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That's barely the case any more. The amount of gig-economy wage slavery in all countries is sky rocketing. No country is really spared. You can find people everywhere who are juggling e-scooter, ride share, food delivery etc jobs at an excruciating schedule for barely any money.

In Sweden in particular, it seems that the waves of refugees in recent years have only fueled this.



If those refugees are grateful for the opportunity to work and earn, and are in much better conditions now than in the countries they fled, and also wouldn't necessarily qualify for higher wage jobs because of language/cultural/educational barriers, why is that so bad? And if it allows more prosperous Swedes to enjoy the convenience of food delivery for a cost that they think is worth it, is that so terrible? To me, the market is working here. People are getting what they want. If these companies didn't exist, both customers and workers would be doing the next most attractive thing to them, which would be by definition worse from their viewpoints. Customers would be wasting their valuable time driving to get food or eating less appealing food at home, and workers would get some other menial, low paying job. If the only available jobs had a high minimum wage and benefits, then they would simply go unemployed and become wards of the state.


The problem is the market isn't efficient, and the middlemen (Uber, DoorDash, ...) are getting an outsized share of the revenue relative to their only essential contribution which is (automated) organization. They are only able to command that percentage because regulations filter out potential smaller undercutting competitors. That's also why they fail in "developing" countries with more relaxed policing. Not because there isn't the necessary wealth gap between workers and customers, but because they are undercut by "regular" black market workers.


If they really aren't adding enough value relative to what they extract, then they are opening up a competitive weakness that eventually should be exploited by a new entrant in the marketplace. Right now, the whole area is being opened up by these intermediaries, which are spending enormous amounts on marketing/advertising/promotion to increase customer awareness of the offering and to establish relationships with restaurants. Once this market is developed, a new entrant with a comparable offering but much lower take rate could make sense-- so long as they are very efficient and low cost in providing this service. The fact that DoorDash is making zero/negative profit now suggests that they aren't taking too much of the pie. If they were, they simply wouldn't be able to recruit couriers once the word was out that it was a bad deal.


Or they will die without replacement after having consumed existing capital (drivers' cars, vc money, consumers' ability to buy).




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