Anyone you'd hire would be risking breaking the law in the U.S. or some other country, plus you'd have no legal protection if they decided to screw you over.
This reminded be of the Planet Money episode on long-haul truck drivers [0]. It's a similar contractor v. employee (company driver) scenario. Not a happy story, unfortunately.
The CARES Act and state-level programs are paying unemployment assistance to contractors and self-employed individuals not usually covered by unemployment [0], [1].
Which is a one-off "world is burning down" case which no one planned for or expected. Hardy a long term plan by the VCs to take advantage of everyone else.
I'm guessing unemployment insurance didn't cover a lot of the rest of the unemployed either for COVID (as it ran out due to never being designed for this situation) so it came from taxes. In which case no one paid into the social safety net except through taxes (which Lyft/Uber are not exempt from).
Any remotely competent student of history can foresee occasional economic crises with high unemployment. That’s why we have a national unemployment insurance scheme.
Maybe you don’t foresee a pandemic, but only in the same way that you don’t foresee getting side-swiped when a car passes you while blowing its tire. Or having your house’s roof ripped off by a tornado. Totally unforeseeable events, but somewhat predicable circumstances.
The bailouts in crises are not one off because there’s always going to be another crisis.
Taking care of contractors who work for employers that arbitrage labor protections == corporate bailouts.
Even DOE is partly privatized both Sandia National Laboratories and Savannah River National Laboratory are run by private defense contractors for the government.
I don't know how much we should count defense contractors as "privatized" there's bidding[1] and the contractors are financially independent[2] but, due to the nepotism of the system defense contracts are quite flush with money and it seems like most contracts end up benefiting semi-retired military folks by giving them a cushy landing (though this is anecdotal).
I think power utilities might be a better place to look at privatization - but most of those (like PG&E) end up frequently running afoul of a lack of oversight while also not really out-performing public power utilities[3].
1. Often times with insanely high barriers to entry sometimes including being "non-public"
2. To my knowledge the only defense-ish contractor folks that have gotten bailed out are the more public facing ones like Boeing which do mixed public/private work.
3. Though this industry has a terrible track record across the board for being accountable, profitable and responsible. I might point at VT Yankee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont_Yankee_Nuclear_Power_P... as an example where the company just tried to dissolve itself before paying for cleanup out of its contingency fee.
The study examines a factory workplace which may already have a high-level of background noise. Perhaps the effect is non-linear? Anecdotally, two or three coworkers talking near me doesn't feel more distracting than one coworker on the phone.
Well, the dB scale is already deeply nonlinear. Adding a 50dB conversation to 40dB ambient noise results in… 50.4 dB total noise. Add two more people each talking at 50dB (at the same time!) and the total noise is about 55dB.
