gig economy
420 primary on covid
promote to 2nd on bezos
see lobbying
crony and disaster pending, aggressive lobbying
foreign owners?
aha omg: addiction plus last bits of extraction
doordash funder eric adams nyc
CA 4 23
Across the country, companies with significant foreign ownership, like Amazon, Uber, DoorDash, and Airbnb, have used their money to influence the outcome of elections and to advance political agendas in their favor.
We deserve a democracy by and for the people of California, not multinational corporations. I urge you to vote AB 83 out of the suspense file.
oddly airbnb and lyft good guys?
vs lobbying?
judd pop info 1 25
after a violent mob stormed the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, hundreds of corporations took action to communicate to the public that democracy itself was more important than maximizing their political influence. These corporations pledged to stop donating to the 147 members of Congress who voted to overturn the election that day — or stop all political donations — in the wake of the attack. In both cases, the message was the same: standing up for democracy is more important than transactional politics.
Four years later, there has been no meaningful change in position among the 147 members who voted to undermine the democratic process. Except for former Congressman Tom Rice (R-SC), who retired in 2023, none of the members have expressed any regret about their vote. During the 2024 campaign, President-elect Donald Trump repeatedly called January 6, 2021, a "day of love" and pledged to pardon members of the mob who were convicted of crimes. Trump's candidacy was enthusiastically embraced by the same members of Congress who voted against certifying Biden's victory.
And yet, almost all corporations who pledged to stop supporting the politicians who voted to undermine democracy after January 6, 2021, have resumed their contributions.
On January 11, 2021, for example, Amazon released the following statement:
Given the unacceptable attempt to undermine a legitimate democratic process, the Amazon PAC has suspended contributions to any Member of Congress who voted to override the results of the US Presidential election. We intend to discuss our concerns directly with those Members we have previously supported and will evaluate their responses as we consider future PAC contributions.
Beginning in September 2022, however, Amazon quietly resumed donating to members who participated in an "unacceptable attempt to undermine a legitimate democratic process." In October 2022, Amazon told Popular Information that its policy was "not intended to be permanent." Amazon justified his reversal by noting that "[i]t’s been more than 21 months."
As of today, Amazon has donated to dozens of election deniers, tens of thousands more to committees dedicated to putting those members in power, and recently contributed $1 million to Trump's second inauguration.
Similarly, on January 11, 2021, AT&T released a statement saying its federal PAC had decided to "suspend contributions to members of Congress who voted to object to the certification of Electoral College votes."
Thirty-five days later, on February 22, 2021, AT&T donated to the House Conservatives Fund, the Leadership PAC of Congressman Mike Johnson (R-LA). Johnson, who is now the House Speaker, voted against certifying the election. Today, AT&T has donated over $1 million to over 100 members who voted to overturn the election. It also is a major donor to Trump's second inauguration.
The promise keepers
While most companies took the path of Amazon and AT&T, there are a few companies that have stood by their principles. Popular Information has identified 10 companies that pledged to stop donating to members of Congress that voted to overturn the election and, over the last four years, have not broken that promise.
Farmers Insurance
Following the Capitol insurrection, former Farmers Group CEO Jeff Dailey released a statement promising to suspend political donations. “Like many Americans, we were horrified by the acts of violence that took place in our nation’s capital. While we recognize and support all Americans’ right to peacefully protest and exercise free speech, we strongly condemn acts of violence and hateful rhetoric,” Dailey said in the statement, according to CNN. Since January 6, 2021, the insurance company has kept its promise and has not donated to any members of Congress who voted to overturn the election.
Unlike Farmers Group, several other insurance companies — including Cigna, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Allstate — broke their promises to withhold their money from those who voted against certifying the 2020 election results.
Airbnb
After January 6, 2021, Airbnb released a statement promising to withhold donations from those who voted against certifying the election. “Airbnb strongly condemns last week’s attack on the US Capitol and the efforts to undermine our democratic process,” the company said. The company also released a safety plan for the inauguration, including canceling Airbnb reservations in Washington, D.C., made by those associated with a hate group and banning individuals involved in the Capitol insurrection from the platform. Since January 6, 2021, Airbnb has kept its promise and has not donated to any members of Congress who voted to overturn the election.
Expedia Group
While Expedia Group and Airbnb have not given any money to election deniers since 2021, other travel and hospitality companies have reneged on their vows to do the same. Marriott International and Hilton Worldwide, for example, have both donated to former Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
Nike
In January 2021, Nike released a statement promising to halt donations to members of Congress who voted to overturn the election. “Nike’s Political Action Committee (PAC) helps our employees support elected officials who understand our business and whose values align with our mission of serving athletes. These nonpartisan values rely upon upholding the principles of democracy,” the statement said. “Nike’s PAC will not support any member of Congress who ignores these principles, including those who voted to decertify the Electoral College results.” Since the Capitol insurrection, Nike has kept its promise and has not donated to any members of Congress who voted to overturn the election.
Clorox
Since 2021, Clorox has not donated any money to election deniers’ campaigns. Ecolab, a company selling similar products to Clorox’s, promised to stop donating to congressional candidates who previously voted against certifying the 2020 election, according to CNN. But during the 2024 election cycle, Ecolab donated thousands of dollars to Steve Scalise (R-LA), Kevin Hern (R-OK), and other members of Congress who tried to overturn the 2020 election.
General Mills
While General Mills upheld its pledge after January 6, 2021, Kraft Heinz has put tens of thousands of dollars into the hands of election deniers after making a similar vow not to do so.
Holland & Hart LLP
Holland & Hart, among the top 200 earning law firms in the world, has not donated to anyone who voted to overturn the 2020 elections. In contrast, Cozen O’Connor, an even bigger firm, reneged on its promise.
Qurate Retail
Unlike other retail brands like Amazon and Walmart that have not followed through on their vows not to give money to election deniers, Qurate Retail has kept its promise.
Whirlpool
Whirlpool, which terminated its political action committee in early 2023, did not give any money to people who voted to overturn the 2020 election. While Whirlpool kept its promise, competitor General Electric did not.
Lyft
Lyft has kept its promise to withhold donations to election deniers after January 6. While Uber never made such a promise, the company and its CEO recently donated $2 million to Trump’s inauguration fund.
===
aha 221: wage theft, not just farmworkers or indic rest mgr: amazon and other bigs corps do it, algo? max profit /extract built into corp DNA
// gig economy? stole tips for wages; bezos steps down/sideways?
https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/amazon-wage-theft/
lil sis
our work also helped broader national campaigns aimed at the investors, bankers, insurers, and attorneys behind the fossil fuel industry. Our research on Liberty Mutual’s director Jay Hooley’s board membership with ExxonMobil contributed to action backed by a range of groups, while our profile of the law firm Paul Weiss aided the growing #DropExxon campaign among law students. More recently, we began what will surely be a long project of mapping out the Biden administration’s ties to the fossil fuel industry - in this case, revolving around Ernest Moniz’s influence on Biden energy transition team.
On top of all this, we continued mapping the power in many other ways, from examining the antics of Puerto Rico’s debt vultures and Act 22 investors, to scrutinizing the powerful law firm running Trump’s Justice Department and the efforts of Uber and Lyft to stifle gig worker rights in NYS (see coverage in *Vice* and the *Markup*).
1220 merc
p.A6
Political influence
End campaign spending by foreign-influenced U.S. firms
By Michael Sozan
Although the aftermath of the presidential election has dominated headlines since Election Day, California saw a development that strikes at the heart of its own self-governance. Foreign-influenced U.S. corporations spent tens of millions of dollars to help pass Proposition 22, invalidating a California law and allowing the companies to classify their workers as contractors instead of employees.
One of these corporations - Uber - is partially owned and controlled by the government of Saudi Arabia. Another corporation - Lyft - is partially owned by a Chinese conglomerate. This means that Saudi Arabian and Chinese investors played a role - at least indirectly - in determining the fate of important California policy. The time has come for state and federal leaders to pass common-sense laws to stop foreign influence in our elections via American corporations.
Ten years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its disastrous ruling in Citizens United, giving corporations the right to unlimited political spending. Since then, independent groups unrelated to political parties have poured more than $7 billion into federal elections, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. This includes secret "dark money" that cannot be traced to its source and is often routed through so-called nonprofit organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or the NRA, which get large contributions from corporations. More than $750 million of dark money was spent in the 2020 election alone.
Foreign-influenced U.S. companies allow a pathway for foreign entities to achieve, either directly or indirectly, what they are barred from doing as governments or individuals: spend money in U.S. elections.
Setting their sights on California in 2020, Uber and Lyft joined forces with DoorDash, Instacart, Uber-owned Postmates and others to devote a staggering $203 million to support Prop. 22. This spending spree made Prop. 22 the most expensive ballot measure in California's history.
This is part of a larger trend that Californians have witnessed. First, the rise of super PACs and a deluge of corporate and secret political spending, which have made politicians less accountable to everyday voters. Second, a political system further warped by foreign interference in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, as well as President Donald Trump's unconstitutional solicitation of foreign assistance for his failed reelection.
Foreign investment in our economy is not always bad. In fact, approximately 35% of all U.S. stock is now owned by foreigners. Yet challenges arise because foreign investors' interests can diverge from Americans' interests.
Perhaps it's not surprising that ExxonMobil's CEO once remarked, "I'm not a U.S. company and I don't make decisions based on what's good for the U.S." If that is the case, ExxonMobil and foreign-influenced companies like it should not be permitted to spend political dollars to sway U.S. elections.
The good news is that a popular solution exists that is gaining momentum: a ban on election-related spending by foreigninfluenced U.S. corporations. For example, if a single foreign entity (government, company or person) owns more than 1% of a U.S. company, that company would be prohibited from spending money in elections. Often, investors who own at least 1% of a major corporation are among the largest shareholders, with at least tens of millions of dollars of stock. The prohibition would also apply if a group of foreign entities owns at least 5% of a U.S. company. Most of America's largest publicly traded corporations exceed the 5% threshold, although many smaller companies do not.
California should follow the lead of federal, state and local lawmakers to enact foreign ownership thresholds. Reps. Ja- mie Raskin, D-Md., and Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., filed federal legislation that would accomplish this.
Similar legislation is pending in several states, such as New York and Maryland.
And a commissioner on the Federal Election Commission, Ellen L. Weintraub, has led a sustained quest to update regulations to include this policy solution.
Californians - especially those in marginalized communities - know that their preferred candidates or policies cannot be accurately reflected when elections are heavily influenced by runaway corporate spending and foreign investors to whom CEOs owe a fiduciary duty.
In order to help strengthen our democracy and promote economic patriotism, it is time to prohibit political spending by foreign-influenced U.S. corporations. Michael Sozan is a senior fellow for the Center for American Progress.
https://www.democracynow.org/2020/12/8/prop_22_uber_lyft_gig_workers
transcript coming, she says PR firm foia'd her?!
ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft scored a major victory with the passage of Proposition 22 in California, and worker rights advocates fear they will push similar measures in other states. Prop 22 will exempt companies in the so-called gig economy from having to classify their workers in the state as employees rather than as independent contractors. Uber, Lyft and other companies that rely on gig workers spent more than $200 million to promote Prop 22, and a survey of California voters who voted “yes” on the measure showed 40% thought they were supporting gig workers’ ability to earn a living wage, even though critics say the measure will do the opposite. “The law will now exempt drivers like me from basic wage and labor protections afforded to most workers in the state in the middle of a pandemic and recession,” says Cherri Murphy, a Lyft driver and organizer with Gig Workers Rising. We also speak with Veena Dubal, professor of law at the University of California, Hastings, who says measures like Prop 22 pose “extreme danger” to American workers. “If this spreads past California, we are headed for an even worse situation of inequality than we are already experiencing,” Dubal says.
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guk ref
https://yyy.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/12/uber-prop-22-law-drivers-ab5-gig-workers
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uber bought itself a law. Here's why that's dangerous for struggling drivers like me
Cherri Murphy
The company, along with Lyft and DoorDash, spent more than $200m to deny drivers the wages and benefits we’re entitled to
Thu 12 Nov 2020 06.00 EST
Last week, Uber bought itself a law.
Along with Lyft, Instacart, DoorDash and Postmates, app companies spent more than $200m – the most spent on any ballot campaign in US history – to bankroll Proposition 22 in California. With its passage, the law will now exempt drivers like me from basic protections afforded to most other workers in the state.
And in the aftermath of their bought-and-paid-for victory, these companies are promising to roll out this model nationwide, foretelling a grim future for gig workers across the US.
The racist business model behind Uber and Lyft
Read more
But let’s be absolutely clear: Prop 22 is a dangerous law. Voters in California, inundated with ads promising drivers a “living wage”, flexibility and greater benefits, believed they were ensuring drivers a better future in the middle of a pandemic and recession.
But voters were hoodwinked. Drivers are now neither employees, guaranteed rights and benefits such as healthcare, nor true independent contractors, since we can’t set our own rates, choose our own clients, or build wealth on the apps.
Instead, Prop 22 promises substandard healthcare, a death sentence to many in the middle of a pandemic. We’re promised a sub-minimum wage in the middle of a recession that an independent study showed would be as low as $5.64 an hour – not the eventual $15 state minimum. We’re given no family leave, no paid sick days and no access to state unemployment compensation. Most importantly, while we’re already prevented from unionizing under federal law, the measure also makes it nearly impossible for California to pass laws protecting drivers who organize collectively, a fundamental right that companies undermine to silence worker power.
The companies fought ruthlessly to put us here. When California clarified who should be an employee for the purposes of state law, the companies first ignored it, arguing the law did not apply to them. Then, as California’s attorney general and city attorneys across the state sued them, they decided to pour millions into passing their own law, even threatening to leave the state if they did not get their way.
And when the campaign got under way, these companies were unconscionable. Uber forced drivers to click through in-app messages warning them that they would lose their jobs if Prop 22 failed – for which they were sued. It sent notifications to riders warning of longer wait times and higher prices. Instacart had its workers include “Yes on 22” stickers in every order and deliver them in “Yes on 22” bags.
They even spent part of their war chest convincing voters that it was racist to oppose the measure, a particular affront when 78% of drivers in San Francisco are people of color and 56% are immigrants. Lyft ran ads quoting Maya Angelou’s “Lift up your eyes” poem, and Uber bought billboards stating “If you tolerate racism, delete Uber” to capitalize on the Black Lives Matter movement. The Prop 22 campaign touted the support of BLM Sacramento, only to retract it when the group’s leader said she personally supported it but the group as a whole did not. All this while trying to strip a majority Black and brown workforce of fundamental labor rights.
Yet, through it all, the sentiment I’ve heard and felt from drivers isn’t resignation, but anger and energy to keep the struggle going. Drivers have been organizing before this campaign and we’ll keep organizing after, just as farm workers, domestic workers, and others cut off from basic labor standards have done for decades.
Far from ending this fight, these app companies accelerated and cemented our organizing, bringing thousands of drivers together across the state. And we have options.
In California, one of the world’s wealthiest economies, I should be able to afford rent and pay my bills as a driver
First, Uber, Lyft and the other gig companies owe millions of dollars in stolen wages, for which they are being sued by the California labor commissioner. That suit can continue, along with others launched by the attorney general and several city and district attorneys, that could also give ride-hail and delivery drivers hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.
Second, these companies must keep their promises. They’ve made promises for healthcare, minimum wage, workers’ compensation and more, but in all my three years working as a driver, completing more than 12,000 rides, they’ve never followed through. Drivers will be holding them to account across the state, ensuring we are being provided the minimums in the new law.
Finally, despite threats by each gig company to take the Prop 22 model nationwide, the new administration may not be so receptive. Both Joe Biden, the president-elect, and Kamala Harris, the vice-president-elect, opposed Prop 22, speaking of an “epidemic of misclassification”, and their campaign plan specifically states they would model federal gig worker legislation on the California law, AB5, that Prop 22 is allowing app-based companies to avoid.
These multibillion-dollar companies have enough money to bring this fight to each and every state. They spent more than $200m in California, but the very next day, their stock prices soared, adding $10bn to their valuations. This is just the cost of doing business to them. Writing laws is easier than following them.
We can’t let them. In California, one of the world’s wealthiest economies, I should be able to afford rent and pay my bills as a driver. I shouldn’t be forced to scour for public bathrooms or work 70-hour weeks to do this job. But that’s what these companies have forced upon us.
Uber may have bought itself a law, but it has not bought itself reprieve. All labor has dignity, and driving for Uber or Lyft should be no different.
Cherri Murphy is a social justice minister and Lyft driver based in Oakland, California. She is also an organizer with Gig Workers Rising.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/biden-transition-team/
Among the many challenges Joe Biden's administration will have to confront after Donald Trump ends his temper tantrum is deciding what posture to take toward big business.
There will be a battle for the soul of the new president as corporate Democrats vie with progressives to influence policy in areas such as regulation and antitrust.
Initial signs are encouraging.
The Biden transition just released a list of some 500 individuals who will be staffing the Agency Review Teams charged with preparing the way for a transfer of power in all parts of the executive branch.
Most of the people are from academia, state government, law firms, non-profits, unions, think tanks and foundations.
Surveying the list of affiliations,I found only about 20 for large corporations. Most of the people are from academia, state government, law firms, non-profits, unions, think tanks and foundations.
It is likely some of the law firms are there to represent specific corporate interests, but the numerous representatives from progressive public interest, environmental and labor groups should serve as an effective counterweight.
Unions in Labor Department
In the Labor Department list there are no law firms or corporations; in their place are representatives from five different unions along with people from the National Employment Law Project and other progressive groups.
What is particularly significant is the near absence of people affiliated with Wall Street banks.
The Defense Department list has someone from JPMorgan Chase; Homeland Security has a representative from Capital One; and the International Development group includes someone from U.S. Bank. There is no one from Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Wells Fargo or Morgan Stanley.
The Treasury Department group is led by someone from Keybank, which is based in Cleveland and ranks about 29th among U.S. banks. Fortunately, the Treasury group also includes representatives from places such as the Center for American Progress, the American Economic Liberties Project and the AFL-CIO.
Environmentalists at EPA
Other balancing acts include the list for the Environmental Protection Agency, which includes a representative from Dell Technologies but also from Earthjustice (the lead person) and The Sierra Club.
Some of the corporations show up in surprising places. Walt Disney is represented on the Intelligence Community list. The cosmetics firm Estee Lauder has someone on the State Department list. Someone fromAirbnb is in the National Security Council group.
Tech Companies at OMB
Looking at current corporate villains, the one that stands out is Amazon.com. It shows up on two lists—the one for the State Department and the one for the Office of Management and Budget.
Lyft and Airbnb are also on the OMB list, along with some academics, a consultant, state officials and someone from Meow Wolf, a Santa Fe-based non-profit that produces immersive art experiences.
Given that OMB oversees regulatory policy, the absence of public interest, union and environmental people raises a concern. Otherwise, it appears that the Biden team is limiting corporate influence in the emerging administration.
Let's hope it stays that way.
https://www.mediamatters.org/bret-baier/foxs-special-report-airs-biased-segment-shill-californias-prop-22
==
https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/deregulatory-rush-shows-even-if-defeated-the-trump-white-house-willing-to-scorch-the-earth-before-they-go/
no twt lnx
Deregulatory rush shows Trump White House willing to 'scorch the Earth before they go'
Brett Wilkins and Common Dreams October 18, 2020
With President Donald Trump's re-election very much in doubt, his administration is rushing to ram through regulatory rollbacks that could adversely affect millions of Americans, the environment, and the ability of Joe Biden—should he win—to pursue his agenda or even undo the damage done over the past four years.
Reporting by the New York Times details how the administration is cutting corners as it scrambles to enact as much of its agenda as possible before ceding power on January 20 if Trump loses the election. Required public comment periods and detailed analyses, according to the Times, are being eschewed in favor of streamlined approval processes that have left even staunch deregulation defenders sounding the alarm.
[EricLiptonNYT
JUST POSTED: Facing the prospect that President Trump could lose his re-election bid, his cabinet is scrambling to enact regulatory changes affecting millions of Americans in a blitz so rushed it may leave some changes vulnerable to court challenges]
"Two main hallmarks of a good regulation is sound analysis to support the alternatives chosen and extensive public comment to get broader opinion," Susan E. Dudley, director of the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center and formerly head of regulation in the George W. Bush White House, told the Times. "It is a concern if you are bypassing both of those."
Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, told the Times that the president has always "worked quickly... to grow the economy by removing the mountain of Obama-Biden job-killing regulations."
However, critics are warning that some of the proposed changes are being rushed through with insufficient regard to the harm they might cause. Some of the issues that are raising red flags include:
Refusing to lower limits on dangerous particulate and ozone pollution, which cause thousands of annual premature deaths.
Allowing so-called "bomb trains" that transport highly combustible liquefied natural gas on freight trains.
Determining when workers can be classified as employees orindependent contractors.
Exempting certain commercial drivers from mandatory hour limits and rest periods.
Placing limits on how science is used in the air pollution rule-making process.
Expanding regulation of immigrants by requiring citizenship applicants to submit biometric data, by forcing sponsors of immigrants to stay off welfare and prove their financial independence.
In response to the reporting, critics of the administration like writer Matthew Kressel said that it helps make clear that if the Republicans in the White House cannot win reelection, they'll "scorch the earth before they go."
And Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, tweeted: "I think people underestimate the amount of time and energy that is going to be needed just to climb out from under the mountain of shit this administration leaves behind."
MattGertz
I think people underestimate the amount of time and energy that is going to be needed just to climb out from under the mountain of shit this administration leaves behind.
Many of the changes reflect the agendas of the powerful corporate and other business interests whose key players have donated generously to Trump, belying the president's oft-repeated claim that he is "draining the swamp." Other regulator rollbacks come despite warnings from career officials within federal agencies about the harm they could cause.
carlzimmer
EPA’s scientific advisers warn its regulatory rollbacks clash with established science
Alarmed by the administration's rushed rate of regulatory rollbacks, a group of over 15 Democratic senators earlier this month sent a letter (pdf) to Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia warning of "profound economic implications" for some 143 million U.S. workers that would result from curtailing public comment periods for the proposed rule change regarding independent contractors.
"Workers across the country deserve a chance to fully examine and properly respond to these potentially radical changes, and a 30-day comment period is not nearly enough," the letter states.
==
https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/latest-election-stunt-proves-uber-and-lyft-are-their-own-worst-political-enemies/
Like so much about politics today, the debate around Uber and Lyft's Proposition 22 in California has quickly become polarized. Simplistic media narratives like "Silicon Valley versus labor unions," or Uber's self-serving argument that its drivers prefer flexibility over security, leave voters confused and torn.
But there is a more complex historical reality lurking beneath the headlines. Yes, the future of work is changing, and the labor laws must adapt, as the CEOs of Uber and Lyft asserted recently in a joint op-ed. Yet these companies have consistently missed numerous opportunities to act as good-faith partners for their drivers, and for society in general.
I have personally witnessed these companies' failings. After my book *Raw Deal: How the Uber Economy and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers* was published, I was asked to a meeting with high-level Uber representatives. Previously, I had also been part of a meeting with Lyft leaders.A central part of these discussions was my proposal calling for a "portable safety net" for their drivers, and for other types of freelance workers.
With a portable safety net, each worker would have an Individual Security Account into which any business that hires that worker would contribute an amount pro-rated to the number of hours worked for that business. Those funds then would be used by that worker to pay for her or his safety net needs, such as health care, Social Security, sick leave, and injured worker or unemployment compensation. Instead of pitting flexibility against security, a portable safety net would allow not only flexible work, but also the economic security that workers and their families need.
A number of countries already do something like this, and former President Barack Obama endorsed my idea in his 2016 State of the Union address. A statement of principles was signed by about 40 business, government, labor and NGO leaders—including the president and CEO of Lyft, John Zimmer and Logan Green—calling for a portable safety net as a foundation for the future of work in the 21st-century economy. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has also called for enacting a portable safety net plan.
It seemed like this had the makings of a win-win solution. But when legislative bills were introduced for a portable safety net in the states of Washington, New York and New Jersey, Uber and Lyft came to the bargaining table offering pocket change.Rather than contributing 20 percent of a worker's wage that is necessary to fund an adequate safety net, Uber and Lyft offered to contribute 2.5 percent. And they wanted their contributions to be voluntary. In all three states, the legislation died because these billion-dollar companies frittered away real opportunities.
When California legislation was proposed, Uber and Lyft once again countered with a paltry portable benefits package. With no serious negotiating partner on the other side, the California legislature overwhelmingly passed Assembly Bill 5 to reclassify drivers as employees rather than independent contractors.Now it's the law, but Uber and Lyft have refused to implement it. This has resulted in multiple lawsuits and legal judgments against these renegade companies. One study found that if their drivers had been classified as employees in the last five years, Uber and Lyft would have paid more than $400 million into California's unemployment insurance fund. Instead, California taxpayers have footed the bill for the significant wage and benefit gaps created by these companies and their crummy gig jobs.
These bitter losses prompted Uber and Lyft to join with DoorDash and Instacart to spend more than $184 million—the highest amount for a ballot proposition in California history—to try to pass Proposition 22.
A Broken Business Model
One can't help but wonder why these multibillion-dollar companies, who can dig deep into their piggy banks to spend on this ruinous ballot measure but not on their drivers, consistently come to the bargaining table offering pocket change. Well, there's more to this story.
It turns out that, despite how badly they underpay and mistreat their drivers, Uber and Lyft are still in huge financial trouble. They have been losing billions of dollars every year, even as their stocks have collapsed. Profit margins are inherently low in the taxi business, and their predatory business model massively subsidizes more than half the cost of each and every ride in their bid to boost market share and undercut the competition. As a result, traditional taxi companies and livery drivers have been pushed to the desperate edge of bankruptcy, and airport shuttle companies have been driven out of business.
Public transportation has also been damaged. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, public transit ridership in most major cities had declined, as commuters opted for half-priced Uber and Lyft rides over the mass ridership experience. One of the most ambitious studies of ridesharing impacts, conducted by researchers at the University of California, Davis Institute of Transportation Studies, found that ridesharing results in a dramatic rise in the number of trips made and miles driven in an automobile, as well as a pronounced reduction in the use of mass transit. All of that contributes greatly to increases in traffic congestion and carbon emissions.
Certainly, for the small minority of people who use Uber and Lyft's subsidized rides, most of them younger, college-educated, better-off Americans (their use is "double the rate of less-educated, lower-income" people), this transportation option has been helpful. But for the vast majority who do not use these companies' services, and who ride on the bus or drive personal vehicles, stuck in Uber-congested traffic, ride-hailing's legacy has been decidedly negative. In short, ride-hailing has been bad for most ride-hailing drivers, and bad for congestion and traffic flow, and bad for public transportation.
So what are these companies offering with Proposition 22? Yet another miserly version of a portable safety net. For example, the value of Proposition 22's offered health benefit is about $1.20 an hour—but that's well below the value of benefits mandated for employees under state and federal laws (which is more like $4 to $6 per hour, depending on the occupation). And many drivers would not be able to afford their share of the health care premiums, which would range from 20 to 60 percent.
Prop 22 also will not likely offer higher wages because of a complex formula that will be used to determine "minimum wage." A study by the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center found that if Proposition 22 passes, many drivers could earn as little as $5.64 an hour once their considerable driving expenses are subtracted, which is not even half of California's minimum wage of $12 per hour.
None of Prop 22's offerings come close to what drivers will receive if voters reject it and drivers remain regular employees instead of independent contractors. Even worse, Proposition 22 would lock in these serf-like conditions, since it will require an unprecedented 88 percent vote by the state legislature and the governor's signature to change it.
Uber and Lyft are their own worst enemies. They entered the taxi business 10 years ago, breaking every law in the books, motivated by the Silicon Valley philosophy of "move fast and break things." Well, they broke it, and now they can't figure out how to fix it.
As California Attorney General Xavier Becerra has said, "Any business model that relies on short-changing workers in order to make it probably shouldn't be anywhere, whether California or otherwise." Ride-hailing has been popular and seemingly has potential, but the public must insist that these companies not profit by shifting all the risk onto their workers and hurting the environment. The vote over Prop 22 is about making a stand for the type of jobs and businesses Californians want to see in their Golden State.
Steven Hill (www.Steven-Hill.com) is the author of Raw Deal: How the Uber Economy and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers and Expand Social Security Now: How to Ensure Americans Get the Retirement They Deserve.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
booktv 1020
:{after the Gig:(style="font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}:
Author Juliet Schor argued that there is a dark side to the gig economy and shared her ideas for how to make it…
an 1020
https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/expert-uber-funded-ballot-measure-in-california-would-create-permanent-underclass-of-workers/
no lnx (bad code?)
Expert: Uber-funded ballot measure in California would create 'permanent underclass of workers'
Angry young man driver, pissed off shaking hands and shrugging shoulders, has problems with the car. Displeased perplexed guy has a road accident. Traffic jam rush hour.
Nicole Karlis October 03, 2020
Those who took high school civics may recall that our democracies lives on fractions. A majority vote — one-half plus one — is what it takes to pass a bill in most legislative bodies. The constitution requires a "supermajority," meaning two-thirds of a governing body, for only the most important and crucial matters: to override a presidential veto, or remove an officer via impeachment, say.
If two-thirds seems like a high threshold for a congressional body, what about seven-eighths? That's the super-duper-majority that would be required to overturn Proposition 22 — the Uber- and Lyft-funded ballot measure that will appear on California ballots this November — should it pass this fall.
You read that right: the astroturf ballot measure written by some of Silicon Valley's biggest corporations, which is written to keep these companies' contractors from achieving benefits or a stable, salaried job, would require a seven-eighths majority of state legislators in both state chambers in order to be overturned — such a difficult threshold to meet that experts say it would be effectively permanent.
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The origin of Proposition 22
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It all goes back to California's Assembly Bill 5, which went into effect on January 1, 2020. The impetus for AB5 was to make gig economy work into more stable and reliable work, and reduce worker exploitation; currently, driver-contractors like those who work for Uber or Lyft are not guaranteed health care of any other benefits if they work more than 40 hours a week, as they are legally contractors rather than employees.
Likewise, such drivers and deliverypersons often make less than minimum wage after their own expenses are accounted for. AB5, which put into place a "test" to determine whether someone is a contractor or employee, was designed to lift these kinds of workers out of poverty.
Yet since AB5 passed through California's state legislature, Uber and Lyft have refused to comply; instead, they chose to pour over $180 million into the astroturf campaign for Proposition 22. Similar gig worker-reliant companies have chipped into the campaign, too. DoorDash has donated $47.5 million; Instacart has donated $27.5 million, and Postmates has contributed a little over $10 million.
According to Ballotpedia, Proposition 22 is the most expensive ballot measure contest in California, and the United States — and if it passes, it will set an example for the corporations that funded it that they could use as a model in other states. Indeed, the companies are funneling so much money into this campaign because there's a lot at stake. For example,Los Angeles and San Francisco are two of the five largest markets for Uber, which has stated in financial disclosures that new regulations in major metro areas could negatively affect their financials. Many of their workers have criticized these companies for pouring so much money into a campaign as they struggle to receive basic support, like personal protective equipment and hand sanitizer, from their employers during the pandemic.
Proposition 22 is more than just a determination of classification, though. Labor experts fear it will be a major setback for labor rights, the community at large, and that it will send the wrong signal to other states who have been exploring ways to regulate these companies.
"They have basically operated as though the law does not apply to them," Ken Jacobs, the chair of the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, told Salon. "And I think that signals to other states around the country, 'Don't try to enforce your laws because we have the political power and resources to defeat you if you do.'"
We spoke to experts about the fine print of Proposition 22, and how it will affect Uber and Lyft drivers in the state of California if passed.
1. Very few drivers will actually qualify for health insurance benefits
Uber and Lyft have positioned Proposition 22 as a "third way" solution to provide more benefits to drivers. The campaign states on its website that voting "yes" on Proposition 22 will provide drivers with "new benefits and protections in these tough economic times including a minimum earnings guarantee,access to health carebenefits and insurance against illnesses and injuries acquired on the job."
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Yet this depends on a driver's "engaged time," according to the proposition, meaning the time between accepting a ride and completing the ride. This doesn't factor the time a driver is waiting in between drives. For drivers who average 25 hour per week of engaged time during a calendar quarter, Uber and Lyft will provide "subsidies equal to 82% the average California Covered (CC) premium for each month." For those who average between 15 and 25 hours of "engaged time" each quarter, the companies will provide healthcare subsidies equal to 41 percent the average CC premium for each month.
"They purport to have a healthcare reimbursement piece here, but it's very weak and very few drivers would qualify, or at least qualify for the larger amount of it,"Jacobs said.
Rey Fuentes,Skadden Fellow at the Partnership for Working Families, told Salon that drivers would essentially have to drive 40 hours a week to get that 25 hours of engaged time to qualify for the best offer. In a report Fuentes co-authored, he notes a second way in which drivers will be essentially cheated of quality healthcare options. "By using the definitions section to ensure that the maximum benefit is actually 82 percent of an average premium payment for the lowest-cost healthcare plan on the Covered California insurance exchange, not a worker's actual premium expenses," the report states.
2. Drivers won't be guaranteed paid leave or paid sick days
Under the current California state and federal law, app-based workers are required to have a minimum of eight weeks of paid family leave, and three days of paid leave for illness or care of a family member. None of this is part of Proposition 22. In the report Fuentes co-authored, the researchers call this omission "glaring," especially in the pandemic, in which many rideshare and delivery drivers are considered to be "essential workers."
"Although some app-based companies have created limited sick leave benefits to respond to this crisis, these plans are voluntary and temporary, and cannot be added to this initiative before voters can weigh in on the ballot measure," the authors write.
Fuentes says there are many drivers who drive to make money to help support a sick family member.
"They're doing it because they're caring for individuals who have illnesses and families, or they have an illness themselves that they can't have traditional employment because your work arrangements are precarious," Fuentes said. "That's why it's actually more important that those workers get things like paid sick leave or paid family leave."
Since drivers have to work at least 40 hours a week to reach 25 hours of "engaged time," taking a vacation will likely affect whether they qualify for healthcare benefits.
3. Drivers won't be able to unionize
This year, more drivers have been organizing to protest unfair labor practices and the lack of protections during the pandemic. However, if Proposition 22 passes, drivers won't be able to unionize and leverage the power of collective bargaining. Under federal law, according to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), app-based drivers are said to lack benefits of collective bargaining because they're more like "entrepreneurs," legally speaking. While the legality of this is disputed by various labor organizations, Fuentes said this leaves an opening for states to "establish a separate organizing statute that gives workers the lawful ability to form a union under state law."
"The ballot initiative, however, would prevent the state legislature from ever considering a collective bargaining regime unless it gets a 7/8ths vote of the state legislature, which is an impossible threshold," Fuentes said.
4. Proposition 22 reverses key worker benefit if there's a car accident
"From a driver's perspective this is actually one of the things we think is so harmful about the ballot initiatives," Fuentes said. "California provides workers compensation protection to drivers injured on the job, and that benefit is covered through what is called no-fault coverage."
Even if they are at fault for the accident or contributed to it, all workers in California are covered by the workers compensation statute. Fuentes said Proposition 22 "reverses that."
"This suggests to us very clearly that workers could be denied coverage if they're even partially at fault, which is not something that should ever happen with a workers compensation scheme," Fuentes said. "And the broader part is that workers who are seriously injured and partially disabled or permanently disabled, you can access that up to a lifetime benefit through California's Workers Compensations Temporary Disability Program, but the ballot initiative capped at two years."
5. These reversals and precedents will be most likely permanent
Most astonishing is that Proposition 22, if passed, will be very difficult to amend, since that would require a seven-eighths (87.5%) vote in each chamber of the California State Legislature. Fuentes said this will "lock in" a "permanent underclass of workers."
"All the historic workplace safety protections that California has enacted to protect workers, all of those things are still vitally necessary and even more so now during COVID-19," Fuentes said. "From an abstract perspective, the idea that some of the richest companies in the world are passing a ballot initiative that would exempt their workers from basic labor protections is just, I think beyond the pale."
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https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj4q7p/uber-lyft-give-california-gop-millions-while-fighting-driver-reclassification
9/20
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the Yes on Proposition 22 campaign—a ballot initiative bankrolled by Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, and Postmates to permanently protect themselves from reclassifying California drivers as employees—has donated $2 million to California's Republican Party.
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The revelation was posted to Twitter on Monday by KPFA Radio reporter Ariel Boone. The donation was made on Friday, with additional contributions made exclusively toVentura County and Santa Clara County Republican parties for an additional $20,000 and $2,593.15, respectively.
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According to campaign finance records, the companies have contributed $184.3 millionto the Yes on Proposition 22 campaign’s war chest as of September 18. In a deep dive into the campaign’s advertising operations, Darak Kerr of CNET found it had already spent millions on digital advertising, but that was likely only "a small fraction" of what would be spent on television advertisements. Here lies another way the campaign’s money is being redirected to the GOP: consulting groups and lobbyists.
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The Chris Mottola Consulting—founded by a former GOP operative and responsible for multiple ad campaigns for prominent GOP politicians—has helped craft multiple ads for the Yes on Prop 22 campaign. According to its website, advertisements that "tell the story of victims, villains, heroes and actions.” Uber and Lyft have also deployed a record number of lobbyists this year, many of whom have worked for prominent Republican lawmakers.
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Generally, Democrats have been publicly supportive of California’s Assembly Bill 5, which Proposition 22 seeks to exempt gig companies from complying with, while the GOP has vocally opposed it.
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During the Democratic nomination race, prominent candidates including Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris (whose brother-in-law Tony West is Uber's general counsel), expressed support for Assembly Bill 5h. After reluctant support for protesting ride-hail drivers, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden came around to supporting AB5.
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Assembly Bill 5 has been regarded much more coldly by the GOP, however, especially by prominent figures such as Senator Ted Cruz, who attacked AB5 as part of a "daily war on jobs", and Representative Dan Crenshaw, who pointed at the bill as proof that "Republicans are the party of Uber" while "Democrats are the party of taxi cab unions."
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“It was only a matter of time before they embraced the political party [that] wants what they want,” Edan Alva, a ride-hail driver and organizer with driver advocacy group Gig Workers Rising. “They’ll do anything to protect their wage theft long enough to find a way to profit from it. Donating to the GOP hurts workers and drivers, but that’s what they’ve been doing all along.”
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By comparison, the No on Proposition 22 campaign—financed largely by driver advocacy groups and unions—has raised a comparatively humble $5.6 million. To make up for the fact that they have almost 33 times less money than the gig company campaign, drivers have relied on generating attention through protests, press conferences, and actions meant to raise awareness of driver misclassification, poor working conditions in the industry, and exploitative labor practices.
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“Early on during this crisis, I had to work even when I was sick. Even then, that was not enough and I almost found myself without a roof over my head,” Alva said. “That is what these people are spending millions to defend. Not making sure we are safe, secure, well-paid, or have benefits, but whether we can help them one day make money. They won't stop with our industry. They'll spread this to every industry if they can.”
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TAGGED:LABOR LYFT RIDE HAIL AB5 PROPOSITION 22
an 1020 also lyft and doordash
Expert: Uber-funded ballot measure in California would create 'permanent underclass of workers'
Those who took high school civics may recall that our democracies lives on fractions. A majority vote — one-half plus one — is what it takes to pass a bill in most legislative bodies.
https://www.cnet.com/news/uber-lyft-doordash-181-million-campaign-war-chest-goes-heavy-on-ad-blitz/
no lnx pix of ads
jimin Song says working for Instacart saved her life. Two years ago, she was trapped in an emotionally abusive relationship that culminated with her partner pulling a gun on her. She needed to get out quick and make some money while taking care of her two kids. So she signed up to be a shopper for the grocery delivery company and still does the work today.
Song's experience made its way to Instacart's corporate headquarters, and the company asked to feature her in a promotional video on becoming a shopper.
"They liked my story," Song said in a phone interview. "I think that's why they used me as an example, to show that people are in tough situations and they may need this job."
Now, Song has become one of the "paid spokespeople" for the Yes on Proposition 22 campaign funded by Uber, Lyft, Doordash, Instacart and Postmates. In one political ad for the California ballot measure, she sits in the driver's seat of her car with a face mask on. In another, she talks about her hectic schedule being the mom of two kids.
Incorporating workers, like Song, and their stories into ad campaigns is now commonplace in the pitched battle over Proposition 22, which could change the business models of the five gig economy companies in the country's biggest state. At stake is whether gig workers will be reclassified as employees as dictated by California law AB5 or if they'll remain classified as independent contractors.
AB5 requires companies to provide gig workers benefits such as minimum wage, health care and sick leave by making them employees. That could add tens of millions of dollars in costs each year to the gig economy companies' bottom lines, according to analysts.
Proposition 22 is designed to establish a carve-out for the companies. The proposition suggests creating an alternative to the law that maintains workers as independent contractors but adds benefits such as expense reimbursement and a health care subsidy.
The proposition is jointly sponsored by Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart and Postmates, which have contributed $181 million to the campaign, making it one of the most expensive ballot measure campaigns in US history. The No on Proposition 22 campaign, which is backed by unions and labor groups, has raised $5.6 million.
With the Nov. 3 election less than seven weeks away, both sides are focusing on ads. Facebook, Instagram, Google and local TV channels have been blanketed in messages, including those featuring Song for the Yes campaign.
"Now, politicians are trying to take away our ability to do independent work," Song says in one ad. "It would force me to choose between my job and my children."
The Yes on Proposition 22 campaign paid Song $1,290 for being involved in at least one of these ads, according to public records from the California secretary of state. It also paid at least two other gig workers, Kiesha Broussard and Isaiah Navajo, $590 each for their involvement in advertisements. (CNET couldn't find contact details for either Broussard or Navajo. The Yes campaign didn't respond to a request for contact details for the two workers.) More ads featuring roughly a dozen other drivers have also popped up, but public records for those expenditures haven't yet been posted by the state.
"You have to imagine these companies are going to plow a lot of money into this thing."
Steven Passwaiter, VP of Kantar's Campaign Media Analysis Group]
These people are considered "paid spokespeople" because they've received money for being involved in the ads, according to a spokesman for California's Fair Political Practices Commission. However, the campaign isn't required to disclose this in the ads themselves because the payments are less than $5,000.
"Every driver who appears in our ads is a volunteer," a spokesman for the Yes on Proposition 22 campaign said in an email. "The listed expenditures are reimbursements for travel time, expenses and mileage."
Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and Postmates (which was acquired by Uber in July) didn't respond to requests for comment. Instacart referred CNET to the Yes on Proposition 22 campaign.
The million-dollar ad machine
Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart and Postmates hired Chris Mottola Consulting to create some of the ads featuring Song and other gig workers, according to public records. The firm was founded in 1985 by Chris Mottola, a former political consultant for the Republican party.
Mottola has created ads for political candidates, including the late Sen. John McCain of Arizona, former US President George W. Bush and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. On his LinkedIn profile, Mottola says the author and journalist Carl Hiaasen once described him as the Freddy Krueger of politics.
Many of Chris Mottola Consulting's ads appear to be aimed at tugging on the heartstrings of viewers. On its website, the firm says the best commercials "tell the story of victims, villains, heroes and actions in an honest and self-effacing way." The consultancy didn't respond to phone or email requests for comment.[pix]
s of Thursday, the Yes on Proposition 22 campaign had spent more than $1.7 million to feature ads on Facebook, according to Facebook's ad library. It's spent $980,800 to display 183 of its political ads on Google. According to Google's ad analytics, the campaign's spending had remained relatively steady throughout 2020 until it spiked in mid-August, when it rose from an average daily expenditure of about $10,000 to a peak of $162,800 on Aug. 15. The most recent reported daily expenditure, from Sept. 5, was $84,900.
"You have to imagine these companies are going to plow a lot of money into this thing," said Steven Passwaiter, vice president and general manager of Kantar's Campaign Media Analysis Group, which is the research company's nonpartisan political advertising intelligence division. "One would expect that it's just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger until we get to Nov. 3."
It's unclear how much the Yes campaign has spent on TV ads, and the campaign's spokesman declined to answer questions about TV and radio spending. But Passwaiter, who's analyzed Yes on Proposition 22 ad spending for Kantar, said "compared to what they're spending on TV, [digital ad spending is] a small fraction."
The No on Proposition 22 campaign is also raising its ad profile, but it's spending far less. Google's Transparency Report, which tracks political ad spending on its platform,doesn't show any ads from the No campaign.Starting in June, the campaign began featuring ads on Facebook and has spent about $47,000 on the social media site as of Thursday, according to Facebook's ad library. Very few of the No campaign ads feature produced videos but instead have static interfaces that say that "Prop. 22 hurts app-based drivers" and that Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden agrees.(Biden urged Californians to vote against the proposition in a May tweet.)
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forbe 519
he investor feeding frenzy around food-delivery startups hasn’t stopped. Just three months after raising $400 million, DoorDash confirmed it has closed another $600 million with New York City hedge fund Darsana Capital Partners leading the round. That’s an extra billion in its war chest so far this year, and half of the total of $2 billion raised for the San Francisco startup since its founding in 2013. The new funding round increases DoorDash's post-money valuation from $7 billion to $12.6 billion, according to cofounder and CEO Tony Xu.
“This allows us to pull forward the future sooner,” Xu tells Forbes. “It’s helpful to raise capital, especially when the macroclimate seems to be a bit choppy.”
That external turbulence has shaken some of DoorDash’s competitors in what’s already a cutthroat market. Tensions around U.S. and China trade talks have put the markets in a precarious state, affecting stock in publicly traded Grubhub (2018 revenue: $1 billion). Postmates, which announced that it had confidentially filed to go public in February, still has not made its filings public or started an IPO roadshow. Uber’s public debut in early May was disappointing. Shares are trading below its initial pricing. But Xu isn’t shaken, even after seeing Uber or other consumer tech IPOs falter in the public markets. “The short answer is that it hasn’t had an impact on how we thought about our business or how we’ve thought about our future,” Xu says.
Investors clearly haven’t been spooked, either. Last week, Amazon announced it was leading a $575 million in London-based Deliveroo, bringing its total funding to $1.5 billion....
an 820
CA law not in enforce b/c of appeal? illegal in other countries to pull out of place to dodge regs?
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/why-courts-across-the-globe-keep-finding-the-gig-economy-is-the-road-to-serfdom/
the tech industry buzzword “gig” has distracted society from important questions about the gig economy that are surprisingly traditional: whether a business has employees or contractors, and how it can avoid payroll taxes and legal liability. Countless Silicon Valley business models have been built under the guise of gigs, Uber and Lyft two of the best known cases, which is ironic considering that for all of their high-tech pretensions, at the core both are taxi and food delivery services. But with state governments like California facing increasing revenue shortfalls and an estimated 57 million gig workers in the United States noting a lack of employer protections and fair wages, the matter has shifted to the courts.
Uber and Lyft now find themselves at the center of years-long legal disputes on this question. Court challenges, however, are now extending beyond these two companies.
Over the past 40 years, the rise of neoliberalism has enabled employers to tilt the terms of our capitalist economies heavily toward capital and away from labor, via the evisceration of unions, the deconstruction of the welfare state, and the privatization of public services. The growing use of the independent contractor classification represents the latest attempt to exploit and amplify this power imbalance. The exploitation of this labor loophole is symptomatic of the rise of what author Albena Azmanova has called “precarity capitalism” in her new book, *Capitalism on Edge*, a condition that Professor James Galbraith has described as “a minority ensconced in a diminishing set of safe career paths or sufficient wealth not to bother worrying about [economic insecurity], and a majority living in persistent anxiety over the costs of health, housing, education, the quality of public services and other formerly ordinary attributes of middle-class life.” What makes this trend particularly galling is that the main economic drivers of this transition to serfdom fancy themselves as enlightened, socially “woke” corporations, be they Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, or Amazon, but in fact all embrace employment practices more evocative of the 19th-century robber barons.
As the protections governing the traditional employer-employee relationship have been increasingly subverted, workers have responded by turning to the courts to rectify this loophole that has allowed their employment conditions to become a form of indentured servitude. And the courts are largely ruling in their favor. A California superior court judge has recently denied injunctive relief to both Uber and Lyft, which means that they will be forced to comply with earlier rulings, and a California state statute, that mandated them to reclassify their workers as employees (although the original August 20 deadline has now been extended until October so that the companies’ full appeal can be considered by the California Court of Appeals). The original California ruling confirms a similar ruling made by a New York federal judge in July.
these are also consistent with a growing number of decisions in other countries, such as the UK, where Uber is now appealing a lower court ruling that its drivers should be classified as employees “entitled to employment protections such as a minimum wage and holiday pay,” and in Canada, where the country’s Supreme Court has recently ruled that Uber drivers were entitled to sue for traditional benefits and vacation pay.
Equally striking is some of the sharp language deployed in these proceedings against the practices. In the judgments, the courts explicitly highlighted the massive imbalance in the so-called “contractor” relationship between the companies and their respective workforces, which invalidates any notion of the “contractors” being genuinely independent. In the Canadian case, *Uber Technologies Inc. v. Heller*, the Supreme Court specifically cited the inequality of bargaining power between the plaintiff and Uber, noting that driver David Heller was in fact powerless to negotiate any of its terms of his engagement with the company (which largely invalidated the notion that he was an independent contractor as Uber alleged). Likewise, in the UK Court of Appeals case, *Uber BV v. Aslam*, the judges noted that Uber’s “drivers do not market themselves to the world in general; rather, they are recruited by Uber to work as integral components of its organization.” In other words, Uber exercises full control over them as employees, but it attempts to escape its obligations by designating the drivers as independent contractors. Consequently, the UK Court of Appeal characterized Uber’s description of the work relationship “a sham.”
The success of these legal cases has encouraged further challenges: DoorDash, “the US market leader in food delivery,” is now being faced with a preliminary injunction by San Francisco’s district attorney to “force the company to reclassify its workers as employees,” reports the Financial Times.
Displaying Leona Helmsley-like contempt for the rulings, Uber and Lyft are both threatening to suspend their service if they have to reclassify their drivers as employees. This of course is as flimsy a threat as could be imagined: how many publicly traded Fortune 500 companies would dare to tell stockholders that they plan to cut themselves off from revenue as part of their business strategy, especially if the long-term goal is to use their “contractors” to establish a consumer base, while they work to perfect the robotic technology that ultimately enables the company to replace them with self-driving cars (a strategy that is hard to execute if the companies threaten to shut down their operations whenever they encounter a law they don’t like)? That is their only plausible path to profitability in the longer term, assuming, of course, that the self-driving cars fully develop the capacity to recognize a pedestrian, so that they don’t kill them.
In fact, both companies are hemorrhaging cash even as they operate with the existing legal loopholes. Meanwhile, their interim strategy is to make their exploitation legal for as long as possible: In addition to the shutdown threats, they are deploying considerable sums to have the California statute overturned via a ballot measure, Proposition 22. The state of California estimates that it is missing $7 billion a year in lost payroll taxes from the gig economy.
But the fact is that the companies’ business models have been unsustainable by any measure, even before their abusive labor practices were challenged in the courts. Since inception, both have survived by virtue of an ongoing high IPO bubble that has infused them with cash to staunch the red ink. It’s a form of “Ponzi finance,” a condition that economist Hyman Minsky defined as “the cash flows from operations… [being insufficient] to fulfill either the repayment of… [principal] or the interest due on outstanding debts by their cash flows from operations.”
As a letter writer to the Financial Times observed, the IPO bubbles that sustain these Ponzi schemes are predicated on “a cynical assumption that… [these companies] will be allowed to expand… [their] drove of cyber serfs.” Absent that assumption, the reality is dire. As the analyst Hubert Horan has highlighted: “Uber has now lost $23.2 billion in the past four and a half years.” Horan also notes that the company has higher operating costs than the taxi companies it is seeking to displace. In other words, without illegal exploitation models, the rate of financial losses would far exceed their ability to raise cash from the credulous finance and investment world.
Attempts to circumvent existing employment law protections simply constitute a form of social dumping, even as Uber’s CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, decried the lack of flexibility in current labor law as denying workers the freedoms to choose the way they work and when they do it. Khosrowshahi asserted this in a recent New York Times op-ed, and went on to argue that pay versus benefits was a “false choice.”
Uber’s CEO is right, but not in the way he argues. In a genuinely independent contractor relationship, the quid pro quo is higher pay as an offset to the lack of paid benefits. But companies in the gig economy generally don’t operate this way: Uber and Lyft pay minimum wages that in many instances compel employees to work 70-80 hours per week to make a living. That considerably impinges on the contractor’s supposed work-time flexibility, as well as rendering it virtually impossible to afford decent benefits, such as adequate health insurance, let alone sick pay or vacation leave. In the words of a recent report of the National Labor Relations Board’s Office of the General Counsel (NLRB GC), “Uber drivers—who earn about $9–$10 an hour—can’t expand revenues because they can’t control prices or expand their customer base—the only thing they can do is drive more hours.”
The NLRB report also noted that any “boost” to the drivers’ earnings “is minimal and stalls out after about two years.” While they are called “independent contractors,” their independence is illusory because the so-called “entrepreneurs” in reality “do not even have basic control over how they deliver rides… [and] are ‘supervised’ by semi-automated and algorithmic systems that track their acceptance rates, time on trips, speed, customer ratings, and other factors, and drivers can be ‘deactivated’ based on these factors.” That’s not a co-equal work relationship between an employer and an independent contractor; it’s more a form of indentured servitude.
In other words, the courts’ legal clarification accords with the underlying reality.
This strengthens the case for a robust social welfare system, notably something like Medicare for All. A publicly funded single-payer system would not only alleviate a major source of economic insecurity for workers, but also ensure that employers don’t have to weigh the cost of providing health care to their employees as a condition of doing business in the United States (a factor that puts them at a disadvantage relative to global competitors).
That consideration aside, COVID-19 has created a situation in which many of the extolled benefits of the gig economy, such as working from home or choosing one’s hours of employment, are gradually being imported into a multiplicity of jobs, without subverting the protections and benefits afforded by traditional employment practices. To be sure, many of these jobs will ultimately revert to office environments, but a recent report from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research persuasively argues that working from home and other such features of the gig economy are likely to be expanded in other businesses that are not reliant on a medieval labor model to sustain profitability.
Happily, our courts are finally beginning to draw a line to limit such egregious practices. The next steps must go beyond the efforts of individual states. The federal government ought to establish a national framework to wipe out these evasions once and for all and to rebuild the rights and protections that used to characterize our economy in more civilized times.
Marshall Auerbackis a market analyst and commentator.
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https://medium.com/team-human/the-digital-economy-is-capitalism-at-its-worst-230b2eeb38d4
Instead of bringing widespread prosperity, the digital economy has amplified the most extractive aspects of traditional capitalism. Connectivity may be the key to participation, but it also gives corporations more license and capacity to extract what little value people have left. Instead of retrieving the peer-to-peer marketplace, the digital economy exacerbates the division of wealth and paralyzes the social instincts for mutual aid that usually mitigate its effects.
Digital platforms amplify the power law dynamics that determine winners and losers. While digital music platforms make space for many more performers to sell their music, their architecture and recommendation engines end up promoting many fewer artists than a diverse ecosystem of record stores or FM radio did. One or two superstars get all the plays, and everyone else sells almost nothing.
It’s the same across the board. While the net creates more access for artists and businesses of all kinds, it allows fewer than ever to make any money. The same phenomenon takes place on the stock market, where ultra-fast trading algorithms spur unprecedented momentum in certain shares, creating massive surpluses of capital in the biggest digital companies and sudden, disastrous collapses of their would-be competitors. Meanwhile, automation and extractive platforms combine to disadvantage anyone who still works for a living, turning what used to be lifelong careers into the temp jobs of a gig economy.
These frictionless, self-reinforcing loops create a “winner takes all” landscape that punishes the middle class, the small business, and the sustainable players. The only ones who can survive are artificially inflated companies, who use their ballooning share prices to purchase the also-rans. Scale is everything. This sensibility trickles down to all of us, making us feel like our careers and lives matter only if we’ve become famous, earned a million views, or done something, even something destructive, “at scale.”
While digital business plans destroy a human-scaled economy, the digital businesses themselves compromise the human sensibilities required to dig ourselves out of this mess. The human beings running those enterprises are no less the psychic victims of their companies’ practices than the rest of us, which is why it’s so hard for them to envision a way out.
Well-meaning developers, who have come to recognize the disastrous impacts of their companies, seek to solve technology’s problems with technological solutions. They see that social media algorithms are exacerbating wealth division and mental confusion, and resolve to tweak them not to do that — at least not so badly. The technosolutionists never consider the possibility that some technologies themselves have intrinsic antihuman affordances. (Guns may not kill people, but they are more biased toward killing than, say, pillows, even though both can be used for that purpose.) Furthermore, they propose technosolutions that are radical in every way except in their refusal to challenge the underlying rule set of venture capitalism or the extreme wealth of those who are making the investments. Every technosolution must still be a profitable investment opportunity — otherwise, it is not considered a solution at all.
Even promising wealth redistribution ideas, such as universal basic income, are recontextualized by the technosolutionists as a way of keeping their companies going. In principle, the idea of a negative income tax for the poor, or a guaranteed minimum income for everyone, makes economic sense. But when we hear these ideas espoused by Silicon Valley’s CEOs, it’s usually in the context of keeping the extraction going. People have been sucked dry, so now the government should just print more money for them to spend. The argument merely reinforces the human obligation to keep consuming, or to keep working for an unlivable wage.
More countercultural solutions, such as bitcoin and the blockchain, are no less technosolutionist in spirit. The blockchain replaces the need for central authorities such as banks by letting everyone on a network authenticate their transactions with computer encryption. It may disintermediate exploitative financial institutions but it doesn’t help rehumanize the economy, or reestablish the trust, cohesion, and ethos of mutual aid that was undermined by digital capitalism. It simply substitutes for trust in a different way: using the energy costs of blockchain mining as a security measure against counterfeiting or other false claims. (The computer power needed to create one bitcoin consumes at least as much electricity as the average American household burns through in two years.) Is this the fundamental fix we really need? A better ledger?
The problem the blockchain solves is the utilitarian one of better, faster accounting, and maybe an easier way to verify someone’s identity online. That’s why the banking industry has ultimately embraced it: the quicker to find us and drain our assets. Progressives, meanwhile, hope that the blockchain will be able to record and reward the unseen value people are creating as they go about their lives — as if all human activity were transactional and capable of being calculated by computer.
We must learn that technology’s problems can’t always be solved with more technology.
This was section 48
==
==
https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/how-a-basic-economic-principle-could-derail-our-ability-to-combat-the-coronavirus/
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no lnx
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How a basic economic principle could derail our ability to combat the coronavirus
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Written by Leigh Osofsky, The Conversation April 7, 2020
by Leigh Osofsky, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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A series of recent protests by the workers preparing and delivering our essential foods and other goods highlights a key risk to our ability to combat the coronavirus.
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Some employees at an Amazon warehouse and Instacart “shoppers” briefly walked off the job on March 30, citing inadequate health protections and compensation. And Whole Foods workers organized a national “sick out” protest to pressure the grocery chain for hazard pay and more protections.
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With most Americans sheltering in place, these workers are among the millions of individuals who face heightened risks as they continue to do their jobs keeping our refrigerators and pantries stocked during the pandemic. But because of an economic theory I study known as “positive externalities,” most of them aren’t being adequately compensated for it.
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Creating positive externalities
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A positive externality is created when someone’s private behavior leads to broader social benefits. Common examples include when someone buys a hybrid car, gets vaccinated or stops smoking. In each of these examples, someone’s private behavior reduces risks for everyone.
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A negative externality, on the other hand, is when private behavior leads to a public harm, such as pollution from a factory.
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By delivering food and other supplies, workers at Instacart, Whole Foods and hundreds of other companies are reducing the need for people to congregate and thus lowering the systemic risk of COVID-19 for everyone.
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This is an essential public health benefit at a critical time in the pandemic. Without them, it would be much harder to fulfill government stay-in-place orders and slow the spread of COVID-19.
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But in general they perform jobs that pay relatively little, and the workers say they lack basic protective gear such as hand sanitizer and masks that would keep them safe.
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Paying for an externality
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Unfortunately, the free market isn’t very good at dealing with positive externalities like this – or compensating those who bear the cost. As a result, there’s a risk the people creating the public benefit will not provide enough of it.
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This is easiest to understand by way of example.
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Imagine a “shopper” for Instacart – the app-based food delivery platform – delivers groceries to someone with COVID-19. It begins as a private transaction: The worker gets paid, and the sick customer gets food delivered in a time of need. But there is an additional benefit to the rest of us – the positive externality – from the delivery. Everyone is safer because the sick consumer doesn’t have to go to the grocery store.
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Then there is the extra cost. The Instacart worker faces a heightened health risk by spending more time outside of home and delivering groceries to the sick customer. While the customer may pay a higher tip as a measure of her gratitude, it is unlikely to be enough to take into account the value of the broader benefit to society or the concentrated risk that the Instacart worker faces in producing this benefit.
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And that means the undercompensated worker may decide it’s in her interest to stop putting herself at risk – and stop delivering food.
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Now consider that this is happening countless times and in countless ways across the country as millions of workers keep putting themselves at risk so that others can stay at home.
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Who should pay the workers enough to compensate them for their extra risk and ensure we all continue to enjoy this broad public benefit?
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Instacart and other companies, of course, are the ones paying these workers, along with fees or tips paid by consumers. The surging demand for these companies’ services suggests they should be able to afford to offer higher wages and provide the kinds of protective gear like masks and hand sanitizer that the workers need.
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Some companies are doing that. Target, Amazon and Whole Foods have said they will provide their workers temporary “hazard pay.” And Instacart responded to the protest by providing its gig workers with health and safety kits.
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A government response
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But a few companies stepping up to compensate their own workers slightly more isn’t enough to compensate the workers for the great benefits they are providing to the public at large.
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In economics, widely shared public benefits such as large parks and clean lakes tend to require public – that is government – support. Similarly, the production of a good that is costly but has a large positive externality, like the efforts of all these workers, needs a government response.
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Essentially, the government could compensate these workers for the benefits to the public through something like a hazard subsidy and a supply of protective gear, thereby ensuring an ample supply of these workers and the services they provide during this time of crisis.
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To be sure, this isn’t a perfect solution. For instance, absent some sort of market forces dictating how much the government subsidizes, the government may pay too much. And there would be questions about which workers are truly essential to creating the public health benefits and should receive the higher pay – should liquor employees be included?
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But in a time in which the government is already offering large, unqualified aid packages to the public, such costs are not insurmountable. To get close to the right solution, I believe we first need to recognize how these workers create a large public benefit for us all.
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[You need to understand the coronavirus pandemic, and we can help. Read The Conversation’s newsletter.]The Conversation
Leigh Osofsky, Professor of Law, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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==
===
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amazon worker smalls fired for protest
amazon and Whole Foods workers move to strike against unjust and unsafe practices
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==
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documents reveal how Amazon risked lives to prioritize speed and explosive growth
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ProPublica 1219
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/can-uber-and-lyft-survive-if-californias-worker-protections-go-nationwide/
==
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/google-has-a-chance-to-do-good-for-gig-workers/
:{
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...because sure, ping-pong tables are nice, but what these workers want is what all workers deserve: fair pay, decent benefits, a voice in their workplace and the job security that comes from a bargained labor contract.
Google should encourage HCL to recognize the union and give its employees a fair contract. By doing this, Google would set a significant example for the tech industry.
Contract and gig workers, like those at HCL, are a big part of the U.S. economy—a 2018 report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that 15.5 million Americans worked as independent contractors, on-call employees, freelancers or temporary employees. That’s up from 12.1 million in 1995.
Besides lower pay, contract workers often get fewer benefits than a company’s regular employees. Or they get no benefits....
===
https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/lyft-uber-to-spend-60-million-on-propaganda-to-keep-workers-maximally-exploited/
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no lnx
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Lyft, Uber to spend $60 million on propaganda to keep workers maximally exploited
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Written by Nicole Karlis / Salon September 1, 2019
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On Friday, California state senators on the appropriations committee voted for Assembly Bill 5 — a bill designed to improve the livelihood of gig economy workers at companies like Uber and Lyft, whose business models depend on independent contractors who often suffer inconsistent wages and little or no benefits.
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The vote brings the bill one step closer to becoming a law, one which has the potential to completely remake California’s gig economy to make it more equitable for workers. Lawmakers voted 5-2 to send the bill to the Senate floor, which will be the final vote.
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Yet Uber and Lyft seem frightened at the prospect of treating their workers better, and have been amping up their efforts to protect their companies in case the bill passes. Both rideshare companies’ business models rely on having low-paid independent contractors that are exempt from full-time employee benefits — and even that seems not to be enough to break even. Uber lost $5 billion in the past 3 months, the same time period in which it went public. Lyft’s quarterly loss was $644 million.
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Assembly Bill 5, if passed, would force all companies to make their drivers W-2 employees — a move that would require paying a standard slate of benefits, as well as guarantee that employees made at least minimum wage. Notably, many Lyft and Uber drivers have reported making less than minimum wage, a situation only possible because of the contractual nature of their labor.
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But Uber and Lyft are not going to treat their workers any better without a fight. As The New York Times reports, both companies are taking extreme measures to keep their workers independent contractors, spending millions on propaganda to sway public opinion.
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The two rideshare companies are spending $30 million each — $60 million total — toward a fund to put an initiative on the California 2020 ballot to exempt them from AB5, assuming it passes. DoorDash, whose business model also depends on independent contractors, said it would contribute $30 million, too.
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In a statement to TechCrunch, a Lyft spokesperson said: “We are working on a solution that provides drivers with strong protections that include an earnings guarantee, a system of worker-directed portable benefits, and first-of-its kind industry-wide sectoral bargaining, without jeopardizing the flexibility drivers tell us they value so much.”
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Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer, said in an interview with The New York Times the fund is a “Plan B.”
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“As a Plan B, we are reluctantly funding this initiative,” West said. “This is not our first-choice option. We would much rather have a historic deal that is good for drivers, good for innovation, good for labor.”
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The news quickly followed requests made by both companies to their customers to contact their legislators to oppose AB 5 and support their proposed revision. In an email to California riders, Uber advocated for a policy that would offer drivers a minimum of $21 per hour while on a trip, in addition to paid time off, sick leave and compensation if they are injured while working — all rights that drivers don’t have as independent contractors.
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In a separate email from Lyft sent to its customers, the company said that AB5, as it is written, could mean that customers pay more, wait longer, and “risk losing reliable access to rideshare altogether.” They, too, promised a new proposal “with additional workplace protections for drivers and a minimum earnings floor.
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AB 5 expands on and codifies the 2018 California Supreme Court decision made in Dynamex Operations West, Inc. v. Superior Court of Los Angeles, and will make it harder for companies to claim that workers are independent contractors. The determination, according to the bill, would be an “ABC” test would ascertain whether a worker is an employee rather than a contractor. Under the test, as it stands, it is likely that gig economy workers — who are currently classified as independent contractors — would be considered employees.
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While the bill only pertains to the state of California, some experts believe its repercussions will extend across the country — perhaps unsurprising given that California is both the largest state by population, and has the largest economy of any state.
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“What happens in California will be closely watched around the country,” Ken Jacobs, the chair UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, told Salon in July. “As we have seen with paid sick leave, $15 minimum wages, and fair scheduling, policies that start in one state or locality often spread elsewhere.”
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Jacobs told Salon such a law can have a nationwide impact not only because it will set a precedent, but because a majority of gig economy companies are in California — like Uber, Lyft and Postmates.
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“California makes up a significant part of the market for many of the gig economy companies,” Jacobs said. “It will have a large effect on their overall business model … in the context [of] New York City, and other important markets, that have put higher labor standards in place.”
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The corporations’ massive propaganda efforts to exempt Uber and Lyft exempt from the bill come as an insult to Uber and Lyft drivers who support AB5.
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“It’s insulting,” Uber driver Rebecca Stack-Martinez, an organizer for Gig Workers Rising, told Salon in an interview. “Here is a company claiming drivers are the heart of their business, and that they would do right by them.
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“If that was true they would let AB 5 pass,” she added.
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Stack-Martinez said she felt “nauseous” when she heard that the companies had created a $60 million fund for the 2020 ballot measure.
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“Why don’t they take that money and give it to their drivers who are sleeping in their cars and who can’t afford to put food on the tables for family?” she said.
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Tech giants argue that their workers “prefer” freedom and flexibility in their workday. Jacobs, of the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, told Salon that argument lacks steam.
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“Their model is based on offloading as much risk to the drivers as possible while paying at the lowest possible rate,” Jacobs told Salon in July. “There is no reason there cannot be flexibility in an employee model …. this is a choice the company makes, and ultimately the best place to make the decision on trade-offs between security and flexibility is through a union — and workers need both higher labor standards and a union to have a voice in how policies are implemented.”
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==
==
note ripple effect (also someone just noted that schedule/hours fluctuation is stress and makes budgeting impossible]
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As it moves into package delivery, Amazon is bringing its labor model along, relying in part on Amazon Flex drivers, who use their own vehicles, take directions from an app, and are paid a piece rate for each batch of boxes they deliver. The impacts are already being felt at the US Postal Service and UPS, whose hundreds of thousands of unionized employees constitute one of the last surviving corners of the working middle class. A few months ago, over the objections of the Teamsters union, UPS began placing ads for drivers who will use their own vehicles.
===
https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/is-the-gig-economy-a-path-to-prosperity-or-the-indenture-of-just-getting-by
:{
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...We know just how violently exploitative slavery was as an institution but how many Americans know that by some historical estimates half to three-quarters of European immigrants that came to the colonies had some form of indenture price hanging over their head.
Capital has been kicking labor’s ass since it wore powdered wigs in this country and the data shows it hasn’t let up since, as the widening wealth and income gap demonstrates.
Scroll forward a few hundred years, the entire recorded history of the country and according to a 2018 Federal Reserve Report on the Economic Well Being of the U.S. Household in the 21st century “four in 10 adults, if faced with an unexpected expense of $400, would either not be able to cover it or would cover it by selling something or borrowing money.”
So that’s the great wheel of progress? More like the randomness of the wheel of fortune. At least when you were indentured there was a chance you might get free food and shelter.
In the 2020 debate for the Democratic nomination, the constant refrain we hear from the moderators of the cable debate is that the greatest danger Democrats face is the perilous prospect they will go too far left, too fast.
If anything, we have been moving too slow for too long and we can see it in the data related to the growing affordability crisis that’s been documented by the United Way across the country with its analysis of the working poor in several states.
The national non-profit takes a detailed look at the local cost of living and wages for families they define as asset limited income constrained but employed (ALICE). In California 48 percent of the state’s families are either poor or struggle week-to-week to get by. In Florida, it is 46 percent. In Ohio, 42 percent are in that ALICE cohort. In New York, 45 percent either live below poverty or are struggling on the edge over which they will plummet after one major unexpected expense.
We did not get to these numbers overnight. This is the consequence of decades of permitting corporations to grow larger and larger as the union movement shrunk to a fraction of what it once was. Fifty years ago, almost a third of Americans were in a union while today it is just one in ten. Is it any wonder that since the 1970s wages have declined or stayed flat as worker productivity skyrocketed along with the cost of living?
As I have written in this space before, there are signs of a grass roots labor union revival born out of something that has been brewing for several Presidential election cycles. It is driven by data that shows this generation of young adults are on track to be the first that won’t do better than their parents economically.
For me it appears to be most evident In New York State that has a bit of a head start with one of the highest concentrations of organized labor in the country. In the next few weeks the state’s union movement is hoping to right what New York State AFL-CIO President Mario Cilento, believes is a “decades old disgrace” with the passage this session of the Farmworkers Fair Labor Practices Act (S-2837/A-2750).
In the 1930s America’s farmworkers were excluded from the landmark protections extended to the rest of the nation as codified during the New Deal. The 1935 National Labor Relations Act and the 1938 Fair Labor Practices Act expressly exempted them, along with domestic workers.
These landmark reforms codified the concept of overtime and a minimum wage.
“People think we all took these huge leaps forward, but these reforms were not universal,” said Joshua Freeman, a professor and labor historian at the City of New York’s Graduate Center. “It depended on your race and gender and the farmworker and domestic worker cutouts were to get southern Congressional Democrats on board who did not want to see black workers covered.”
During the eighty-plus years since, resistance to farmworkers organizing and gaining legal work place protections has remained intense with less than one percent of the workforce being able to benefit from union membership.
In New York State’s the drive to, at long last, provide farmworkers with labor rights they have been denied for decades is led by 33-year-old State Senator Jessica Ramos, who was first elected last year and chairs the State Senate Labor Committee.
“We must ensure that farmworkers are granted the rights that all other workers in our state are afforded — a day off, overtime pay, unemployment benefits and the right to collectively bargain,” she said in an email exchange...
==
strike before 92bill est IPO (112% tax proposed by SF?)
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Uber drivers strike and the future of labor: 4 essential reads
Bryan Keogh, The Conversation
The Uber driver walkout raises questions about how workers can fight for better pay and benefits in the age of the gig economy – a topic frequently on the minds of Conversation scholars.
:{:{
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:{:{
Uber drivers across the globe logged out of their company’s app for several hours on May 8 to protest its compensation policies.
Strikes occurred in at least eight U.S. cities including New York and San Francisco as well as places as far-flung as London and Melbourne. They were timed to precede Uber’s huge initial public offering.
Drivers are demanding better job security and higher wages. Their status as independent contractors often denies them some employee rights. And studies show many drivers earn less than $10 an hour after expenses.
The walkout raises questions about the future of worker mobilization in the age of the gig economy. Here are four stories from The Conversation archive that offer lessons for today’s worker activists.
1. 1919 Seattle strike offers hope
A century ago, 35,000 shipyard workers and 25,000 other union members – roughly a fifth of Seattle’s population – walked off their jobs to demand higher wages.
The Seattle General Strike of 1919 shut down a major U.S. city, inspired a rock opera, provoked fears Russian Bolsheviks were trying to overthrow American capitalism and, ultimately, was an abject failure in achieving its ends, wrote University of Oregon history professor Steven C. Beda. Yet the incident offers “surprisingly hopeful” lessons for today’s striking teachers, Uber drivers and others, he argued.
“It had proven to workers, both in Seattle and elsewhere, that there was power in unity, however fleeting,” Beda recalled. “For five days, workers had shut down the city and then run it themselves.
"For today’s workers tired of decades of wage stagnation and fleeting benefits in the gig economy, the Seattle General Strike offers an important lesson about the power of organized laborers: When united, workers can take on the most powerful foes,” he wrote.
2. Google and the power of customers
Late last year, thousands of Google employees staged a walkout to demand changes to the way their company handles sexual harassment complaints. The company pledged to overhaul its policies.
The grievances that motivated the protest, the first of its kind by well-paid and benefit-rich high-tech workers, were “emblematic of what’s prompting millions of American workers to feel they have lost their voice,” argued Thomas Kochan, a professor of management at MIT.
To find it again, they should look to a similar walkout by employees of Massachusetts-based Market Basket in 2014, which Kochan called the “most successful strike of the 21st century.” The employees won their battle because of strong customer support, a strategy Google workers should follow, he wrote.
“Although labor law won’t protect them, they might be able to use the hundreds of millions of Google’s customers – of its search engine, email program or mobile phone software – to pressure executives to negotiate in good faith,” he wrote. They “could not only end up changing their company’s policy on harassment, but become the vanguard that could help disrupt U.S. labor law in the process.”
3. Teachers fighting for social justice
Teachers in several cities in the U.S., including Oakland, California, also went on strike last year.
While low teacher pay was one of the motivations, they were also protesting the lack of funding for student resources. And in the process, they enlisted the help of student and community groups and focused on racial justice, explained Rebecca Tarlau, an assistant professor of education and of labor and employment relations at Pennsylvania State University.
“All these actions have transformed the Oakland Education Association – and many other teachers’ unions across the country – into leaders of a social movement that has the potential of redefining public education, the labor movement and American politics,” she wrote.
4. Risks of inaction
Despite some success, the power of unions to represent workers has plummeted in recent decades as their ranks have dwindled.
MIT’s Kochan, a frequent contributor to The Conversation on the future of labor, also wrote about three key questions that need to be answered by all American workers, from high-tech Googlers and gig economy drivers and “taskers” to underpaid teachers. But he also warned of risks.
“Unless talk leads to actions to change the course of the economy and labor market, the next generation of workers is destined to experience a lower standard of living than their parents – the opposite of the American Dream,” Kochan argued.
This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives.
:{
- Labor
- Protest
- Social justice
- Unions
- Employees
- Teacher unions
- Teacher pay
- Uber
- strike
- Lyft
- Gig economy
- Organized Labor
- Labor unions
- Essential Reads
- Quick reads
- teacher strik
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==
==
https://theintercept.com/2019/04/01/lyft-ipo-gig-economy-labor-law/
==
==
https://YYY.theguardian.com/business/2018/nov/20/high-score-low-pay-gamification-lyft-uber-drivers-ride-hailing-gig-economy
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...
language of choice, freedom, and autonomy saturate discussions of ride hailing. “On-demand companies are pointing the way to a more promising future, where people have more freedom to choose when and where they work,” Travis Kalanick, the founder and former CEO of Uber, wrote in October 2015. “Put simply,” he continued, “the future of work is about independence and flexibility.”
In a certain sense, Kalanick is right. Unlike employees in a spatially fixed worksite (the factory, the office, the distribution centre), rideshare drivers are technically free to choose when they work, where they work and for how long. They are liberated from the constraining rhythms of conventional employment or shift work. But that apparent freedom poses a unique challenge to the platforms’ need to provide reliable, “on demand” service to their riders – and so a driver’s freedom has to be aggressively, if subtly, managed. One of the main ways these companies have sought to do this is through the use of gamification.
....
==
==
guard uk uber gamification
...n addition to offering meaningless badges and meagre savings at the pump, ride-hailing companies have also adopted some of the same design elements used by gambling firms to promote addictive behaviour among slot-machine users. One of things the anthropologist and NYU media studies professor Natasha Dow Schüll found during a decade-long study of machine gamblersin Las Vegas is that casinos use networked slot machines that allow them to surveil, track and analyse the behaviour of individual gamblers in real time – just as ride-hailing apps do. This means that casinos can “triangulate any given gambler’s player data with her demographic data, piecing together a profile that can be used to customise game offerings and marketing appeals specifically for her”. Like these customised game offerings, Lyft tells me that my weekly ride challenge has been “personalised just for you!”
Former Google “design ethicist” Tristan Harris has also described how the “pull-to-refresh” mechanism used in most social media feeds mimics the clever architecture of a slot machine: users never know when they are going to experience gratification – a dozen new likes or retweets – but they know that gratification will eventually come. This unpredictability is addictive: behavioural psychologists have long understood that gambling uses variable reinforcement schedules – unpredictable intervals of uncertainty, anticipation and feedback – to condition players into playing just one more round.
....
==
==
https://YYY.theguardian.com/business/2018/nov/20/high-score-low-pay-gamification-lyft-uber-drivers-ride-hailing-gig-economy
:{
}:
...
language of choice, freedom, and autonomy saturate discussions of ride hailing. “On-demand companies are pointing the way to a more promising future, where people have more freedom to choose when and where they work,” Travis Kalanick, the founder and former CEO of Uber, wrote in October 2015. “Put simply,” he continued, “the future of work is about independence and flexibility.”
In a certain sense, Kalanick is right. Unlike employees in a spatially fixed worksite (the factory, the office, the distribution centre), rideshare drivers are technically free to choose when they work, where they work and for how long. They are liberated from the constraining rhythms of conventional employment or shift work. But that apparent freedom poses a unique challenge to the platforms’ need to provide reliable, “on demand” service to their riders – and so a driver’s freedom has to be aggressively, if subtly, managed. One of the main ways these companies have sought to do this is through the use of gamification.
....
According to Burawoy, production at Allied was deliberately organised by management to encourage workers to play the game. When work took the form of a game, Burawoy observed, something interesting happened: workers’ primary source of conflict was no longer with the boss. Instead, tensions were dispersed between workers (the scheduling man, the truckers, the inspectors), between operators and their machines, and between operators and their own physical limitations (their stamina, precision of movement, focus).
The battle to beat the quota also transformed a monotonous, soul-crushing job into an exciting outlet for workers to exercise their creativity, speed and skill. Workers attached notions of status and prestige to their output, and the game presented them with a series of choices throughout the day, affording them a sense of relative autonomy and control. It tapped into a worker’s desire for self-determination and self-expression. Then, it directed that desire towards the production of profit for their employer.
Every Sunday morning, I receive an algorithmically generated “challenge” from Lyft that goes something like this: “Complete 34 rides between the hours of 5am on Monday and 5am on Sunday to receive a $63 bonus.” I scroll down, concerned about the declining value of my bonuses, which once hovered around $100-$220 per week, but have now dropped to less than half that.
“Click here to accept this challenge.” I tap the screen to accept. Now, whenever I log into driver mode, a stat meter will appear showing my progress: only 21 more rides before I hit my first bonus. Lyft does not disclose how its weekly ride challenges are generated, but the value seems to vary according to anticipated demand and driver behaviour. The higher the anticipated demand, the higher the value of my bonus. The more I hit my bonus targets or ride quotas, the higher subsequent targets will be. Sometimes, if it has been a while since I have logged on, I will be offered an uncharacteristically lucrative bonus, north of $100, though it has been happening less and less of late.
Behavioural scientists and video game designers are well aware that tasks are likely to be completed faster and with greater enthusiasm if one can visualise them as part of a progression towards a larger, pre-established goal. The Lyft stat meter is always present, always showing you what your acceptance rating is, how many rides you have completed, how far you have to go to reach your goal.
In addition to enticing drivers to show up when and where demand hits, one of the main goals of this gamification is worker retention. According to Uber, 50% of drivers stop using the application within their first two months, and a recent report from the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California in Davis suggests that just 4% of ride-hail drivers make it past their first year.
Retention is a problem in large part because the economics of driving are so bad. Researchers have struggled to establish exactly how much money drivers make, but with the release of two recent reports, one from the Economic Policy Institute and one from MIT, a consensus on driver pay seems to be emerging: drivers make, on average, between $9.21 (£7.17) and $10.87 (£8.46) per hour. What these findings confirm is what many of us in the game already know: in most major US cities, drivers are pulling in wages that fall below local minimum-wage requirements. According to an internal slide deck obtained by the New York Times, Uber actually identifiesMcDonald’s as its biggest competition in attracting new drivers. When I began driving for Lyft, I made the same calculation most drivers make: it is better to make $9 per hour than to make nothing.
Before Lyft rolled out weekly ride challenges, there was the “Power Driver Bonus”, a weekly challenge that required drivers to complete a set number of regular rides. I sometimes worked more than 50 hours per week trying to secure my PDB, which often meant driving in unsafe conditions, at irregular hours and accepting nearly every ride request, including those that felt potentially dangerous (I am thinking specifically of an extremely drunk and visibly agitated late-night passenger).
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guard UK
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who sets the rules for all these games? It is 12.30am on a Friday night and the “Lyft drivers lounge”, a closed Facebook group for active drivers, is divided. The debate began, as many do, with an assertion about the algorithm. “The algorithm” refers to the opaque and often unpredictable system of automated, “data-driven” management employed by ride-hailing companies to dispatch drivers, match riders into Pools (Uber) or Lines (Lyft), and generate “surge” or “primetime” fares, also known as “dynamic pricing”.
The algorithm is at the heart of the ride-hailing game, and of the coercion that the game conceals. In their foundational text Algorithmic Labor and Information Asymmetries: A Case Study of Uber’s Drivers, Alex Rosenblat and Luke Stark write: “Uber’s self-proclaimed role as a connective intermediary belies the important employment structures and hierarchies that emerge through its software and interface design.” “Algorithmic management” is the term Rosenblat and Stark use to describe the mechanisms through which Uber and Lyft drivers are directed. To be clear, there is no singular algorithm. Rather, there are a number of algorithms operating and interacting with one another at any given moment. Taken together, they produce a seamless system of automatic decision-making that requires very little human intervention.
For many on-demand platforms, algorithmic management has completely replaced the decision-making roles previously occupied by shift supervisors, foremen and middle- to upper- level management. Uber actually refers to its algorithms as “decision engines”. These “decision engines” track, log and crunch millions of metrics every day, from ride frequency to the harshness with which individual drivers brake. It then uses these analytics to deliver gamified prompts perfectly matched to drivers’ data profiles.
Because the logic of the algorithm is largely unknown and constantly changing, drivers are left to speculate about what it is doing and why. Such speculation is a regular topic of conversation in online forums, where drivers post screengrabs of nonsensical ride requests and compare increasingly lacklustre, algorithmically generated bonus opportunities. It is not uncommon for drivers to accuse ride-hailing companies of programming their algorithms to favour the interests of the corporation. To resolve this alleged favouritism, drivers routinely hypothesise and experiment with ways to manipulate or “game” the system back.
When the bars let out after last orders at 2am, demand spikes. Drivers have a greater likelihood of scoring “surge” or “primetime” fares. There are no guarantees, but it is why we are all out there. To increase the prospect of surge pricing, drivers in online forums regularly propose deliberate, coordinated, mass “log-offs” with the expectation that a sudden drop in available drivers will “trick” the algorithm into generating higher surges. I have never seen one work, but the authors of a recently published paper say that mass log-offs are occasionally successful.
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Some Say the Gig Economy is Capitalism's Final Victory — But Maybe It's Not
The Conversation
Karl Marx wouldn’t agree that worker power has been killed by the 21st century. READ MORE»
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10/18
45 min training video on early warning signs of union eg hang out, use words livable wage raplh nader radio
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Amazon’s Minimum Wage Hike Is Not What It Seems AN
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$15/hr employees whole food, what about contractors? bernie BEZOS bill
amazon just hit 1 trillion value?
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818 nla:
KEEPING DOWN PAY AND BENEFITS IN THE GIG ECONOMY
ALEC will also be considering a “Uniform Worker Classification Act” that promotes short-term contracts and freelance work over permanent jobs. The resolution focuses on “uniform standards for determining who is an employee and who is an independent contractor,” but is designed to establish a very broad definition of independent contractor that lets employers off the hook for the rights and benefits enjoyed by traditional employees and prevents union organizing. Misclassifying workers is a classic corporate strategy for short-shrifting employees and has been the subject of much litigation.
While companies such as Uber, Lyft, and TaskRabbit are changing the job market, they typically generate low-paying jobs with few or no benefits. The tenuous relationship between employers and employees in many of these jobs raises a passel of legal issues. Are these contract employees subject to the same wage and hour laws? Are these contract employees eligible for unemployment benefits, job training, workman’s compensation, and other worker protections?
In New York, the state has taken steps to regulate the industry after six professional drivers killed themselves, and drivers for-hire and taxi drivers say they are not making enough to pay their bills or support their families. New York’s Unemployment Insurance Appeal Board recently ruled that Uber and Lyft drivers are formal employees of the company, and Seattle recently gave Uber and Lyft drivers the right to organize a union. The model bill being considered at ALEC would attempt to fend off such regulation by lowering the bar for whom corporations can consider a contract employee. note pattern, any time mod kicks in ctr-attack]
The NetChoice trade association represents e-commerce employers such as Lyft and Airbnb at ALEC and is likely responsible for this bill. The National Employment Law Project has a handy fact sheeton why this is such an important issue.
https://www.alternet.org/labor/gig-economy-new-term-serfdom
chris hedges
A 65-year-old New York City cab driver from Queens, Nicanor Ochisor, hanged himself in his garage March 16, saying in a note he left behind that the ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft had made it impossible for him to make a living. It was the fourth suicide by a cab driver in New York in the last four months, including one Feb. 5 in which livery driver Douglas Schifter, 61, killed himself with a shotgun outside City Hall.
“Due to the huge numbers of cars available with desperate drivers trying to feed their families,” wrote Schifter, “they squeeze rates to below operating costs and force professionals like me out of business. They count their money and we are driven down into the streets we drive becoming homeless and hungry. I will not be a slave working for chump change. I would rather be dead.” He said he had been working 100 to 120 hours a week for the past 14 years.
Schifter and Ochisor were two of the millions of victims of the new economy. Corporate capitalism is establishing a neofeudal serfdom in numerous occupations, a condition in which there are no labor laws, no minimum wage, no benefits, no job security and no regulations. Desperate and impoverished workers, forced to endure 16-hour days, are viciously pitted against each other. Uber drivers make about $13.25 an hour. In cities like Detroit this falls to $8.77. Travis Kalanick, the former CEO of Uber and one of the founders, has a net worth of $4.8 billion. Logan Green, the CEO of Lyft, has a net worth of $300 million.
The corporate elites, which have seized control of ruling institutions including the government and destroyed labor unions, are re-establishing the inhumane labor conditions that characterized the 19th and early 20th centuries. When workers at General Motors carried out a 44-day sit-down strike in 1936, many were living in shacks that lacked heating and indoor plumbing; they could be laid off for weeks without compensation, had no medical or retirement benefits and often were fired without explanation. When they turned 40 their employment could be terminated. The average wage was about $900 a year at a time when the government determined that a family of four needed a minimum of $1,600 to live above the poverty line.
The managers at General Motors relentlessly persecuted union organizers. The company spent $839,000 on detective work in 1934 to spy on union organizers and infiltrate union meetings. GM employed the white terrorist group the Black Legion—the police chief of Detroit was suspected of being a member—to threaten and physically assault labor activists and assassinate union leaders including George Marchuk and John Bielak, both shot to death.
The reign of the all-powerful capitalist class has returned with a vengeance. The job conditions of working men and women, thrust backward, will not improve until they regain the militancy and rebuild the popular organizations that seized power from the capitalists. There are some 13,000 licensed cabs in New York City and 40,000 livery or town cars. The drivers should, as farmers did in 2015 with tractors in Paris, shut down the center of the city. And drivers in other cities should do the same. This is the only language our corporate masters understand.
The ruling capitalists will be as vicious as they were in the past. Nothing enrages the rich more than having to part with a fraction of their obscene wealth. Consumed by greed, rendered numb to human suffering by a life of hedonism and extravagance, devoid of empathy, incapable of self-criticism or self-sacrifice, surrounded by sycophants and leeches who cater to their wishes, appetites and demands, able to use their wealth to ignore the law and destroy critics and opponents, they are among the most repugnant of the human species. Don’t be fooled by the elites’ skillful public relations campaigns—we are watching Mark Zuckerberg, whose net worth is $64.1 billion, mount a massive propaganda effort against charges that he and Facebook are focused on exploiting and selling our personal information—or by the fawning news celebrities on corporate media who act as courtiers and apologists for the oligarchs. These people are the enemy.
Ochisor, a Romanian immigrant, owned a New York City taxi medallion. (Medallions were once coveted by cab drivers because having them allowed the drivers to own their own cabs or lease the cabs to other drivers.) Ochisor drove the night shift, lasting 10 to 12 hours. His wife drove the day shift. But after Uber and Lyft flooded the city with cars and underpaid drivers about three years ago, the couple could barely meet expenses. Ochisor’s home was about to go into foreclosure. His medallion, once worth $1.1 million, had plummeted in value to $180,000. The dramatic drop in the value of the medallion, which he had hoped to lease for $3,000 a month or sell to finance his retirement, wiped out his economic security. He faced financial ruin and poverty. And he was not alone.
John McDonagh began driving a New York City cab 40 years ago. He, like most drivers, worked out of garages owned and operated by businesses. He was paid a percentage of what he earned each night.The corporate architects of the new economy have no intention of halting the assault. They intend to turn everyone into temp workers trapped in demeaning, low-paying, part-time, service-sector jobs without job security or benefits, a reality they plaster over by inventing hip terms like “the gig economy.”
“You could make a living [then],” he told me. “But everyone shared the burden. The garage shared it. The driver shared it. If you had a good night, the garage made money. If you had a bad night, you split it. That’s not the case anymore. Right now we’re leasing [cabs at the garages].”
Leasing requires a driver to pay $120 a day for the car and $30 for the gas. The drivers begin a shift $150 in debt. Because of Uber, Lyft and other smartphone ride apps, drivers’ incomes have been cut by half in many cases. Cab drivers can finish their 12-hour shifts owing the garages money. Drivers are facing bankruptcies, foreclosures and evictions. Some are homeless.
“The TLC [New York City Transportation and Limousine Commission] wanted to limit yellow cab drivers to 12 hours a day,” he said, referring to the distinctive yellow cabs that have medallions and can pick up passengers anywhere in the five boroughs. “There was a protest. Yellow cab drivers were protesting that they have to work a 16-hour day in order to make a living. It’s cut everything. Everybody’s fighting for that extra fare. You would be at a light with two or three other yellow cabs. You saw someone up the street with luggage you would run the lights to get to them. Because that might be an airport job. You’re risking your own life, risking getting tickets, you’re doing things you would never have done before.”
Uber and Lyft in 2016 had 370 active lobbyists in 44 states, “dwarfing some of the largest business and technology companies,” according to the National Employment Law Project. “Together, Uber and Lyft lobbyists outnumbered Amazon, Microsoft, and Walmart combined.” The two companies, like many lobbying firms, also hire former government regulators. The former head of the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, for example, is now on the board of Uber. The companies have used their money and their lobbyists, most of whom are members of the Democratic Party, to free themselves from the regulations and oversight imposed on the taxi industry. The companies using ride-hail apps have flooded New York City with about 100,000 unregulated cars in the past two years.“We don’t have any health care,” he said. “Sitting for those 12 to 16 hours a day, you are getting diabetes. There’s no blood circulation. You’re putting on weight. And then there’s that added stress you’re not making any money.”
“The yellow cab has to be a certain vehicle,” said McDonagh. “It’s a Nissan. [Nissan won the bid to supply the city’s cabs.] Every yellow cab has to charge a certain price. When that drop goes down, that’s regulated by the city. They added on all these extra taxes, for the MTA and for the wheelchair [half of all yellow cabs are required to be wheelchair-accessible by 2020], a rush-hour tax. Uber comes in. No regulations at all. They could pick whatever type of car they want. Whatever color of car. They could change prices when it’s slow. They can lower the prices. When it’s busy they can do price surging. It can be two or three times. Whereas the yellow cab is just plowing along at the same rate at the same time. Going to Kennedy Airport from Manhattan is $52. No matter what the traffic is like, no matter how many hours it takes you to get there. Uber will jack up its prices two or three times. You might have to pay $100 to get to Kennedy Airport. While the yellow cab industry is almost regulated to death, Uber is coming in with new technology, figuring out different ways how [it is] going to make money. … It’s finished, with the yellow cabs.”
Life for Uber and Lyft drivers is as difficult. Uber and Lyft use bonuses to lure drivers into the business. Once the bonuses are gone, these drivers sink to the same economic desperation as those driving yellow cabs.
“Uber is leasing cars,” McDonagh said. “They have car dealerships that will sell. They advertise as, ‘Listen, you can have bad credit. Come down to Uber. We’ll get you the money or loan to buy this car.’ And what they do is they’ll take the money directly out of what you’re making that day to pay for the loan. They can’t lose. And if you go under, they’ll sell the car back to the dealership and then redo it for the next immigrant driver. There’s a whole scam going on.”
“As a yellow cab driver, you don’t see the world vision,” he said. “But there’s that famous term ‘the race to the bottom.’ You’re working more and more hours for less and less wages. This is the new gig economy. Someone will use an Uber to go to an Airbnb and get on his phone to order something from Amazon to eat in his house. All those shops are now gone. From cashiers to cab drivers. I feel like I’m a blacksmith or a typesetter at a newspaper business trying to explain to you what the yellow cab industry used to be. We’re becoming obsolete.”
“Guys are sleeping in the cab,” McDonagh said. “They’ll go out to Kennedy at 2 or 3 in the morning. They pull into the lot and go to sleep to catch [passengers off] the first flight that’s coming in from California a couple of hours later. You have guys who won’t go home for a couple of days. They’ll just stay out on the street. They roam the street to try to make money. It’s dangerous for the passenger. The amount of accidents will be going up because drivers are drowsy.”
McDonagh said Uber and Lyft cars must be regulated. All cars should have meters to guarantee an adequate income for drivers. And drivers should have health care and benefits. None of this will happen, he warned, as long as we live under a system of government where our political elites are dependent on campaign contributions from corporations and those who should be regulating the industry look to these corporations for future employment.
“We have to limit the amount of cabs, particularly here in New York City,” McDonagh said. “If we did it in the yellow cab industry for 50 years, why can’t we do it with Uber? They’re adding 100 cars a week through the streets of New York. This is insane. When you call an Uber, the biggest complaint people have now is, ‘The car is here too quick.’ They’re there within two or three minutes. I can’t even get dressed. … They’re rolling empty throughout the city, waiting for that hit.”
“Horses in Central Park are regulated,” he pointed out. “There’s 150 of them. They make a great living there, the guys on the horse and buggies. Say Uber comes in and says, ‘We want to bring in Uber horses. And we want to add 100,000.’ And let’s see how the market will handle it. We know what’s going to happen. No one will make money. They’re all around Central Park. And now no one can go anywhere because there are now 100,000 horses in Central Park. It would be considered madness to do that. They wouldn’t do it. Yet when it comes to the yellow cab industry, for 50 years all we could have was 13,000 cabs, and then within a year or two we’re going to add 100,000. Let’s see how the market works on that! We know how the market works.”
“They [the horses] work less hours [than cab drivers],” he said. “They don’t work in hot and cold temperatures. If you believe in reincarnation, you should come back as a horse in Central Park. And they all live on the West Side of Manhattan. We live in basements in Brooklyn and Queens. We haven’t upped our status in life, that’s for sure.”
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