App-Based Gig Economy: Opportunity or Exploitation?

I want to give a shout out to Chad at GigTube (Twitter @Gig_Tube and  GigTube on Youtube) for posting the article that inspired today's title. Mike Bebernes at Yahoo News put up an article with a title worth discussing: The gig economy: Opportunity or exploitation?"

That's a great question. In light of last week's Prop 22 decision in California and the fact they're still trying to get PRO Act pushed through the Senate, it's worth discussing. Are app-based gig economy workers (especially in Delivery and Rideshare) exploited? Or is it an opportunity for people?

Yes.

I think both are happening. But I believe we have the power to decide which one it is.

What we talk about:

1:38    Introductions, the importance of multi-apping

5:00    Talking about other platforms besides the major 3 or 4 delivery apps

6:09    With PUA ending in September, things can change a lot for delivery. It's more important than ever to look into multiple apps

15:00  Finally diving into the topic - Gig Economy: Opportunity or Exploitation?

17:55  I believe that it's both exploitation and opportunity

19:44  Gig economy apps are trying to get employees but only pay for contractors

22:07  Gig companies bank on gig workers thinking like employees

25:45  Not being up front with what Gig work actually entails

29:30  The opportunity is in independence.

32:27  Delivery has been a life saver for many during the Pandemic

42:00  The best way to avoid exploitation.

You can find the dedicated page for this episode here on our website.

What do you think? Is it exploitation or opportunity? Leave a comment at the episode page linked above or email your comments

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Transcript

0:00

So is your glass half full or half empty? Frankly, I don't care if the glass is empty. Let's just fill it again. Well, hey, Courier Nation, welcome back. It is season two, episode five of the Deliver on Your Business podcast. This is all about being a business owner in the gig economy because DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, Instacart and Uber and Lyft, all of these they say, hey, we don't want you as an employee. We want you to contract with us as a business. So the best way to do that is be a business. Deliver on Your Business is all about equipping you and encouraging you to be the boss, take control of your business and your life as you contract with these gig economy companies. Well, hey, my friends, welcome back has been a crazy few weeks for me. It seems like all I've done this past month is get a few podcast episodes out and not a whole lot going on on the website and everything, because we've just been super busy with moving, trying to sell a house. So there's a lot of ways to kind of feel out of my element. And so he start to get back into the flow, a little bit of getting some content up. And I wanted to let you know kind of what's going on here in the week ahead and kind of give you a little story about that if you're listening to me much. I've always been a proponent of working as many of these platforms in the gig economy as possible. When I started out, I was doing Grubhub, DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Postmates, and I did this full time. And the thing was that with each of these platforms, you could really just about make it full time. Maybe Postmates was the exception because they weren't busy enough here in Denver. But with most of them, you could have just order after order after order. And you know, when I first started looking at some of the other platforms and some of the other options out there, I think it kind of thumbed my nose up at them a little bit because you couldn't do that. You couldn't stay busy with just about anybody else that was out there. There weren't a whole lot of things out there. There are a few things here and there, but the thing about that is things are changing. I don't know if you've noticed it. I've certainly noticed it that things are definitely changing. With Grubhub, you could guarantee that you just always had offer after offer with Grubhub, at least here in Denver. And over time, they started slowing down. And it used to be you never went more than two minutes between offers, and there's a lot of times now it could be a half hour between the cow Bell ringing. And if you're working just one platform, you could sit for a while. I see a lot of times that DoorDash slows down and that Uber eats slows down. And of course, now Postmates has been swallowed up. So we have fewer choices. And that's where I've always said that multi apping is so important that you've got to keep yourself busy, you know, and even like a few weeks ago here on the podcast, we're talking about the strike that some DoorDash drivers were planning at the end of July. And as I talked about that, I really try to stress the importance that you got to treat this thing like a business. You hear that from me over and over and over. They're making you do this as a business. And the best way to kind of make the most of it is treat it like a business. But when you do that, what that means is all of these companies are our customers now. They're not your boss. They're your customer. And the thing about any kind of business is you don't want to have only one source of income. You don't want to have only one customer. And the other thing about having customers, whatever type of business. I've said this several times lately that the nature being a business that has customers is the customer is going to try and screw you over. You know, customers. There's nothing that requires them to be fair. And I know that that's an issue with a lot of people that kind of feel like, okay, DoorDash isn't being fair because they're really cutting our delivery fees and grub hub isn't being fair for this. That or the other thing or the way tips are happening or different things like that. And the thing is, you're never going to force them to change. But that's reality. In any kind of business you do, the customer is going to try and screw you over. And when the customer gets to be too bad at it, there are times you just have to say, okay, it's time to move on and find other customers. If you rely too much on one customer, and then that customer starts to just mistreat you or whatever, you're in a tough spot. So it's just really, really important to have an eye on all the different opportunities that are out there. And there's a lot of new and smaller and more diverse platforms out there. Some of them are up and coming, and some do things a little differently. Some of them deliver other stuff Besides meals from restaurants. I've avoided the ones like instacart and shipped. Personally, I should really try them out, just I think, to be able to write about them. But I don't want to spend my time shopping, so I've kind of avoided those. But there are some others that you pick up, other items that are ready to go. I did a review on the website here several weeks ago for Veho, which is in a number of markets now. But what they do is they do deliveries where you deliver all these like, Hello Fresh and everyplate, the box meals. And there were some pluses, and there were some negatives to doing deliveries for them. But it's something that I just started thinking, you know what? I want to start doing a little bit more of starting to look at some of these little platforms like that. And here's the thing. This is why I'm kind of feeling like it's maybe more important to start looking at all those different things. I think September is going to be the beginning of something. I don't know. I don't know what to expect. Honestly, I kind of feeling it could be a weird month for delivery. In years past, September was when things were starting to pick up. Now, football season was huge because people love to have their watch parties and they bring all their friends together. And so I've always had as soon as September started, especially Saturdays and Sundays, things got busy because everybody's watching here in Denver, they're watching the Broncos. And kind of the nice thing about College football is there's such a mix of football fans if you can kind of stay busy all the way through the day on Saturday. And I'll tell you what, I know exactly where I'm going to be tomorrow at 11:00 Denver time. It's going to be sitting on the couch, watching my Nebraska Corn Huskers and probably torturing myself a little bit like I have been in the last few years. It's just and usually you expect between that and people going back to school and eventually the weather starting to cool off, that it just means it's going to be a busier time. But here's what's going to make it weird. And I don't know, it could be a huge problem. And one of the big things that's just coming down the pipe right now is this on September 4, I think that's when the extra unemployment from the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance and the extra $300 per week that has been coming in for a lot of people and all of a sudden that's going away for seven and a half million people. That's huge. And that can have a lot of repercussions on what we do in the delivery world. And I think it's one of two ways. One, there's the impact on demand,$300 a week, that's $1200 a month coming into people that all of a sudden is going away. And if they're still unemployed, what does that do? And the thing about that is that could make all the difference between barely scraping by or not scraping by at all and having enough extra money to do things like deliveries. So I think that there could be a huge impact on demand. And I think we need to be ready for that. Things could slow down in the delivery world. Here's the other thing, though. We know that a lot of people are not going back to their jobs that were unemployed. We know that when you do delivery and you go and you pick up from restaurants, and there's nobody working there because people are not going back to work. And there are probably a lot of different reasons for it. Some of it is people, like just sitting at home with that unemployment. And the weird thing about unemployment with this pandemic is there's not as much pressure from the state for you to go out and find another job, because the state doesn't have time to pressure people for that. They're doing all they can just to keep up with how many people are on unemployment and everything like that. So that I'm sure is a factor. Some States ended the program early because they were trying to get people to go back to work. A lot of what I've read is it didn't really make a lot of difference in those States that people still aren't going back to work. And I think that's because the other thing about it is this little pandemic and staying at home has just really flipped everybody's idea of work upside down. That, you know, I think a lot of people just realize the nine to five is a grind. And a lot of people just realize there was such a huge burden off their shoulders when they got laid off. But they could still get by all those different things and just this reality that is things are unwinding and everything that for a lot of people, it's like, I don't want to go back to that. You know, I can see the difference. Just in my life, my wife lives that we kind of rethought a lot of things. We look at a lot of things differently. And my wife is a teacher in community colleges, and all of the classes went remote. And all of a sudden you start thinking, you know, this remote work type of thing, this more flexible work type of thing is a great deal. And so a lot more people are, I think, hesitant to go back to that. They're hesitant to go back to that structured thing. And if they hated work to begin with, they're looking for whatever else they can do. And what this is going to mean is, I think a couple of things, too. The restaurants are still going to be understaffed. We're still going to have longer waits. You got to be ready for that type of thing because of that. But I think the other thing that it means is if you're listening to this, you're listening to this probably because there's something you enjoy about doing this whole gig economy work, whether it's a full time thing, whether it's a part time side hustle type of thing, there's something about it that makes it enjoyable. And I know a lot of people have realized, you know what? I'm making good enough money. Maybe I should do this full time because I just hate my job that much. I know that I don't know that I can ever go back to that W2 world, the nine to five world. And what does this mean, though? It means that more people are going to start looking at maybe I can go out and do some deliveries, maybe I can go out and do some ride share. Maybe I can pick up more of this gig economy stuff. And when that happens, you got more drivers, you got fewer orders. So I'm kind of wondering if everything is going to slow down a little bit. And so I think, though, about that is you got to be ready for that type of thing. And so you end up having to make some decisions. You end up deciding if it slows down, you know, is it time to rethink doing this? And for some people, it will be or if you're not getting a business out of the customers you have, do you go out and find more customers? That's why I get back to what I was just talking about as far as getting to know some of these little platforms. And so that's kind of shaping some of the things that I want to do going forward. And then all of this kind of give you a heads up that here in the next week, I'm going to go out and try out a different platform. I've done some deliveries in the past for a little company called Deliverthat now it looks like they're in quite a few markets. They do catering orders. And so, like here in Denver, they pick up a lot of the orders from Easy Cater. If you do drive DoorDash and you do some of the drive orders for DoorDash, a lot of times they work with Easy Cater. And it's different, though. Again, you can't do it full time because generally most of their orders are kind of between twelve and one, between ten and one. And so it may not be great as a full time type of thing, but here's where I'm going with this, things are changing. You can you can't rely on being busy all the time with a lot of these platforms like you used to be able to do. And so now it's time to start looking at some of these other little guys and something that I probably should have been doing a long time ago myself to kind of get a better feel for what it's like with some of these. And like I said the next week, I'm going to do as much Deliver that as I can do, because I want to be able to kind of write about the experience. I want to tell what's working with that what isn't. I've had a lot of people find my because they're searching for what's it like delivering for Veho. And so I want to start doing a lot of those things and looking a little more into some of these lesser known platforms that are out there. Now, I can't say that any of these are going to help, because if deliver that isn't in your market, that may not help you a whole lot, right? Because you can't go out and deliver for them if who's not in your market. And most of these, once you get past the big three, most of the rest of these are only in a few markets. And so there are some that are here in Denver that are not anywhere else or very few other places. There are some that are in your market that probably aren't here. I've always thought it'd be fun to try waiter or Bite Squad, and I can't do them here. But the whole thing is maybe the individual one won't help us much. But what I'm hoping is maybe that experience of starting to look at how can you weave together all these little guys in with the big guys to help you out? So that's kind of a little bit of what we've got coming up. Okay. I know that was a long intro, but there are ways that that all brings us to today's topic as well. There was an article that I saw. A link to. It was posted on Twitter where I saw it by Chad from. He calls himself Gig Tube@gig_tube. He's got a YouTube channel called Gig Tube. Also, he used to be called Chad the Gig Economist. But anyway, he posted a link to this article in Yahoo. And it was called Gig Economy, Opportunity or Exploitation. And just right away, I thought, yeah, that's a good topic. Maybe that's what we should be talking about here. So, Chad, I want to thank you for putting that up there. And, folks, you ought to give him a follow. If you're on Twitter, it's @Gig_Tube on Twitter. Check out his YouTube channel, and he gets some good people on for interviews and things like that. And he brings up a lot of stuff that are a good food for thought for those of us that are in the Gig economy, the delivery world and things like that. So I'll give a shout out to Chad there. I think it really is. It's just especially for these times, it's something that we really ought be thinking about. It something we really ought to be asking ourselves. And it is this question with the Gig economy, and especially, you know, I focus so much on the delivery side DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grub, Hub, Instacart and on ride share as well. Uber eats. I'm sorry, Uber or Lyft or any of these others, some of these small contractors. You know, I think it's an important question. Is it an opportunity? Is it exploitation? And I think it's a really important question right now. Just last week, California Superior Court judge ruled that Proposition 22 was unconstitutional. And there's that whole thing in California about AB 5 ABC test. Proposition 22 was passed by the gig companies as a vote of the people that would guarantee that gig economy contractors could remain as independent contractors Pro Act. They're still trying to get that passed in the US Senate, which would implement this ABC test, which would make a huge difference whether or not these companies could use independent contractors or whether they're forced to hire employees. So it's a big topic right now, and it really it does come down to this question. Is it something that gig companies are exploiting their contractors? Are they taking advantage of the independent contractor status? Do drivers need to be protected against that? Or is this an opportunity? And what kind of opportunity is it? And so you kind of get to that question. I think that's something worth talking about. I would love to hear from you. I'd love to get your thoughts on this gig economy. Is it exploitation or is it opportunity? My answer is yes. My take is that it really is both. I think both are happening here. I really believe that DoorDash Grubhub Uber eats that they are exploiting the independent contractor status and as a result, probably exploiting a lot of contractors. And I also think that the gig economy is such an incredible opportunity for so many people. And that's what makes this whole question kind of challenging. And I go back and forth on this, should these companies be forced to hire employees? Because I do see where there's that exploitation happening. But I also see where it would be such a tragedy for so many people that if you took away that opportunity to be an independent contractor. And so I don't think there's an easy answer, but I do think it's worth talking about. So I thought I'd kind of give maybe some of my thoughts as to both why I think there's exploitation happening, but why? I think there's an incredible opportunity. I'm going to tell you that I don't feel exploited. I've been doing this for nearly four years now, and I don't think I've ever felt exploited by any of these companies, even though they have all cut prices, even though they have all got, I think, more controlling over time and things like that. But it's because I'm embracing the opportunity. It's because I'm embracing the control that I can have. And so that's part of I guess this whole discussion, you know, and maybe that's what it is, is when it's all said and done, it really boils down to how you look at it. And I think there's a certain way that you get to choose whether or not you're exploited or whether it's opportunity. So let's go into this. Why do I think that the gig economy apps are exploiting the independent contractor status? So that's where a lot of this movement is that, hey, these guys are exploiting drivers. You know, there's no minimum wage, there's no workers compensation. Drivers are on their own drivers are, you know, running their cars into the ground and not making that much money for it and things like that. And so right away, it's like they're exploiting these drivers. And here's the reality. I think that there's a little bit of that. But I also think that it's like people have the choice to figure out what they're doing. And the thing about the gig economy is nobody is forcing drivers to do any of this stuff. But the reality is there are no guarantees. You know, if DoorDash throws a two dollar and 50 cent delivery offer at you, there's no guarantee that you're going to make much money at all. There's no guarantee that you're going to deliver that and not end up paying more for using your car than what you're making. You know, there's no protection, there's no safety net. There's nothing like that when you're an independent contractor. And is that exploitation? Like I said, I don't feel exploited by that. But I do think that they're exploiting that status, because here's a few things about all of this. I think it really comes down to this thing that DoorDash Grubhub, Uber, Ubereats, Lyft, Instacart all of these companies. What they're trying to do is they're trying to get this labor intensive work done without really paying for the labor. They're trying to get employees to act like employees without paying for the privilege, without providing the guarantees, without fulfilling the responsibilities that go with having. Employees. And so they are exploiting that situation. And and I've said this a number of times, just over and over and over that if you take to heart that you're doing this as a business, you're not going to be exploited because you're taking control. But having said that, I also know that there's a huge, huge number of contractors who they don't do that. And more important, I think the reason that these companies are exploiting the status is that they know that they're going to get a ton of contractors who are thinking like employees, and, in fact, they're banking on it. They need it to happen. Their business model actually relies on that. These companies, they play a lot of manipulative games to try and control drivers. I think they're shady as all get out about the way they do it. And a lot of it is it's not a direct control. It's not saying you've got to do this. You got to do that. But they'll threaten Deactivations, not specifically. They'll not say, okay, if you don't take more orders, you'll get Deactivated. But they're always throwing out these warning letters and Deactivation letters for just calling it fraud without telling people what they're doing. They're using that as a way to manipulate as a way to bully drivers into thinking that they've got to submit that they've got to conform to whatever, but they'll never directly tell you that you have to do certain things, because if they do that, they get in trouble because they've crossed that line of control. So I think there's this behavior on their side that I really do believe they're crossing the line, but they're doing it in just shady enough way. That and that was shady. S-H-A-D-Y and not that other word. But you could probably say the other word as well, but they're doing it in just such a way that you might have trouble proving something in court, you know, and it's that kind of stuff that I think, okay, that's exploitative. You look at the way that they advertise for contractors. You look at some of the ads that they place and they look like job. I mean, they look like job advertisements. It looks like you apply for a job. And so there's a lot of that whole process about the way they bring people on that. It feels like you're getting hired for a job. They still want to have kind of that direct relationship where it's more like they're managing you than it is a business to business relationship. They'll put all the wording in the contract just right. I understand that I am an independent contractor, and I am not an employee. Yeah. Doordash we get that. But we also know that you don't get that. We know that you think of us like employees because the thing is they need they absolutely have to have a certain number of people that think like they are employees. They have to have a certain percentage of their drivers that are going to take everything that's offered to them. They have to have a certain percentage of their contractors who are going to think and act like employees, because otherwise they would not have they wouldn't be able to get all of their orders, all of their rides, all of their deliveries fulfilled. They wouldn't even come close. They have to have that. And they know this. And so ultimately, what it comes down to is they're offering it as a business to business relationship, but they don't want you to think of it as a business to business relationship. They still want you to think of it as an employee employer relationship. And they encourage that enough that I think they're really crossing the line into exploitation. I think that there are enough things that they don't tell you when you sign up. And honestly, when you sign up, you should be paying attention. It's up to you to pay attention and look up this stuff that when you sign up and you agree to something that says, hey, I agree that I'm, an independent contractor will pay attention to what you just agreed to. That's your responsibility. But they know that enough people are not going to pay attention, and they're banking on that. And that's the kind of thing that tells me this is an exploitative relationship. You don't see any of these big companies saying, hey, you better double check your insurance. All they want you to do is submit your insurance. They know they absolutely know that 90% of you are uninsured because most personal car insurance companies will not cover you on a delivery. It's a little different with a ride share. When they provide some insurance, there's a little more coverage there. But for delivery people, they know that you're not insured. Most of you are not insured. Probably a lot of you that are listening that haven't listen to me, maybe Hound and Hound about making sure you got the right insurance. Most of you are not covered when you're out on deliveries, and maybe a lot of you don't even realize it. But there's never any warnings about that. They know you're not insured. They know that literally millions of drivers are at risk anytime they're out on a delivery, and they don't say a word about that. You know why? Because if they were to tell you when you're signing up that, hey, you might end up having to pay a little extra on your insurance to make sure you're covered. To get that, add on to get that writer to get that endorsement, or you might have to change your insurance because your insurance may not cover you. You might have to get commercial or hybrid policy. If you got to pay more for something like that, you're not going to sign up and go out and deliver. And especially when 90% of gig workers are doing like 10 hours or less, they're not going to go out and pay more for insurance for something that's so very part time. They know this risk that is out there, but they're not going to communicate that risk, because if enough people know that they're not going to sign up, and again, we get back to that issue. They don't have enough people then to deliver. I think if enough people understood just how at risk they are when they're on deliveries, whether that's insurance or just the fact that there's no guarantee there is no minimum wage, you're completely on your own. There's no workers compensation, any of that stuff. If people understood that before signing up, I think that they would probably realize or that they probably wouldn't sign up as likely. And once again, they don't have enough people. And I think that's ultimately what it is. It's not that these big companies are lying, but it's more that they certainly aren't rushing to let you know exactly what you're getting into. And the fact that I think they're just banking on the fact that people are going to sign up with this employee idea with his employee mentality, and to the point that if enough people knew what it really was to be an independent contractor, they wouldn't sign up. All of that stuff says that the companies could not survive without that employee mentality, and that's the part that I really feel like is exploitative that. The bottom line is that these companies could not survive without a large percentage of their contractors approaching this like an employee. I think that's where the exploitation is. But I also think that's where the opportunity is, the opportunity is really in the same place. It's in that independence. But where it's an opportunity is because there's freedom. Guys. There's never been such a great opportunity to just go into business for yourself. I can tell you, when I got out of high school, when I was in College, he didn't have the opportunity that you've got to be just self employed to go out and do things the way you want to do when you want to do whatever way makes sense. If you wanted to do that, you actually had to start a business, and usually there's an investment and there's all this other stuff. And oh, my gosh, I know there were times that I took on some part time jobs just to make ends meet, but it was hard to do to work that around other schedules and different things like that. But if I could just go out on the fly like we can do now, it's just such a huge, huge difference. All of this freedom, all of this flexibility. And the reality is you can claim your rights as an independent contractor. You can say, no, I don't have to take every offer that you give me. I don't have to go where you want me to go. I don't have to take the orders you want me to take because you signed me up as a business, I have the right to choose what makes sense. And, oh, by the way, you're my customer now. You're not my boss. And if you're not paying me enough, I've got other customers who will. And that's huge. So here's the thing. And this is something I've been kind of beaten like a drum lately. Is that when you run a business, you know that your customer is going to try and screw you. They're going to try and get by as cheaply as they can. They don't care about your profit. They don't care about how well you do. All they care about is what they can get from you for as little as they can get. And that's what DoorDash and Uber and Grubhub are. They're your customers. And they're kind of like those shoplifting customers. They're going to try and get away with as much as they can get away with. But the thing is, when you run a store and you know that people are going to be that way, you run your business in such a way that even in that environment, you can still be profitable. And that's the thing as an independent contractor. Yeah. These guys are going to try and screw you. All right. And yeah, they're going to try and exploit to you. But you've got the control as a business owner that in spite of how they're going to act, you got to make the decisions. You get to be the one to choose how things happen. And that, I believe, is opportunity. Because I'll tell you what, if you've got an employer that's trying to screw you over, you don't have a whole lot of flexibility in that situation. And that's the thing. Everybody that wants to force these guys to hire you as employees is that the kind of employer that you want to have, you know, they're not going to all of a sudden become model citizens. The thing is, here's why I think that now I guess another reason I just think that there's such an opportunity in the gig economy. And it's just the fact that delivery and so many other gigs like that have been life savers for thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands in the pandemic, because here was a quick and easy source of income, and it wasn't this pity little income that might come out to two or $3 an hour. Not for most people. Anyway. You're talking about a lot of people able to bring in $20 $30, sometimes $40 an hour, just going out whenever it makes sense for them to go out. And when things got tough this last year, that made all the difference for a lot of people just putting food on the table. And it's just been the fact that you can do this, you lose your job or you have a job that just really sucks. And you can just go out and say, okay, I can do this maybe full time, even if it's just for a few months while I kind of get my bearings together, or I can go out when I get done with work, and I can spend two or 3 hours, and I can do this. And this is going to help me either make ends meet or it's going to help me pay off some bills. And how many people have paid down credit cards and all sorts of debts and student loans by doing this extra work? That that flexibility was not there not too many years ago. So I think gig work is a life saver for a lot of people. And it's a fantastic opportunity for people that may be because of their situation, might not as easily be able to get on to something else. Some of the stereotypes are very real. They shouldn't be there. There's no excuse for it, but they're still there. And some folks that are having trouble maybe finding work because of the color of their skin or their orientation, or a number of things like that can go out and make the money that they need to get by. And I'll tell you something, ageism is a huge thing. You get to people that you get to a certain point in life, and all of a sudden, employers don't take seriously what they have to offer. And it's harder for people to get into certain positions. It is harder for single moms to work a job when you've got your kids around. And so you've got all these different situations where this flexibility is a huge opportunity, that opportunity to get out there and not have to worry about some boss saying Yay or nay, that's a big deal. Self employment, I think, can be a fantastic thing, whether or not it's gig economy, whether it's operating a website and doing a podcast or finding ways that you can make a living without a boss there as the gatekeeper to your ability to make that living. It's just it's an incredible opportunity, I think in a lot of ways like that. And I'm going to tell you that gig work is for a lot of people. It can be this incredible gateway drug. I've used that term a lot. It's an introduction to being self employed. It's this chance at you start your business, you go out, you set your own schedule, you make your own decisions. And all of a sudden you realize I kind of like this. In fact, I don't just kind of like it. I can't go back. And that's me. I have a hard time thinking I could ever go back to being an employee. For me. I've kind of taken more of that route. That it's like the gateway drug thing where I started with the gig work. And it's allowed me to start building this business around the website and the podcast and different things. It's just there are all sorts of things like this where, man, I wish that that kind of opportunity had been around when I was younger, you know. And so I think it's both I think that, yes, these companies are exploiting the independent contractor status. At least I think they're exploiting a lot of contractors who are going into that still thinking that their employees. But this is where I think I really struggle with all of this Prop 22 and AB 5 and Pro Act stuff, because I think on the one side, I see what these companies are doing. I see that, man. And really what it kind of comes down to, I think, to be blunt, is I think they're trying to trick people into being employees, and they're trying to do it at a massive scale when DoorDash has 2 million drivers, and I see them less up front about what people are signing up for. I see them constantly overstepping the way that they bully and pressure their contractors into compliance and all of that stuff. I look at that and I say, yes, something's got to be done. They shouldn't be allowed to do that. And so in some regard, I can understand this idea of legislating them into using employees, because traditionally, when you're using people that way, that's really the only way that you're supposed to do it, especially that kind of scale. But I don't think that that's the answer, because I also feel like that's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I look at what AB 5 has done in California. I look at how you actually AB 5 when you look at the judge's decision. One of the things the judge that just overturned AB 5, one of the phrases that he put in there was that AB 5 was and the ABC test, were understood to reclassify gig workers as employees. Now, that was never in the language. The idea that AB 5 was supposedly supposed to be about just defining independent contracting, but that was the goal. That really was what they were targeting was a gig economy. And yet I see what making that change did to so many freelancers independent contractors in so many other fields and people trying to just run their own business. And so much of that was shut down all over the state that it's like you can't do that. Even if you're trying to protect one area, if you're shutting down so many other people, there's got to be a different way. There's got to be a better way. But to have force these companies into employment status if that were in place, if they were employees, I think our survival as an economy and as people during the pandemic would have been very different because people don't have the freedom to just go out and make money on the fly when your employees and I know a lot of people say, well, there's nothing that stops these companies from being flexible and giving you freedom and all that stuff. And if you really believe that, how can I get you back into the real world? Because here think about this. Think about this here. If DoorDash and Grubhub and Uber and all these companies are constantly crossing the line as to how much control they're supposed to have over you when you're an independent contractor and when that control is illegal, do you think they're going to let go of that control when it's actually legal for them to control your schedule and all those different things like that? It's not going to happen. These guys are not going to become model citizens. And so that's that whole balance, though, between that exploitation, something's got to happen. I don't know what forcing them to hire all employees. I'm not sure is the answer because of what that does to so many people that just rely so heavily on this flexible schedule. So I don't know what the answer is, as far as what's in between it. And actually, this isn't about coming up with this answer. It's just kind of more like, okay, here's my thoughts. Is this an opportunity, or is this exploitation? But here's the thing I think both you and I can do. We can determine the answer for ourselves. We can decide, are we exploited, or is this an opportunity? You're going to make a choice. It doesn't have to be both. I think both are happening, but I think it's happening with some as exploitation and others it's opportunity. And a lot of it has to do with how you approach it, because you've got the right to take control. As an independent contractor, you can choose to be the boss. You can make your decisions. You can decide whether or not these opportunities are worth grabbing. You can decide which customers you have. You can bounce back and forth between customers. You can choose your times. You can choose your deliveries, your rides, all these different things like that, and you get to be the boss. And when you take control, when you become the boss, there's no way these guys going to exploit you. And that's why I say in four years, I don't feel like I've ever been exploited because I made the decision that I'm going to run my own business. I'm going to play their game. They say that I'm a business. All right. I'm going to be a business, and that's the choice that you can make. But I do feel like if you feel like this is an exploitative type of thing, then don't do it. If you feel like they're taking advantage of you, then don't do it. Go get a job somewhere. There's jobs all over the place right now. Go get a job somewhere where you can be an employee. You can have the protections that come with being an employee. And here's the deal. Here's the deal with this, the fastest and the quickest way I believe, to put an end to the way that they are exploiting this independent contractor model is if people took seriously what it means to be an independent contractor, or if they took seriously that you're doing this as a business. Because if you understood that there's no guarantees, my customer is going to try and screw me. There's no minimum wage. There's none of that. But you know what? I'm okay with that, because I've got the opportunity now, because here's the thing. You're going to have a lot of people that are going to see that lack of guarantee that there's no safety net. There's none of that. And they're going to say, no, this is not for me. And if people that expect it to be treated like an employee would quit signing up as an independent contractor, DoorDash and Uber eats and Grubhub Uber and Lyft. Those guys would not have enough people to fulfill the demand for them, and they'd be forced to change. So maybe the answer is to let the market happen. But for the market to happen, you got to start taking seriously what you're getting yourself into. You know, you got a choice here. Is this an opportunity? Is it exploitation? If it's exploitation, then get out of it. If it's an opportunity, then embrace the opportunity and take control and be the boss.