How The Gig Economy Feeds On Its Workers?
How the ‘Gig economy’ feeds on its workers to profit its corporate masters and their shareholders? Technology has facilitated more services and cheaper rates for consumers. Delivery drivers and riders provide their own assets, like vehicle and smart phone, to make those deliveries possible. These, often, expensive assets depreciate through use and the gig worker must bear the cost and not the parent platform. The risks are all with the worker and not the platforms. Indeed, Uber has a pathway where drivers, often, end up paying for the shopping with their own money, which is to be reimbursed days later. If the worker was being paid extra for these financially onerous uses of their assets it might be OK, but they are not.
Gig Workers Underpaid For Their Work
Delivery drivers are, often, paid below the minimum wage, when you subtract fuel, phone charges, insurance, vehicle maintenance and other sundries from their earnings. Uber runs regular promotional bonus offers to stimulate their drivers to work more. The reality is that these bonuses, when achieved, barely bring up earnings to be commensurate with the minimum wage. It is an old trick to make animals perform tricks to get treats. This is how the Gig economy feeds on its workers. Consumers benefit but at the expense of workers being underpaid. It is the platforms and their shareholders who really make the money.
Disempowerment & The Gig Economy
We live in a neoliberal economic world, where Big Tech runs monopolies to profit from both underpaid workers and consumers with little choice. The concentration of corporate ownership in most sectors has meant price setting and price gouging in many instances. ‘User pays’ is the neoliberal motto. The individual is emphasised by those on the Right, politically, as this disempowers things like communities. It is easier to control lots of small units out for themselves than a united body like a union. Those on the Right have outmanoeuvred Unions over recent decades to render them largely impotent. Greed is good has infiltrated the consciousnesses of the many. Short term gains have come at the cost of longer term protection in numbers through being united as workers. The Gig economy has been bereft of representation for years. There has been a recent stand by the TWU in regard to Gig workers in the delivery game.
Establishing Some Standards For Gig Workers
“The Transport Workers Union and Australia’s two largest on-demand delivery platforms DoorDash and Uber Eats together made a joint submission to the Fair Work Commission for the establishment of a set of minimum standards for workers in the on-demand economy.
The proposed Minimum Standards Order (MSO) includes legally enforceable new protections for workers and baseline standards that the TWU has campaigned for over many years, marking a meaningful step forward that strengthens protections and provides certainty for thousands of platform workers.
The agreement demonstrates how minimum standards for platform workers can be achieved while preserving the flexibility that is inherent in platform work. The proposal strikes a balance to introduce a fair minimum rate of pay for on demand delivery workers for the first time, while supporting the sustainability of the sector.
DoorDash, Uber Eats and the TWU have agreed to key standards including:
- Minimum safety net pay rates for all classes of transport types;
- Dispute resolution processes;
- A voice for platform workers, via engagement and feedback mechanisms;
- Representation rights; and
- Accident insurance for injured workers
This landmark achievement is the latest milestone in an ongoing collaboration between the TWU and the digital labour platforms, to improve the quality, safety and security of platform work.”
It will be interesting to observe if and how these new standards will be applied and their effectiveness. Announcements like these are not the end of the matter but the bare beginning!
The Price Of Energy
“In Australia, on the political front, we have very little in the way of progressive or Leftist policy options. It is rather the choice of how far Right. Traditionally centrist positions have been favoured by most voters, usually Centre Right. The LNP Coalition has, over recent years, moved further Right in thrall to populist demagogues like Donald Trump. Neoliberalism via privatization has seen many previously publicly owned assets move into private hands. The energy utilities are an illustrative example of this, where numerous private companies operate within this sector, either generating, wholesaling or retailing energy. Despite promises to the contrary prices for energy have not come down. Those greater efficiencies have not materialised.”
Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of What Price Life?; America Matters: Pre-apocalyptic Posts & Essays in the Shadow of Trump; and other titles. NOW AVAILABLE AT APPLE BOOKS & GOOGLE PLAY BOOKS. Google Play Books AUDIOBOOK
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