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this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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Late Stage Capitalism
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So then how does this address my scenario of the capitalist who does not hire any employees but relies entirely on independent contractors to do the work of setting up and maintaining the factory? This is in principle no different from me hiring the plumber to install my new kitchen faucet.
You might say the factory is different because it’s on land which is separate from my family home but that’s not a fundamental issue for the capitalist to overcome. Plenty of farmers, for example, build manufacturing facilities (say, for processing crops into livestock feed) on their farms where they live.
The issue of independent contractors is at the heart of the fight over Uber and Uber Eats drivers. Some jurisdictions have sought to try to force drivers to be employees rather than independent contractors in order to give provide them with an hourly wage and benefits such as health insurance, dental care, and pensions. Of course drivers themselves frequently oppose this designation because formal employment necessarily entails the loss of control over working hours and schedules.
Neoabolitionist society would seem to enshrine the independent contractor status of Uber drivers into law. Essentially all employees as we know them today would be converted into gig workers!
Or is there some other mechanism to deal with this? Is there another video by Ellerman that addresses all these questions?
There are legal tests to test whether a worker is an independent contractor or an employee such as the control test. You shouldn't be able to declare a de facto employee as a de jure independent contractor. The factory with only independent contractors wouldn't be able to exercise the same managerial authority over the workers as if they were employees. If these contractors cooperate directly, they are almost certainly in a de facto worker coop.
https://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/UsingESOPsInPlatformCompanies.pdf
@latestagecapitalism
Right, and that’s the Uber distinction. Drivers for Uber set their own hours and can log off any time they want and stop working. Uber does not have the ability to dictate what hours they work, nor even which deliveries/fares they accept and which ones they reject. Uber’s power in the relationship comes from their ability to set how much money is offered for a given delivery/fare, and which ones are offered to which drivers.
The hypothetical no employee factory I’m thinking about would not have regular employees who are needed to operate machines for entire work shifts. The factory would be mostly automated and the work which is performed by humans would mostly consist of contracted, scheduled maintenance and upgrades to the tooling and other machinery. The day to day operation would supervised by the owner from a single, computerized command centre.
While this may seem like science fiction, you can already see this sort of large scale operation in agriculture. A single farmer operating a large, modern combine harvester can harvest thousands of acres all by himself and deliver it to silos on his farm. He can then operate the other equipment to process it or unload it into trucks to be delivered to market later.
The number of farm workers in the US was around 14 million in the early 1900s. Today that number is about 3 million. In the same time, the US total population when from 92 million to 335 million. This is a change from just over 15% of the population employed in agriculture to less than 1%, a 15-fold decrease.
All of this is to say that I don’t know that Neoabolition would represent as radical of a change as expected. Maybe that’s the point though, because the total abolition of private property seems way too far-fetched these days.
The link argues that uber drivers are employees.
The no employee factory as described sounds fine. Ellerman's philosophy doesn't just imply a worker coop mandate. Since natural resources aren't the fruits of anyone's labor and the equal claim to them of future generations, we should apply common ownership arrangements to land and natural resources and artificial monopolies.
Neo-abolition doesn't solve every problem.
Social ownership of capital is orthogonal policy issue
@latestagecapitalism
So for the Uber case we’d expect a worker coop app owned by the drivers? That makes sense to me.
My dad drives for Uber Eats and one of the issues for him is that there are too many drivers with not enough demand a lot of the time. He ends up spending a lot of time sitting around waiting for orders to come in.
I think in a worker coop model you’d probably see a restriction in the number of drivers in an area. But then you could also see competing apps show up.
I’m really not sure what would happen!