Name: Care.com Introduces Limited Benefits For Caregivers
Uploaded: 2016-09-15
Duration: 4 min 20 s
Description: Author Arun Sundararajan explains why it’s still a big deal

So this care. com seems like sort of a seminal moment in this whole debate over are these employees, should these workers have benefits or not. What's your take on it? Well I think it's a good glimpse into what the future of the social contract might look like. People who are not full time employees but who are attached to an institution like care. com getting some sort of safety net without being full time employees. So, this sort goes to the whole debate around a lot of these companies in the sharing economy. On the one had, these big companies are just building themselves on the back of these employees. They don't have to pay They don't have to invest in assets etc. On the other hand, they're also providing employment for many of these people who become micro entrepreneurs or make a living in a tough job environment. So, where do you come down on this? Is it good or bad? Well, I think the shift is fundamentally good for the following reasons, where moving the role of the individual From being a provider of labor or talent in exchange for a wage from the institution to actually being part owner, to being someone who runs a small business through an institution. So you go from working for a hotel To being an AirBnB host that's running a small business through the hotel. You go from driving for someone else as an employee to being an Uber driver. You from working in a retail store to being an Etsy seller. So, as the role of the individual shi From being laborer to being owner. We are going to, in the long run, reduce inequality, because we are spreading the ownership of capital in society, across a broader range of people. The challenges that we hit up against are that we have gotten used to the model of full time employment. It's been around for a long time and since been around for a long time we've constructed and funded a pretty healthy safety net, the social contract around that I mean you compare fulltime employment today Mm- hm. To something like what's described in the jungle, Upton Sinclair's book. You can see that the model of full time employment by itself isn't fundamentally good. It's the things that we've wrapped around it that are good and the funding models for the social contract that make it desirable. And so this move by care. com represents sort of a small step towards starting to construct A similar kind of social contract around the new models of work. So policies around that. What about traditional industries? So this is maybe good for these workers who are able to do this. But is it fundamentally taking away jobs from incumbent industries? I mean, in the case of Uber, it's not exactly, maybe not analogous. But in the case of Airbnb, the hotel industry, this is one of their big Beefs that use it. AirBnB, when you stay at AirBnB, you don't need to have all these jobs that a hotel would normally have. So, is that big picture? Can the sharing economy actually reduce, can it alter the job picture in a negative way in some of these incumbent industries? Well, it's certainly gonna shift some of what used to be me working for someone else. Towards me owning a small business that I operate through a platform. And so while we may, in the long run, have fewer hotel workers, we're going to have a lot more small business owners through Airbnb. They're gonna be putting in some of the labor. But this is sort of at the heart of the challenge here, right? Because we're used to thinking of jobs as units that involve full time and salaried. Mm- hm. The shift towards AirBnB is actually going to increase the amount that we spend on short- term accommodation. It's going to allow a much larger number of people to earn money providing short term accommodation. So, overall it's going to grow. The income that people who provide short term accommodations Modation of getting it's just going to reduce the number of people who make a living full time as hotel workers. Mm- hm. [ MUSIC ]

Author Arun Sundararajan explains why it’s still a big deal