According to free market theories, we should all be selling our labor freelance.
This is incorrect. If the disutility to an employer of absorbing short term risk is lower than the disutility to the employee, it makes perfect sense. And similarly, if an employer has a comparative advantage over the employee for hustling, specialization makes sense.
There are also large tax incentives (most notably relating to medical spending) for full time employment.
"Free market theories" don't generally oppose risk mitigation strategies, specialization or exploiting economies of scale.
In more general terms employment is an agreement between employer and employee. If you're willing to give your employer a better price for your labor in return for some measure of security you'll probably find an employer with whom you can come to some arrangement, assuming there's any demand at all for your skill.
Where I work we have a ridiculously complicated project with crazy business rules and hundreds of thousands of C++ lines written over twenty years. It takes an entire year for someone to become productive. My employer pays people on that project very well and tries to keep them happy so they won't leave and take that year of training out the door.
Those are good points. I should have clarified, I meant a naive interpretation of free market theory.
I'm only a dabbler when it comes to economics, but I think the field of the "theory of the firm" is interesting. And one of their primary topics the question of why all labor isn't sold on a free market.
The Theory of the Firm is an interesting and foundational one, but we should be careful to define "free market" in this context. A labor market still exists inside, outside, and between firms. Firms are simply organizing small aspects or chunks of it. They are both part of, and subject to, the broader labor market.
ToTF is actually a very interesting framework through which to evaluate the "Sharing Economy." It suggests that transaction costs for certain goods and types of labor have been lowered to the point where freelancing / ad hoc exchange makes sense. But there is still an organizing force underlying these pockets of the market. Lyft and Uber haven't eliminated the previously existing firms in the taxi marketplace. They've organized the market more effectively, and in some cases, they've lowered transaction costs for the marginal labor supply who otherwise would not have entered the market. They have also increased and aggregated demand, further incentivizing latent supply to come online. The story of Lyft and Uber is largely a story about how technology made inefficient markets a lot more efficient.
I'm not sure I see the connection between these companies and the plight of the middle class in America. That's where the author of this piece loses me. It's almost as if he's covering two interesting, but tenuously related topics in the same piece. The "hustling" imperative is an interesting one, however, and he's on to something with that.
moreover comparing the "hustling" in Lyft to the traditional "hustling" of taxis makes it seem like a vastly superior improvement (instead of comparing the "hustling" in lyft to the 40-year-secure jobs that americans of the 50s had).
The 'hustling' imperative comes about from inflationary economics. While we had inflation in the past, the general security of previous generations was financed through debt expansion. As the total amount of debt is maximizing the social capacity for trust, we can no longer finance the security of contemporary generations. Ironically, 'taking care of' previous generations came at the cost of stealing it from present generations.
Not to worry, Europe will be seeing this sooner or later (probably not the Nordic countries, as they have low headline inflation rates).
But what exactly is the difference between a freelance contract and an employee contract? You can work freelance for a company for several years? Aren't all the employee benefits just negotiable things that a freelancer could negotiate as well? I think in that wider sense everybody is a freelancer. Everybody has to decide for themselves what job to take on, and what compensation they get. Job security is also something that has a certain value.
You can maybe argue that some people are completely unable to make those decisions and society should just make the decisions for them ("you are going to be a plumber" and so on...). That line of thought quickly leads into weird philosophical territory, though (freedom, free will,...).
This is incorrect. If the disutility to an employer of absorbing short term risk is lower than the disutility to the employee, it makes perfect sense. And similarly, if an employer has a comparative advantage over the employee for hustling, specialization makes sense.
There are also large tax incentives (most notably relating to medical spending) for full time employment.
"Free market theories" don't generally oppose risk mitigation strategies, specialization or exploiting economies of scale.