirable areas.

Each requested ride is a new job. The contractor can choose to not take that job, for any number of reasons.

The fact that the job has a set rate is not abnormal at all. The fact that the client will “punish” you for not being available is also not abnormal at all.

Additionally, the contractors are able to work whenever they want, wherever they want, and for whichever companies they want.

The only real oddity here is that the contract work is dependent on the ride sharing companies. There should be an additional classification for dependent contractors. These drivers are definitely not employees, under any definition.

An Uber driver can certainly decide how and where their work gets done by using the car of their choice, except they aren't allowed to. Uber decides what vehicles they can use.

> Seems to be we're fundamentally trying to force an old classification to a new set of jobs.

There's nothing new about delivery driving and taxis. What's new is that companies are pretending that an app means that they shouldn't have to play by the same rules as every other employer.

This. The cars have a bare minimum requirement to ensure a good passenger experience and for safety (no older than X year of manufacturing, etc.), but beyond that, you are welcome to use whatever car you want. Uber has no issues with letting you use any car of your choice, as long as it meets the minimum requirements (which seem to be pretty reasonable).

I've seen regular Uber drivers (not Uber Black or any other more premium services) pull up in anything ranging from a few years old Priuses to pretty much brand new Teslas and Audi Q-series SUVs.

After all, the defaults have to be set to something, they might as well be set to the current values. You can even have a first launch "Choose defaults" setting.

Then people can go up and down the scale of what they want but no one practically will. And Uber can promise premium service only for things that meet some minimum standard.

Then none of you would get no questions asked refunds and I would. And everyone would be happy.

WWE wrestlers are independent contractors yet are instructed to perform certain moves and even deliberately lose matches

Surely it at least means being independent from some of the rules that you have to follow if you have a full time job, or why do it? If it doesn't at least mean setting your own price, then what in the world is the point?

Imagine you are freelancing on a software project but you can't ever make any good money because, strangely, the price you're allowed to charge is set by Stackoverflow and not you. Seems kind of presumptuous of them to decide that for me, no?

I don't understand why so many people in tech will bend over backwards to not notice the most obvious, basic nature of the economic arrangement between these firms and the people who do all the work. Just look at this stuff straight on. It's obvious what it is. Imagine yourself as a worker instead of a boss for once.

There is an Upton Sinclair quotation that fits.

There's the John Oliver's video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8UQ4O7UiDs

And also a journal article in response to the video

https://bit.ly/3vqHHar

Which concludes,

"But in the end, the totality of the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of wrestlers being more accurately classified as employees."

So the workers can negotiate when, how and for how much they'll work for their clients? I've got an '01 sedan collecting dust, can I decide that's how I'm going to pick up my clients via Uber?

When I worked as a contractor, it didn't matter that I used some shitty laptop or OS to get my work done, because I had the freedom to decide how and where I completed my work. Workers using Uber are denied that freedom.

This isn't a reasonable comparison. Your shitty laptop or OS was likely not part of the product. If I want a website I don't care what your laptop looks like. If I am being driven somewhere I certainly care about what condition the car is in.

Right, so sounds like Uber sensibly wants their representatives on the street to project their desired corporate image.

Thus, employees.

If a client hires me to build a web app, I get to decide how, when and where it is built. That means I get to choose if I use, say, Django or Rails on the backend, and maybe React on the front end. These are certainly part of the product.

No thats not really true, for all cases of contracting.

I, as the client, could absolutely tell you to use rails, and if you don't use rails, I can "fire" you the contractor.

Sure, some clients might not care. But some would care, and they can tell you want to do, and control what you use, and not work with you if you don't do what you say.

If I started "Daniel's Ruby Shop", collected money from clients, and paid it to you if you made Ruby websites that met standards I set, and required you to Skype me at specific times or forever be banned from "contracts" you're not an independent contractor, you're my employee.

That said, I'm not really sure what the solution is. If drivers that drive more than X hours per week have to be employees, I wouldn't be surprised to see Uber attempt to limit hours for each driver.

There are millions of part-time employees in the US who choose their own hours.

The fight here is not about whether Uber should be setting the hours that their drivers/employees work it is about: 1. Who pays the relevant employment taxes 2. Do the drivers qualify for state/federally mandated benefits like time off, unemployment, workers comp, etc.. (note: all of those things cost money, plus time to administer) 3. Do they come under rules about treating all employees the same (e.g.: do drivers that work full time get the same 401k program as Uber programmers)

All of this is really about Uber and the like trying to shift costs and burdens away from themselves. In many cases trying to eliminate them from their business model. We as a society have put protections in place against this because we saw how horrible things got, and this is an attempt to end-run those protections. I am open to figuring out how we should re-jigger how we run this, but not like this at the expense of workers.

Many gig workers explicitly do not want to become employees, as there are many disadvantages to doing so. In these cases, the only people that benefit are the politicians that can go on ignoring the real problems.

Lots of issues in modern US business arise from laziness / stupidity / corruption / uselessness of Congress.

I believe that there should be reform and that we should be working towards a better legal environment for informal workers and companies that want to use them at scale facilitated by technology. You can believe that and still recognize that the law as written would not support a definition of these workers as independent contractors (because they are not and it really is not a gray area due to the way that they are managed/directed).

It's also an issue for the US that we can go many years under an enforcement regime that assumes that we basically have this new category of worker that we are, for reasons of convenience, defining as independent contractors, but that the law clearly states do not meet the definition of independent contractors. Then we get a new administration that decides it will enforce the law as it's written instead of tacitly recognizing the fake pseudo reform of non enforcement that we had from earlier administrations. That isn't good government.

The problem with your argument is that because the law is ambiguous with regard to this situation, the labor secretary is effectively making law by choosing a particular interpretation of the law.

Though to be clear, I agree with you 100% that this is because Congress is just perpetually failing America through corruption, selfishness, etc., and that failure puts the labor secretary in an unenviable position of having to enforce laws that don't really work for the situation.

Your argument does not provide any basis for preferring one interpretation over another.

In terms of preference, mine is not for one labor secretary's policy over another (I mean, I have a preference there, but it's beside the point here). My argument is that the labor secretary is making law here, and that is a bad thing because it is the job of Congress to make laws, which they are utterly failing to do.

Congressional paralysis is definitely a problem, but until we have a major change in either Senate rules or political paradigm, we not see any improvement on that front.

My understanding is that if a worker has any characteristic of an employee, they are an employee. Any of several criteria are sufficient and only one of them is necessary.

In the bigger picture, Congress passes laws and delegates authority to a branch of government to establish rules and regulations using a process complying with other statutes that dictate how rules and regulations become binding.

Essentially, in the US at all levels -- Federal, State, and Local -- there are two types of legal requirements. Statutes and rules/regulations. The statute is the what. Rules and regulations are the implementation details...ok, there's actually a third parallel part which is legal precedent established by the courts.

Anyway, Congress delegates authority to executive agencies so that it can focus on other things and not have to micro-mange each tiny detail of everything under the sun.

As to "Anyway, Congress delegates authority to executive agencies so that it can focus on other things and not have to micro-mange each tiny detail of everything under the sun." - each tiny detail? This is a case of classifying millions of workers. We're not talking about a tiny detail, we're talking about something that is immensely important both to all the people affected by it as well as all the companies that have to operate under these labor laws. This isn't Congress delegating away the details, it's them failing for an extended period of time to address an absolute enormous and critical issue in the labor market.

In terms of scale the Department of Labor classifies all workers. Should Congress classify each worker individually?

Were previous Labor Secretaries out of line for classifying the workers as contractors?

“Employees” gain access to the full gamut of employment-law protections; “workers” get some protections but can be dismissed at will; the self-employed are taxed more lightly but receive few legal rights.

The Surpreme court ruled that Uber drivers are workers and not self-employed.

And self-employed here generally are not taxed less, rather about the same (details vary), but have to do the taxation themselves.

I should note that you still can be fired illegally, for example surrounding harassment or protected status (gender, race, etc...).

And by extension lots of issues in Congress arise from laziness / stupidity / corruption / uselesssness of the electorate that put them there. Invest heavily in education and revisit in a few generations.

It is a persistent myth that the US does not invest in education. Not only is the dollars per student spent in the US competitive, it exceeds the majority of European nations spending per student by a large margin.

"In 2015, the United States spent approximately $12,800 per student on elementary and secondary education. That is over 35% more than the OECD country average of $9,500. At the post-secondary level, the United States spent approximately $30,000 per student, which was 93% higher than the average of OECD countries ($16,100)."

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/020915/what-country...

I see this question only rarely asked. Too many people seem to think that shoveling extra money on X will get you better results almost automatically. No, it won't, corruption and special interests can capture that extra value unless the investor is careful.

Now it is true that underfinancing will get you worse results, but the opposite just does not hold.

Money is going somewhere but most of it isn't into the actual education.

It also means that outside money can lead to successful primaries of otherwise popular legislators, if the legislator doesn't toe the line required. There used to be many Republicans that not only publicly agreed that climate change is a real, human-caused, phenomenon and that also proposed action to solve the problem. After a few legislators got primaried out of their seats, this position is no longer allowed at all in public statements by Republicans, because most legislators are too scared to risk being primaried.

Increasing the House of Representatives by ten fold or more might help.

Getting rid of many of the procedures that prevent votes from happening would probably help too.

And of course, overturning Citizens United...

While you would end up with much more representatives - and in theory more representation - each individual rep would become much less influential. I think expanding the house to be thousands of members large would also make deliberations much more difficult and shallow as a result. I have no idea how parliamentary procedure would work with thousands of interested parties. But I do acknowledge that it is do-able.

That being said, I am in favor of increasing the size of the house, but only by about 100 seats or so. I'd also want term limits in order to facilitate more turnover for district seats. But that's a separate debate.

This.

Sometimes I feel like the entire nation needs to go back and revisit our civics books. The job of the Labor Secretary is to make certain that federal labor laws are followed. If you want changes to federal labor law, it does you no good to demand them of the Labor Secretary. Call your congressperson and your senator. Even better, vote for more qualified congresspeople and senators.

This is a republic. Which means that ultimately, the labor laws are far more our fault than the fault of the Labor Secretary.

The problem with this comment (and others like it) is the presupposition that the problem is that people are not voting "correctly", because if only they did, all the problems would be solved.

But that glosses over a very large number of problems, some of which are deeply systematic, at which point questions like "whose job is it really to fix these issues anyways" may in fact deserve answers that are more out-of-the-box than "the republican democratic system works as intended, so the problem must be elsewhere".

This glosses over the fact that enough of the population disagrees with your assessment of the problem and proposed solutions that there is no consensus and that is why your problems are not being solved in the way that you want. In fact, that is almost always the case.

People feel that the thresholds of consensus required in republican processes get in the way of their plans only when they fail to persuade others. Then they start looking for more authoritarian solutions, such as having party-bureaucrats make laws by fiat.

Yes, this is part of it, but it goes even deeper than that. For example, California government passed AB-5, and then later popular ballot passed prop 22, which essentially goes contrary to AB-5. Does that suggest that leadership is out of touch with the electorate? Maybe. The fact that numerous pages of exceptions had to be carved out in AB-5 in the first place (and it's still criticized even after that) also indicates that the legislation wasn't very well thought out to begin with.

If you think in terms of a software engineering organization, it would seem crazy to take bug reports and just blindly do whatever the tickets with largest number of CAPS LOCK words says. But governments often do exactly that: they take some top-of-mind idea and just go with it, without paying heed to any sort of expert research, leaving implementation details to be determined by others "lesser" offices of government, and without care for the repercussions of rolling out such policies. It's the equivalent of pushing the "release" button in your enterprise software, cross your fingers and hope for the best, without any observability infrastructure and without a rollback plan if everything breaks.

> People feel that the thresholds of consensus required in republican processes get in the way of their plans only when they fail to persuade others. Then they start looking for more authoritarian solutions

This is also true, and it's definitely a touchy subject. On one hand, global consensus seems "fairest", but is it really the fairest if the vast majority of people are not affected by a decision (or they are affected to different degrees depending on various factors)? What of their expertise in the subject matter? Many problems do have solutions that align with common sense, but many others require solutions that are counterintuitive, but that can only be proven to be more effective with hard research. It's a difficult line to thread, and I feel that the status quo favors popularity more than science when it comes to decision making.

The idea of representative government is you outsource decision making to people, not that you hire people to always do what the majority wants. That is the justification for a ballot initiative override. Not necessarily saying that ballot overrides of legislative actions are good structure -- there are pros and cons. But in the case of AB-5, that was clearly an out-of-touch legislative body taking some very extreme measures that were more radical than the state population wanted. That is a common thing when you have one-party states like CA, so in the current CA landscape ballot initiatives are a good safety check on what is a one party legislature controlled by party insiders.

> If you think in terms of a software engineering organization, it would seem crazy to take bug reports and just blindly do whatever the tickets with largest number of CAPS LOCK words says. But governments often do exactly that

In my experience in the corporate world, working from everything from non-profits to start ups to DJIA member companies, I find corporate decision making to be equally random and opaque. They are just random in different ways. In the corporate world, if you can find an executive sponsor and frame something the right way, you can convince them to follow a road of sheer madness. In government, if you can convince a politician that something is trendy or a cheap way of getting votes, they will commit huge blunders. If you can convince them that something is a moral imperative, they will commit unspeakable atrocities.

> This is also true, and it's definitely a touchy subject. On one hand, global consensus seems "fairest", but is it really the fairest if the vast majority of people are not affected by a decision (or they are affected to different degrees depending on various factors)?

Indeed a tough subject. The way I think about is this. If you are in the business world and you are leading a team of 5 engineers, who are trying to make a decision. Let's say 3 strongly believe in A. 2 Strongly believe in B and are strongly opposed to A. Do you say "majority rules"? Unlikely. You will try to find consensus. Consensus could be something like 60%A and 40%B. This consensus gathering process is why businesses often do crazy things, but they don't know a better way as pissing off 40% of your team is something you need to avoid. The 2 people can quit -- they can transfer to another team. So ultimately you do need to gather consensus rather than search for 50% +1 in making decisions within a team.

But a society is like that team. It requires more than 50% +1, otherwise you will find groups seceeding. One way of addressing this is to put in various roadblocks to require more than 50%. Say you need 2/3. Then people have to negotiate. If you want to do something 1/3 hates, then you can do it if you give them something in return. You bargain and you reach a consensus where everyone gets some of what they want, even if they don't like it. But then you might reach a situation where the society is split and simply can't come to a consensus because there are moral issues at stake that they are not willing to compromise on. Then your option is federalism. You break the society up into two groups and let each one make rules for themselves. Within each federalist group you have the super majority requirement again, but because they have shared values, they can reach that super majority.

All of this stuff was debated long ago in 18th-19th C France and England, and many very smart people looked at all these issues, which is why we have this weird federalist form of government in the US where you have both a senate and a house and it's really hard to get anything passed into law unless you have both a geographic and population supermajority on your side. But as the nation splits into two camps that view each other as basically evil, unreedemable, hopelessly foolish people, you are finding more and more gridlock and more and more appeals to Federalism. California wants to run their own climate policy? Fine, let them. Oklahoma wants fracking and free gasoline to everyone? Fine, let them. If you don't, the days of the republic are numbered.

That's fair, but it's still madness :)

> ultimately you do need to gather consensus

I think consensus is just one form of conflict resolution. Compromise is another, for example. When we have a scenario of 5 people, 3 pro-X and 2 pro-Y, one could argue that are actually three choices: X, Y and the status quo, where an impasse between X and Y is functionally equivalent to everyone being pro-status-quo. Rephrasing in terms of status quo vs something else might help in understanding where X and Y overlap and where they differ and might lead to more productive open-ended discussions than a discussion that is solely adversarial between X and Y.

I don't believe it's necessarily possible to reach consensus in all cases. For example, the issue of abortion doesn't seem like one where either side is willing to let go. But I do believe that it's possible to reach a compromise in many cases (for example, pro-life proponents might be willing to concede that a anencephalic fetus posing life threatening risk to the mother is an acceptable case, while still believing that normal unplanned pregnancies should be taken responsibility for).

There's also always a possibility of a fourth choice Z, for example a policy from a different country (e.g. Portugal's handling of drug abuse being seen as a medical problem, rather than limiting the discussion to one solely about the spectrum of criminal severity). And there's yet other ways to handle conflicts, such as the iron fist approach that China uses (which some might argue was effective at handling covid, for example, questionable as it may be in other areas such as freedom of speech).

My take away is mostly that even if things are as they are because of something that was settled by scholars centuries ago, it still behooves us to revisit different ideas, ideologies and approaches to tackle today's problems, rather than ignoring or not understanding the weaknesses of the status quo processes.

For issues that can't be compromised, federalism is the solution. However this falls apart for issues where there are real (or perceived) externalities. If you are anti-abortion because of your moral framework, its unlikely you see allowing another community to do it as acceptable. The same as if you are worried about climate change, you don't want fracking in places you don't live.

It also doesn't really matter what the Federal law is or Labor Secretary does/says, worker agreements are governed by State law, and their are 50 States with similar, but not identical legal standards defining employees vs independent contractors. In some cases you may be defined as an employee at the State level but Independent Contractor for purposes of the Federal level (say the IRS Code/Federal Taxes). Even within a single State one agency say unemployment office was classify you as employee and another such as workers comp classifies you as independent contractor.

But if you think the labor sec should merely concern themself with robotically enforcing the most literal meaning of the labor code, I think that's dubious as well. They should be thinking more big picture than that, like about whether the laws, when enforced, achieve their ostensible purpose. In this case, I would think it means saying, "well, if we want to do right by workers, I recommend we refactor the labor system like so...". That is, pass that on to Congress and the administration.

That, I think, should be a higher priority than fighting ever harder to be technically correct on an increasingly arcane distinction.

At which point congress is free to ignore the secretary. Ultimate authority always lies with congress. We can change that, assuming we want to change the Constitution. But today, congress is in charge of making laws. It is not in the remit of the Secretary to short circuit the Constitutional order. The best the secretary can do is, effectively, to send an email to congresspeople and senators. Which email would be a whole lot more effective coming from the voters instead of the secretary.

If the Labor Secretary is not acting in accord with Federal Statutes passed by Congress and legal precedents established by the Federal Courts, the Secretary can be sued and injunctive relief sought. Of course the Secretary can be sued even if they are following the law.

I have real independent contractors in my family, they might work 2 hours each for 50 different customers in a year. They do their job exactly how they want to. It's not like it makes sense for any one of their customers to provide benefits of any kind. This is the kind of stuff this classification was meant for.

They already have as much time off as they choose to have. It's all (obviously) unpaid as "who would pay them?"

Really all PTO is for most salary exempt positions anymore is ability to delay work without getting fired. Now if you work in a position where you churn out things on a daily basis or less and someone will fill in for you while you're gone, PTO is actually PTO.

There's an implication from PTO of a different era where you weren't required to makeup work you missed while on PTO. Much of that has disappeared. That's fine for most salary exempt positions assuming you aren't fed a constant queue of work to keep you pushing 50+ hour weeks regularly and it's OK to do 20 hour work weeks and some 50 hour work weeks.

Maybe I'm just old and people don't care that they do more for less TC than they did in years past.

And how exactly would you reach this conclusion? How would you know what's better for someone, better than they do? At least in CA, the decision was clear that it wasn't against people's interest.

Basically imagine you have Job A all things being equal you can have the Job A and all the benefits of being an employee or you can have Job A and none of the benefits of being an employee. How is it possible it is in anyone's interest to take Job A and not receive the benefits they are legally entitled to?

This must be why Uber incessantly spammed their workers with Prop 22 propaganda via push notifications[1] on their phones and tablets.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/15/21517316/uber-spamming-u...

Prop 22 actually removes options from the table, making it almost impossible to modify, repeal or replace the proposition. Surely if you and Uber cared about giving people options, then you'd recognize that labor law needs to adapt with the needs of workers, instead of being cemented in time in a manner that benefits some employers over everyone else.

There's a lot of jobs where work simply is not with a regular customer -- i.e. tradesmen, independent consultants, musicians, etc.

If a person mows lawns for 25 different customers in a given week, who gives them their vacation/retirement/health benefits?

The "gig economy" is a legal hack by corporations to pay workers less than minimum wage [2]. We can talk a lot about problems with government (there are a lot of issue there), but the fact that the government has issues does not act as a free pass to allow private institutions to pay workers less.

[1] https://mashable.com/article/uber-driver-survey-pandemic/

[2] https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-uber-driver-w...

20% is good for job dissatisfaction. Why would you be dissatisfied working there? Because you'd rather be doing something else. That's why they pay you.

I don't even get your initial point. Have you never worked a job you didn't like? Many jobs suck, but people have to earn money. They will hopefully, eventually move on to more satisfying jobs.

> Many gig workers explicitly do not want to become employees

I’ll be more clear, I have two points, point 1 is that “workers do not choose gig economy jobs because they offer flexibility, they choose them because they have low barriers to entry”. This means that employee classification is irrelevant to workers, they do not explicitly want to be contractors. The 20% job dissatisfaction statistic is sufficient to prove my point because if there were alternatives, those 1/5 of workers would not be working for Uber.

Point 2 is “the gig economy benefits employers more than traditional employment and disadvantages workers more than traditional employment” I support this claim with the statement that Uber drivers have been paid less than minimum wage.

We want employers to provide benefits, as opposed to the government because that means higher taxes. Then you put a million exclusions and tax deductions and other loopholes, so no one knows what they're really getting, but we can say we did something and that benefits do exist to serve as arguments against broadly, easily accessible benefits to serve as a floor on quality of life.

Universal healthcare, say Medicare for All style, does not have to mean higher taxes. And it would make a big difference to gig workers and the ones working for the likes of Walmart.

A very high percentage of Walmart employees need government assistance due to their income not actually being enough to pay the laborer what their labor costs them to deliver.

At a minimum, labor needs to exist reasonably and show up for work. Healthcare is a part of that, right along with the basics.

All of us are subsidizing labor for a few of us to put profit, or more peak profit in the bank.

The priority discussion boils down to what makes the most sense for the nation.

Do we cut back on the military industrial complex?

Maybe we decide subsidizing labor makes sense. That would also mean not shaming and blaming people who seek and obtain help from the government. Doing that is baked in right now, in that no matter what those people do, a large percentage of them will need help.

Or, we simply change nothing and yes, taxes are higher, but the national spend is lower overall. Many of us will benefit.

We could prioritize it so employers are more on the hook in various ways. Some of them will not be viable. Even if they all are, we may not have enough jobs. Government could be an employer to make sure everyone has a work opportunity that pays enough to exist and show up for work.

There are many options. Not all mean higher taxes, but all that discussion means a national priority talk also has to happen.

If we do nothing, our priority is not having people make it, exist reasonably and show up for work.

Predictably, lots of people are not making it, may do crime, are homeless, may not have health care, maybe will show up for work, if they can get it.

If our priority becomes about people existing reasonably and showing up for work, we will see that, but will have higher taxes, or back off some other things we currently make a priority.

The US spends $676 billion on defense, almost the exact same amount on Medicare, $1 trillion on Social Security, and $409 billion on Medicaid. Social welfare spending is a much, much larger portion of the US budget than military spending. Here are the numbers straight from the Congressional Budget Office https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2020-04/56324-CBO-2019-budg...

Did that Trillion not come from people contributing? You know it did.

And still, we can and should totally question our current spend.

How does that impact the discussion? Do we think we need another problem by not actually paying those benefits?

Secondly, back to the first question, so?

What's our priority?

Right now that priority is not healthy people, able to show up for work, existing reasonably.

Does that make the best sense? I don't think so.

The other thing I did was walkthrough a little bit about what those priorities might look like. There's several ways to solve this problem.

And we do have a problem when roughly half the labor force makes roughly 30k a year.

How would that be? It seems like it certainly would to me. Maybe by less than employees plus employers currently pay in aggregate healthcare costs, but I can't imagine a way where the government pays for Medicare-for-all and taxes don't go up.

Do you have a specific idea in mind that I'm missing?

In short - you can buy a banana for a dime or give the government a nickle and get a "free" banana.

I'm super glad my mom has Medicare! But she isn't benefitting from it being efficient, she's benefitting from it setting the rate it pays and requiring providers to accept it.

The other is a compulsory payment to a government entity as a result of earning income.

The rest of the developed world would very strongly disagree.

The penalty for not making that payment can be death, is likely financial ruin.

For many people, that optional payment is enough to buy a home.

Ask around about "optional"

Then we can set that aside and recognize net, liquid income will go up for most everyone.

All in the US more or less pays roughly 2x or more what some other countries pay for equivalent healthcare, so there is nominally room to extend coverage while keeping costs flat in theory. In practice, it's complicated. Also 'roughly' and 'more or less' have some wiggle room for systemic differences, but it's about right.

The obvious solutions include new hybrid classifications or mandating certain benefits based on tenure. Why is this not considered? Why take away choice from those who specifically decided not to get a full-time driving job (which have always existed)?

I think a more productive line of debate would be:

1. Do we, as a society, believe we should only care for those who can be productive?

2. Do we, as a society, value things other than productivity?

3. Do we, as a society, believe it is the place of a governing body to ensure a standard quality of life (whatever that standard may be)?

Putting barriers around who deserves what doesn't really serve to do much other than exclude people who don't know how to work the system, or those who are unable to work the system.

In some countries these decisions are made for you and funded through taxes and fees. Other nations require you to plan your own way. The USA leans toward the individual over the state.

Certain things like healthcare should be revamped to remove the ties to employers but it's important to keep the prevailing culture in mind. People overwhelmingly still want the ability to choose here - what they lack are the options to choose from.

As an example my grandfather lost his leg to a blood clot due to being sent to an overwhelmed hospital that left him sitting undiagnosed for hours on end - it is easy to read that scenario as being forced into a lack of care, but choices wouldn't help things here. If he had a choice he would have advocated for going to his family doctor first which would have made the situation worse - in all honestly hospital overcrowding and underfunding is the only thing that led to him losing his leg.

Healthcare is a sector of the market that most people here (even me - and I work in a company that deals specifically in the US healthcare market) don't have enough knowledge to make intelligent choices in because the knowledge needed to comprehend all the random crap that can go wrong with your body is intensely deep.

I also don't think it's far to say the US favors individuals over the state - the US cares very little about individual health. And that's not precisely what you meant when you said it favors individuals over the state but I think it's important to highlight that the situation in the USA is quite detrimental to a lot of individuals.

And yes, I do want to choose my healthcare. I want to select the plan that best fits my needs. If you want a larger simpler plan that covers everything then you can choose that.

Me having choice does not take away from you, it only provides more for both of us.

And I especially don't understand how it doesn't lead to exactly the problematic outcome we are talking about which is that poor people can't afford access to quality healthcare.

You don't "choose" what level of fire department protection you need. How is healthcare different? I suppose you can always hire your own private firefighter/doctor...

So long as you give people the choice, and it's based on PERSONAL financial contributions rather than government-organized taxes, those with less means will have less access to a finite set of healthcare resources and result in systemic inequalities.

I suppose I can imagine that there is some "ultra deluxe" version of healthcare where instead of crutches you get a wheelchair, and instead of a shared recovery room you get your own, and I do support those with the means to pay extra for something like that. But the baseline HEALTHCARE access part needs to remain the same...

The issue is that better coverage requires private insurance, mostly offered through corporations. Smaller companies can't compete, some people can't leave a bad job because of losing their plan, and others are limited to public options because they don't work. This is the overwhelming problem with USA healthcare. There aren't actually many choices because of this complex and outdated connection between jobs and benefits.

I know that today America has choice. But it leads to the highest healthcare costs in the Western World (to allow for middlemen healthcare companies to be some of the largest privatecompanies in the country), with the worst quality for the poorest people.

So the question is, how do you solve the problem of universal access while giving people the "choice".

> The issue is that better coverage requires private insurance, mostly offered through corporations

Not in the rest of the western world. We just simply don't have these companies. They don't need to exist. They are a form of corporate socialism transferring wealth from taxpayers to mediate something that can be handled directly.

Health insurance companies is a moral failure. I'm going to double down on my metaphor. Fire engines don't check your insurance to decide if they should put your fire out. That used to be how things worked 100 years ago.

The choice for better healthcare is limited and locked behind employment. That's the problem, instead of letting everyone have access to all plans, and the solutions are too complicated to discuss here. However insurance is not a moral failure, it's a financial and risk management concept. Just because your government manages somethings for you with your taxes doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I understand that when you're a fish it's hard to understand what water is, but the fact that employment plays any part into this whatsoever is a problem. Nobody in Canada or the UK or Luxembourg (some countries i have some experience with) would ever factor in healthcare in a decision to start or leave a job. It is absolutely not a variable.

Yes, I've said exactly this about half a dozen times now. It seems you're arguing based on myths and preconceived notions against the USA rather than actually responding to anything I've said. Let's end it here.

I just don't understand you acknowledging that healthcare choice being locked behind employment and insurance companies middlemen being a problem yet still wanting "healthcare choice." What does that mean to you if you don't have the others any longer?

I absolutely want to choose my healthcare.

The choice being discussed here is specifically around health plan particulars like stronger vs. weaker drug covers - surprising you by not covering any oncological drugs - or having a different balance between deductible and cost.

I'm still trying to grip why people care about choice though since most of those become non-issues with national insurance - most of those choices are about how you're going to balance paying for care with limited resources, while in nationalized systems the question of cost is mostly or fully removed - it's just the auxiliary costs that still can bite you (i.e. parking costs at a hospital, costs for a private room for recovery, etc...)

People have preferences for different doctors. Choosing different doctors is part of choosing your healthcare. Personally, I order my own tests and come to doctors with recommendations and ideas to discuss. Not all of them are open to this collaborative approach.

In terms of choosing insurance... It's a little silly to talk about what people want. What many people want is to go to whatever doctor or hospital whenever they want and have someone else pay for it. They often foolishly choose to limit out of pocket costs at point of service, while paying for coverage they don't need. Different people have different concerns. My preference is for my insurance to be for when I need it, and "first dollar coverage" is insuring me for an expense I can already afford, making it a bad deal.

To me the "prevailing culture" is more about the vibrancy of walking into a vendor and directly paying for services that you would like, rather than needing to appeal to some bureaucracy (whether "public" or "private") to convince it to agree that you "need" something. The medical system is currently so far from this, that I don't think it has much bearing on the practical reforms being discussed. Although I would love to see reforms in this direction as well - eg published price lists uniform for any payer, and a prohibition on arbitrary post-facto billing.

It's more like the providers have to conform to the Medicare pricing, instead of screwing the payers. This is why we need single pricer. Simply put into Medicare pricing agreements that the provider cannot charge anyone more than they charge Medicare or Medicaid. Not only does it avoid the price gouging of the uninsured and privately insured, it also ends the whole concept of out of network. Very few providers can survive without Medicare funds.

Politically I wonder what's holding this back, as it seems like it would be more palatable than Medicare for all. Silent hospital lobby? Big insurers that don't actually want to make their market more efficient as they're effectively cost-plus entities?

Not balancing this means society will go into decline one way or the other.

Offering basic levels to society members is health if the society can afford it and allows the society to grow quickie because risk is removed.

This is overly simplistic. Someone providing child or elder care is providing social value in a way which should not be measured against economic measures of production. Life is not an economic zero-sum game.

You might "work" 2h a month, because you spend the rest of it caring for family members, or maybe you're trying to get that first draft/beta version out the door.

Or you might just not want to work.

We need to stop assigning so much worth to work. We know automation is coming, and we know that not everyone is going to be able to find work in the future.

I mean it as a serious question, as it's not clear to me what the difference between benefits and salary is (not being from US).

I understand that the health insurance is one of them (and, to be clear, I do believe you should have that whether you work 0 or 100 hours a month).

But what are others? Pension contribution is just a part of your salary that you are required by law to put aside. Guaranteed minimum time off comes to mind, but that obviously makes less sense if you are already not working too much. What else?

There are millions of employees in the US who work part-time and choose their own schedules.

They do not allow you the same flexibility to work for the next 30 minutes, take a few hours off, then work another hour this evening without doing anything more than just starting or stopping the app whenever you feel like.

How would you replicate that with part-time hours?

This is a silly argument. You pay for your healthcare no matter what, it's just a question of who administers it.

> Then you put a million exclusions and tax deductions and other loopholes, so no one knows what they're really getting

This is precisely the current state of employer-sponsored healthcare, and also the wildly complicated medicare/medicaid system.

Universal coverage combined with higher taxes (ideally on people who already have lots of money and therefore place very little value on marginal income) is arguably better and easier to reason about than a mandate for employer-provided coverage and its associated opaque and complicated effects on labor markets, including higher fixed costs of hiring people and decreased ability for people to move between regions, industries, and even jobs within the same industry/career.

But who administers it has a lot to do with how much you pay for it. For example, a high deductible plan will save you a lot of money as long as you aren't in the 99th percentile of healthcare needs, and (unless the deductible is really high) still not bankrupt you if it turns out you are.

Any kind of government plan that doesn't give you that choice because it's paid from taxes rather than premiums is plausibly going to cost you more money. And that's true even on average, because high deductible plans make people more price sensitive, which exerts downward pressure on costs. (The fact that US healthcare regulations disfavor high deductible plans is one of the reasons costs remain high.)

The US system is also uniquely screwed because the rest of the world piggybacks on US medical R&D while in practice regulating prices even for products under patent. The result is that the US market is paying a disproportionate share of the R&D cost. Cost comparisons to single payer systems that pretend that single payer systems are inherently less expensive are ignoring the lower contribution of those systems to worldwide medical R&D. Moreover, the recipient companies are disproportionately in the US and have lobbyists and large numbers of voter-employees, so implementing a single payer system here would be unlikely to remove those costs. Then you're left with the resulting increase in price insensitivity and the US system becomes even more unaffordable.

It's actually a hard problem. The solution probably has to involve the other countries paying more of the R&D.

I'm happy to talk about manufacturer drug rebates which is an amazingly crazy portion of the healthcare market that would be illegal in almost any other market due to the perverse market incentives it creates. But yea, the short version is that the private healthcare market is incredibly inefficient.

"We" don't necessarily think benefits should be provided by the whims of private businesses.

as opposed to the government because that means higher taxes.

The assumption here being that benefits from the government are paid with higher taxes, and benefits from employers being paid from the kindness of the CEO's heart and not from wages that would have otherwise been paid you.

>"We" don't

I want the money that my employer pays into health insurance to be paid to me into an HSA like tax sheltering of healthcare funds, and then I want no health insurance middleman. Poof---there goes all the corrupt incentives and ridiculous administrative overhead.

That is literally impossible. Even if insurance companies are made illegal tomorrow, that role of market maker between providers (doctors and hospitals, drug companies) and customers (patients, employers) will always exist. This is because such a role is needed.

Patients do not have the capacity nor the knowledge to find the best doctor, the best hospital, or the best drug maker for them.

Health insurance was invented in the late 1930s as a political ploy to forestall government health programs. Did patients all get stupid at that time, or was it the case that they were all going to the wrong doctors and hospitals before then?

Please give human beings a little credit. We make decisions every day, some of which are a lot more substantial than which state-licensed physician to hire.

ps. you don't know what "market maker" means...

Okay, but I didn't mean literally outlaw insurance middlemen.

I mean fix the incentive structure such that I have the option to forego insurance middlemen.

> Patients do not have the capacity nor the knowledge

I completely disagree, and what business of yours or anyone's is it to say I'm `lacking in capacity and knowledge` to such a degree I shouldn't be allowed to make my own healthcare decisions!?

Worse still, right now the US government puts a cap on the percentage of profit an insurance company can take from premiums which coupled with the current near monopolistic healthcare insurance system incentivizes paying as much as possible for treatment to justify higher premiums.

And what defines a good quality of life depends on who you ask.

I have a chronic condition and for a year the only reason family didn’t end up on street is because of gig jobs. Most days 12-16 hours a day in bed essentially blind in horrific pain. But sometimes totally fine. Disability straight up laughed at me.