“There Is Nothing Inevitable About Exploitation”: The Future Of The Gig Economy Is Up To Us
By: Katie Tandy
Tags: Labor Movement, Exploitation, Civil Rights, Workers Rights, Gig Economy

How did you find yourself swimming in these waters? What informs the work you’re doing?

After September 11, I started talking to taxi workers who had experienced a lot of hate violence as a result of the 9/11 attacks. What I learned in that process was that many of them, in addition to experiencing hate violence, were also not making any money.

And I didn’t understand how — in America — you could work for 12 hours a day and go home with no money in your pocket, or sometimes having lost money. That got me interested in the concept of independent contracting as a space where a lot of immigrant workers and subordinated racial minority workers — including those in my family — find themselves.

You don’t need to have social, political, or economic connections [to get these jobs] which is the way that a lot of native workers have connections. You also ostensibly don’t have a boss which is very appealing — especially for people who are limited English speakers.

But the real reason these jobs are so readily available is because they’re really bad jobs. They’re low-paying jobs — they’re hard jobs without protections.

So I started studying the taxi industry. And as that happened, Uber and Lyft hit the streets of San Francisco really proliferating the independent contractor model locally, and then nationally and internationally — not just in the taxi industry, but also in the service sector more broadly.

My concern has always been and continues to be… if we allow these companies and their practices to be normalized and legalized then the few protections that we have — particularly for the most marginal and vulnerable workers in the United States — are going to disappear. And the model will spread across the service economy.

We will enter (we are already there to some degree) another Gilded Age where people work really hard and can’t afford to pay for food, much less achieve something like property ownership or the possibility of entering the middle class.

You’ve said that the most successful labor organizers have eschewed ‘holding hands with capital.’ When we talk about holding hands with capital, how are we talking about it? How do we envision a world in which companies can make money so to speak, but not predicate their business model on exploitation?

So I think that right now we’re at a crossroads, and there are two options moving forward…

There is the option of exploitation, normalizing this kind of work where you have people earning by the piece, not earning a predictable wage. If they’re injured on the job, or if they’re laid off, they’re unprotected. We can normalize this, and massify it, expand it to other industries, and as problems arise — as workers show us that they’re not making enough money to feed their families or to be housed — then we will, maybe solve the problems that are posed by these business models down the road…

Or we can step forward in the shadow of this pandemic and the Black Lives Matters uprising and say, okay. We know that this economic inequality in this country is expanding, that fewer and fewer people are protected by the laws that were written to create a safety net for workers, and we can enforce existing laws and regulations against these companies such that they have to abide by minimum wage laws, overtime laws, just like any other company. Just like Walmart and McDonald’s and Burger King.

Let me interrupt for one second — is the crux of this problem the misclassification of workers as freelancers?

Yes. I think that the crux of this is misclassification. Certainly, there are real freelancers in this country, people who are truly independent contractors. Plumbers, small business people, carpenters — traditional trades in which people are independent contractors in which they get to keep the fruits of their own labor and are not working for a large corporation.

But in this [gig] economy, what we’re talking about are workers who are very clearly employees of their companies and the ways in which those companies have gotten away with misclassification.

And that is rooted in their economic and structural power, their ability to avoid lawsuits, their ability to hire armies of lobbyists and attorneys. The fear that they instill in government enforcers. These are the things that have kept workers from being able to claim their rights in this economy. And I think because of everything that’s happened in the last year because of worker agitation — because we’ve clearly seen in the pandemic what the exploitation is and what it looks like — it does seem to be a turning point where government entities are more willing to enforce existing laws so that they’re not misclassified.

Workers’ rights need to grow and not diminish. These workers are, as a majority, a subordinated racial minority workforce and they deserve the same rights and protections as every other worker.

Something that Public Rights Project centers in their work is emphasizing that we don’t need to overhaul or write an entirely new slate of laws—we just need to equitably enforce the ones we have. I’m curious whether you think we have sufficient laws on the books, but there isn’t the energy or ironically the ‘capital’ around it to enforce it?

That’s exactly right. Laws aren’t getting enforced for a few reasons. One, because of the state of arbitration law in the US. These companies have really tight arbitration agreements which prevent enforcement of the law. So you can’t certify a class of workers in court because workers have all signed these arbitration agreements that take them to private arbitration as opposed to public court.

So the laws can never be enforced in that sense — that’s one really big reason.

And then you don’t see a lot of state enforcement by Attorney Generals or City Attorneys or the relevant state official because they’re so worried about a, the political ramifications of standing up to big tech. And b, they don’t have the resources. As one government official told me, “we don’t have the resources to be papered by Uber’s lawyers! We’re a small office.”

I would say that we could and should definitely consider growing our employment and labor laws, but I am 100% on board with Public Rights Project stance, that the existing employment and labor laws need to be enforced.

If we pull back the camera to a bird’s eye view…when we talk about the capital L ‘Labor Movement,’ what does that mean to you? Where are we in that continuum? How is the gig economy both exactly the same and deviating from what we’ve been doing?

You know, it’s a great question. The labor movement is definitely in an exciting upswing. There seems to be, to put it crassly, two camps in the ‘big L’ labor movement. The people who believe that we’re only going to regain momentum by organizing and engaging with workers and building a movement.

And then people who think that the best way to grow the middle class is to forgo traditional labor organizing, and behave more like Capital or engage in business unionism.

And I very much fall in camp number one as I think that most rank and file workers do. I think that the kinds of organizing that we’re seeing in the gig economy are reminiscent of the organizing that we saw at the beginning of the 20th century before the passage of the New Deal laws that gave us our system of worker protections.

Meaning these workers are self-organizing — they are militant workers who are interested not just in being a member of a union, but in having a democratic workplace, and improving their working conditions, if necessary, through direct actions.

I think what we see in the gig economy is very reminiscent of what we’ve seen in US history, people who are just absolutely deprived of all ability to survive despite the fact that they work really long hours. They’re not getting the fruits of their labor and the law isn’t necessarily on their side and so they become militant, and they engage in radical organizing.

It’s frankly really inspiring to see. There’s something about the way that they’re organizing and what they represent, that is serving as a catalyzing effect. I think that the gig economy workers who are organizing have really influenced Amazon workers, they’ve really influenced and inspired white-collar tech workers in Silicon Valley. I think that they have sparked all of our imaginations in terms of what radical organizing can look like.

I’m curious. I totally agree that workers and consumers and local governments are collectively recognizing the role of exploitation in these economies. If we were able with a megaphone to speak to the average American human who uses all these services, a person overwhelmed by apathy…

Where should we be asking people to put their energy? Are we encouraging boycotts? Are we encouraging ‘Call your Senator!’ What do you think is the most useful thing to tell people to try to move the needle?

I think having conversations is the basic and most important thing that everyone can do. Have conversations about why it is that Uber and Lyft prices have all of a sudden gone up in California, even though they got Prop 22 passed.

Why it is that even after Prop 22 passed workers are still not making a living wage, despite the fact that the company promised workers that they would. Having political conversations with one another is often an underestimated political force. Tell stories of gig economy workers and what their lives are like — sleeping in their cars, internal migrant workers driving from LA to San Francisco to make a living.

The other thing that I think people can do in this particular moment is support the Pro Act, which would unequivocally give these workers a right to organize.

Rideshare Drivers United, Gig Workers Collective, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance — a lot of these associations of workers are not getting funding from unions because it’s dangerous to fund organizing when workers are independent contractors or might be considered independent contractors. Independent donations help support them…

These are things that could really change the power dynamic.

Is there anything that I’m not thinking about that you are that you’re excited about or frustrated by or just want to include in this conversation before I let you go?

I think that part of what has gotten lost in this story, from both a legal perspective and from a cultural perspective, is the important shifts we are witnessing — people are no longer necessarily being controlled by in-person bosses, but instead are being controlled by algorithms.

It is important and necessary for people who are just consumers of the gig economy, to understand that down the line, their own work lives will be impacted by the practices in this economy. It’s important for them to make that recognition now, to join the workers in the fight against these exploitative practices.