My kid studies in a Russian online school. All classes are remote, 2 hours each, with 4 to 6 kids in a single class. The school operates akin to other modern Uber-like businesses. It connects students with teachers: collects the requests from parents, finds them a proper class, deals with payments processing and oversees the whole process to make it easier for both sides. It’s a valuable service and we were happy to find it.
I’ve recently been very surprised and uneasy to learn that a math teacher in a school like that earns just $5.5 an hour. I don’t know the salaries in rural parts of Russia, but in big cities teachers in schools earn much more than that. It’s an embarrassingly low sum of money with no employment protection and no benefits. Just as it is the case with the other gig workers: taxi drivers, on-demand couriers that bring you food, etc.
Companies that operate those services are more often than not part of a very profitable big tech sector or venture funded with millions of dollars. You’d think they are not in need to squeeze every last penny from their workers. But that’s what they do. They want to grow fast and to do that they need to keep prices as low as possible, often much lower than the old way of getting these services.
These companies have complete control over business relationship between the worker and the user - they dictate the end user pricing and then decide how much on top of that they will leave for themselves, usually in a form of 30% commission. A teacher can’t decide how much to charge her students for the class. A teacher can’t cut her expenses by using cheaper payment providers or other backend services. The only way to earn more in such a system is to work more hours. As a result a more than 10 hour work day for a teacher or taxi-driver is a common case.
This situation should not be considered normal. I don’t have a lot of faith in tech companies finding and implementing a more fair system. They’ve already had a lot of time and experience dealing with various types of gig workers, but we are still here, with no improvement. On the contrary, more types of services are being digitized and new workers get the same unhealthy conditions.
This should be regulated. I don’t know the exact solution, but we could start with a simple rule. If the end user price is set by the platform, then the platform must employ the worker, with all corresponding responsibilities. If the platform doesn’t want to employ the worker and is willing to continue to treat them as an independent contractor, then they should be free to charge the user for their services however they want.
Thus the workers could choose between maybe lower salary, but with the protection and benefits of an actual employment or a higher paycheck on their own terms, if they believe that the service they are providing is better than the market.
I am pretty sure that we will look back at the early days of the gig economy as an unfair and shameful period. The same way we now think about the working conditions of the early XX century factory workers.