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will gig workers get what regular, everyday, ordinary, standard employees get?

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  • I recall that, in the early 2000s, I began to annoy people with passionate conversation about "just in time (j-i-t)" models of manufacturing, a major theme of my required course work with the federal government. I had a broad view of how the government, especially with respect to increasing use of contractors, was implementing a form of the model.

    In the 80s when I worked in CA, I talked a bit to engineers who worked for contractors. I asked what happens when a contract mission moves from company A to B. They said that some would be simply hired by company B to continue the project. A few would move with the missions if their expertise was not general enough or their interests aligned with the work. In the 2000s after my required continuous training and after encountering many classes that seemed to treat people as inventories, I realized that the future might very well be one where everyone was either a member of a small group of similar contractors or self-contractors. The advantage for all of business is the ease of exchange of personnel for whatever reason (salary, shifting requirements, etc.). Also, it off loaded the need to offer benefits or to manage paperwork like salary deduction for payroll tax. In short, the bidder on a job would be no different from the larger contractors. And, similar to the large contractors, when a project was over no one was left to anyone but themselves to find something else to do or to retrain for competitiveness.

    You can think of many other examples of things for which business would find attractive to drop/shift the burden, but one really stands out - no dead wood or any reason to feel guilty about performance. Contract lost if not meeting time, cost and performance goals. In later years I believed I was seeing another element when, as in the early 2000s, people were being told to embrace self-employment via Internet entrepreneurships. The picture the hype brought was a million Americans running their own small eBay.

    I am going on and on, but I am seeing that the younger people don't experience the sense of panic or insecurity that I thought such a shift would produce. The world is changing, and, in the early part of this century, it might be things like j-i-t hiring and running your own income producing shop, but it might grow into something I haven't considered or, rather, imagined.

    With some of this, whoever bids for work or self-employed workers will need to build a competitive amount of taxes, benefits and other expenses into their bid or prices. The government will probably find they need to make a legal framework for the growing relationship to avoid a society with a great number of people, including professionals, that are left without enough to cover what is currently covered by payroll jobs (or should be). In today's world many work medial jobs without paying taxes, etc. A house painter wanted work but refused a contract. I would not agree to such an arrangement. Everyone told me I was mean. Government oversite could very well grow with the host of disparate needs that might result.
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