Pages

Friday, June 16, 2023

Jacobin has interesting content about gig-job worker exploitation ties to former Obama people.

Link, dated 6/12/2023, stating in part:  

Barack Obama abandoned his commitments to unions, and many top staffers went to work for the gig economy. In his Netflix series Working, the former president bears witness to workers’ suffering as if it were immutable — and something he had nothing to do with.

The first episode [of the Obama/Netflix mini-series] follows three people who do service work: hotel housekeeper Elba, home care aide Randi, and delivery driver Carmen. At minute twelve, we follow Carmen as she delivers meals for Uber Eats. The camera zooms in on her phone’s display, where we can see the app’s interface. Carmen accepts a delivery order that the app tells her is $16.61 including the expected tip.

[...] In the series, the only mention of the idea of minimum trip payments comes when Carmen says, “It would be nice if you got at least minimum wage,” only to continue, “but they don’t do that.” There is little discussion of such policy questions about Uber or its gig-economy counterparts, much less their right to continue on with a business model whose main innovation comes down to labor arbitrage.

It is hard not to conclude that Carmen is powerless to change anything. Apparently, so is Obama — which is odd, since the gig economy as we know it today was effectively created during his administration. Uber was founded two months after Obama’s inauguration. The company launched Uber Eats in 2014. And many of Obama’s former staffers have played a key role not only in expanding the gig economy in general, but in the growth of Uber specifically.

David Plouffe, Obama’s 2008 campaign manager and a senior advisor to the president, joined Uber as a senior vice president of policy and strategy in 2014, using his access to the president’s circle to combat what Uber’s then CEO Travis Kalanick described as the company’s opponent: “the Big Taxi Cartel.” Plouffe also worked these connections to export the company’s labor arbitrage abroad, playing a key role in Uber’s global lobbying effort.

Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager in 2012 and the president’s deputy chief of staff, helped too. He introduced Plouffe to Kalanick, advising the company on how to smooth over frictions as it expanded into new markets. Kalanick also considered hiring Jay Carney, the president’s former press secretary, to lead the company’s communications strategy; instead, Carney joined Amazon as senior vice president of global affairs in 2015.

Yet here is Obama, showing us the consequences of his milieu’s actions, his failure to institute even relatively tame protections for workers as Uber and other gig-economy companies spread across the United States, burrowing into the marrow of our cities and towns until they were so entrenched as to become almost unavoidable and untouchable. We hear no mention of his former vice president’s disinterest in this issue either, as gig companies’ continue apace with their efforts to ensure their workforce’s lack of protections by creating a nonsensical “third category” of worker, a nefarious middle ground between worker and independent contractor that allows bosses to better exploit their employees.

Lest we forget, Obama reneged on his commitment to prioritize the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which among other things would have instituted “card check.” This would mean that when a majority of workers have signed union authorization cards, the union would be certified without having to submit to the onerous process of holding a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election that is lopsidedly stacked in bosses’ favor.

Without even going into the corporate-friendly bailout over which he presided during the Great Recession, Obama also backed out of all sorts of other commitments he made to the working class to win their support. To name just one, here’s a speech he gave during his first primary campaign in 2007 to a crowd in South Carolina: “If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I’ll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself. I’ll walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America.”

Obama did not, in fact, join anyone on a picket line during that first term — not even as Wisconsin gutted unions under right-wing governor Scott Walker.

Why dredge all that up? The answer is that Walz vetoed only one bill, aimed to help workers against the Uber/Lyft machine. It was a curious veto, and the now mentioned Democratic Party - Obama flavor to things might factor into the Walz veto thinking. As in might/might not. He says his worry was ride share in rural Minnesota.

 On record. But one has to wonder. Why be anti-labor, if you are nominally a Democrat?