"Under the contractor model, Lee says, the leaders at Luxe hadn’t been able to schedule workers for unpopular hours like late nights on Friday and Saturday; they could only bribe them to come online with higher rates of pay, as Uber does with surge pricing."
That's not bribery; that's simple supply and demand.
Structurally identical: "The leaders at [insert startup here] hadn't been able to employ engineers for free, they could only bribe them with high rates of pay"
You're right, but there is a large group of people who refuse to believe that employment is a functioning market like any other where a resource is bought and sold according to factors including scarcity, difficulty, and pleasantness. For these people, it is easier to describe employment negotiations in terms of exploitation, 'taking advantage', bribery, and power, than to acknowledge it is essentially the same as a business to business negotiation.
I don't see those two ideas as incompatible in the least. Negotiation is all about power dynamics. A functioning market is amoral, whether something is a simple transaction or exploitation can only be judged in context. As technology continues enabling the replacement of labor with capital, the free market worshippers would be well-advised to come to terms with that nuance.
Except it isn't like every other market because most people don't have a choice not to work, whereas they do have a choice not to buy a TV, phone, bigger house, etc.
Employers will exploit this fact and take advantage of people desperate to keep their job.
The market value of your time and energy is not well-defined, while the company has aggregated data so they can better price the value of '1 hour on Friday night' versus '1 hour on Tuesday afternoon'. This information asymmetry is not present when I go to the grocery store, especially with apps that can compare the price of an apple at Safeway vs Market Basket.
In technical terms, there should exist an intersection between your marginal propensity to spend and your marginal utility of leisure (i.e. not working). But if you can't determine your fair 'value' when working shitty hours, then your 'calculations' can't be correct.
Yes. But they do not have a choice not to work. That means that capitalists can collude to drive wages down to unhealthy levels. Even Adam Smith warned us against this and advised the state step in to help the worker.
Right, and to get a worker to fill that demand, you can do a few different things. Yes, you could pay them more to incentivize them to work.... Or you give them something else valuable instead of more money... e.g. A regular job with the benefits of employment.
Just because the extra incentive the company supplies isn't money doesn't mean they aren't still operating in the world of supply and demand.
Sure, that's fine, it's just the article prose struck me as particularly bogus. And if it's based on a quote from the Luxe CEO, that leads me to question his assumptions, priorities, and values.
That's not bribery; that's simple supply and demand.