1. It's not like it would be difficult to track all of the little chunks of time worked and add them all up. Everything is automated anyway, and nobody is filing time cards.
2. In the end, the wall clock is how workers experience time when they're out doing work for these companies. They get their bike out and go deliver food for a few hours, or get in their car and drive around the city picking up and dropping off passengers. It's not clear to me that the interstitial minutes between gigs should be considered free time for the workers that goes uncompensated. If they drop off a passenger and pick up a new one within five or ten minutes, they've been working continuously. They haven't had a chance to go home and take their socks off and relax. They're working. It seems like a step backwards for everyone's mental well-being to use technology to clock the exact minutes that they produce value for the company, and cut off their pay the instant they stop producing. It's like a widget assembly line monitored by cameras where workers get automatically clocked in only when they're physically touching the widgets, so that if they sit up to stretch, or walk over to the cabinet to grab a different tool, or even if the conveyor belt is sending the next widget over to be worked on, they stop getting paid. I wouldn't want to work like that.
3. The fact that someone can be doing work for multiple companies at the same time doesn't seem like such a big problem to me. If they're on a segment of a route in which they're simultaneously delivering a passenger and someone's lunch, they should get paid for both. And the same contiguous-time rules I mentioned in #2 above can apply - as long as they're continuously picking up lunches and passengers within a certain interval, they're working two jobs.
in response to 2 and 3: What about the status quo where gig workers are running 2-5 apps at once. If they are payed between trips, do they collect minimum wage from all companies?
1. It's not like it would be difficult to track all of the little chunks of time worked and add them all up. Everything is automated anyway, and nobody is filing time cards.
2. In the end, the wall clock is how workers experience time when they're out doing work for these companies. They get their bike out and go deliver food for a few hours, or get in their car and drive around the city picking up and dropping off passengers. It's not clear to me that the interstitial minutes between gigs should be considered free time for the workers that goes uncompensated. If they drop off a passenger and pick up a new one within five or ten minutes, they've been working continuously. They haven't had a chance to go home and take their socks off and relax. They're working. It seems like a step backwards for everyone's mental well-being to use technology to clock the exact minutes that they produce value for the company, and cut off their pay the instant they stop producing. It's like a widget assembly line monitored by cameras where workers get automatically clocked in only when they're physically touching the widgets, so that if they sit up to stretch, or walk over to the cabinet to grab a different tool, or even if the conveyor belt is sending the next widget over to be worked on, they stop getting paid. I wouldn't want to work like that.
3. The fact that someone can be doing work for multiple companies at the same time doesn't seem like such a big problem to me. If they're on a segment of a route in which they're simultaneously delivering a passenger and someone's lunch, they should get paid for both. And the same contiguous-time rules I mentioned in #2 above can apply - as long as they're continuously picking up lunches and passengers within a certain interval, they're working two jobs.