#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."
"Whereas, I think if you were able to build a company or a brand or an institution, at the end of that, you’re like, “Well, I made this.” And maybe I could sell it. Maybe I could just let some other people run it. Maybe it stands for something. Maybe we could shut it down and everyone could talk about how much they missed it, but it’s more than you. And I think the platforms are not organized economically to ever allow that to happen..."
"My team is happier. We did not know that the Twitter thing would happen, but the Twitter thing happened, and our desire to publish in the boxes we controlled went up as a group. And then, on top of it, our audience saw that we were having fun. And once you are having fun anywhere on the internet, people sort of gravitate to you. So traffic has gone up."
We need to stop buying into the way these companies conceal the service they provide behind the ordering app they give us to initiate a service. Uber Eats isn't a type of app, any more than it's a type of car. It's a delivery company that uses apps and cars to provide a service. One restaurants, drivers and customers all pay for in different ways, so the owner can cream off pure profit.
#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."
"A new report from the research group Data & Society, released Wednesday, takes a look at how gig work has taken shape outside of the West. Titled “The Formalization of Social Precarities,” the report draws together interviews from India, Bangladesh, and Brazil. It explains how gig work fits into — and is exacerbated by — existing social issues in various regions, deepening inequalities and creating problems that are difficult to recognize, let alone solve. Each culture has its own norms around race and caste, and they shape the parameters of gig work in profound ways.
“We wanted to look at social behavior and the interaction between workers and customers, and how all of that is shaped by caste and class,” Ambika Tandon, who led the India research, told me.
The report finds that using apps as intermediaries between workers and clients has created a strange kind of dislocation. With platforms owning that relationship, it keeps both sides less aware of the circumstances around them."
#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.