new from @SenWarren: a "major nationwide campaign" pic.twitter.com/LB46zMqbSG
— Ruby Cramer (@rubycramer) May 23, 2016
Presumably related, from The Nation:
… The gig economy has not been an enormous issue on the campaign trail, and legislators in Congress haven’t attempted to address it in any comprehensive way. But Thursday in Washington, Senator Elizabeth Warren waded into the debate with a lengthy policy speech at the annual New America conference in which she said it’s time to “rethink the basic bargain for workers who produce much of the value in this economy.”
Warren’s essential point is that for all the talk about Uber, ride-sharing apps and their brethren are only part of a larger, destructive trend toward classifying workers as part-time. “Long before anyone ever wrote an article about the ‘gig economy,’ corporations had discovered the higher profits they could wring out of an on-demand workforce made up of independent contractors,” Warren said. Indeed, 53 million Americans—one in three workers—is a freelancer…
Warren sees the gig economy as more of a symptom than a cause. “The gig economy has become a stopgap for some workers who can’t make ends meet in a weak labor market,” she said. “For many, the gig economy is simply the next step in a losing effort to build some economic security in a world where all the benefits are floating to the top 10 percent.” …
Her proposals: Improve the safety net (expanded Social Security, a new system of catastrophic insurance coverage), make employee benefits portable, and increase regulation & clarify laws around part-time work. As described at the link, all of these proposals are nicely calculated to make Kochsuckers and other Republicans fall down in foaming fits. Which is a good short-term goal on its own, but they’re also important steps towards stopping the relentless erosion of the middle class for the benefit of the Zero-Point-One Percent.
***********
Apart from agitating, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Corner Stone
I’m pretty sure I am in love.
Corner Stone
And for anyone who still holds some fantasy about having Warren on the ticket as VP, please to shut the piehole, mmmkay?
Hillary Rettig
Wonderful! Also headlined by my favorite Joe Hill quote.
Corner Stone
Getting another reasonable jurist on SCOTUS (note I did not say liberal or centrist) will go a loooong way to having rulings against wage theft companies like Uber, and other gig economy proponents. It’s way past time for a labor renaissance!
Labor Uber Alles!
aimai
God I love her! And it just goes to show what a powerhouse can do in the Senate–I’m looking sadly at my other Senator, known as “whats his name the junior Senator from MA.” Has anyone heard anything from him lately?
Omnes Omnibus
@Hillary Rettig: Do you know any other Joe Hill quotes?
Corner Stone
@aimai: Murphy? Marky Mark? Murky? Marklar? Something like that, isn’t it?
eclare
Have only seen Perez on tv once, but am thinking with his current job he would be a nice fit as VP.
Corner Stone
@Omnes Omnibus: “Mexicans have fifteen, Jews have thirteen, rich girls have sweet sixteen… everybody has a crazy birthday but poor old Christian boy! ”
Oh, wait…that’s Bobby Hill. Ne’ermind.
Corner Stone
@eclare: He’s actually not bad. Good sense of humor, stays on message, loves his madre.
eclare
@Corner Stone: Plus before Labor he was at Justice, doing some pretty good lawyering on civil rights. Saw him on Bill Maher.
Baud
I read that as “potable” and wondered why Warren would want works to be paid in water.
Baud
@Corner Stone:
@eclare:
My current favorite as well. He seems to check a lot of boxes.
Corner Stone
@Baud: Still working that Global Climate Change denier vote bloc, eh?
piratedan
@Baud: considering the drought out west, it has more value than bitcoins…..
Baud
@Corner Stone: I should. Those people will believe anything.
Corner Stone
I am so fucking tired of this fucking primary.
Corner Stone
Had the pleasure of spending the last several days listening to retired union workers and their spouses kvetch incessantly how worried they were about Trump winning in the fall, while at the same time saying how little they thought of Hillary. Heard Kasich’s name more than once as the only “reasonable” choice they could have made if they were voting in the R ticket, which none of them are.
People with fully funded pensions are really assholes.
Regnad Kcin
@Corner Stone: Markey Mark
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: As long as it’s not from the purple pipes.
eclare
@Corner Stone: The Democratic primary imbroglio is making the Republican one look downright orderly. And that should embarrass the hell out of some people.
Corner Stone
@eclare: It was over after MA but IMO he can keep grifting until the end. I’m not embarrassed by BS staying in, just tired of the effluence from it. It’s been over for weeks and weeks.
The outcome of the Republican primary should embarrass the hell out of whatever number of R voters exist that did not vote for Trump in the primary.
gene108
@Baud:
Without potable water we all die. It should not be dependent on your employer.
schrodinger's cat
This is how you answer terrorism
Flash mob, at the third anniversary of November 26 attacks at the storied CST station (previously known as VT=Victoria Terminus) where the attacks on Mumbai started in November 2008.
Roger Moore
@piratedan:
So does bellybutton lint.
debbie
Has anyone brought this up today?
It was a 7-1 decision with, of course, Thomas as the lone dissenter.
gene108
Where my brother used to work, the cafeteria had some free stuff for the employees – cereal, nuts, fruits, etc – so would he be eligible to keep getting the free food?
Or if an employer had free daycare could you still use it, even though you no longer worked there?
How portable are we talking abou here?
I mean there’s a whole world of perks outside of health insurance that would be sweet, if folks can hang on to, even as they changed jobs.
Ruckus
I’m one of those “gig” workers. I could find no decent jobs for someone my age which is why I opened another business 11 yrs ago, which just 10 yrs prior to that I’d said I’d never do again. I don’t regret doing so but I do think I’d have rather not had to go through that. Although I’d probably be in the same place I am now because of the recession. But the labor market of the last 15 or so years has screwed so many people that even without a recession many would still be in trouble just trying to make ends meet. The gig concept for most or all is on the same level as lower taxes on the rich=job creation. Independent workers usually are any thing but. If they truly were independent they would be small business owners.
les
And this is how you actually implement the Bernie platform.
Barbara
Kudos to Elizabeth Warren and company. She really is amazing.
? Martin
I think she’s missing the bigger trend here.
That’s true for many, but that’s not the point behind the gig economy. The gig economy is a more fundamental restructuring around ‘permissionless’ employment. You don’t need to be interviewed to work at Uber. Nobody is judging you, your age, your clothing, your skin color in some shitty conference room somewhere. You fill out the form and you do the work.
That benefits a lot of people that get screwed in the current labor market, but municipalities are now erecting the same kinds of barriers – fingerprinting, etc. to undermine that trend. So lets not recognize that there are benefits to a less discriminatory hiring approach.
But behind this is an even larger trend which is that if you look at many of the gig jobs – from mechanical turk to Q to taskrabbit to uber, they are in large swaths jobs that employers intend to automate but haven’t quite gotten to. These are temporary. Adding policies to make them more like full time jobs misses the point – the point is to eliminate them as jobs that need doing. No sooner will those policy prescriptions arrive than the AI will arrive to make them moot, and efforts that could have gone into helping the displaced workers went into the wrong thing. Outsourcing is not the economic model you are trying to compensate from, slavery is – where you had non-compensated productivity which was being siphoned off by the investor class (slave owners). Assuming you had a system of ethical slavery (automation is effectively that), where you could get labor without having to pay wages, thereby eliminating the need for labor, how would to distribute the profits from that activity? The first step is acknowledging that non-compensated productivity is taking place on a large scale and figuring out how to factor it into the national taxation system.
If you are a worker looking at the horizon and seeing no human labor involved in the thing that you do, does
sound like they will do anything real to help? Sure, that stopgap may last longer, but the buggy makers and the typewriter repair folks and in the future the truck drivers and coal miners aren’t going to be helped with stopgaps. This economic change is extinction level for many of their professions, and stopgaps won’t cut it. Trump promises he’ll fix it, which is complete bullshit, but these people are terrified, and if the stopgaps won’t really help, why not take the chance? The problem is that the workers see this extinction coming, but the politicians don’t, and aren’t signaling that they either care or are prepared to deal with it. $15/hr does little good if there’s no human in that job.
Democrats need to be much bolder on this than even Warren is being. They need to cut directly to the center of non-labor productivity, they need to propose policies that will fund a much bigger living wage guarantee from that non-labor productivity, and they need to do it soon. The next president, assuming they are re-elected, will likely see the elimination of 3-5 million jobs due to automation, replaced with probably a million, higher paying jobs requiring college or advanced degrees, few of which will be open to the 3-5 million displaced workers. 3-5 million people is the difference between President Clinton and President Trump.
eemom
oh SHIT
Corner Stone
@? Martin: Holy fucking fuckballs.
Corner Stone
@eemom: Maybe he will think twice about giving felons the right to vote back, nicht wahr?
? Martin
@Corner Stone: You usually have much more specific criticism for me than that. I’m disappointed.
Pogonip
Re open thread: Manly Wade Wellman’s unique occult Americana stories were collected in Who Fears The Devil? Long out of print, it is now available as an e-book, at least on Kindle, for $3.85 or so. Enjoy.
According to Wikipedia, Wellman also wrote several John novels. I’m going to check every so often to see if those come back into print too.
rikyrah
@debbie:
Unca Clarence is such an embarrassment
Corner Stone
@? Martin: Sorry to disappoint. You have entirely missed what Warren is arguing for. The fact that some jobs will go to automation in the next decade is not her point. It’s hard to make a point by point rebuttal against a screed that is so wrong it’s hard to get to the end of.
But this is of a piece with a lot of the things you have advocated here time and again. I, for one, seem to find your view of the American workforce’s future to be damaged, and biased due to your personal monetary investments. Apple is not the shining light of how we’re going to move forward as a societal workforce. And it’s not Amazon and it’s not Uber and it’s not even the gig economy over all.
rikyrah
Senator Warren rocks. She broke it down in plain language
Ghost of Joe Liebling's Dog
@Pogonip:
Here’s a link to a post about Wellman’s other Silver John writings.
(And if you listen to American folk music and don’t already know this, Bob Coltman set a tune for “Vandy, Vandy” and told about playing it for MWW, whose reaction was surprising and very much in sync with the tone and character of the stories. Worth finding.)
debbie
@rikyrah:
It’s like he’s doing this just to be spiteful.
? Martin
@Corner Stone: Actually, agriculture is the model which is most apt here. Changes in agriculture was massively disruptive, forcing massive migration to cities and to industrialized jobs, and leaving a hell of a lot of of people out due to their inability to make that shift. The first gilded age came about due to this shift, until we (decades later) changed how the government provided for the people by shifting how we treated labor (from largely subsistence to industrial). We’re going through another such change, and we’re seeing another such gilded age as the beneficiaries of being early to this economic space reap the profits.
GDP per person employed is higher in the US than anywhere else on earth, yet wages have become increasingly disconnected from output as productivity deviates from historic trends – and that trend started in the 70s, before Reagan and before NAFTA, so we can’t blame them for its origin. That is, a lot of work is getting done which people aren’t getting paid for. The trade argument is that we’re being undercut by other nations, but we aren’t. In terms of output, we are well ahead of other nations. 8x the output per worker compared to China. US workers are doing 8x the work of Chinese workers but US minimum wage is only about 4x that of China’s. The problem is that all of these assume that output can only be produced by people, and that’s not true. At the very least there is a massive magnifying effect of technology and automation to the countries wealthy enough to employ it at scale, but those productivity benefits are not passed back to workers. They are not taxed. They do not support Social Security or Medicare. If the point of having a strong economy is that it confers benefits on the citizenry, then we have a huge disconnect because our economy cannot do that so long as it becomes increasingly productive per worker, and that increased productivity cannot generate revenue for paving roads or building hospitals because our view of the economy is over-focused on labor as the source of taxation. (Corporate profits also aren’t the right place to tax, but investor profits might be.)
Apple isn’t particularly relevant to this discussion. There are places where they are illustrative in a positive way, and places in a negative way. And you may not want the economy to move in the direction of Uber or Amazon, and I may not either, but it is moving that way whether we like it or not. We cannot clap our way out of this, and denying it will be ruinous.
schrodinger's cat
@Corner Stone: Don’t bother arguing he is the Tom Friedman of Balloon Juice.
Corner Stone
@? Martin:
No. It’s not. And it does not have to, whether we like it or not. Just like the HAMP did not have to reward the wrong parties and incentivize negative behavior, the gig economy is not inevitable. It does not have to be.
I don’t need Uber. I have a very well regulated and licensed infrastructure that meets my needs, on demand. They contribute to society and community building, maintenance and rebuilding. Uber does not. Why not? I’d like to see a 5-4 SCOTUS rule that they should. And that is more possible now than it has been in two+ decades.
The 1099 economy is not inevitable, it never was. Sen Warren seems to think it’s not inevitable and I agree with her.
Unpacking your productivity vs wages vs undeveloped workers argle bargle is going to take more appetite than I have at the moment. You do this all the time. Who do you think is going to be attending your university in 10 or 15 years? Where do you think you will be working?
Corner Stone
@schrodinger’s cat: Drives me fucking nuts at the fait accompli of American middle class and people who aren’t Martin.
burnspbesq
@debbie:
The facts were really egregious. Once the Court got past the interesting law school exam question about adequate and independent state grounds (there was a question about this on my Federal Courts exam), it was pretty easy to get to the right outcome.
liberal
@schrodinger’s cat: LOL! What an apt description. Wish I’d thought of it myself.
Steeplejack
@Corner Stone:
Srsly.
Omnes Omnibus
@burnspbesq: I haven’t read the decision yet, but wasn’t Thomas’s dissent based on adequate and independent state grounds?
Another Holocene Human
Bernie thinks he’s gone blind, Warren just threw so much shade on his game.
dww44
@rikyrah: I agree. He’s a native of my state and city of birth. I couldn’t believe what he did today in the 7 to 1 ruling. He thought that the prosecution’s preemptory juror strikes were credible? In whose universe? He’s apparently a rudderless ship now that Scalia is gone.
Steeplejack
@Pogonip:
Not John novels, but The Golgotha Dancers and The Devil’s Asteroid are available free at Project Gutenberg.
J R in WV
@Pogonip:
I have several Manly Wade Wellman books, old paperbacks, and they are great. Folklore of the mountains, witchery and mythology, foggy evenings, and creepy evil defeated by a good heart.
I don’t do Amazon, their ethics make me, kind of sick, but anything that puts his storytelling back in the readership, that’s a good thing.
Pogonip
@Steeplejack: I have those!
pseudonymous in nc
@Corner Stone:
I actually think there’s room for some interesting — I know, I know — triangulation here. Not all 1099 employers are exploiting the status to shift liability in the way that Uber and Taskrabbit have tried to finagle: some are legally unable to because their contractors have to be independent for regulatory reasons. (I’m thinking here of firms that contract with facilities to provide clinical services, and handle the billing and other bureaucracy, where the actual practitioners need to be independent professionals with their own NPIs, individually registered with insurers. Richard Mayhew can probably go into detail about this.)
So I think there’s space to legislate in order to give ethical employers more latitude to tap into the kind of safety net made available to W2 employers so that 1099s who work sufficient hours can access group policies and unemployment insurance and workers’ comp and possibly 401(k) matches. It’s a hard balance to strike — you don’t want employers turning W2 employees into 1099s in order to forgo their payroll tax obligations — but if you can say to Uber ‘start providing proper benefits and protections for your drivers and it’ll be harder for you to get sued over their status’ you might get a decent legislative win.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@schrodinger’s cat: :-) That was great. Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Corner Stone
@pseudonymous in nc:
Come right the F on. We’re not talking about mom and pop shops that need some extra protection for different reasons. We are addressing mega businesses that are trying to scale. The major way they achieve significant profitability is through cheating their main drivers of revenue.
Corner Stone
I still wish I had a yooge chunk of cash because I would set up shop in Uber’s top ten most profitable locations and undercut the shit out of them, price wise. I have no idea how this is a business model. There is no barrier to entry against a “ride app”.
Omnes Omnibus
@Corner Stone: Uber is completely full of shit. They only pay the distance the person is in the car. If you have to drive 20 miles to pick up the person and he wants to go 3 miles and then you need to drive 23 miles home. You get paid for the 3 miles with the passenger. If you turn down non-profitable rides, you don’t get calls.
Such life! Such profits. Assholes.
Corner Stone
If I were running the union for taxi and limo drivers in the top 30 cities most profitable for Uber I would take all monies and start running a shadow Uber service for less money. A lot less money. And I would also hire a lot of cough Uber cough drivers to do their thing. Not saying, just saying.
? Martin
@Corner Stone:
People made the same argument 150 years ago that we didn’t need to move off of a subsistence economy to an industrial one. I suppose in theory you are correct, but we’d have the economy of North Korea had that happened. I doubt very strongly that people want to roll the clock back in that way. And while this transition will be comparably difficult, I suspect 50 years from now nobody will want to wind back to today. Perhaps things will turn out terribly and we’ll wish we listened to you, but I doubt very much that we’ll resist the temptations to lurch forward.
In 15 years I intend to be retired, but I do expect that my workplace will be very different. Its untenable that the higher education system has protected this residential, high cost system promising nothing more than a shiny credential. It’s not that there aren’t good things happening beneath, but they could be happening for people without packing them up and moving them across country, and they could be happening in a way that carries a lot more direct benefit to their lives. That’s not to say that there aren’t positive experiences in the current approach, but they are reserved for a select few and they cost dearly. There are plenty of other ways to deliver those experiences that are more inclusive. That should be happening in less than 15 years, but won’t because there’s quite a deep moat around the current system which will take a lot of time and money to breach.
Hows that going to help you when this day comes? How are you going to undercut a wage of $0? If you think you’ll cripple them, Uber is raising several billion dollars a year. They can run at a loss for as long as is needed to reach the autonomous phase.
And consumers take Uber over taxis because Uber provides a better experience, not because they are cheaper. When you call an Uber, you can see reviews of the driver and decline them. The drivers know they are being rated, so they are far better incentivized than taxi drivers (believe me, I grew up in NYC) to provide a better experience. African americans have flocked to Uber because they can call anonymously and don’t have to worry about a cab driver refusing to pick them up. And because cities have constrained the number of medallions, it’s not uncommon in certain cities to not be able to find a cab because there aren’t enough, but Uber/Lyft, in part due to surge pricing, is much more reliable.
There are all kinds of problems with the existing taxi model that cities have refused to deal with. For example in most cities you don’t hire cab drivers. In most cities, the drivers are contractors that rent a vehicle from the cab company and keep the proceeds – and may lose money for that shift if they don’t get enough fares. The cab company owns and maintains the vehicle and holds the medallion. They’ve already shoved all the risk to the driver.
Arclite
Make Elizabeth Warren head of the DNC?
Kay
@? Martin:
Sure, Martin. That’s why Uber spends tens of millions of dollars lobbying and running campaigns to keep them on a 1099 with no job protections. Because they’re all going to be replaced with self-driving cars. That’s also why low wage employers spent probably a billion to fight a minimum wage increase. Because they don’t need employees to create profit.
People have been using this “long arc” buggy whip argument to pay people less for 50 years- probably longer- 100 years. Uber seems hugely concerned with next quarters profits. Why shouldn’t their workers be concerned about what they make the decade or the next 20 years?
It’s not that complicated. They’re using 1099’s because it saves them 40% on labor costs and allows them to free ride on all the other employers who actually hire people and pay full boat. It’s not some futuristic vision of innovation. It’s cheap labor. It’s risk-shifting from employer to employee. That’s their “innovation”.
What if every employer did what Uber does? The special snowflake status they’re claiming is wholly dependent on there being a base level of actual employers. They’re riding on other employers. All Warren is doing is trying to stay ahead of that.
Kay
@? Martin:
It’s also not true that there’s no barriers to employment at Uber. You don’t just fill out an application. You need a state-issued and subsidized driver’s license (that’s their first employee check) and you also need a reliable car and insurance, which means they’ve effectively knocked out a lot of risk by excluding the bottom 20% from employment.
You basically need a real job to work at Uber. It’s much, much easier to work at McDonalds and McDonalds is an actual employer. McDonalds doesn’t require a state-subsidized and vetted license and a 20,000 investment or 20,000 in credit. There are MORE barriers to employment at Uber.
Kay
@? Martin:
Actually, if they’re investing 20,000 in a vehicle (or credit for a vehicle) for Uber they’d be much better off investing that 20,000 in training for a real employer. They’re not even getting a good return on what they invest in the job/company because it isn’t a job. They have to buy their own equipment.
Uber is the best argument for why smart people in government and finance have lost the plot- they’ve lost the basic tenets and foundations of how ordinary people make money. They’re so far up in the fucking stratosphere of theory they buy the most transparent bullshit “bad deal” without thinking.
Kay
@? Martin:
I looked at one of these 1099 deals the other day. It’s a 1099 “job” where the person takes orders for a cable products show. Okay, they need a landline and a newer computer and a reliable high speed internet connection. They get no training because if they did their cheap-ass employer would have to admit they’re employees. They need a 3000 investment for a part time “job” that pays 10 dollars an hour and they train themselves.
This is not a good deal, Martin.
New England Beekeeper
@? Martin: Thanks for the insight you provide in this area. Very valuable to see these decades long waves in context.
Kay
Do we really want to do this? Do we want to be the crap country to work in and for? People notice They notice that the two best companies to work for here are German-owned and managed. It’s embarrassing. Somehow German companies can operate in the US w/out treating people like garbage but US companies cannot?
What’s wrong with our business schools that we churn out a bunch of people who are garbage, race to the bottom employers and managers? Is that what we want to be? The developed country with cheap labor and no worker protections?
NCSteve
The thing about “the gig economy” is that a lot of these young people’s “gigs” entail doing the work of fifty somethings whose jobs were eliminated because they were held by people in their fifties who wanted too much money and cost too much in benefits and because corporate America now views people in their fifties generally as so much shit to be scraped off their Guccis.
And I’m not complaining about the twenty-somethings or comparing them to strikebreakers or anything. Rather, I’m worried about them and about what happens to them when they age into the over forty bracket and, themselves become the shit to be scraped off of corporate America’s shoes, except without ever having had a 401(k) or enough money over the basics to save any of it or even to have bought a home.
I look at how corporate America treats people over 40 (having managed to reduce the ADEA into a nullity with Republican appointed judges) and then I look at the politicians who corporate America funds demanding that the Social Security retirement age be increased to 72, and I’m left wondering just what the fuck these assholes think people are going to do to them or with them during the twenty to thirty years between when they’re last fired without ever being able to get another job and Social Security retirement age.
Corner Stone
@? Martin:
I do so enjoy when you argue against a statement or position I have not taken, nor am advocating. To sum your quoted piece of blargage, this is the Buggy Whip Dodge. Look carefully through this thread. At no point am I arguing against technological advancement or progress. The argument here is that the Gig Economy business model is not a major leap forward in the advancement of society, workers or mankind. It is, in fact, the opposite of progress. As you state yourself at one point, it is a return to the Gilded Era for owners of capital.
Workers will indeed have a challenging environment as we make further gains in a number of technological areas. Just flat out accepting a future where all the risk is on the worker, while receiving almost none of the reward is not progress for a developed, productive society.
Corner Stone
@? Martin:
No, they can not. Because currently their bloated valuation is due almost entirely to PR. They are a brand. If, in fact, they are exactly what they claim to be – a ride share software app with only contractors and no employees – then they have no barriers to entry and are vulnerable to a price war.
Anecdotally, this is entirely untrue in the cohort of people I know that use/have used Uber. It is exclusively about price.
Corner Stone
@Kay:
Ha! Exactly!
As I said myself here in January when driverless cars were being discussed:
“First they came for the buggy whip makers, but I said nothing…because it was over 100 years ago and it made no sense to even mention it any longer.”
Corner Stone
@Kay:
Could not agree more on that. This is not technological progress that is forcing a seachange in how the developed workforce thinks, acts and lives. It’s a handful of glibertarian assholes sucking away at the commonweal without putting a damn dime back into the bucket. Using our roads, safety infrastructure and everything else we all contribute toward all without a thought to anything beyond the next quarter. They are a “disruptor” in that they employ cheap labor as a profit driver and other employers that are regulated to some degree can’t compete with that. Is that like using an engine powered tractor when your neighbors all have mules for plowing? No, it is not a technological advancement.
Carolyn Kay
This is great news. I’m a Hillary supporter, and I’m all for it. I believe that Hillary is a progressive, and the more progressives we give her in Congress, the better off we’re all going to be.