- cross-posted to:
- antiwork@lemmy.ml
- news
- technews@radiation.party
By making drivers “businesses”, Amazon essentially avoids labor, safety, and liability laws all at once. It’s a huge racket.
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If they don’t have alternative sources of work, then they effectively work for Amazon, and it should be legislated as such. That excuse only works in a labour market with a lot of competition on both the supply and demand sides. Legislative systems really need to be more nimble to keep up with the loopholes that larger organisations can put money into investigating. But yeah, we all know why that doesn’t happen.
There are entrepreneurs who truly do have “one big client.” I’ve been one.
But yeah in this case it’s clearly just Amazon skirting the rules.
It’s a fair point. If you go to a business and go, hey I’ve got something for you, are you interested, then yeah that’s entrepreneurship. I suppose the difference is that the role there isn’t well defined. So maybe that’s a significant difference, direction of solicitation.
There are differences that government look at that, prior to Amazon (and others) gaming the system, worked well. For example, contractors would be using their own equipment, not the customers, have their own insurance, etc. That makes a lot of sense: if you hire a carpenter to fix your bathroom, you probably don’t provide the powertools.
But for Amazon, it was just a way of also cost-shifting equipment and insurance onto employees.
I think one obvious difference would be branding and management. Entrepreneurs don’t have managers, and the relationship between Amazon and its workers is what I’d call micromanagement. If you’re telling someone when they can take a break, you don’t have a vendor, you have an employee.
Another obvious difference is that entrepreneurs have their own brand. If the giant delivery van says Amazon on it, it’s an employee driving it, not a contractor.