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MattHamilton Nolan
9/29/15 3:35pm
The truly insidious thing about 'on-call' scheduling is that these same companies then want to punish you if you're not available or can't make last minute arrangements/cancellations. 'On-call' scheduling should largely be illegal for most jobs and tightly regulated for the very few jobs where its actually a necessity. And I say this as a person who has to do an 'admin on call' week every six weeks or so. But the company I work for is gracious enough to plan out these weeks a year in advance so I have ample time to make arrangements, AND they're pretty lax about people swapping weeks as needed, so long as someone is on-call.
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  RobNYCMatt
  9/29/15 3:42pm
  It’s completely stupid for retail jobs. How hard is it to make a schedule?
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  1llamarampage will write againMatt
  9/29/15 3:46pm
  The sickest thing for me is the people who do on-call scheduling are by and large people who aren’t being paid a living wage and/or are working part-time. They could probably really benefit from a second job! Too bad there’s no way to make that work with two totally random, last-minute, pasted-together schedules that are based on the whims of some totally checked-out middle-manager.
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NefertittiesHamilton Nolan
9/29/15 3:36pm
I’ve been working for Amazon for over a year now as a freelancer. I get to work from home but the pay is phenomenally poor, especially considering how capable you have to be to do it. They tried to hire unqualified folk but had to let most of them go because their output was such low quality. I’m going to do it for as long as I can though, since I get to fuck around on Gawks periodically without anyone breathing over my shoulder. Plus no commute.
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  GartrelleGordonNefertitties
  9/29/15 3:46pm
  What kind of freelancing?
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  newsratnessNefertitties
  9/29/15 3:46pm
  question: without commute costs, plus the benefits you see from staying home... do you consider it worth it? or would you take higher pay without the home benefits in a second? or did you already sort of answer that and Im just being dense?
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tornadoslackssHamilton Nolan
9/29/15 3:29pm
Well shit, I signed up for Amazon Prime on that $67.00 special they offered (heh, saw it on gawker). I was all set to order those awesome disposable litter boxes and a fire pit today and then happily wallow in my free 2 day delivery special person status. Now I feel dirty.
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  Matttornadoslackss
  9/29/15 3:35pm
  Those are some...very specific purchases.
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  pdxwhytornadoslackss
  9/29/15 3:37pm
  Don’t feel dirty! That’s like feeling bad for buying pants at the GAP. Amazon is not the only one with this foul business practice, after all. It is juts one of the more bloated and egregious.
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bourbon.p.millerHamilton Nolan
9/29/15 3:34pm
I recently had the terrible idea to interview for a corporate role at Amazon. At the end of the hour, I asked the hiring manager what quality of life was like for the team (supply chain) and he said: “oh it’s great. We can work wherever we need to and our hours aren’t set. Everyone works very, very hard... We don’t really take vacation ever but we have fun at work.” Yeah no thanks
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  Chuck E.bourbon.p.miller
  9/29/15 3:48pm
  I had a phone interview for a full-time role there about two months ago, for a role I am literally the best-qualified for. Despite the horror stories I’ve heard from friends who work there, I was enthusiastic. Near the end of the call, when asked if I had any questions, I asked about commuter options for working at their headquarters in South Lake Union, and mentioned I love taking transit in and out of Seattle. That seems to have been a red flag for them: I’m someone who would expect to arrive to and leave from work on a set schedule. The phone screener stumbled a bit with her reply, noting that they had “lots of married full-timers” who would go home to make dinner, out kids to bed, etc. before getting back online to do more work from home. Even if that did give me pause, it didn’t matter. They suddenly decided that I wasn’t a good “fit” after the call.
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  1llamarampage will write againbourbon.p.miller
  9/29/15 3:49pm
  I just had my employee orientation at my organization, and they explained how our system is set up to encourage people to take their vacation - you can carry a fairly large number of hours through the year, but can only carry over a certain amount to the next year. It’s enough that you can accrue enough time so that if you have an serious medical problem, you can be fully-paid over the time between getting sick and having your disability insurance kick in, but not so much that people would feel okay going years without taking time off. I felt really lucky to have my position after that.
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MattHamilton Nolan
9/29/15 3:47pm
Also, I have to say, I love the idea in the last paragraph about how if we had good enough government benefits (and they’d have to universal, natch) then businesses would be freed from having to provide benefits in the first place. Of course, while such a thing would seem like a win/win for both employees and businesses, a lot of businesses would vehemently oppose this. ‘Benefits’ (and to an extent the promise of qualifying for benefits in the near future) is the carrot that a lot of companies dangle in front of employees to keep them with the company when those employees would otherwise flee from it like rats from a sinking ship. That’s why the idea of min-come would be violently opposed. Less because of something-something-income-redistribution and more because a lot of companies know that the minute we have a government safety net solid enough to provide for people’s basic needs adequately, independent of a job, a lot of companies are going to go tits up, almost overnight.

Why, you ask? Because if suddenly, you have a check coming in from the government that will provide for your basic needs, and you have universal health care, then suddenly you're not going to worry as much about keeping a shitty job with shitty hours that you get treated shittily at. The work force will become extremely fluid and companies that don't suck up to their employees by either offering some extremely great benefits, great pay, or at least really good working conditions, are suddenly going to find themselves with mass walk outs. And since the entire workforce is in the same boat now, that's going to translate into less people so desperate for work that they'll take any job to fill in the gaps. The workforce will become much more selective about what constitutes a 'good job'. For a large part of the current workforce a 'good job' is any job that pays you enough to technically keep you above the poverty line and not homeless. When the threat of homelessness and poverty are eliminated the standard of a good job is going to be raised quite a bit. And companies that are unable or unwilling to submit to that new standard quick enough are going to start going bankrupt.
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  flamingolingoMatt
  9/29/15 3:57pm
  Yeah, this has already sort of been happening with the implementation of Obamacare. Lots of people who were previously hanging onto jobs just to keep their health insurance have left the workforce, which (theoretically) should be nudging wages higher.
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  Maxine FloefflerMatt
  9/29/15 3:59pm
  Employer-based health care is kind of an anomaly dating from World War II. There were wage and price controls and a huge labor shortage so companies could only compete for workers on benefits and they started offering health care. After the war the US could have joined the rest of the industrialized world and gone single-payer but oh no, that smacked of socialism.
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UncleCCClaudiusHamilton Nolan
9/29/15 3:36pm
Reading a critique of the gig economy here is a bit rich considering some of you used to be paid by page view. You guys gleefully participated in the dismantling of journalism and writing jobs. You’re just now realizing you made a bad bargain and are trying to regain some of the perqs through unionization.
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  NoOnesPostUncleCCClaudius
  9/29/15 4:01pm
  “You used to be exploited and now you’re tying to fix it. How dare you write about other people being exploited!”
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  UncleCCClaudiusNoOnesPost
  9/29/15 4:36pm
  Denton never held guns to their heads. They took less money for more or less the same jobs on a new platform and they got to do it in their pajamas for a while. They were kids just out of college and insurance and job security were what old people did.
  
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FizziwigsHamilton Nolan
9/29/15 4:12pm
I was a freelancer for the same company, where I came into the office everyday and worked 40-50 hour week, for nearly 5 years. They touted this “flexible gig” situation even though it was just a totally normal 9 - 5 job. The hidden thing about this arrangement is that you have to do estimated freelancer taxes and since you’re technically your own business, you have to pay self employment tax which fucks you in the ass when you have no business expenses to deduct. And if you make up business expenses, now you’re the one put in a precarious legal position. It’s such BS.
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  RhinestoneEaterFizziwigs
  9/29/15 4:33pm
  That is hugely illegal.
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  thwarted666Fizziwigs
  9/29/15 6:51pm
  I’ll never understand long-term, full-time freelancing. I mean, I understand it, but it sucks. Just hire the person and pay benefits already.
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Max CherryHamilton Nolan
9/29/15 5:47pm
Ugh. There’s the daily internet article that makes me throw up a little. What is it with Americans? How did we let it get this bad? Is it that young adults today don’t think they’re going to be old? I sometimes wonder if this is really the case, when they say they’re never going to retire and that they won’t need social security or medicare. Some of them say that they’re going to stay in good shape. Who knew? A gym membership will allow you to live for hundreds of years!
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  CharitybMax Cherry
  9/29/15 10:46pm
  It’s not exactly “young adults” making most of these decisions. How many 20-somethings do you think sit on the board of companies like Amazon or Wal-Mart?
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  Max CherryCharityb
  9/30/15 1:35am
  I was referring to young adults in the workforce today that just go along with these conditions.
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Myrna MinkoffHamilton Nolan
9/29/15 5:01pm
I don’t disagree with your overall point, but I do want to make clear that the so-called gig economy and actual, professionals who freelance are two different things.

As someone who has been happily self-employed for several years now, I can attest that people can* make quite good money with flexible schedules as freelancers, and I encourage those who are interested to look into it.

But the people who make it are those who are actually running a business, even if that business is just them. It is not the same as jobbers cobbling together multiple income streams that each pay poverty-level wages.

*Self-employment is def. not for everyone, even those who are very skilled at their jobs. You have to be good at what you do, good at the administrative parts of running a business, good at knowing what you have to outsource to other experts, AND have the personality that can deal with unpredictability and be very flexible. I love it, but it is not the worry-free utopia people like to make it sound like.
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  fnsfsnrMyrna Minkoff
  9/29/15 5:11pm
  Plus the people working on flexible scheduling models also don’t fit into this. These are not people who are free to work when it suits them - instead, they typically will be fired if they turn down a shift, even if scheduled less than 24 hours in advance, and the inconsistent schedule actually often makes it impossible for them to hold down multiple jobs, no matter how badly they need them.
  
  And I do think there is one place where freelancing can be a good deal for workers, although it’s admittedly not a common one. I’m someone who has freelanced on top of a full-time job with benefits for close to 20 years now, and it’s helped me buy a home, create an emergency fund (I practically worked fulltime for another company when my full-time job was imposing furloughs and I was afraid they would go under) and diversify my skills. I’ve worked with one particular place for over 10 years now, which is longer than I’ve held any of my full-time posts. But I realize I’ve been very fortunate to be able to do this.
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  Myrna Minkofffnsfsnr
  9/29/15 6:07pm
  I don’t think your situation is that uncommon, actually. I’m a writer, and thus, know a lot of writers, and most of them do some degree of freelancing on the side, although not all of them admit that widely. It’s how I got started: First doing a small article here and there for an old work friend, than doing more work for them regularly, then getting some new work from referrals. I made a solid 30% of my income from freelancing while working full-time, which served me well when I got laid off and could transition to full time freelancing pretty easily. (That original gig is still going strong 11 years later, and makes up about half my income, while requiring only one day of work a week.)
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aprilphreshHamilton Nolan
9/29/15 3:36pm
I wish I could be in charge of the corporate spin for a business behemoth. Where I work won’t cop to outsouring our I.T.; they’re “growing our team in India.”
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  lena dunhams boobsaprilphresh
  9/29/15 4:05pm
  Trust me it will end. They were “growing our India” team too, then all shit hit the fan with how poor the quality of IT work was out of India (since you know anyone who was actually good got a H1-B and got the fuck out of India) and ended up pulling services back to the US.
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  aprilphreshlena dunhams boobs
  9/29/15 4:44pm
  But our India team works 24/7, just so our needs are always met!
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