{"id":2207,"date":"2015-06-17T13:51:34","date_gmt":"2015-06-17T21:51:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2207"},"modified":"2015-06-17T13:51:34","modified_gmt":"2015-06-17T21:51:34","slug":"least-viable-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2207","title":{"rendered":"Least Viable Work"},"content":{"rendered":"

So today, the California Labor Commission has decided that an Uber driver was, in fact, an Uber employee<\/a>. This is one of those things that doesn\u2019t past the \u201care you dumb as a box of hammered snot\u201d test: are you provided equipment by the company? Does the company set the rates for your service (and prohibit your receiving tips)? Does it rate your performance and disallow your working if you drop below a certain threshold? \u00a0Congrats! You are an employer.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been chirping for years that this sort of thing was inevitable – that given the opportunity, companies would eventually outsource anything below a director level and collect individual contributors and their leads\/managers in a way that would make them completely disposable – the only thing is, I assumed it would be through the sort of staffing agencies that provided us with contractors during the boom of the late 90s in DC. \u00a0Instead, we have \u201cthe 1099 economy,\u201d which is the middle-class-white-people-smartphone-enabled version of day labor. Minimum viable product? The modern way of life in Silly Con Valley appears to be \u201cleast possible amount of work you can do and still be a company.\u201d That\u2019s the trick Uber is trying to pull off: being a taxi company that outsources the business of owning cars or hiring drivers and just collects the vig for matching people up. What they argue is that they\u2019re not Yellow Cab, they\u2019re Tinder.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s everywhere. \u00a0I get the same thing at work when the telecoms people won\u2019t troubleshoot a phone issue – the VoIP phone is plugged into a local network jack, so go look at that and confirm it works before you call us, and oh by the way we don\u2019t support the headsets we gave out with the phones because they\u2019re peripherals, and if you can\u2019t fix them you should call the company we hired to go hand out the phones and headsets in the first place, but not us. \u00a0That\u2019s the miracle of technology combined with outsourcing: you can run a business and collect money while simultaneously chanting \u201cNOT IT\u201d the minute someone has a problem.<\/p>\n

Good gig, if you can get it. But a future where you can either be the big entity cashing the checks or the 1099\u2019er stringing together gigs to build an income sounds more like something out of a cyberpunk dystopia than a future vision of the good life. \u00a0I used to say that Silicon Valley is where the future comes from – and if that\u2019s still true, you might not be glad that it does.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So today, the California Labor Commission has decided that an Uber driver was, in fact, an Uber employee. This is one of those things that doesn\u2019t past the \u201care you dumb as a box of hammered snot\u201d test: are you provided equipment by the company? Does the company set the rates for your service (and … <\/p>\n

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