I've been a freelancer - a contractor - for most of my life, but I've also been a salaried employee and an hourly employee and there is a significant difference between all three.

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Hourly and salaried work has some disadvantages in terms of independence and freedom, but they have one huge advantage: stability. As a freelancer, my pay yo-yos around - in some years, I'll have a month that's worth 30 times more than all the rest combined.

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Which sounds great, until you turn it around: some years, I'll earn 1/30th of my top rate for 11 out of 12 months. Also: I don't get vacation pay, I pay for my own health care, etc. But for me, it makes sense: I work for lots of clients, do my paperwork, and get by.

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Which brings me to the "gig economy" and its pretense people who do EXACTLY the kind of work as a waged or hourly employee are really independent contractors, despite being completely dependent on, and under the thumbs of, employers.

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Gig economy work is a way to shift all the risks associated with being an employer onto your workforce, while hoarding all of the benefits that independent contractors customarily enjoy. For employers, it's a disposable workforce whom you owe nothing to.

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For workers, it's a contractor's precarity without a contractor's independence.

Which brings me to Amazon drivers hanging cellphones from tree-branches.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-01/amazon-drivers-are-hanging-smartphones-in-trees-to-get-more-work

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You see: Amazon Flex drivers are not employees, they're contractors. Their boss is an app that decides, from moment to moment, whether they will get work and how much they'll get paid for it. The app uses a secret mix of factors to make these determinations.

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These drivers are like mice on an intermittent reinforcement schedule, getting work according to factors that they are not privy to and cannot predict.

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In the immortal words of @GreatDismal: "Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb
permanently on the fast-forward button."

(this is your periodic reminder that cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion)

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Amazon Flex drivers develop various folk theories of how the app works, and one of these - which sounds plausible to me - is that you are more likely to get a job if the app thinks you're physically close to a pickup spot.

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So: in the Chicago suburbs, desperate Amazon Flex drivers, competing with one another for the unknown sums on offer for making deliveries, stash phones in the branches of trees close to Whole Foods and other Amazon distribution points.

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This tricks the Amazon Flex app into thinking that they are on the very doorstep of the distribution point, upping their chances of getting a delivery (the drivers sync a second phone to their tree-phones, so they get alerted when they get a job).

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Labor economists talk about "chickenization," named for the hyperconcentrated poultry industry: chicken farmers are notionally independent contractors, but they have no independence.

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Big Chicken tells the farmers how to build their coops, sells them their chicks, specs out medicine, feed and light systems. But the meat-packers don't tell farmers how much they'll get paid until the chickens are delivered.

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The poultry industry - which has divided up the country so that each region only has one processor - does analytics to decide how much to pay, titrating the money-drip so that it's enough to survive, but not enough to get ahead.

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That way they can hold out the threat of a canceled contract to any worker caught "cheating" - say, by speaking out to regulators about these abusive practices.

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You'll never guess what Amazon has proposed to do about the fact that its drivers are so desperate they're hanging phones from tree-branches.

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They've promised to investigate and discipline the drivers.

Because when your workforce is totally chickenized, you don't need to correct these dysfunctions by eliminating the need for worker "misconduct" (say, by paying workers a steady, predictable rate).

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Instead, you can treat any attempt by your "independent contractors" to increase their leverage as a form of fraud and punish them.

eof/