[Barack Obama abandoned his commitments to unions, and many top
staffers went to work for the gig economy. In his Netflix series
Working, the former president bears witness to workers’ suffering as
if it were immutable.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

IN OBAMA’S WORKING, THERE IS NO WAY OUT  
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Alex N. Press
June 12, 2023
Jacobin
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_ Barack Obama abandoned his commitments to unions, and many top
staffers went to work for the gig economy. In his Netflix series
Working, the former president bears witness to workers’ suffering as
if it were immutable. _

Barack Obama in his new four-part docuseries, Working. , (Netflix)

 

The cognitive dissonance becomes overwhelming around twelve minutes
into the first episode of _Working_, a four-part docuseries by (and
sort of starring) Barack Obama that premiered on Netflix on May 17.
Each episode looks at a different category of job, ascending up the
ranks: “Service Jobs,” “The Middle,” “Dream Jobs,” and
“The Boss.”

The first episode follows three people who do service work: hotel
housekeeper Elba, home care aide Randi, and delivery driver Carmen. At
minute twelve, we follow Carmen as she delivers meals for Uber Eats.
The camera zooms in on her phone’s display, where we can see the
app’s interface. Carmen accepts a delivery order that the app tells
her is $16.61 including the expected tip.

“They say that, but sometimes you don’t get a tip,” Carmen tells
us, her voice edging into frustrated sarcasm by the end of the
sentence. “Also, you don’t have their address, so it’s not like
you have an idea of how far you’re gonna go,” she adds.

In other words, a driver might accept an order only to then learn that
the cost of gas to deliver it is greater than the money she will make
from the order. But by that point, it’s too late. Efforts
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underway to change this by requiring a minimum trip payment for
delivery drivers, but thus far, Carmen’s powerlessness is the norm
for gig workers.

In the series, the only mention of the idea of minimum trip payments
comes when Carmen says, “It would be nice if you got at least
minimum wage,” only to continue, “but they don’t do that.”
There is little discussion of such policy questions about Uber or its
gig-economy counterparts, much less their right to continue on with a
business model whose main innovation comes down to labor arbitrage.

 

It is hard not to conclude that Carmen is powerless to change
anything. Apparently, so is Obama — which is odd, since the gig
economy as we know it today was effectively created during his
administration. Uber was founded two months after Obama’s
inauguration. The company launched Uber Eats in 2014. And many of
Obama’s former staffers have played a key role not only in expanding
the gig economy in general, but in the growth of Uber specifically.

David Plouffe, Obama’s 2008 campaign manager and a senior advisor to
the president, joined Uber as a senior vice president of policy and
strategy in 2014, using his access to the president’s circle to
combat what Uber’s then CEO Travis Kalanick described
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opponent: “the Big Taxi Cartel.” Plouffe also worked these
connections to export the company’s labor arbitrage abroad, playing
a key role
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Uber’s global lobbying effort.

Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager in 2012 and the president’s
deputy chief of staff, helped too. He introduced
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to Kalanick, advising
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company on how to smooth over frictions as it expanded into new
markets. Kalanick also considered hiring Jay Carney
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president’s former press secretary, to lead the company’s
communications strategy; instead, Carney joined Amazon as senior vice
president of global affairs in 2015.

Yet here is Obama, showing us the consequences of his milieu’s
actions, his failure to institute even relatively tame protections for
workers as Uber and other gig-economy companies spread across the
United States, burrowing into the marrow of our cities and towns until
they were so entrenched as to become almost unavoidable and
untouchable. We hear no mention of his former vice president’s
disinterest in this issue either, as gig companies’ continue apace
with their efforts
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ensure their workforce’s lack of protections by creating
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nonsensical “third category” of worker, a nefarious middle ground
between worker and independent contractor that allows bosses to better
exploit their employees.

Lest we forget, Obama reneged on his commitment to prioritize the
Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which among other things would have
instituted “card check.” This would mean that when a majority of
workers have signed union authorization cards, the union would be
certified without having to submit to the onerous process of holding a
National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election that is lopsidedly
stacked in bosses’ favor.

Without even going into the corporate-friendly bailout over which he
presided during the Great Recession, Obama also backed out of all
sorts of other commitments he made to the working class to win their
support. To name just one, here’s a speech
[[link removed]] he
gave during his first primary campaign in 2007 to a crowd in South
Carolina: “If American workers are being denied their right to
organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House,
I’ll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself. I’ll walk on that
picket line with you as President of the United States of America.”

Obama did not, in fact, join anyone on a picket line during that first
term — not even as Wisconsin gutted
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under right-wing governor Scott Walker.

Unions do show up in Obama’s show. One of the three workplaces the
series follows from the lowest-level employees up to the boss is the
Pierre Hotel in New York City. The hotel is unionized (though the show
never mentions which union; it’s the Hotel and Gaming Trades
Council, an affiliate of UNITE HERE) and it’s why the lower-level
workers we meet at the Pierre have been at the same job for decades,
unlike their counterparts at nonunion jobs.

“I don’t work for tips because I know I can count on my
paycheck,” says Elba, the housekeeper we follow in the first
episode, explaining that she makes around $4,000 a month. “You have
to be a member of the union here.”

As she and her coworkers discuss the threat automation might pose to
their jobs, they’re interrupted by the arrival of Beverly, one of
the hotel’s switchboard operators and their union representative.
“We’re talking about what happens when they replace you with a
machine,” one worker explains to her.

“It’s not that easy to take us out, that’s the reason why we
have a union,” says Beverly. “Look at the other hotels that closed
for good. A lot of the places where there is no union, those people
walk away with nothing.”

The scene leads into a narrated history lesson by Obama. A hundred
years ago, explains the former president, there were factory jobs, and
they were terrible. Then, Franklin Delano Roosevelt “pushed through
new protections for workers: the New Deal.” Obama notes that “a
conservative Supreme Court tried to block these changes from taking
effect.”

“Factory work was still hard, but the jobs were better,” says
Obama. The catch, though, was that domestic and farmworkers were
excluded from these protections. “Service workers,” says Obama,
are the “direct descendants of the legacy that undervalued certain
types of work. A lucky few work at union shops like the Pierre, but
with most domestic care jobs or in the gig economy, you’re still on
your own.”

So it’s luck that makes some workers union members and others not.
Too bad — yet another path that could resolve this problem turns out
to be a matter of chance, rather than, say, something Obama himself
could have worked to change during his two terms in office.

 

What is going on here? The show’s title, _Working_, is an homage to
Studs Terkel, the fantastic chronicler of working-class life in
America. In addition to his radio broadcasts, Terkel published
numerous books of oral history, and _Working_ is his most well
known. In the show’s opening minutes, Obama tells us that he
discovered Terkel as a young college student in Chicago, which was
Terkel’s city too.

The former president describes the book as “a chronicle of people
from every walk of life and what it was like for them to work.” We
hear a quote from Terkel about the method of his characteristically
winding interviews, which in _Working_ (the book) often elicit
specific, lively gold: “There is no one way to begin, it’s
arbitrary. But you want to find that quintessential truth. The essence
of a truth.”

What truth is Obama trying to get at? From the first episode, one
might reasonably conclude that the message is: none of us are stronger
than the system in which we live, and the best we can do is bear
witness to the suffering of American workers. Spoiler alert: that
remains one of the takeaways throughout the series.

At the end of episode one, Obama joins Randi, the home health aide, on
a grocery trip, listening to her explain that she now works at a
private, adult-supervised living home for the handicapped, a job that
gives her some flexibility as a single mother but which only pays her
$1,400 a month.

“A month?” Obama asks her.

“Yeah,” she responds. “I can get by but—”

“But at the end of the month, it’s tight,” says the former
president, finishing the sentence.

“It’s tight,” agrees Randi.

It’s a good start to an in-depth conversation about the poverty
wages Randi earns, but we don’t get much more. And this is about as
curious as Obama gets, which is one of the central problems with the
series. Labor reporting requires interest in the lives of
working-class people, and one of the more astonishing aspects
of _Working_ is that one gets the sense that Obama is not actually
interested in the people around him.

By contrast, Terkel’s curiosity about the people he interviewed was
unmissable. He resented the indignities and violence to which
capitalism subjected them. As he writes in the first sentence
of _Working_’s introduction, “This book, being about work, is, by
its very nature, about violence — to the spirit as well as to the
body.” This is a stronger moral judgment about wage labor than
anything we get from Obama, whose line of inquiry throughout the
series concerns whether jobs are just a paycheck, or a source of
meaning for people now, too. But surely he made it that far into
Terkel’s book?

Yet even with Terkel’s disdain for the wrongs inflicted upon human
beings by capitalist work, he never reduced his interview subjects to
mere suffering, as Obama’s _Working_ sometimes does; workers’
personality and, most importantly, intelligence shone through in his
interviews. It’s what makes them classics of the form.

Obama’s show seems more concerned with the former president himself.
Isn’t it odd that this great man is speaking to regular people?
Isn’t it funny that he went from president to television producer?

“This is Barack Obama,” he tells Beverly, the switchboard operator
at the Pierre Hotel when calling down to order room service. The scene
would be cute if surprising average people with the fact that
they’re interacting with the former president weren’t the part of
this gig that he seems to enjoy the most. The problem is that if
you’re bored of talking with working people, the onscreen results
will be boring, and _Working_ makes labor reporting dull. Thanks,
Obama.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Alex N. Press is a staff writer at _Jacobin_. Her writing has
appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Nation,
and n+1, among other places.

 

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* Labor History
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* gig economy
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* unions
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* Working Class
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* Barack Obama
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* low wage labor
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