To be honest, I think Skip and Uber Eats are either struggling or in a seasonal down cycle right now. Very few orders coming in, and it’s not just my dad. He talks to the other drivers out there and they say the same thing.

I think on the one hand maybe a lot of people are away on summer vacation so not ordering food as often. On the other hand, interest rates in Canada have shot through the roof, so maybe a lot of people are cutting back on ordering in and choosing to cook more to save money.

Unfortunately, interest rates also affect my dad, so he’s getting squeezed pretty hard. I can’t blame the gig companies for that though, that’s the Bank of Canada’s doing.

Both cost so much more than dieect order and pickup that it's getting close to cheaper to take a cab to get it direct from the shop, right?

I know I have never ordered from either because I was immediately aghast at the massive markup over the regular price for the products...

> If the best the current system can offer is "either debase yourself like a peasant into multiple gig jobs that regularly screw you, or, be homeless, and sorry there's just nothing we can do about that"

It's not. Gig work is one of many options.

You can be a full-time employee. You can be a part-time employee. You can start your own business. You can work for local, state, or federal government in innumerable roles.

Or, if it suits you, you can be a gig worker.

Focus on specific cases of companies treating workers unfairly, as this legislation appears to do. There's no point railing against "the system" because there is no "system".

Show me the full yime jobs as food delivery driver that would meet the demand for such jobs and I'll give you $100

Prottip: they don't exist

Delivery drivers always got paid jack and made the majority of thier income from tips. It was always a bad industry and Uber etc just make it worse by taking an additional cut and causing businesses to outsource to fewer total workers across the industry than would be employed/were employed under the traditional model where any business that wanted to do delivery had to do so by directly employing someone.

There's another side to that coin. If every restaurant that wants to offer delivery has to have their own driver, that means there are tons of drivers sitting around doing nothing while waiting for orders to come in. By outsourcing delivery to Uber, all restaurants in a city can be served by one pool of drivers, leveraging economies of scale. This opened the door to many more restaurants offering delivery because they didn't need to pay drivers to sit around.

And?

That argument is essentially: Workers should suffer so those who already were of means can profit more.

You can't open a restaurant unless you're already doing well, with large amounts of capital etc.

Drivers are generally living oatcheck to paycheck with zero available capital.

You do see why I feel zero sympathy, right?

And that's ignoring you're actually arguing for drivers to do more work for the same or even less pay....

Considering current labor shortages it wouldn’t be at all unreasonable to conclude that many gig workers do this because they actually prefer the flexibility these app provides to working fix shifts with almost no way to influence tour schedules yourself. All these champagne socialists seem to ignore that for some reason..

In some ways gig work can provide a level autonomy not normally available to the people taking gig work, sure, but it doesn't change the fact that gig workers are exploited, and that's bad.

If the alternative is more degrading forms of labor, with businesses sneaking around full time protections by only giving people 30 hours of work, and paying an absurdly low minimum wage, that's hardly an indictment of the idea of strong labor protections - quite the opposite. Why did you bring up socialism? Are you saying capitalism can't provide good labor conditions and we need socialism to do so? Extremely based take.