By Robert Reich
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Meanwhile, human beings do the work that’s unpredictable
– odd jobs, on-call projects, fetching and fixing, driving and delivering, tiny
tasks needed at any and all hours – and patch together barely enough to live
on.
Brace yourself. This is the economy we’re now barreling toward.
They’re Uber drivers, Instacart shoppers,
and Airbnb hosts. They include Taskrabbit jobbers, Upcounsel’s
on-demand attorneys, and Healthtap’s on-line doctors.
They’re Mechanical Turks.
The euphemism is the “share” economy. A more accurate term would be the
“share-the-scraps” economy.
Customers and workers are matched online. Workers are rated on
quality and reliability.
The big money goes to the corporations that own the software.
The scraps go to the on-demand workers.
Consider Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk.” Amazon calls it “a marketplace for work that
requires human intelligence.”
In reality, it’s an Internet job board offering minimal pay for
mindlessly-boring bite-sized chores.
Computers can’t do them because they
require some minimal judgment, so human beings do them for peanuts — say,
writing a product description, for $3; or choosing the best of several
photographs, for 30 cents; or deciphering handwriting, for 50 cents.
Amazon takes a healthy cut of every transaction.
This is the logical culmination of a process that began thirty
years ago when corporations began turning over full-time jobs to temporary
workers, independent contractors, free-lancers, and consultants.
It was a way to shift risks and uncertainties onto the workers –
work that might entail more hours than planned for, or was more stressful than
expected.
And a way to circumvent labor laws that set minimal standards
for wages, hours, and working conditions. And that enabled employees to join
together to bargain for better pay and benefits.
The new on-demand work shifts risks entirely onto workers, and
eliminates minimal standards completely.
In effect, on-demand work is a reversion to the piece work of
the nineteenth century – when workers had no power and no legal rights, took
all the risks, and worked all hours for almost nothing.
Uber drivers use their own cars, take out their
own insurance, work as many hours as they want or can – and pay Uber a fat percent. Worker safety? Social Security? Uber says
it’s not the employer so it’s not responsible.
Amazon’s Mechanical Turks work for pennies, literally. Minimum
wage? Time-and-a half for overtime? Amazon says it just connects buyers and
sellers so it’s not responsible.
Defenders of on-demand work emphasize its flexibility. Workers
can put in whatever time they want, work around their schedules, fill in the
downtime in their calendars.
“People are monetizing their own downtime,” says Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York
University’s business school.
But this argument confuses “downtime” with the time people
normally reserve for the rest of their lives.
There are still only twenty-four hours in a day. When “downtime”
is turned into work time, and that work time is unpredictable and low-paid,
what happens to personal relationships? Family? One’s own health?
Other proponents of on-demand work point to studies, such as one
recently commissioned by Uber, showing Uber’s on-demand workers to be “happy.”
But how many of them would be happier with a good-paying job
offering regular hours?
An opportunity to make some extra bucks can seem mighty
attractive in an economy whose median wage has been stagnant for thirty years
and almost all of whose economic gains have been going to the top.
That doesn’t make the opportunity a great deal. It only shows
how bad a deal most working people have otherwise been getting.
Defenders also point out that as on-demand work continues to
grow, on-demand workers are joining together in guild-like groups to buy insurance and other
benefits.
But, notably, they aren’t using their bargaining power to get a
larger share of the income they pull in, or steadier hours. That would be a
union – something that Uber, Amazon, and other on-demand companies don’t want.
Some economists laud on-demand work as a means of utilizing
people more efficiently.
But the biggest economic challenge we face isn’t using people
more efficiently. It’s allocating work and the gains from work more decently.
On this measure, the share-the-scraps economy is hurtling us
backwards.
ROBERT B. REICH, Chancellor’s Professor of
Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at
the Blum Center for Developing Economies, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton
administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet
secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written thirteen books, including
the best sellers “Aftershock" and “The Work of Nations." His latest,
"Beyond Outrage," is now out in paperback. He is also a founding editor
of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause. His new film,
"Inequality for All," is now available on Netflix, iTunes, DVD, and
On Demand.