Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Okay, but this also typical for low-skill *employment.* I had the opportunity to negotiate my last salary, certainly, but pay rates for the largest sectors (e.g. retail, food service) are virtually always "take it or leave it."

(I'm not really enjoying being the bad guy, here, I'm just trying to get a better sense of where the lines are being drawn and to what end.)

My understanding is that low-skill labor behaves a lot like a sort of commodity. I expect that both high-skill employees & high-skill contractors negotiate their fees, & both low-skill employees & low-skill contractors will wind up taking a market rate

IMO the popular lens is that drivers get screwed over by aggressive top-down price-setting (which might be true!) -- but there's an alternative: if driver labor is basically a commodity, data-informed flexible price-setting may virtually always make the typical driver better off

I’m willing to believe it makes them better off, but that speaks more to how to regulate the third category than whether it exists Are there other examples of low-skill contractors who can’t set rates? If not, that low-skill employees can’t argues for drivers being employees, no?

Within the "gig economy," top-down price-setting is basically standard? Seems to come down to whether or not end consumers can be expected to discriminate on more than price -- e.g. Rover pet-sitters set their own prices, but most folks don't wanna leave Fluffy with just anybody

Taskrabbit and its competitors let you set your own rate as well iirc, for similar reasons. But even if the whole gig economy worked this way, couldn’t that still argue for a third category, and that the gig economy as a whole was a response to that category’s absence?

Taskrabbit doesn't do standardized services, though -- price-setting is impractical if not impossible -- and much of what's on the platform is skilled/semi-skilled. I'm not against a new class, I'd just like some idea how the lines might be drawn & how it'd improve the situation