Not the OC, but I’ve heard that comment line often:

- what appears like sweatshops are actually significantly preferable working conditions for the local population; workshops are hot and crowded sure, but it’s sheltered and beats back-breaking farming, where pests can eat your yearly revenue overnight; (that point you agree with, as far as I can tell)

- so much that, in some conditions “sweatshops” are a positive thing and local people are excited over it: they show up early, some singing, in their best clothes; (I have no evidence of this handy right now, you might disagree but if you read the first point, it shouldn’t be a surprise); example of that is the young rural Chinese workers who were happy to be hosted on bunk beds at Foxconn and others because that meant they could save more money, talking about it like Facebook grads talk about free food; that effect might not last, doesn’t appear to have for Foxconn (or Facebook);

- in the early conditions, “sweatshops” are great and external political forces trying to ban them, or more often regulate them out of profitability i.e. existence, comes off as horribly misguided attempts; an extreme version of “better is the enemy of good” difficult to parse for a population without many options;

- adding expensive controls works against workers’ expressed interests that could be either a. legitimate but conditional (they need the money and the local standards are low, working fast is a tiring but reasonable way to achieve their goal) or b. the capitalist version of Stockholm syndrome. In my experience, it’s nowhere easy to sort the two edge-cases apart. If that’s the case, a market-liberal option is to let bad employers loose their workers by making sure there’s low employment overall, the places with real opportunities can poach them away. Also essential: personal growth needs to happen; I wasn’t super hopeful that “the market” would deliver until Lambda school.

That line of reasoning has been the first criticism of trade and workers’ unions since the XIXth century and the vertiginous growth of the Industrial revolution: they defend current tradesmen and employees against newcomers. I think trade unions can do amazing things to help spread the wealth but I would be wary about that edge.

There are newer arguments in favour of Uber in that sense:

- how easy it is to get a job, fast even: a massive upside of Uber is that you can enrol under a day and get paid within seconds of dropping your passenger; people with stranger schedules, deaf people, with non-violent criminal background have testified in that sense; anyone familiar with “Growth”, especially on a platform would recognise the approach;

- at this point, “unintended” consequences are widely documented; public servants should expect rules like that would back-fire, and adapt their rulings; Uber’s margins or lack thereof are public; other similar companies have left markets, leaving their workers in the dust; it’s easy to confuse the valuation of an IPO with free cash, to mistake Growth for Profit (God knows every reporter covering tech makes that mistake) but I doubt that Uber can afford to raise compensation by a lot;

- there are now many alternatives in the gig-economy: bad employers cannot retain workers; e.g. Amazon’s warehouse would not retain anyone if they were that bad. I’m less familiar with Amazon and convinced by that one, but if you go on money-making/saving forums, you’ll notice how so many contributors have tried and compared dozens of gig-platforms. The common thread? Everyone there started by being excluded from the standard employment market by personal circumstances, unintended consequences of regulation, prejudice or sometimes just being a terrible human begin. But that’s the starting point.

I really don’t think that the gig economy is the solution: banning 29-hour limits, having incentives to accommodate for handicap, family life, etc. for any business that can shift hours also need to be in place. Few people want a series of gigs; for the few who do, what many of those companies have done isn’t worse than the alternative. For the many who want a stable, predictable job, I don’t think the solution is to regulate industries where tasks are, say, very time-specific.

Disclaimer: I’ve worked for Deliveroo (the non-US equivalent to Doordash) and dealt with those questions a lot. I’m overall proud of the work there, from many personal contacts with riders; I also have a litany of complaints handy, mainly because it was my job to prioritise them all (and there were a lot and many were really bad but not as bad as unemployment/dealing drugs/failing to make it as a Grime singer).

I would have a more critical take against Uber Taxi, mainly around how they abused the financial illiteracy of their workers. That’s one aspect I would certainly want to see regulated.