"Spanfeller is a twat" (theaspiringengineer)
03/24/2019 at 13:14 • Filed to: None
0
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"Spanfeller is a twat" (theaspiringengineer)
03/24/2019 at 13:14 • Filed to: None | 0
| 6 |
I was at a restaurant called Ojo de Agua moments ago, it’s a chain restaurant and if you ever get to try it I strongly recommend that you have the eggs tatemados.
Anyway, a big part of this restaurant is the fact that there aren’t any waiters. You need to queue and find a table yourself and you cannot order from the table.
Or so it was. A Colombian company called Rappi (similar to deliveroo) started sending “associates” to Ojo de Agua. They would have offer you a 2.5 dollar discount if *you ordered your food from the app.*
The Rappi associate would then queue for you, buy your food, and take it to your table, with a good discount (the eggs tatemados are 6.5 dollars, for reference)
This way you downloaded the app, which is what Rappi wants, and the associate made an income from the purchase...which is what they want.
Rappi doesn’t only do food; you can ask the associates to bring you virtually anything... you can have then do so called “rappi favores.” I’m talking cash, I’m talking delivering unopened gifts to recipients, and I’m also talking about buying prescription medicine, or taking your car into a service... ANYTHING!
You just hire an associate at an hourly rate. Typically college students, these associates have a myriad of skills, and tend to also have quite a good reception.
This is, however, the ultimate expression of a gig economy, and it’s not an easy job to have. Your income is highly dependent on factors you cannot control, and since you’re an “associate” you must declare your own income instead of having your taxes automatically retained by Rappi’s accountants.
In other words, the associates probably don’t pay any taxes on their income since they probably don’t declare it. An associate makes on average 6,250 pesos a month, which is 40% of the average income in Mexico City. But, they don’t pay any taxes on it!
Plus, as associates, they aren’t automatically registered into the Social Security administration (which runs healthcare for 60-ish percent of Mexicans). Instead they would need to voluntarily join... and if you’re a 19 year old college student thinking about the new Nike shoes... you’re not thinking about the inevitable, and gradual, deterioration of your body. So of course you don’t pay into IMSS. Even if it would cost around 45 dollars a month to insure your dumbass(and any dependents if you have a wife or children).
-I must clarify that as employees, they would only have to pay 5 dollars a month out of their own income, and Rappi would need to pay the remaining 40 dollars from their own money-
Rappi has come up with a plan to deal with this. Which is to give private insurance to all of their associates. Which is nice! until you consider that they’re all young, relatively well paid individuals working in the safest parts of the city.
So, Rappi would save themselves the 40 dollar obligatory health insurance by making them associates, and by having what is essentially a super-low-risk pool of insurees, paying virtually nothing to insure their associates as well.
Magnificent.
Distraxi's idea of perfection is a Jagroen
> Spanfeller is a twat
03/24/2019 at 15:33 |
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That’s not internet of thangs though, it’s gig economy. IoT will be when a sensor scans your gut as you walk through the restaurant door and automatically decides you want the eggs tatemados. Or at a more simple level, the restaurant system detect s you walki ng in the door by connecting with you r phone, and sets up your regular order - my work can sell you the system to do that latter version ri ght now.
Can the associates get away with not paying tax giv
en that all the money is
passing through Rapp
i’s books and is therefore in theory visible to the tax man
? The guys in our
M
exico office
s were “self employed”
(and presumably not paying tax, we carefully never asked)
during t
he early days of our presence there when we were too small to
a
fford all the paperwork of setting up an offici
al presence to employ them. B
ut we eventually moved them to employee
s bec
au
se we got nervous that we were beco
mi
ng visi
ble enough that t
he
y’d get in trouble.
|
Spanfeller is a twat
> Distraxi's idea of perfection is a Jagroen
03/24/2019 at 15:51 |
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Well, the short answer is “Yes.”
-note that I'm not a tax attorney, this is just based on my own experience-
What an overwhelming amount of businesses do here is under report salaries, so for instance...a construction worker probably makes 9,000 pesos a month plus any union-ordered benefits but... this construction worker would be, under the eyes of the taxman and imss, registered at 3,000 pesos a month. Since most businesses do it, IMSS doesn’t see any sudden spikes... so they don’t report to SAT.
Any employee making less than two minimum salaries pays no income tax, and a negigble IMSS fee. So, these associates could be making 6,000-7,000 a month, but Rappi could cook the accounts to show 4,000 or they could also just say that it’s the responsibility of the associate to do the taxes. In which case, they need to pay a 7% income tax, but they don’t need to pay the IMSS fee, which would represent a significantly higher portion of their income.
Plus, the government is pretty happy with under-reported salaries since it’s better than
not
reporting income at all, half of the Mexican economy is informal, a problem that Peña Nieto tried to tacle. He alone raised the amount of money the government recieves by
fifty
percent!
Even though our tax agency was probably the best one in the world (Germany sends people here
to train
) at detecting fraud, when they send the information to our FBI, or to anyone who could actually enforce the tax collection it gets lost.
SAT underreports fraud to FGR, and FGR rarely acts out on this fraud. So on goes this circle of stupidity. Plus, the government often gives pardons to businesses who might owe billions in past taxes, as long as they get regulated from that moment on. Every president in my lifetime has sponsored deals like that.
Plus, this is at the Federal level, where shit sort of works. At the state level its even more stupid, Mexico City looses hundreds of millions of dollars a year due to irregular businesses, company frauds, unregistered vehicles, tampered water dues, all sorts of things.
Granted, the new president decided that SAT was too techy, and fired a lot of the programers and accountants there. So SAT is slowly turning into something like the IRS, and Mexicans will have to self report their taxes...
Which is hilarious.
davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com
> Spanfeller is a twat
03/25/2019 at 09:43 |
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Whoa - never thought of a restaurant using “gig waiters” contracted by another company. Will be interesting to see if Rappi comes to the US. There are plenty of people who’d have plenty of ways to use an assistant for errands from time to time.
ZHP Sparky, the 5th
> davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com
03/25/2019 at 11:03 |
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Isn’t that basically what TaskRabbits are? Probably peaked a bit too soon before the whole Uberization of everything took over.
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davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com
> ZHP Sparky, the 5th
03/25/2019 at 11:27 |
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Honestly didn’t know this existed, but not surprised.
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ZHP Sparky, the 5th
> davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com
03/25/2019 at 11:36 |
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Yeah they were pretty popular in SF probably 8 years ago or so, haven’t heard much about them since.