It is that time of year in Finland...

Tax records time

In Finland, they release the tax information for the top earners (everyone over 100K earned, though I think more are released in some regions) and publish them in the newspapers, so we can all be jealous of those who earn more than us. Often, it is tech people, or old money family businesses that make up the majority of the list, and each year people complain about there not being enough female representation, or the surprise low-level in comparison to others in the same role, like this year, a football coach.

My complaint is a bit different.

The highest earning individual was the founder of the Wolt delivery service, with €79M ($84M) earned in 2022. That is a pretty decent amount. But, my complaint is that this business model relies on access to cheap labor in order to operate. What this means in Finland, is foreign workers who don't have much opportunity to do anything else, so they are desperate and will do anything, working very long hours, often on "operating licenses" of another person, paying half their income to the license holder.

There was no mention of this in any of the articles I read.

And I am guessing this business model is the same all over the world where it is used, where people are not actually employed by the company, but are essentially freelancers. According to what I could find, the hourly rate is about the same as the lowest paid McDonald's workers. The difference is, McDonald's doesn't hire these kinds of people either, so, they are essentially forced to work and the work has almost no benefits other than "flexibility" of how much you work. Which I hear is something like 12 hours a day, in order to make enough money. And, it also means that they have to cover all of their own insurances and expenses. At least they can call themselves entrepreneurs.

Where is the line before this becomes a clear form of exploitation?

Sure, it is "opt-in" but what option do they really have, if the system is set up that they can't get a job elsewhere, other than the jobs that no one "local" wants to do? Perhaps this is some kind of right of passage to be included as part of society, but the government is also looking at ways to exclude people further, raising the bars to say, lowering the bar to kick people out if they don't meet expectations. I am pretty sure, that if this was an industry of Finnish workers, these kinds of conditions would be seen as unacceptable, yet the general view is that the people doing this now should consider themselves lucky to be able to earn anything at all.

In a country where they want people to integrate into the culture, what lesson are they learning?

However, what I think this highlights is how incentives operate and how people can be manipulated into acting a certain way. There is obvious incentive for businesses to maximize their profits, and what they are doing in this case is preying on people who don't have other options to meet their needs. So the workers are incentivized to do whatever it takes, regardless of whether it is appropriate or not.

Imagine if 20 years ago, a man said to a woman, what I want you to do is make sexual videos of yourself and I will sell them to people all over the world for a few dollars and give you 80% - is that female empowerment?

It used to be called pimping.

Yet now, it is a normalized activity and encouraged, because the incentive to make money is high enough that enough women from all over the world, including celebrities, are willing to go into sex work. There are multiple platforms filled with them - whole industries created to support - plenty of money going around, so that predominantly women can be objectified, but because they are "opting-in" it is okay, and they do so because they are incentivized enough to forget about all of the complaints they had about this kind of behavior, or how they judged women who did this earlier - because they want some too.

OnlyFans revenue in 2022 was $932 million, up 160% from the previous year. OnlyFans creators earned $3.9 billion, an increase of 115% from the previous year. The company's profits were $433 million, up from $61 million in 2020. OnlyFans has paid out $10 billion to creators since its founding in 2016, and the platform has over 2 million creators. Creators can earn money through subscriptions, where users pay a monthly or annual fee, and the creator keeps 80% of subscription revenue, while 20% goes to OnlyFans.

For those doing the math, while the company only takes 20%, the revenue for the company increased 160%, but only 115% for creators. This means that they are earing in other ways - probably advertising. But me than this, while they have given out an impressive 10B over the last 7 years, with 2M creators, that means there is an average of just $5000 each.

Lucrative.

But, this is the way things are going. Because the gig economy is required for normal people to make ends meet. People have to do what they can as living costs spiral, even whilst the investors and owners are making record profits. People used to complain about wage slavery, which is still a thing, but 40 hours a week isn't going to cut it, so people have to sell themselves as slaves in other ways too - from the safety of their own home, in a work from anywhere environment.

It would be interesting to what percentage of the creators do the majority of the income go and, cross reference that with where the creators are from. Are there work opportunities for them in other domains, would they be paid elsewhere similarly? It might not be the case for the top earners, but if the average earning is $5000, there are people earning much less than that.

Blac Chyna, also known as Angelina Renee White, is currently the highest-paid creator on OnlyFans, earning around $20 million per month from her 16.2 million subscribers who pay a $19.99 monthly subscription fee.

The math doesn't work on that - I don't know how it works, but if all those subscribers are paying $20, she should be getting 320M a month, minus the 20% the platform takes. But that aside, every year, she earns 48,000 times the total average.

We are shifting into an interesting world, with AI taking jobs, social unrest, rising prices and more and more people struggling to make ends meet. Actors are being replaced by animations, workers by robots and systems and we are being compartmentalized and diminished to a survival lifestyle. It is starting to look a bit like the world of Bladerunner.

Is this world we are creating empowering, or taking even more advantage of us?

We are driven by incentives and the most basic form is the desire to survive. With the right conditions, we will do just about anything and have done in the past. Those in control, create the conditions according to their incentive - to maximize their wealth. And with wealth, comes the power to make conditions even more favorable.

Including minimizing taxes.

There is a big difference in tax percentage between what the workers and creators pay, and the percentage the companies they work for pay. The gap keeps widening.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]