Slave to the Grind

bjesomučje wrote:

паће wrote:Има у тој гажној привреди^РЖ једна ствар која је јебе, а то је време и поступак између два радника на истој ствари. Пошто је цео прц у томе да немају сталне раднике и нарочито не са радним временом, него их позивају кад шта треба а ови има да су на располагању, чим на једној ствари треба да ради више њих то почиње да се компликује. Може на гажу да ради малопродаја, перионица, разношење, кошење траве - ствари где 1 радник уради 1 ствар па је посао завршен и одмах наплатив. Може донекле и градња, то је увек и радило на то да има помоћних и повремених радника, и то да не морају да буду нарочито стручни.

Ал' ајде да замислимо да тако ради млин, електрана, железница, или гомила служби које морају да имају посаду од-до (нпр хитна, изношење смећа). Не видим како би то могло да се разбије на гомилу ситних послића који могу да сачекају да се појави неко да их уради.

ja bih rad u gig ekonomiji definisao kao društveno delegitimisan rad, ne kao klasičan nesiguran i/ili povremen rad. ja mislim da su to različite stvari. gažni posao je "posao koji to nije", odnosno onaj ko radi taj posao ima stigmu budale koja forsira nešto što nije namenjeno, prvobitno zamišljeno, tehnološki predviđeno da se radi kao da je klasičan posao, ali po svim elementima jeste stalni, tekući, rad. sa druge strane, tipičan prekarni rad nema nikakvu naročitu stigmu, i može biti i solidno vrednovan, odnosno "legitimisan" kao pravi, istinski rad koji ima i da se adekvatno plati 

sa druge strane, na primeru ubera, vidimo da to i nije prekarno odnosno nesigurno, samo je relativno povremeno, a možda nije ni to. rad za uber je izuzetno siguran, uber ti neće dati otkaz osim ako te ne banuju kad nešto zasereš (ili ti kreten da nezasluženu lošu ocenu), a posla uvek ima. 

tako da se tu dešava jedno divergiranje i više se ne može pričati o klasičnom prekarnom radu u slučaju tih haj tek kompanija

ono što je zanimljivo je koja još područja rada može da inficira taj mim o poslu koji nije posao. možda će jednog dana biti "što voziš toliko ta kola hitne pomoći, de uzmi nešto zanimljivo da učiš i da se usavršavaš i sredi više taj sivi"

verovatno se jedan značajan segment novijih generacija iskreno pita "kako je moguće da neko vozi autobus, da džedži napolju kao saobraćajac itd - kako je moguće, zašto ti ljudi rade to?"

Many jobs are pointless. Others are being automated away. In the future, who will still work for a paycheck?

According to a major new study, Uber, Lyft and their smaller rivals are clogging major U.S. cities — not relieving congestion — and even more traffic may be on the way when self-driving cars are commonpl
ace.

Bruce Schaller, a former New York deputy commissioner of transportation and author of the report, tells Axios that when people use a ride-hailing company, they are opting to do so rather than take public transportation, walk or bike. They generally are not choosing between hailing and driving themselves.

• U.S. ridership is surging, he said — up 37% last year, to 2.6 billion passengers, from 2016.
  
• And hailing added 5.7 billion miles of driving a year to the nine cities in the study compared with six years ago — Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington.
  
• Uber and other ride-hailing services may not have exacerbated traffic initially. "But now they are clearly a source of congestion, and to deal with congestion you have to deal with them," he said.
  

Schaller's report aligns with an October study released by UC Davis. It found that, in U.S. cities, 49% to 61% of ride-hailing trips would have not been made at all — or by walking, biking, or public transit.

The irony is that when the consumer is made king, workers are forced to become even more flexible, providing services on a 24-hour cycle, usually to the detriment of their own health and wellbeing.

But the cult of early rising seems to miss a pretty obvious point: There is an opportunity cost involved. First and foremost, if you’re waking up this early without going to bed early, you’re going to be very tired and sleep-deprived. If you are going to bed early, that means you’ll need to cut down on other non-work-related areas of your life such as exercise, doing household chores, cooking delicious meals, having drinks with friends and colleagues after work, reading actual books, having free time after you put your children to bed, or watching one of the 17 Netflix shows everyone is talking about. Indeed, unless the goal is to make like a Silicon Valley ascetic and eschew friendship, pleasure, wine, home-cooked meals, and downtime in the service of ruthless productivity, this advice seems pretty useless.

Worse still, the early-rising canon doesn’t seem to question the fact that the primary motivator for maximizing our mornings is to make more room in the day for work. As the demands of employers extend far beyond what’s possible in the eight-hour workday, early-rising advocates recommend not cutting back on work, but simply finding creative new ways to accommodate it. That’s because the waking up early isn’t really particularly good for you: It’s good for capitalism. As Nicholas Lezard writes in his review of Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, “Today we are willing connivers in our own sleeplessness … as far as late capitalism is concerned, we are nothing more than ultimately disposable units for keeping economies running.” 

Lab Rats is a lively and spirited takedown of a human resources industry that is increasingly brazen in its unabashed parasitism. Its core argument – that “dignity, respect, stability and security still matter” – is surely irrefutable. The book is the latest addition to a growing body of literature taking issue with the normalisation of precarious and long-hours work.

A few years ago, Dan Lyons, a former technology journalist with Newsweek, endured an unhappy stint with a software startup called HubSpot. Initially dazzled by the company’s youthful vibe – all ping-pong tables and beanbags – he quickly became disillusioned. “Beneath their bubbly exteriors,” he recalls, “many people were anxious, frightened, unhappy, and massively stressed out.” He wrote a bestselling book about that experience, Disrupted: My Misadventures in the Start-Up Bubble (2016). In Lab Rats, Lyons warns that the oppressive working culture he witnessed in the tech industry is being rolled out to other businesses, including some in the public sector, thanks to the efforts of a coterie of high-end management consultants. These are a truly strange breed, combining ludicrous pomposity with an almost psychopathic earnestness. Lyons frequently refers to them as “mad” or “nutty”.

Many venture capital-funded tech startups operate a business model premised on high staff turnover, wherein, he writes: “Employees can (and should) be underpaid, overworked, exhausted and then discarded.” The aim is to maximise the value of the company in the short term, with a view to cashing out when it is sold at an IPO.

Management gurus have a particular fondness for cloaking their practices in military and sporting metaphors: LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman believes we should think of the employer-employee relationship in terms of a “tour of duty”, while Netflix’s notoriously brutal human resources “culture code” declares that the organisation is “a team, not a family” – the idea being that your place in a team is contingent on your performance, whereas the unconditional love of a family is bound to engender complacency. Lyons rightly points out that the analogy is specious, since “the best pro sports teams succeed exactly because the players feel like a family”.

Job insecurity and wage inequality have been rising ever since the years of Reagan and Thatcher, but the advent of digital technology has exacerbated this trend, making it easier for companies such as Uber to assemble and manage large armies of low-paid contract employees. Whatever these workers might gain in flexibility is more than cancelled out by the disadvantages: “gig economy” work invariably means no health insurance, no retirement pension, no child-care provisions or paid holidays – all things Stephen DeWitt, the CEO of a startup selling “labour clouds” of freelance contractors, breezily dismisses as “old-model inefficiencies”. Citing evidence linking chronic mild stress to declining mental health, increasing antidepressant usage and rising suicide rates, Lyons reminds us that an economy built on insecurity is a public health time bomb. It is a cruel paradox that the very workers who are enervated by long-hours culture are expected to surrender ever more of their depleted emotional energy to their employers. Competence alone no longer cuts it; Lyons interviewed one woman whose boss fired her because she didn’t “seem excited enough”.

...

When I talk about these realities, I often have parents or concerned adults ask what we can do about it, and I confess that I don’t have any answers. These kids are the products of their institutions, and structural institutional problems don’t have individual solutions. But as Rebecca Solnit writes, “Before a disease can be treated, it must be diagnosed. And you do not need to know the prescription before you diagnose a disease.” We owe it to the kids in our country to at least diagnose their disease, which is a society that turns children into stressed, anxious, competitive, indebted consumers. We do this to prepare them for their grown-up lives in a society that turns all people into stressed, anxious, competitive, indebted consumers.

I find some measure of hope in the fact that the kids I’ve worked with and others I’ve talked to seem to know something is askew, that their lives ought not to be like this. I’ve found that they want people to take them seriously without adding pressure. They want a bigger and better story to be a part of, a better world to live in. I just hope that they’re not too exhausted to live in it by the time those of us who care about them gain the power to give it to them.

Stiže "gig ekonomija" u Srbiju: Donosi nam veće zarade i više slobodnog vremena, ali ima jednu veliku manu