#Uber#RideHailing#GigEconomy#BigTech#Lobbying#SiliconValley: "Meanwhile, Uber has a long record of using deceptive actions to avoid regulatory oversight, most notably through a program called Greyball. In Boston, Las Vegas, and a host of European cities, it deployed a mock version of its app on the phones of unfriendly city officials to make it falsely appear that the service was not available. In some cities, it investigated passengers’ credit card accounts to help determine if they were government officials.
Where state legislatures or courts do not deliver for Uber, it turns to the ballot box. In 2019 California passed a law making companies responsible for proving that their workers were independent contractors, which opened the door to reclassifying them as employees. Uber and other gig economy companies responded by pouring $220 million into a ballot initiative, Proposition 22, which it billed as a defense of drivers’ rights. “Protecting the ability of Californians to work as independent contractors throughout the state using app-based rideshare and delivery platforms,” it stressed, “is necessary so people can continue to choose which jobs they take, to work as often or as little as they like, and to work with multiple platforms or companies.” In fact the proposition would exempt app-based workers from nearly all labor protections, including paid sick leave, retirement benefits, and workers compensation. It passed, though a group of drivers have contested its legality in the California Supreme Court. Its success is still a troubling sign of Uber’s political clout. In Massachusetts, Uber, Instacart, and Lyft raised $43 million in 2022—and $7 million so far this year—for copycat ballot initiatives."
"I think the defining economic reality of the modern platform media world is that all the platforms realized that an infinite supply of teenage creators are cheaper to deal with than media companies or groups of media individuals or powerful creators."
#GigEconomy#Precarity#PlatformEconomy: "More than two decades after the first ride-hail driver rolled through San Francisco’s streets, the idea of a platform worker is a permanent fixture in many communities and economies. And as more sectors become platformized, there is an increasing urgency to understand how these jobs have changed, what new work conditions have been created, and what regulatory reforms might be needed to ensure fair conditions.
Edited by Murali Shanmugavelan and Aiha Nguyen, The Formalization of Social Precarities explores platformization from the point of view of precarious gig workers in the Majority World. In countries like Bangladesh, Brazil, and India — which reinforce social hierarchies via gender, race, and caste — precarious workers are often the most marginalized members of society. Labor platforms made familiar promises to workers in these countries: work would be democratized, and people would have the opportunity to be their own boss. Yet even as platforms have upended the legal relationship between worker and employer, they have leaned into social structures to keep workers precarious — and in fact formalized those social precarities through surveillance and data collection."
#India#GigEconomy#DeliveryApps: "Rolled out in 2023, Swiggy’s gold, silver, and bronze rankings for its gig workforce are based on a dynamic rating system — it changes weekly depending on the quality and quantity of work. Workers with a higher ranking get perks such as the ability to book the following week’s shifts in advance and “attractive interest rates” on personal loans. The program also includes health insurance as a benefit, which can change every week.
Gold-rated workers receive health insurance for themselves and their families; in the silver category, the family is ineligible for insurance. Bronze-rated workers are only eligible for insurance coverage in case of accidents.
While platforms have often used similar gamification tactics to incentivize workers to work or earn more, including health insurance in such a program could be detrimental not just to the workers but also their families, labor experts told Rest of World." https://restofworld.org/2024/swiggy-health-insurance-quotas
'As gig work becomes the norm in many fields, freelancing women make significantly less than men — just 79 cents for every dollar a male freelancer makes, new data shows.
Researchers at OnDeck, a personal finance company, in February analyzed the hourly rates of 9,078 freelancers across the U.S. who used the platform Upwork to bill more than 100 hours.'
So, at the high-skills end of the gig economy, a significant minority of professional service(s) contractors have reported not taking work due to the changes in taxation brought in via the IR35 tax reform (which required employers of contractors to be sure about the tax status of contracted workers).
These reforms were partly intended to stop tax avoidance through the setting up of one person service firms.
Do middle class professionals not like paying a fair(er) tax?
#Russia#Surveillance#Biometrics#FacialRecognition#GigEconomy: "Now TBIJ, in partnership with Follow The Money and Paper Trail Media, can reveal that the technology used to repress dissent against Putin’s authoritarian regime is powered by unwitting gig workers in the global south. A sprawling global network supporting Russia’s surveillance regime draws in US investment firms, one of Russia’s biggest tech companies and two companies sanctioned for their alleged role in Putin’s oppression.
At the heart of it all is Toloka, a little-known tech platform that recruits the gig workers and raises questions about the effectiveness of EU sanctions. Before a recent restructure, all of Toloka was ultimately owned by Yandex, a Russian tech giant with major shareholders in the west.
#GigEconomy#RideHailing: "Whether they’re ferrying passengers or delivering food orders, gig workers often work 10 to 12 hours a day to make ends meet. As they traverse their cities, these workers scramble to find facilities to meet their basic needs — restrooms, clean places to eat meals, and safe spots to rest. Through trial and error, many gig workers have crafted their own invisible city maps, identifying places where they can stop for a breather.
Rest of World spoke to 104 ride-hailing drivers, delivery workers, and cleaners who find gigs via apps across 10 cities — Dhaka, Hanoi, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Karachi, Lagos, Mexico City, Nairobi, and São Paulo — to better understand how often they take breaks, and where they go to use the bathroom and eat meals." https://restofworld.org/2024/gig-worker-rest-breaks/?mc_cid=abefe81351
#DynamicPricing#GigEconomy#Uber#Algorithms#ConsumerRights: "Dynamic pricing today may be unavoidable, but what consumers crave is a baseline of stability and clarity on how much we’re paying and why. There’s something unshakably disorienting about prices changing so quickly and finding our wallets beholden to a set of algorithms we’re not privy to. “It gives the feeling that we’re being manipulated a little bit more than we think we need to be,” says Zagor. Dynamic pricing, with the speed and detail with which it’s utilized today, allows businesses to optimize prices — for businesses, it can eliminate a lot of the uncertainty over whether they’re getting maximum profit. But that can come at the expense of more uncertainty for consumers. “We have this tension between ultimate efficiency for a business and consumer fairness,” says Witte.
Tech bros are not your friends. They are disruptive only in as much as they drive down wages and dismantle protections for workers while pocketing obscene amounts of gullible people’s money under the mirage of ‘choice’ provided by their #GigEconomy.
When you get down to the #deliveroo driver's shelter in Victoria Park #Bristol, you'll appreciate what the #gigeconomy's exploration of #workers looks like....
Once you've read this I'm sure you will not begrudge me using the term #classwar!