Why aren't these payments taken from the employee then? In my country retirement and social security appear right in my paycheck. Why isn't it the same for freelancers (when they declare taxes)? If their wage is too low as you claim, this isn't something that will change when they become employees, so this solves nothing. If this is about a minimum wage, then the real solution is forcing freelancers to work a minimum of monthly hours, which treats the root problem.
This assumes the meaning of freelancers is being able to join and leave an employer when you want, and not being able to fix your own prices and refuse gigs like others are saying. I think you should be able to open a freelance provider with restrictions, as Uber is doing. I see no reason to outlaw that.
> This assumes the meaning of freelancers is being able to join and leave an employer when you want, and not being able to fix your own prices and refuse gigs like others are saying.
You see it that way, but the Dutch law doesn't. If the freelancer has no real choice and cannot dictate his/her own terms they are not a freelancer but an employee without the benefits of an employee. Social programs should be displayed these days on your paycheck if you are an employee. Not every (administration) company is doing it properly though.
Forcing freelancers to work more hours for less than a sustainable minimum pay solves nothing as the minimum wage is calculated on a full workweek.
I'm sure Uber is allowed to offer freelance work, but not with the current way of doing business. As soon as they let the freelancer dictate the pay (or at least properly negotiate) it looks they will be fine.
Not sure what country you are, but most also have the Employer pay on top of that too.
So you might pay a 10% social security tax, and the employer might be paying an additional 15% that doesn't appear on your payslip.
That's what Amazon, etc. are talking about when they say they pay a load of employment taxes.
That's also why a lot of countries are eying the gig economy with skepticism, it's actually often just a massive tax dodge for the company to not pay employment taxes.
I never understood why this distinction is made and why it’s not just obfuscation. The real numbers are the cost of an employee to the employer and the amount the employee gets, the difference is what the state took as a tax, and the way that cut is divided to different state budget chapters is inconsequential to both the employee and the employer
<In my country retirement and social security appear right in my paycheck
What country is that? US, the only country that its politicians actively lobbies against universal healthcare, healthcare that is successfully implemented in every! f*ing! other! Western country?!! (and quite a few other countries that are not Western, such as my full of corruption Eastern Europe one)
Every country that funds social programs with an income tax has mandatory employee contributions, differing only in the visibility of the cost to the employee (up-front taxes vs. a line-item in the pay stub vs. a "employer portion" which isn't reported to the employee but directly impacts the employee's wages).
I work at AWS. The service teams do own and write their CloudFormation providers, although if you've written a custom provider you'd see it is somewhat clunky, so it's sometimes considered more of an operational burden, and you can tell.
We dogfood both the SDK and CloudFormation internally, we just deal with its numerous gripes much the same way you would externally (although we can also contact service teams directly if needed).
Million dollar question would be if all the “feature requests” that AWS support opens when they don’t know what else to do actually go someplace or if they just get swept aside every few days. I’ve always been under the impression they receive very little or no attention. Even bugs where I have included a reproducible test case that results in an internal error, they just keep trying to close the ticket every few days until you go on vacation or e-mail burps and you miss the notice.
I work for AWS. We have an internal tracking system containing customer feature requests, and our service teams review them biweekly and they get prioritized by product management. “Working backwards from the customer” is gospel here.
That is cool to know! For several years I have been tell the support people not to bother with feature requests because I didn’t think they went anyplace, maybe I’ll let them open them going forward.
But why can't he quit? If the owning company didn't assign another guard that's their fault, not the guard. Imagine if a chauffeur was forever assigned to a car because it broke on a disabled parking place. It would just get towed and the bill or court order sent to the actual owner and the chauffeur can quit.
100% blame on Egypt here for a stupid rule ignoring consequences.
Then why not make impersonation illegal? If they enforce making reselling illegal proactively they can enforce making impersonation illegal just the same.
This is overreach. I would be rightly pissed if I lived in CA.
Someone else has mentioned that impersonation is certainly already illegal, and the right solution would be prosecution instead of making a new law, and I agree. I'm not from CA/US so I have no idea why the legislators felt the need for a new law.
Part of this is that it’s really expensive to litigate that nuance in court because even if you believe you’re correct, a company like GrubHub can continue to do business for years and years while dragging this out through the courts. Especially because of covid, many cases like this are already backed up and GrubHub could probably be happily continuing to fleece small businesses for over half a decade.
Also, if a judge for whatever reason doesn’t agree with it, say, “if the government wanted trademarks to be enforced in this manner they’d pass a law about it, no deal” (this happens Eg. An argument that made it all the way up to the Supreme Court, taking years and years to do so, is that discriminating against trans people isn’t discriminating on the basis of sex because if legislature intended it that way they’d say it more explicitly in law. Imagine how many trans people were fired for being trans while this thing was going through the courts.) then now you have to pass legislature again.
Impersonation is illegal, but GrubHub would argue that their logos are everywhere on these menus and it’s clear that they’re acting as agent.
To resolve this under existing law we’d need to wait for a lawsuit to roll through the courts. The legislature passes laws all the time that are somewhat duplicative to clarify their intent. The law isn’t a normalized database, and that actually speeds things up.
>GrubHub would argue that their logos are everywhere on these menus and it’s clear that they’re acting as agent
Which is obvious to anyone who can and does read text. It seems to me that CA protects businesses not from impostors, but from illiterate who cannot differentiate delivery from production and they just rush to review on completely separate review platforms (it is wrong even if delivery contracted with production beforehand, imagine an angry customer reviewing bricks from a brick factory because a reseller brought them half a trailer of bricks broken in half). I bet that when you call a number, they even introduce as “grubhub support”, not as a restaurant. Not only this law treats a symptom rather than a disease, it also allows established monopolies who first used this “loophole” to retain their status in the future.
As of the problem as a whole - restaurants with their own delivery usually have a much worse service than aggregators’. Claims that “they just take our markup” is nonsense, because in practice people do value predictability and ratings of separare delivery services, while they cannot really stick a lever into many different companies that produce nice food but their delivery guys simply suck “because it’s small place and they have to meet ends”. The alternative is not their own delivery, the real alternative is to shutdown. Pandemic changed markets and fault tolerances drastically and those who ignore these facts are unlikely to bloom in it anyway.
You're thinking like a politician, whose law is a hammer and who sees every issue as a nail. Before regulating, let's see if the free market can't work it out way better by itself. And indeed it can, it's called competition.
Amazon itself claims to be "customer centric" because customer trust ensures sales go up in the long term much better than short gain of abusing the customer relationship. Look at this very thread for more evidence.
Maybe if you didn't need an army of lawyers fighting bureaucracy to found the tiniest company a competitor would already have beaten them. Maybe that's why Amazon feels it can afford this kind of business practices. Your intentions are good but your solutions are not.
> let's see if the free market can't work it out way better by itself
How long are you willing to let the free market try and solve it? It seems like the free market has been solving this for, what, a couple decades in Amazon's case?
It seems like the free market is the problem here, and just continuing what's already been tried is going to give us more of the same results.
or, it could in fact be a result of "free-market competition", e.g amazon being afraid of loosing sellers to competitors and they are afraid of punishing them *
* i have (not at amazon) witnessed this first-hand, so its not outside the realm of possibility at all
Don't forget being able to get high priority in the backlog if you need a feature from another service in order to launch.
Former AWS engineer who launched a service here. That, access to source code and being able to setup an hour-long meeting with any engineer are the big points. Not that I think that lacking these is insurmountable, but they're very nice to have.
Are you deliberately missing the point? You follow a logical chain of building up a roughly coherent view of the world. Not as good as following the kind of thorough reasoning that goes into a research paper (since you always have access to "the right answer") but better than most alternatives that can be mass-produced at that level.
Back in Maimonides' time it would be difficult to provide things other than a lump sum in an anonymous manner. If you employ someone, teach them a job or give them a loan they'll get to know you. So I think step 1 drops anonymity for long-term purpose.
This assumes the meaning of freelancers is being able to join and leave an employer when you want, and not being able to fix your own prices and refuse gigs like others are saying. I think you should be able to open a freelance provider with restrictions, as Uber is doing. I see no reason to outlaw that.