[Labor organizing in California and around the world is pushing
platform companies to take extreme measures to defend their
exploitative business model.] [[link removed]]

UBER AND LYFT NOTCH ANOTHER CORPORATE VICTORY IN THE GLOBAL
EXPLOITATION OF ‘GIG WORKERS’  
[[link removed]]


 

Bama Athreya
November 10, 2020
Inequality [[link removed]]

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_ Labor organizing in California and around the world is pushing
platform companies to take extreme measures to defend their
exploitative business model. _

Credit: IDEA Cambodia, a nonprofit supporting app-based driver
organizing. In India, the Indian Federation of App-Based Transport
Workers is organizing drivers.,

 

Workers have just lost a bruising fight over so-called “gig” work
in California. In the lead-up to the election, Lyft even threatened
to suspend all operations in the state
[[link removed]].
Why would the company even think of pulling out of such a lucrative
market? This particular showdown was about who defines employment, and
it has global implications for the future of work.

The fight started in 2018, when California’s highest court had the
audacity to suggest that Lyft, Uber, and other platform
companies abide by the nation’s employment laws
[[link removed]].
The companies refused to comply. So in 2019 California’s legislature
passed a new law, Assembly Bill 5 (AB5) to reinforce the point. The
companies continued to misclassify their workers, so California’s
Attorney General brought suit against them
[[link removed]] in
May. Nearly a year later, Lyft’s response to a court order to obey
the law was to threaten to close down.

While fighting California’s Attorney General and courts, the
companies also aggressively pushed a ballot initiative to repeal AB5.
The initiative, Proposition 22, relied on false premises to make the
case 
[[link removed]]that
it would be good for drivers, as UC Berkeley’s Labor Center has
helpfully noted. When the California Attorney General created an
accurate description of what was in the measure, companies sued to
change the language to suit their PR spin
[[link removed]].

The Attorney General’s language remained on the ballot, but the spin
continued. Supporters stooped to tweeting the home address and other
personal information of Veena Dubal
[[link removed]],
an employment labor law professor at the University of California
Hastings College of the Law and a vocal critic of Uber and Lyft.

In the final days leading up to the election, the fight over Prop 22
took increasingly bizarre turns. Corporations took liberties with the
facts as they pushed in-app messages to passengers claiming “your
driver supports Prop 22,” forced DoorDash delivery people to drop
off Prop 22 propaganda
[[link removed]] with
their deliveries, and paid for deceptive mass mailings purporting to
be from progressive organizations with names like “Feel the Bern
[[link removed]].”

For the moment, this blitz of disinformation has succeeded. About 58
percent
[[link removed](2020)] of
California voters sided with Uber and Lyft to approve the ballot
measure.

In total, platform companies spent more than $200 million
[[link removed]] to
convince Californians to accept working conditions that are more
common to developing countries. One of their tactics was to place gig
worker statements
[[link removed]] in
media and social media outlets claiming that they benefit from their
supposed “flexibility” and “independence.”

I wish Proposition 22 supporters could meet some of the platform
workers I’ve met and interviewed [[link removed]] in
other countries. In many countries, workers have always had
“flexibility” and “independence.” They call it informal work.
And now that the apps have entered their economies, they are actually
losing their autonomy in frightening ways. Here are two stories of how
apps changed platform workers’ lives, but not in the ways they had
imagined.

In Cambodia, a country where the minimum wage is just a few dollars a
day, motorcycle rickshaws (tuk tuks) have been common for many years.
In the past, drivers would negotiate fares directly with passengers.
On a good day, a driver in the country’s capital city might net $10
or so. They had “flexibility” and “independence.”

They also have had very few other options for better, more stable,
higher-paying jobs. It wasn’t a great life—but today, it’s even
worse. Drivers I met last year told me you can no longer get a
passenger without an app. Drivers no longer have freedom to haggle
over fares or even know what fare will be paid before they accept a
ride. Take “Vuthy,” who told me he can no longer refuse a ride
even if the fare isn’t profitable. If he doesn’t accept rides at
whatever fare is set by the platform, he risks being “deactivated”
or removed from the platform. And this could mean losing his
livelihood.

Another story comes from India. Jude had been a successful
entrepreneur prior to the apps entering the market. He owned a half
dozen cars, employed a few other drivers and provided private hire car
services for clients in Chennai, a major Indian city. When Uber
entered the market, it promised it was looking for “partnership”
with independent contractors like him. Jude thought this seemed
promising. After all, his business experienced the normal friction of
getting the word out to clients, and the apps seemed like an easy way
to enhance his client base.

Little did he know that the apps would actually take away his
longstanding client base. Uber took client data not only from Jude but
from other private hire companies, as well, and far from providing
freedom or flexibility, wrecked the market for small companies by
monopolizing the client data. Jude and his drivers lost the ability to
negotiate fares and other terms of service. And he found he couldn’t
leave the platform without losing his entire client base.

This is the model that the companies defended in California. The
scripted testimonials for the Prop 22 campaign site were revealing.
Spokespeople admitted they used gig work to supplement regular income.
They talked about the need to “hustle.”

Here’s a typical recent response from @ChopstixKisser on Twitter:
“The whole gig economy/on demand model is what made it successful.
It’s one of my two hustles, the other being managing six apartments,
which is enough work where it would very difficult/impossible for me
to also manage a W-2 Style job.” Another sponsored post, from
“Clarence,” glorified the fact that the poster doesn’t earn
enough at his “day job” and needs the supplemental income. It all
sounds very much like India or Cambodia.

In the Prop 22 campaign [[link removed]], the companies
cheerfully claimed that “80 percent of drivers work less than 20
hours a week.” And this misleading statistic belies a critical
feature of their business model: the platforms rely almost entirely on
20 percent of the workforce to do almost all the work. They couldn’t
survive without that 20 percent of the driver base that works full
time and handles 80 percent of the actual gigs. Mary L. Gray and
Siddarth Suri describe this lopsided distribution of gig work in
detail in their excellent book Ghost Work [[link removed]].

So why do the companies need the 80 percent, who only provide a
fraction of the labor? One way to see it: the 80 percent are being
used as a huge on-demand scab labor force. So those who are extolling
the virtues of their “flexible” gigs should keep firmly in mind
that this “flexibility” exists because of the full-time workers
who keep the company solvent.

By debasing California’s labor classification laws, it’s possible
the companies are creating a slippery slope to undermine even our most
basic labor protections. Might we descend into a return to child labor
and modern-day slavery? While this may seem farfetched, the U.S.
economy is no longer “developed.” It’s converging with other
informal economies
[[link removed]] around
the world.

So it’s important to consider the situation of a Cambodian tuk tuk
driver in debt for his vehicle and unable to make payments because
platforms are causing decreasing fares. Or in India, where a union has
reported that drivers are committing suicide because their vehicles
are being repossessed by the banks. In both these countries, debt
bondage can lead whole families into slavery. Tech is transforming
these economies but workers aren’t better off, so we have to imagine
these ways in which the United States might be transformed.

From Cambodia to California is a shorter distance than we may think.
Prop 22 will only accelerate the pace of exploitation.

But as we see generational shifts in our national political life,
let’s turn our eyes to the wave of organizing, not only in
California but around the world, that compelled companies to go to
these extreme measures to defend their position. To be sure, the
passage of Prop 22 has dire implications if allowed to stand, as the
ballot initiative allowed corporations to set a dangerous undemocratic
precedent. Companies wrote Proposition 22 to undermine labor
protections. But here’s what else they did: effectively prohibit
elected representatives from revising the law in future.

As Bloomberg wrote
[[link removed]],
“Buried deep in the measure’s mind-numbing legalese, is a rare
proviso: The authors prohibit any change to the law unless it’s
consistent with the proposal’s intent and can garner a seven-eighths
majority in each house of the state legislature.”

This is Citizens United
[[link removed]] on steroids.

The corporate campaign to push Prop 22 was the most expensive ballot
initiative campaign
[[link removed]] in
California’s history. The lesson for corporations: expensive
campaigns to flood voters with disinformation works well. And we
should expect more of it in future campaigns—unless we rein it in.

Here’s the good news. President-Elect Joe Biden
[[link removed]] came
out in support of workers, and opposed the initiative, as did numerous
other major Democratic candidates. Senators Bernie Sanders and
Elizabeth Warren took very strong stands on the rights of “gig”
workers, and we have an opportunity to hold them to these positions.
And their support happened not by accident, but as a result of a major
wave of gig worker organizing around the United States, and mirrored
with successful organizing in other countries.

The companies have built their business model on a house of cards, but
the organizing is proving to be real and durable and based not on
disinformation but lived and shared realities. Time for fact-based
policymaking when it comes to labor protections for all workers.

[Bama Athreya] [[link removed]]

BAMA ATHREYA [[link removed]] is an
Economic Inequality Fellow with the Open Society Foundations.

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