VOX May 10, 2021 5:24PM “The battle for the future of ‘gig’ work” “Ride-sharing companies are pushing to make at third category of ‘independent’ worker the law of the land. Driver’s say the notion of independence is little more than a mirage” by Sarah Jaffe
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Stories from Gig workers
Erica Mighetto, ride hail driver. Expected “it to be a transitional thing…” Early on with Lyft she was making “an average of $40 and hour.” It was great getting away from 15 years of cubicle work and getting a sense of the “word on the street.” But in time Lyft and Uber …”keep moving the goalposts” making it hard to make ends meet. Others echo the experience says Seydou Quattara found that over time in NYC “’I was working more hours for Uber, but I was making less money.’”
For their part the Ubers and Lyfts of the world “argued that gig workers need to be excluded from employee-status reason being that allowed workers “flexibility” and anyway they were mostly part- not full-time “professional drivers.” The benefit to Uber launched in 2011 and now an array of companies using gig workers is these companies could “avoid minimum wage and overtime laws as well as unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation, and payroll taxes” not to mention health care benefits. Over the years American companies have sought to remove benefits citing various reasons. In this case removing “protections because their [gig] work wasn’t really seen as work.” Gig workers disagree and some are pushing back.
Surprisingly, California “passed a ballot initiative…[essentially putting gig workers] in a semi-employee status.” The Proposition (22), backed by $200M from the likes of Uber/Lyft and DoorDash, worked to guarantee a minimum wage while drivers were carrying passengers but gig workers weren't afforded “state unemployment, discrimination protection, sick leave, or collective bargaining rights…". A UC Berkeley study found the minimum wage might be as low as “$5.64 per hour.” Prior to the launch of Uber, New York taxi minimum wage was “$17.22” per hour.
The rest of the country is worried that something like Proposition 22 could proliferate elsewhere. Workers caught in this stranglehold “organized a day of protest” on the night before Uber’s IPO that eventually morphed into “Rideshare Drivers United.” As it was the California legislature and the state supreme court found themselves addressing these issues prior to Proposition 22. The legislative effort, Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), laid out an “ABC test” requiring companies to meet the following criteria to classify workers as independent contractors; 1) worker must be “free from the company’s control”, 2) worker must be “doing work that isn’t central to the company’s business and 3) the workers must be bone fide independent businesses in that industry meaning you must be contracting out to multiple companies.
When AB5 became law in 2019 “it was a huge victory for workers.” But Proposition 22 enacted later exempted “the gig companies out of the protections of AB5. The pandemic dramatically reduced rides and in a way highlighted the lack of medical insurance coverage. Veena Dubal (UC Berkeley Hastings College of Law) says the current models contrary to claims of Lyft and Uber, are …”not innovative or exciting at all…[but rather] a throwback to old models of labor exploitation like piecework and sharecropping.” Given the current algorithms used by these companies, Dubal comments that “Drivers…cannot predict how much they’re going to make…” For sure the industry icons are pushing the Independent Contracting model globally. In effect these companies, according to Dubal, are “saying is that they don’t want to have to provide these basic protections and rights and safety nets and they think that people should be willing to survive without all of these protections we’ve long come to understand as being normal and necessary.”
Not surprisingly “69 percent of [Lyft’s] members of racial or ethnic minority groups…”. Of course, this only exaggerates inequality of gig workers. Sadly, for workers unionizing is more complicated than most of us understand and the needed organizing structures don't fit the typical models. Unionizing efforts in Germany, as an example, have been only marginally successful. According to Josh Eidelson (Bloomberg) “Unions that are trying to head off more Prop 22 scenarios and also expand their ranks will have to weigh the uncertain potential for better treatment from President Biden against the risk of losing or being cut out of the conversation entirely.” Having said that workers know that “unions don’t yet represent” them. At the Federal level, something called the PRO Act, supported by the Biden administration, is being considered with protections similar to AB5. Not surprisingly, Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart and other gig companies are have enrolled dozens of lobbyists and “at least $1,190,000” to persuade congress otherwise.