Here are some articles relating to various parts of workers in the pandemic age. The situations have only worsened for them. It should be a comprehensive look at the state of the gig-economy.
Ride-hailing, food delivery, and various gig-economy firms have never solved their issues with the labor force. Uber and other firms are currently fighting AB5, regarding the status of independent contractors and employees (Uber will get rid of many drivers, if they are considered employees with various benefits).
This pandemic only exacerbated the hypocrisy of innovation - we need gig workers more than ever, but they are living a more dangerous and less rewarding life.
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SF Chronicle: Uber, Lyft, others pour $70 million more for Yes on 22 ballot campaign
“Voters better strap in — they’re in for a barrage of ads and sizzle from the pro-22 side,” said David McCuan, a professor of political science at Sonoma State University who studies California ballot measures. “This is an incredible amount of money and there’s a long ways to go. We’re still 60 days out from the election.”
“It is a pay-to-play scheme in terms of how ballot politics work,” he said.
Uber, Lyft, Instacart and DoorDash each chipped in $17.5 million more to Yes on 22, according to a Late Contributions form filed with the California Secretary of State on Friday. Uber, Lyft and DoorDash had previously put in $30 million each. Grocery-delivery service Instacart had previously put in $10 million, as had delivery-service Postmates, which Uber recently agreed to buy.
The No on 22 campaign, which is funded by organized labor, has raised a comparatively modest $4.8 million.
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AP: Gig workers face shifting roles, competition in pandemic
https://apnews.com/ebc223c6d783c49feca6ffb27af6264b
But increased reliance on temporary and contract work will have negative implications on job quality and security because it “is a way of saving costs and shifting risk onto the worker,” Pinto said.
(Maya Pinto, a researcher at the National Employment Law Project)
Delivery jobs typically pay less than ride-hailing jobs. Single mom Luz Laguna used to earn about $25 in a half-hour driving passengers to Los Angeles International Airport. When those trips evaporated, Laguna began delivering meals through Uber Eats, working longer hours but making less cash. The base pay is around $6 per delivery, and most people tip around $2, she said. To avoid shelling out more for childcare, she sometimes brings her 3-year-old son along on deliveries.
Other drivers find it makes more sense to stay home and collect unemployment — a benefit they and other gig workers hadn’t qualified for before the pandemic. They are also eligible to receive an additional $600 weekly check from the federal government, a benefit that became available to workers who lost their jobs during the pandemic. Taken together, that’s more than what many ride-hailing drivers were making before the pandemic, Campbell said.
(Harry Campbell, founder of The Rideshare Guy. )
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TheMarkUp: Why Is It So Hard for Gig Workers to Get UnemploymentBenefits?
Throughout the country, the legal status of gig workers like Creery is unsettled: Are they employees or independent contractors? It’s a distinction sharpened by the joblessness caused by COVID-19, since only employees who receive a W-2 are typically eligible for unemployment benefits. Uber maintains that drivers are freelancers and thus pays nothing in unemployment insurance premiums; nor does the company transmit individual work records to state relief agencies.
As in Creery’s case, however, a full-time platform worker who gets PUA (net income) instead of state unemployment (gross income) could stand to lose a great deal.Veena Dubal, a law professor at UC Hastings, in San Francisco, said that one local driver reported his gross earnings to be $88,000; his net: just $22,000. She also noted that routing gig workers through PUA lets app companies off the hook and burdens underfunded governments: “We have no accounting of how many drivers went through the [state] portal and how much money taxpayers are fronting because these employers are refusing to pay into unemployment insurance.”
The classification of gig workers as independent contractors has led to another problem, now on full view in California. Uber and Lyft drivers who work another, traditional job, for which they receive a W-2, may get stuck in an arcane gap between regular unemployment and PUA. If, in any quarter over the previous 18 months, an applicant was paid $1,300 or more in W-2 wages, that employment, rather than any 1099 labor, would guide the benefits calculation. A worker who earned $50,000 on an app but only $5,000 from a catering stint could therefore miss out on hundreds of dollars per week in PUA.
This would not be a problem, of course, if platform work were enforced as W-2 employment, and on May 5, California filed suit against Uber and Lyft for “inappropriately classifying massive numbers” of drivers as independent contractors. Uber promised to fight the lawsuit; Lyft said it looked forward “to working with” state officials.
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Recode: The real cost of Amazon
Amazon stock has gone up 79%, since January 1, 2020. At the same time, Amazon continues to have more issues surrounding the treatment of workers, while bringing in record profits.
“It’s frightening, but you have to put on a smile and you go to work because you need the income,” Rosie, who is being identified by a pseudonym because she fears losing her job for speaking to the press, told Recode in late May.
While she’s grateful for the safety precautions Amazon has introduced at its fulfillment centers in the past two months, like providing masks and hand sanitizer stations, she’s alarmed by what she says she saw and heard around her: dirty air filters that aren’t replaced, a visibly ill colleague who vomited in the bathroom — even after passing the mandatory temperature checks the company instituted in early April — and workers standing close together in the morning when they’re waiting to get shift assignments, even though the rules specify workers must always stay 6 feet apart.
“When we talk about Amazon, we’re really talking about the future of work,” Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which represents workers at major retailers such as Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, and H&M, told Recode. “Other employers feel that if they want to survive, they have to find a way to change their working conditions to replicate Amazon. And that’s exactly what we don’t want — we don’t want Amazon to be the model for what working is going to be like, of what the future of work is going to look like.”
As reports emerged of the company firing and cracking down on workers agitating for better conditions at fulfillment centers, a growing number of the company’s engineers, product managers, and designers have become embarrassed, worried, and angry. For the first time, they’re joining forces with their colleagues at the warehouse level to publicly criticize their employer, and some say they lost their jobs because of it. Meanwhile, prominent politicians like Sens. Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren are pressing the company on its firings of workers across corporate offices and the warehouse floor alike.
The growing dissent among Amazon’s corporate workforce followed a few key moves Amazon made in the early days of the pandemic: First, the company fired Christian Smalls, a warehouse worker in Staten Island, New York, who led an early protest against the company in March.
Then company executives, led by top lawyer David Zapolsky, strategized in an executive meeting attended by Bezos about how to downplay Smalls’s complaints by characterizing him as “not smart or articulate.” Then, when Zapolsky’s notes from this meeting leaked to the press and corporate employees began to protest and question Amazon’s actions on internal company listservs, the company fired three key corporate activists in mid-April and began restricting employees’ ability to communicate on large listservs. It paused enforcing these restrictions after Recode reported on them.
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But, there is hope.
Nextcity: Meet the Gig Workers Collective: 11 Women Who Organize Nationwide Strikes But Have Never Met
The 2019 strike, explained the Gig Workers Collective organizers in a statement, was “a whirlwind.” For the first time in years of public worker dissatisfaction with the company, Instacart offered indirect retaliations: first, with what the group suspects was a targeted censorship of a post on Medium, followed by removing the $3 “quality bonus” Instacart shoppers would receive after getting a five-star rating from customers. While Instacart had announced the quality bonus would be removed beginning in January of 2020, the company elected to push up the cut to November of 2019, what Gig Workers Collective members say happened “just days after our protest.” “We’re usually given concessions while something else is simultaneously taken away,” they said. “This was the first time that something has only been taken away.”
With unprecedented media attention and a central organizing group, the Gig Workers Collective’s first protest in November was a game-changer. The protests garnered media attention, and, according to the Gig Workers Collective, “caused many customers to delete the app.”
Why don’t gig workers just quit if a given gig stops working for them? Ithaca-based Gig Workers Collective organizer Robin Pape says, “I’m a person of color. My white mother had black children in the ‘70s, and was disowned by her family. She was an advocate for equality. And I think a lot of people are, like, well, why don’t you walk away? Find a better job, it’s not a career … we recognize that things don’t get fixed like that. Vulnerable people continue to be abused.
“… Looking at the rights for minorities, or members of the LGBTQ communities, both of which still have very far to go, but if people had just walked away, or been — been unwilling to fight, or worry only about their own livelihood or bottom line, then we wouldn’t have made the progress that we’ve made as a country. I mean, even just the whole labor economy, and having weekends off and limited work hours and — and paid time off and sick leave, these are things that nobody would enjoy if, instead of fighting back, people just walked away when they were unsatisfied. And so I think, for most of us, that’s why we stay, and we continue to fight.”
Let's all be aware of ourselves, our surroundings, and people. At least know what is happening.
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