#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."
Pandemics as Matter of a System Crisis: Precarity of Society by Peter Herrmann
This book is focusing on the German polity and its structural weakness, analysing the situation in a historical perspective. It is completed by an essayist globalist outlook on the pandemics.
#PlatformCapitalism#PlatformCultures#Precarity: "This article argues for a pluralization of the “platform capitalism” framework, suggesting we should think instead in terms of “platform capitalisms.” This pluralization opens the way to a better account of how platforms work in different geocultural contexts, with our focus being on China, India and Japan. The article first outlines several roles the state has taken on in mediating platform capitalisms. We then signal three main axes around which to consider the implications of platform capitalisms for cultural production: state–platform symbiosis; platform precarity; and the informal–formal relation in cultural production. This short provocation, we hope, will help foreground the crucial role of the state in platform capitalisms, such that the state–culture–capitalism nexus might be better acknowledged in research on platforms and cultural production now and into the future. This is particularly important as states themselves increasingly become platform operators."
#Brazil#GigEconomy#GigWork#Precarity: "A few months after he was sworn in, Lula called together labor groups, representatives for gig work platforms, and government officials to create a working group that would craft new rules for the industry — the first step in making good on his promise. But barely a year after winning the presidency, the dream of gig work regulation in Brazil may be slipping away. Lula’s working group disbanded prematurely in late September, and there is little consensus on how Congress should proceed. Experts now fear that Brazil may have missed a valuable chance to regulate gig work, potentially leaving workers even worse off than before.
“The committee definitely did not meet what was expected of a government that claims at all times to be in defense of workers’ rights and in defense of decent work,” Rafael Grohmann, principal investigator for Fairwork Brazil, a project that researches technology in the workplace, told Rest of World. “The government was unable to advance even on the basic issues regarding pay and work conditions because there was no definitive discussion.”" https://restofworld.org/2023/brazil-president-lula-gig-work-protection/
#EU#Finland#Neoliberalism#Precarity#TradeUnions: "After World War II, Finland’s militant trade unions created one of the world’s strongest welfare states. Today, the country spends more on the welfare state than any other OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) country, at around a quarter of GDP. Finland regularly tops the rankings of the happiest countries in the world and is arguably one of the most successful examples of the social democratic model.
At the heart of the Finnish class compromise is the tradition of social dialogue between unions, employers, and the government, which has led to annual nationwide and sectoral negotiations on wage setting for all union members, tripartite negotiations on new legislative proposals, and the expansion of the welfare state. But this social contract is about to be torn apart by a newly elected right-wing government.
While Finnish politics made international headlines in recent years with a center-left coalition led by five women and headed by the young social democrat Sanna Marin, a radicalized right won a majority in the last parliamentary election in April 2023. As a result, the conservatives, the Christian Democrats, a Swedish minority party, and the far-right Finns Party formed a government. Since then, the coalition has launched the strongest attack on workers’ rights and social security in the history of the Finnish welfare state.
Annika Rönni-Sällinen is president of Finland’s Service Union United (PAM). Daniel Kopp asked her about what the plans mean for the welfare state — and what her union is doing to respond."
#Capitalism#Neoliberalism#Insecurity#Precarity: "I’m always trying to expand the coalition. We are—and by this I mean the big “we”—are up against incredibly powerful entrenched forces that are causing enormous harm in this world. To have any hope of mobilizing against the institutions that are invested in profiting from the destruction of our planet, we’re going to have to build a formidable mass movement. So we need everybody. One thing I like about the concept of insecurity is that it gives us a basis for finding commonalities. Where inequality encourages us to look at extremes—to think about the billionaires versus the billions of people who have very little—insecurity encourages us to look sideways and see what we might have in common with people, even if those people have a bit more than us, or even a lot more than us. Inequality is important; it’s absolutely important to think in those terms. But when you realize, wow, even the person who has managed to get out of debt and muster up a down payment for a house, even they can’t rest, given the way that the economy is structured—that can be the basis of solidarity."
#Insecurity#Precarity#Capitalism#Neoliberalism#Debt: " Yeah, this is kind of a kaleidoscopic book that mixes politics and economics and history, and a bit of memoir that’s hopefully kind of humorous, to look at the way insecurity is really essential to our economy. One of your previous guests, Jayati Ghosh, she’s brilliant and did a great job of laying out the way inequality is spiraling today. And a lot of my work has focused on the problem of inequality and the obscene concentration of wealth and poverty.
But insecurity is how living in a radically unequal world is actually felt day after day. And, you know, if organizing with the Debt Collective has taught me anything, it’s that economic issues are always also emotional ones — you know, the spike of shame when the bill collector calls or our foreboding about saving for retirement, you know, and of course also our anxieties about our collapsing planet and climate change.
So, I think insecurity is pervasive. But what I’m trying to show in the book is it’s actually built into our economy. It’s not just something that we feel spontaneously. We’re all insecure by design, or something I call manufactured insecurity. We see this with advertising. You know, no advertisement will ever tell you that you’re great and the world needs changing. And we see this in official monetary policy, that tries to ramp up worker insecurity, job insecurity, so that workers will be more docile and won’t go on strike.
And I think that looking at insecurity, recognizing just how widespread it is can help us actually have empathy for each other and build powerful coalitions. I hope we can turn that insecurity into solidarity, so that we can fight for the just and sustainable and collective forms of security that we really need."
How #TechWorkers went from dreaming of starting revolutions, to dreaming of fake #startups, to dreaming of a job for life, to fearing layoffs to make way for #StockBuybacks.
It’s been a few years now since I lived in poverty. That it’s back in the horizon again is making me feel like vomiting. I can’t believe* we are having to pay for the fucking incompetence and care less attitude of substandard management. #academicchatter#ucu#precarity
*before the reply guys turn up, this is a fucking rhetorical device.
Found an art catalogue from 2002 talking about efforts we make to free ourselves from the 'risk society', praising the efforts of 'contemporary individuals' to 'opt for alternative, more fluid and entrepreneurial, lifestyles'. Apparently these offer more freedom from 'canonical time structures'.
#GigEconomy#Algorithms#Precarity#AlgorithmicWageDiscrimination: "If these workers for gig platform companies were classified as employees rather than independent contractors then they would be able to demand a wage floor, overtime compensation, and the right to organize a union. But given the low minimum wage and statutory carveouts for “waiting time,” Uber and Lyft as employers would still be able to use personalized pay to incentivize and control worker behavior.
Indeed, the core motivations of these companies to use algorithmic wage discrimination—labor control and wage uncertainty—could apply to many other forms of employment. Gig nurses, for example, could be offered different payments than their colleagues for the same work, at the same place, based on what the hiring platform knows about how much these nurses were willing to accept for previous assignments, or what they know about their debt and other financial obligations."