Factually! with Adam Conover - Labor under Big Tech with Veena Dubal

Episode Date: September 29, 2021

The job market is now dominated by tech monopolies that are using their power to lower wages and squeeze workers. Luckily, the workers are finally fighting back. This week, UC Hastings professor Veena Dubal joins Adam to detail the future of workers’ rights in the gig economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Thank you for joining me once again as I talk to an incredible expert about all the amazing things that they know that I don't know and that you probably don't know. Both of our minds are going to be blown together. We're going to have a great time. Let's talk about gig work and specifically all of these apps that have changed our lives. We now use, I used them today, we use Uber and Lyft to get around. We use DoorDash, Seamless, and Instacart to get things, food, products dropped off, and of course we use Amazon for just about everything. These companies have transformed our lives, they have made the world so much faster and more convenient, if not always cheaper, and they've done it, they say, through technology, right? They use technology to coordinate and to manage people, to let people run their own gig-driving businesses or make a little extra money working in a warehouse during the winter, during the Christmas rush, right? Well, the truth is a little bit darker because the real secret sauce that allows these companies to deliver us their services so fast and so cheap is not just technology. It's treating people like machines.

Let's look at Amazon, one of America's largest employers at this point. Inside Amazon warehouses, employees are constantly monitored. If you work too slowly or catch your breath too often, or even go to the bathroom too much, you can be fired for taking too much TOT. That stands for time off task. Some warehouses even feature a device that shines a spotlight on the item a worker needs to pick up to stop them from taking what an employee called micro rests in between picking up an item.

Because if you take micro rests, you know, just a little pause to catch your breath, how can you meet quotas requiring you to place 700 items each hour? And this is not safe work. You have to lift, carry, and move items constantly, which means it's no surprise that an investigation of 23 Amazon warehouses found that nearly 10% of their full-time workers sustained serious injuries in 2018. And pain is such a constant part of Amazon warehouse employment that their warehouses actually feature painkiller vending machines. That is real. That is a real thing. And things are just as bad for the workers that drive your package to your front door.

Drivers for Amazon have to consent to machine learning-enabled surveillance in their car before they can even start work. And the hours can be so grueling, the pace so ridiculous, that drivers end up pissing in bottles just to stay on schedule. That's right. To keep their jobs, drivers piss in bottles while being taped by AI cameras in their Ford Sprinter. It is not the wonderful work paradise that the tech industry promised us.

The secret sauce, in other words, of the gig economy is not the wonderful work paradise that the tech industry promised us. The secret sauce, in other words, of the gig economy is not a proprietary algorithm. It's exploitation. These companies have, simply put, amassed monopolistic control over huge swaths of our economy and then used that monopoly power to fuck over workers. But there is some good news. Workers and the politicians who represent them are starting to fight back, and there are signs that things could suck less. California just passed a bill setting quota limits for warehouse workers, and New York City passed a groundbreaking law to guarantee wages and protect food delivery workers. So what does the future of worker rights in the tech era look like? Well, to discuss today on the show, we have a guest. We've been trying to book her for so long because her work is fantastic.

Her name is Veena Dubal. She's a law professor at UC Hastings, and she studies workers and tech. And let me say before we go to the interview that that California law I just mentioned, well, when we recorded this interview, it hadn't been signed by the governor yet. So we talk about it as though it's struggling on the precipice when in reality, hey, it actually has been passed. So without further ado, please welcome Veena Dubal. Veena, thank you so much for being here. I'm really, really excited to be here. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to have you. I've followed your work for a long time. The work that you do writing about and researching labor issues and the tech industry and how those two things connect. We're going to have a ton to talk about. I want to start by

talking about this new bill in California, I believe, that is about making sure that Amazon workers have the right to use the bathroom. Can you tell me about this bill and why? That seems like a pretty basic measure. Why is it controversial? Yeah, it is super simple. It does two things. This is AB 701. It's been passed by the California Senate and Assembly, and it's sitting in front of Gavin Newsom's desk as we speak. And he has not signed it yet. He has roughly two weeks to sign it. But he's got a lot to do. He's a busy guy. He's relaxing by the pool after beating the recall and not, you know, I'm sure there's no controversial reason that he wouldn't be signing it, right? have to do two things. One, they have to report their quotas to regulators, the quotas that they

set for workers. And this is really important because it just offers a window, a descriptive window into what is happening in the warehouse. Right now, everything that we know is happening, we get from workers and through anecdotes. And so this is a way for us to really understand concretely how severe the conditions are in the warehouse. So really just you have to tell us what the quotas are. And the second thing is that it makes it unlawful for a company like Amazon to prevent warehouse workers from doing things that they need to for their health

and safety. So if a worker has to pee, for example, preventing a worker from peeing in order to meet their quota would be unlawful. That's pretty basic. We have health and safety standards already written into the law. It doesn't shock, it's not shocking this idea that workers should need to go to the bathroom or they should need to be able to change their tampon or pump breast milk. These are things that pretty much are already covered by California health and safety laws, but are ignored in this particular industry. And so it's really mild. I think any lay person who hears about this bill would just be like, of course, why do we even have to legislate for this? But Amazon doesn't like it because these companies don't like being told what to do with their businesses. And if we have a concrete sense of

how severe their quotas are, they won't be able to use PR spin to get away with what they're doing. And so they've been saying that just like using all the sort of anti-union propaganda to say, oh, this is just an effort to unionize the workers, that no one, you know, the unions don't really care about the workers, even though this is not about collective organizing at all. It's really about state regulation or even just seeing what's going on. But they're also fighting back on the specific point of just ensuring that workers have access to a bathroom. Like I saw a quote from the California Retailers Association, which Amazon is on the board of, according to this interview with you, I read where they say, quote, establishing potentially open-ended

employee access to bathroom facilities will make employers ability to enforce production standards even more complex. So they're specifically saying a guaranteed right to go to the bathroom would fuck with our shit. So we don't want to do it. And so they are arguing we must have the ability to prevent employees from using the bathroom freely, which is like, I mean, I don't know. To me, that's an extremely basic workplace. I mean, I don't know. To me, that's an extremely basic workplace. It would never would have occurred to me that, you know, a workplace in the United States would prevent people from using the bathroom when they need to use the bathroom. That's something I would have expected to hear about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory or conditions like that in like the 20s where you're chained to your work, your desk. Yeah, it should shock the conscience. desk. Yeah, it should shock the conscience. And I think the fact that they, you know, wrote that without realizing how it would be received speaks to how companies like Amazon have really taken

the low road. For them, workers are cogs in the machine. They haven't replaced the workers with robots, but they've just turned workers into robots and expected that they behave like robots. And you're right. It's totally the kind of human rights issue that we would critique another country for violating. And yet, like, the Retailers Associationers Association is like this is their stated official opposition. So I have to ask, like, how did we get here? I mean, you know, we've had a labor movement in America for well over 100 years, about 150 years now. We've got, you know, even with the fall of the you know, the relative decline of unions, we've got OSHA, we've got a federal department of labor. We have regulations all over the place. California

is a state with a relatively large amount of regulations compared to, you know, other states in America. How do we get to a state where we are having to like a bill to protect this extremely basic human need is controversial at all. That seems like such a huge backslide. How do we get to this place? That's a great question on the subject of much research, but I, you know, I'll say a couple of things. We definitely, the decline of unions in the past, you know, 60 years has really declined worker power more broadly. It has, I think people are not thinking as much regulators and, and workers are not thinking, you know, consumers are not thinking as much about, about the necessity of work regulations. And, and then we have these tech companies who from, you know, Uber to Amazon, who have really rapidly in, you know, in one decade changed consumer expectations around speed and service and to meet those, and they've done this in order to establish monopolies, right? Like when things are so easy, when all you have to do is

click a button on your phone to purchase something and it lands on your doorstep in two days, or all you have to do is click a button on your phone and a really cheap ride shows up in the form of an immigrant worker. It's so easy and you get addicted to it. In places like Los Angeles, where I remember being in Los Angeles before Uber, I was here for like six months and I was like, God, how do I get around this city? I got to go back to New York. And then when I finally had to move here for work five years later, Uber existed. And I was like, oh, I can get to and from the comedy club and get home again.

And it actually, we've talked about this on the show, but like, you know, it actually filled a gap that people needed filled, that the city wasn't filling, the state wasn't filling. And, you know, Amazon did the same thing for a lot. A lot of people have access to goods they wouldn't have access to before. So, you know, it's not just the convenience, it's they really did fill this need, but at what cost? At what cost? Right. And and I think that they the need, particularly, say, in in like, you know, getting your body from point A to point B was really in many ways a failure of municipal governance. Like, why can you not get from work to home in LA without sitting in traffic for two hours? That it's ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous. And it's absolutely a failure of urban planning.

It's a failure of municipal governance. And so, you know, you had these companies come in to fill this gap and the way that they filled it was through this particular business model where they wanted to occupy the entire sector. And we know in capitalism that the tendency for industry is towards monopolization because the more of the sector you occupy, the more power you have, the higher prices you can provide, and the less likely you're ever going to go out of business. Tech has learned in the last few years, in the last decade, that the way that you create monopolies is you create convenience.

You get people to use your service at very, very low prices. You get people to use your service at very, very low prices. You are subsidizing. Your company is being subsidized by venture capital. So even though you're losing money by offering really low prices, you do it because you can. And Monopoly is the name of the game. Everyone gets addicted to Uber. It becomes a verb. And you Uber from home to work or from the club to

work and or the club to home and and um and that's what's happened and now what we will see is um is prices will rise for consumers um we've already we're already seeing this i saw a huge taxi line at sfo the other day because prices lift Lyft and Uber prices were astronomical and people are getting in line to use taxis again. Prices are going to go up. This is true. We've already seen on Amazon, actually, and I think consumers don't notice this, but the things that you buy on Amazon in many instances are actually much more expensive than they would be if you went to Walmart or Target. But such is the case. This is how they're ultimately going to turn a profit through the addiction, through the consumer addiction and the subsidizing of prices initially to facilitate that addiction. And the other thing, in addition

to being cheap, is that they did, and this is relevant the other thing, in addition to being cheap, is that they did, and this is relevant to our conversation, in addition to making everything really cheap, they made everything really fast. And in an age where people like me and you are working really long hours, you know, no one does a 40-hour work week anymore. You know, I'm a professor, I'm tenured, I have job security, I probably work 50 to 60 hours a week. It's hard for me to get my groceries. We all just live this like really quick lifestyle, like all of these things that were that either for, you know, for decades, someone else did in the family when we had like these, the, you know, a breadwinning model of

family where a wife stayed at home and did the grocery shopping and did the cooking. And all of a sudden, now we have, you know, we have these dual family incomes, because we can't survive with, with just one person working and, and there's no time to do any of these service, service things. And so we've, you know, farmed them out to companies to have their workers do it. And in order to compete with one another, they need to be super fast. So I think, you know, to answer your question, which was at the beginning, which is how did we get here? A big part of it just in the last decade is how these companies have preyed on and shifted consumer expectations.

Now, to meet those expectations, what happens beneath the surface is absolute exploitation of labor. I always say, you would never put a slave in your basement and make that person buy you clothes or make clothes for you, sew clothes for you. But like when we buy from H&M and, you know, these fast fashion companies, like that may very well be what is happening. And we just don't know about it. And in these instances, in the warehouses, in the service economy, a lot of this,

and the ride hail industry, the food delivery industry, these services are happening not in Bangladesh or in Yemen, they're happening here in the United States. So it's harder to hide. And what these this bill does is try and AB 701 try to to stop hiding it so we see it and i think the hope ultimately is that it will shock the conscience that those of us who use amazon um will be like hey is like do i really need um do i really need those sponges that i ordered last night today or could i wait you know a few days um and and like there has to be some cultural pushback against this it's just a regulatory pushback and cultural pushback it's um as you said like the these it doesn't feel american um it feels like it feels like something that should

be happening somewhere else and what's sad is that the more it happens um the longer we sort of stand for it um the more it's going to be normalized yeah and we'll be part of our culture the more it's going to be unavoidable, you know, like there's still plenty of situations like after the passage of prop 22, which we talked about on the show, uh, after it passed, but we'll, let's get into it a little bit today. You know, I'm like, all right, I need to stop taking Ubers and Lyfts because I'm so revolted by what these companies did. I've still had to take them sometimes, uh, because there's no, you know, there's no other choice. And part of that's because you were talking about prices rising, right. And, and, you know, how the monopoly works. And there's a really great

example of that, that I think has really directly affected everybody. Which is, you know, like you say, venture capitalists pour money into these companies to keep their prices low. And they're doing that because they're trying to establish a monopoly. And if you look at airport transportation, for instance, there used to be this company called Super Shuttle. You remember Super Shuttle? And I used to take it all the time. You could take a soup. You booked ahead of time, a Super Shuttle to pick you up from your home, take you to the airport or vice versa. You can either do a shared ride for cheaper where they make a couple other stops or you get a direct ride. It costs about the same as an Uber for a direct ride or a little bit less. But that company is now out of business nationally. It used to be at like dozens of airports and it straight up does not exist anymore.

And that as an option to get to and from LAX, a very difficult airport to get to, simply does not exist because they were pushed out of the market. And it was a cheaper option that was better for the environment because it was a shared ride. And it's gone now. And the same thing is happening in so many other industries. And so, you know, there's this thing in America and you're talking about our culture. There's this thing in America of, well, if you don't like the job, get a better job. That job is just for people who aren't good enough to get some better job elsewhere, except that these companies are eliminating the better jobs. They're ceasing to exist because of their explicit business model of creating a monopoly. There are no better retail jobs.

When I first started doing research with Uber and Lyft drivers, I remember I was talking to this guy who lived in the Bay Area. His wife was in a union. She was a longshore union worker, and he had been a unionized carpenter for most of his life until he hurt his back. And this is like, you know, a white working class guy with a strong, sort of strong union identity. And he started, first he started doing trucking, long haul trucking after he heard us back. And he said that that was like the same system. You know, you hardly made any money and he was away from his family. And then this is when Uber and Lyft first started. He started driving for Lyft and he, you know, this is the same story, started making

a lot of money because that's how they lured drivers into the work. And then they lowered prices and lowered prices and lowered prices or wages. And so the workers got stuck after buying a car. And he said to me, you know, Dina, I used to laugh at the Walmart workers. I used to say, like, if it sucks so bad, just go get another job. And then I got stuck in this position where I had bought a car. And this was this was, you know, soon after not not that long after the recession, when there weren't that many other jobs, I bought a car, and I'm stuck. And there's not a lot else I can do. And so this is what I'm doing. And it took him a few years, I followed up with him sort of recently. And he said he was eventually

able to get out of it. But it took a long time. And he said, listen, if my wife wasn't a unionized longshore worker, I could never have gotten out of it. It was the fact that he had one, there was one person with a stable income, such that he could like spend some time trying to find a new job. And, you know, and in the last few years, unemployment rates went down. And so there were, and in the last few years, unemployment rates went, went down. And so there were as a, as a tighter labor market, there were, there was stuff for him to do, but there often isn't. And like, I know a lot of this argument, I hear this all the time from people, like, if it's so bad, why don't they just leave? And, and this is like, so frustrating and so stupid for two reasons. And those two reasons are like, think about, you know, I think about how long it took my partner to leave the law firm that he was so miserable at. I heard him, you know, excuse my language, but I heard him bitch for 10 years before he was able to. Before he was able to, there's a lot, it's hard to search for a new job.

And there's a huge amount of understandable inertia when you have your identity, you have made a lot of capital investment in this work, and it's all wrapped up in it. And they are constantly telling you, we can make this work through all of their bonuses and their algorithms and saying, you know, you can make this work, you can do it, pulling you back in. Like, there's a lot pushing people to, to, to keep, keep at this work. And the second reason it's so stupid is because work in the U S work everywhere really does not accommodate people's basic needs. And our needs are not just to put food on the table and pay for rent. They're also to take care of our kids, to take care of our elders, to be able to go to the grocery store, to do all of this stuff, and to be able to take time off if you're living a transnational life and your family is in India and visiting. I mean, we, the rights for workers are so limited as it is. And so when there is like, you know, a few jobs that allow some degree of flexibility where you can not be fired for not showing up for two weeks,

like that's really appealing. And it, to, to have another type of job that does that. And, and so people are stuck. It's not like, it's like, this is a kind of work that we, that we need, but also that we really need to improve. Yeah. Well, let's talk before we go to break. Cause we mentioned prop 22. And we talked about that last with, in our interview with Meredith Whitaker about right after it was passed and uh what a what a disaster it was um uh but there has been some pretty big news about it recently would you mind and i first learned about it from you on twitter you kind of broke the news almost uh well for a lot of people you did anyway because i think you're just sitting around reading court filings all day. You've got to somehow you get on your phone when a new PDF comes out from the California Supreme Court. What is the new update? Actually, really quick recap on what Prop 22 is and then what is the recent update on it?

I have called Prop 22 the new racial wage code. It is the most dangerous labor law that has been passed in the last 50 years. What it does is create a substandard category of employment for workers who are doing transportation network work and workers who are doing food delivery work. And so for these particular sectors, there are all new labor laws. The minimum wage has completely gone. Overtime is completely gone. Vehicle reimbursements are completely gone. Unemployment insurance is completely gone. And workers' compensation is completely gone.

It's noteworthy that this is probably ride-hailing in particular is one of the most dangerous occupations in the country, according to OSHA. one of the most dangerous occupations in the country, according to OSHA. So what's happening in this context is really that taxpayers are subsidizing these companies that fit into this category of transportation network company and delivery network company because without health insurance, without appropriate workers' compensation, without unemployment insurance, without the minimum wage, a lot of these workers are relying on public benefits and public services, even though they're working some 60 hours a week.

And this was a proposition that was passed in California as a result of a really misleading marketing campaign that Uber and Lyft paid, they put like hundreds of millions of dollars into, claiming that this was going to help workers when actually it was taking protections away from them. That's really well put. That's exactly what they did. They spent two hundred and twenty five million dollars flooding the airways with misinformation, saying that that this was going to give new protections to workers when in fact it took away protections from workers, saying that workers of color in particular really needed it, and that

this is somehow progressive. And at the same time as they were calling themselves anti-racist companies that stood with the Black Lives Matters movement, they were taking away rights from a majority racial minority and immigrant workforce. So really perverse outcome. I don't think that most Californians who voted understood the bill because it was A, really complicated, and B, they were misinformed. So it passed. And it was law until recently. So last month, So last month, I believe it was August 21st, a superior court in California found the proposition to be unconstitutional. Wow. According to the workers' compensation scheme that we have in California is in the California Constitution, and it gives the legislature plenary power, full power to create a complete

workers' compensation scheme for workers. And because Prop 22 took away the ability to create a scheme like that for these the sectors of the of the workforce, the court found that it was in violation of the California Constitution. So very, very technical, technical sort of legal analysis there, but rooted in the reality that these laws were written to protect all vulnerable workers, marginalized workers. And so, you know, very exciting. The court found it unconstitutional. The companies who are interveners in the lawsuit, the lawsuit is actually being defended by the state because now that it's law, the state has to defend it. But so the companies are interveners in the lawsuit.

They, you know, vowed to take it all the way up to the Supreme Court. But what's important to note is that this Supreme Court, this California Supreme Court is the same Supreme Court that decided, unanimously decided the decision in Dynamics in 2018. And it was the Dynamics decision that ultimately led to AB5, which led to Prop 22. Right. Okay. So I think I understand how this works. I'm a new resident of California. And so I've been trying to figure out the political system, but I think I figured out how this works. The California Supreme Court, a number of years ago, actually ruled that a lot of companies were

misclassifying their workers as contractors rather than employees. As a result of that decision, the California legislature is basically compelled to pass this big law, AB5, that fixed that classification problem. But the problem for Uber and Lyft was that that made all of their supposed contractors employees as well and gave them all these wonderful protections. And Uber and Lyft didn't like that. So they passed this Prop 22 to get them out of that again. And now they're saying they're going to take it to the Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court is the same body that was actually protecting workers in the first place and so might not look kindly on that.

So, OK. That was perfect. You should come teach my class. I like to dabble. You know, I like to dabble in explaining. It was really great. Thank you. Well, I wanted to be a college professor and I couldn't hack it in grad school.

So instead I explain things using my layman's dumb, dumb comedy tools. Well, it makes it much more effective. I think people understand it. So that's reason for a little bit of optimism then on this point. Yeah, I'm feeling optimistic. I am feeling really optimistic. I mean, this is a question of, this is a question of first impression. There's not been a lot of precedent that we can like look to and say, oh, this is what the court has said before. But I'm, I am optimistic. Wow. Okay. Well on that optimistic note note let's go to break and then we'll

come back and we'll talk about some more depressing uh aspects yeah probably I'm we'll find more optimism we'll find more depression we'll be right back with more Vina DuBall I don't know anything. Okay, we're back with Veena Dubal. So one thing that I know that you've written about is how, what these tech companies are trying to do and what all of really corporate America is trying to do, trying to increase worker precarity, reduce wages, basically create monopolies and squeeze workers to make more profits. That that is not something that is just going to happen to gig workers, that that is something that really affects all of us. Can you elaborate on that, please? Absolutely. So something that happened after Prop 22 passed, I think the next day, Sean Carillon, who is a partner at, I think it's called Menlo Ventures,

they were an early Uber investor. He wrote an op-ed called What Prop 22 Makes Possible. And in the op-ed, he offered a fascinating window into the world of venture capital. He said, this is basically amazing. We can now gigify retail. We can gigify healthcare. We can gigify education. Like this is a very exciting thing for venture capital. And that's kind of what we were saying all along. That Prop 22 was not just about ride hail work or food delivery work, that this was about labor standards more broadly, that companies since 1930, you know, 36 or whenever, when the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed, have been trying to get out from underneath the minimum wage and overtime, and they successfully did it. And again, like the normalization of this kind of precarious work ultimately means that it's going to spread

because we get used to it. And so, you know, for me, the Prop 22 fight and ultimately what happens with the constitutionality of this fight and the fight that's been happening, that will happen all over the country, you know, they're trying to introduce a similar or they have introduced a similar initiative in Massachusetts. There's some talk of it in Illinois as well. The more that this spreads and the more that this is normalized, the more that this is not just going to be via an app and no longer getting the minimum wage. It's going to be about, and we already have actually in Silicon Valley, substitute teachers summoned into work, not as employees, but as independent contractors, and they do it through an app. And it's not just the app, right? Like, yes, the app is the convenient aspect of it to get people into work, maybe to help them pick their schedule, what have you. It's the labor conditions that the app has come to represent.

And that's what these venture capitalists want to spread because the lower the labor conditions, the lower their labor overhead, and the more profit that they're able to generate for shareholders. Yeah, it's, I mean, it just creates a model of work that they are able to impose on workers. I mean, this happened in California. There was, this was not quite a year ago, but there was, you might remember the details more than more than I do. But there was a grocery chain in California that announced that it previously did grocery delivery. They had union drivers doing it the old fashioned way. You go on the website, you call the store, you know, the kind of thing for elderly folks.

Get my you know, get my groceries delivered. They had union drivers doing it. And they announced that they were laying them all off and replacing them with app drivers, because that's what Prop 22 allowed. Prop 22 said, Prop 22 didn't say Uber, Lyft and Instacart. It said app based drivers and services like, oh, OK, well, if we make our delivery program on an app, we can get rid of all these union workers. And I don't remember how that story ended. I remember the union was trying to fight it, but that was like, this is what we should expect to see further across the country. And notably, this didn't just happen in California.

So this was the Albertsons conglomerate, which owns Safeway and Ralphs. And they did this all over the country in response to the passage of Prop 22, because for them, Prop 22 symbolized, okay, this is okay. California is like what every other state follows. So, we're going to go ahead and lay off all these union workers and instead replace them with DoorDash drivers. And that is precisely what they did. I think, you know, another element of this, in addition to the fact that it's spreading and will spread unless we stop it, another element of this that people don't really understand is that it's not just that these union workers were replaced with DoorDash drivers,

it's that the union workers had really good secure wages and secure jobs. And the DoorDash drivers do not have secure jobs. They're not even able to predict their wages and they're hyper-controlled on the job. So while the union guy might have a relationship with his supervisor and be able to say, relationship with his supervisor and be able to say, hey, you know, my son is really sick. Can I take the day off? Or, you know, I'm sorry, I need to take this phone call, talk to my son's teacher. And that's like, okay, because he has some power in the workplace and his job is secure. These DoorDash drivers are at the whim and whimsy of algorithms. So an algorithm might think that you made a mistake when you didn't and you have no recourse. And we saw this also in the Amazon context where these workers are basically surveilled

all the time by video. They are wearing technology that tracks their movement, what they're doing, how they're doing it. And machines make mistakes just like humans make mistakes. And people were being automatically laid off in instances where they didn't have an ability to, and I mean, I say this in the past tense, but it's very much the present tense, in instances where they don't even have the ability to contest, to say, no, I was there or no, I was actually, I met the quota. The system just didn't pick it up or the system made a mistake. And like when you're arguing with a machine, that's very different than arguing with the supervisor. What about like, you know, I have a bladder infection today.

I need to go to the bathroom a little bit more often. You say that to any boss, any boss. Okay. Go to the bathroom. You know, I get it. Right. Or at least any night, any normal person. Right.

You can appeal to someone's humanity and say, Hey, today something happened. This is within the realm of like, it's in the human social realm, right? Where we understand everybody's a person and we treat each other as people, but you can't say that to an algorithm. And then the boss comes and says, okay, well, the algorithm says you did a bad job and my hands are tied because I just have to do what the algorithm says too. And so therefore you are fired. It removes the human social element from the workplace entirely in a really destructive way. And yeah, the human element of it, the fact that we're humans that have needs and aren't robots, like that is completely, there's no room for that. There's no room for humanity in this kind of surveilled work. You know, going back to our early part of our conversation, these kinds of things are experimented on low-wage workers. So a lot of these surveillance technologies were first implemented in what we call the gig economy.

They were then pushed into these warehouses. And during the pandemic, the same surveillance technologies were used to surveil at home desk workers. So when everyone went home, all of a sudden there was they had to download, you know, videos that tried to take tried, but I would say couldn't gauge, try to gauge productivity. tried to gauge productivity. And, and again, like this is these, these are cultures and practices and, and technologies that we had already seen with low wage workers that spread to other workers. And so, you know, people have been being surveyed or being surveilled based on, and it's continuing to happen based on how many keystrokes they that they make, whether it seems like they are not visibly on the screen or not. You know, they're there. What websites they're visiting, like all kinds of things that just like wasn't common for office work all of a sudden has become quite common. Yeah. I mean, once you start talking about it this way, you start to see it everywhere. Like I'm seeing it so strongly in my own industry, the entertainment industry, which people think

of as being a very well-paid industry that is, white collar isn't quite the right word, but it's a prestigious industry where people are compensated accordingly. That's the general impression. Now, a lot of that is because it's an extremely strong industry in terms of labor. We've had a very strong labor culture in the LA-based and New York-based entertainment industry for a long time. But it's now dominated by a handful of tech companies. It's literally dominated by Netflix, Amazon, Apple,

and then Warner and Disney are the other two. And they're trying to become tech companies as fast as they can. And already, like right now, the big crew union, IATSE, which represents all the people behind the camera, they are in the middle of a contract negotiation right now. And they are literally fighting for meal breaks. They're fighting to be able to have lunch in the middle of a, of literally these crews work a minimum of 12 hour days and often 16, 18 hour days. So the, their literal bargaining points are, we need a meal break. We need to be able to get 10 hours off a night in enough time to drive home, go to sleep and come back. And we need weekends off. in enough time to drive home, go to sleep and come back. And we need weekends off. That is,

that is like, it seems pretty basic. Yeah. I mean, this is back to what the labor union fought for. You know, the, the labor, we always say the labor union created the 40 hour work week, the labor union created weekends off. And, and we're back to that point again. It's, it's insanity. And then I look at like the literal gigification of it. I'm sorry to go on, but this is like, oh my gosh. No, yeah, it's very important. When I look at services like Twitch, for instance, the video game streaming website, which I use, that site is literally in competition with Netflix, with CBS, with all of them for entertaining eyeballs, right? And who is providing the content on Twitch? It's legions of largely unpaid gig workers. You know, you log onto Twitch, you create an account and

Twitch starts going, uh, Hey, you know, what would get you closer to, to partner status would be if you started streaming every day. If you set a schedule, if you stream for 10 hours, 20 hours, 30 hours a week. And if you do that long enough, we might start cutting off a little bit of revenue share from the ad sales. We might start doing that. And so that's like, what if Uber said, you drive around for free for a couple of years and we'll see if we start giving you a little bit of the amount that people are paying. I mean, in some ways they do. Like 20% of workers in the Bay area after they, after they consider their expenses are making $0.

Yeah. Like this is, this is like across, across these tech companies. And what's important to note. Car payment, all those things. 100%. Yeah. And what's important. Yes.

And what's important to note is that this is not like the necessarily the it does not have to be this way. Like technology and labor don't have to be about exploitation. Like you can totally imagine a world in which technologies are being used to make the life of workers better. You know, like you can imagine a world in which flexibility is totally infused into the entire work, service work economy where you get to choose your schedules because it's so easy to centralize everyone's schedules via an app and you still get paid the minimum wage in overtime. You still get your shift. It's just like better for you. But instead, you have the confluence of monopolization and tech companies. And, and what matters in the end is shareholder value, not worker satisfaction or worker, worker security or stability. So yeah, I mean, this whole it's very, as you say, a very, very common in, in LA, with, with, you know with the ascent of YouTubers, Instagrammers, influencers, gamers,

all these people working so precariously without any safety net. And these companies, while they're paying work, I mean, these are workers. These video gamers are workers. While they're not paying the workers, they're making so much money off of their labor. The companies are also not paying into any form of social insurance. So the government is not getting social security. They're not getting unemployment. What happened during the pandemic was all of those people didn't, like, they had to apply for pandemic unemployment assistance, which was like this emergency stopgap measure for independent contractors. Ultimately, that came from taxpayer money.

Like that didn't come from just like, you know, it wasn't pulled out of the air. It came from a reserve that the government has created over time. When that union delivery worker, right, they're laid off so that they can, a DoorDash worker can be hired again. So now that worker is working DoorDash contractor instead of working union. So they don't have health benefits anymore. And they go on Medicaid, right, in order to get health benefits or, you know, a similar program. Yeah, we are literally paying for that. We are literally subsidizing it when the company was previously paying for it. The vast majority of these workers do not have health insurance and,

and are on some form of public assistance. Yeah. Well, I mean, is, is this in any way, like the more we talk about it, it seems unsustainable to me because, you know, if you're, if you're a company like the you know, like the, the Albertson's chain that is turning these workers from people who aren't able to make a living into precarious gig workers who don't have health insurance and don't have enough money to live, well, you're also reducing the number of people who are going to be able to get groceries. That is 100%. And this is what led to the Great Depression. I mean, it was the exact same thing. Like you had the Gilded Age, which is this age of like

mass monopoly. You know, we think of the railroads and the monopolies that they had over getting people and things to out West and just in general from point A to point B. And you had people, unemployment rates were really, really high. And because there wasn't a lot of work spreading, they were just getting as much as they could out of each person because there was very, very few to any regulations. And then we had like massive labor strife. I mean, the kinds of direct actions, work stoppages, protests that we had in the early 20th century, I think are kind of unimaginable to many of us today because we've lived in a period of relative stability, but that is rapidly changing. You had people who are really hungry,

people who are working that were really hungry, who couldn't, who couldn't pay for their, for their rent or who were living on the streets. Homelessness was, was, was through the roof. We're in rapidly declining into that same kind of situation. Sounds like you're describing today. A hundred percent. Yeah, no, a hundred percent, a hundred percent. And so part of me doesn't, like, I know that these companies, I think about this all the time, like these companies, they hire social scientists to figure out how to manipulate workers, you know, their behavior in app through the algorithms, but they don't hire historians. And a historian would say, look, there's got to be some want to have to deal with a union

or you don't want to have to deal with a lot of work stoppages and direct actions and slowdowns, then what you're going to need to do is to make people happy. I mean, like the union consultants will tell you that like one of the best ways to stop a union drive is to make the workers happy. And and so, you know, like no one wants to be there. You know, no one wants us. I don't I don't know what it's like in Los Angeles, but in San Francisco in the last five years, homelessness is become very visible. There are a lot and increased dramatically, a lot of homeless

encampments all over the place. Honestly, it looks like, um, it looks like Bombay. My family's from Bombay. And when I drive around in San Francisco, I think this is very similar to, um, to Bombay slums. Like there are actual slum communities in San Francisco and this like one of the wealthiest places in the world. And when we have conditions like that, there's going to be, there's not going to just be hunger. There's going to be rebellion. Yeah. But that, I mean, you know, there's also, there's places in the, one of the things I remember traveled to India for the first time in my life a few years ago was how

normalized some of that was. That's a hundred percent right. Yeah. Where, where you've got incredible wealth and you've got incredible poverty side by side and people, some people, I'm not going to say how many, but you know, are like, Hey, that's just the way it is. Right. That's the way it's always been. That's the way it is. And somebody said that to me about Los Angeles, that like the worst part about it is kids growing up saying, oh yeah, there's just homeless encampments around.

I'm rich. There's a lot of poor people here. And that's how things are supposed to be. And that's, we don't want people to feel that way. We want to keep that horror. Yeah, no, I mean, the thing about, interestingly, I mean, the thing about a place like India is that you have the slums,

but you also have a lot of labor agitation. There are strikes are everyday part of people's lives. It's just like I lived there for a year. And I think in that one year, the transportation workers struck three times over a period of many, many days. And so or at least that's how I remember it. You know, I what I remember is just thinking, oh, my at least that's how I remember it. I, you know, I, I, I, what I remember is just thinking, oh my gosh, it's so interesting. And during those time periods, we were told like, stay inside, don't, don't, don't leave. Like it could get really violent. And so that's also

something that we haven't, we haven't seen yet, but we will see. We will see if this continues, if we continue down the road that we're on. Well, are we starting to see that pushback? Because like you said, there's, you know, Prop 22 was found, you know, found unconstitutional in California. There is this law, the Amazon P-Break law is sitting on Gavin Newsom's desk, right? Hopefully he signs it, but, you know but at least it made it that far. And I literally have seen there is a new ride share service

that just opened, I don't want to call it a ride share service, I'll call it a car service, app-based car service that opened in LA. I think it's also in Dallas called Alto. I've used it myself.

It pays, and part of its pitch, I'm not saying this is the best service in the world. I'm not pitching this, right? But part of its pitch is our drivers are employees and they make a minimum wage, which in California is $15 an hour. And that's still not enough based on how expensive LA is. But at least, you know, when I use it, I'm like, all right, this person doesn't have to bring their own car. They are not,

they are paid for every hour that they work. They're not just paid when they're driving me. And it's a normal job. And that is at least a little bit better. And most importantly, this service is advertising itself that way because they know that people don't like this about Uber and Lyft. So to me, that's a little bit of a bing, bing, bing, bing. Are we starting to see a culture shift around these issues? I think that we are. And not just around these issues, but just around labor issues more broadly. In the last two years, we've seen a record number of strikes, and these are legal strikes. So strikes in the Uber and Lyft economies are actually considered illegal strikes because of how the workers are classified. But we've seen a record number of direct actions, work stoppages through unions just in the last two years, more than we've seen since the early

1980s, since the Reagan era. And I think that the evidence also suggests that the vast majority of Americans think well of unions, that they believe in labor organizing. Also, a pretty big shift in how we understand, have understood the economy for the last two decades. And so, definitely, I think, you know, there is real reason to be hopeful. And I think the fact that we're even having this conversation is really meaningful. That people are interested in this topic, that they are thinking about the workers who are making their lives convenient, making their lives possible. I think that all of that is real reason to be hopeful, because that's how transformation occurs is through conversations. Like, you know,

the fact that you and I are having this conversation, all these people are going to be listening, and then they're going to talk to their friends about it. Like that kind of awareness seems sort of small, but is actually transformational. And, and I think that, that all of that gives us, gives us reason to be hopeful. Well, so that awareness is great. And I love, I love that optimism and I do share it. And the awareness that hopefully we're building for people listening to this and, and, you know, that is built on social media is really good, but I always noticed there's that step of, okay, now what do I do? People are so quick to

say, okay, do I delete my app? Like, okay, I'll, I won't use it or, or tip, Hey, make sure you tip cash, that sort of thing. But I think we all have an awareness that that is maybe not the mass action that is needed. And so what do you suggest for folks listening at home who say like, oh my gosh, I'm really upset that Amazon, folks at Amazon, their bladders are bursting. How can I pitch in? Yeah. So two things I would say. One is you can support independent organizing. Like if you want to, if you want to feeling guilty about using Amazon, you can spend a little bit of money, any like $20, $15 and send it to an independent organizing group. So two that I can think of that do really amazing work are Rideshare

Drivers United, based in LA, and also Gig Workers Collective. These are workers who hardly make any money, who are not receiving a lot of funding, even from labor unions for various reasons, but could really, really use support. So I would say that's one sort of basic thing. really use support. So I would say that's one sort of basic thing. Another thing is to respect boycotts and strikes. So this week, Instacart workers have been asking consumers to delete Instacart to send a message. So sort of spread that message and sort of respect the picket line, so to speak. And I think those two things actually are huge. And when it's possible, when there are protests, when there are strikes, go out and support them. Vote for people who support labor, make it clear to your congresspeople, to your representatives that you care about these issues and that you want them to act on these issues and to not be beholden to big tech um that's another it's a third thing that's really

that that can that will go go really far um and and i would say again that just again like really just talking about these things has the potential to the narrative to shift the narrative, to not normalize it. That is in and of itself is actually a very important form of resistance. Yeah. Just letting people know that when your friend is like, oh, the Uber drivers, they're all doing side hustles so they can buy their girlfriends an extra dinner, like the Uber ad says, you can be like, no, actually, it's like primarily like people of color. It's immigrant folks who are working. I forget the number, but a massive number of Uber drivers are driving, you know, 40 hour, 50 hour weeks for full time. And that this is really precarious work. 100 percent. Almost all the work that's being done for these companies is being done by full

time drivers. They love to talk about how this is a side hustle for most people. But in fact, you are much more likely to be in the car with someone who's been driving for 60 hours a week and your safety is bound up in theirs. So that's another thing to think about, about why labor standards for the service economy are really important. You don't want your food service worker to not be able to stay home when they have COVID. You don't want that. Yeah. And even if you're not using those services, you're driving on the same roads as them, as that overworked person who's tired behind the wheel, who might swerve and hit you. And that's just not a hypothetical. Right. I mean, it's not hypothetical. We know in markets where these companies enter that traffic accidents go up and direct causal relationship. Okay. Well, we ended on your stirring positive call to action.

Then we veered back into the press. It's hard. That's who I am. It's always negative. Same. Oh, same here. That's why people listen to the show, because they like that shit. And that's why they came in the door.

So this has been a wonderful conversation, Vina. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me on. Yeah, we'll have to have you on again soon. I would love it. After there's a bunch of, after there's more seismic activity in tech and labor. Thank you. Thank you.

Take care. activity in tech and labor. Thank you. Thank you. Take care. Well, thank you once again to Veena Dubal for coming on the show. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. If you want to support the show, head to factuallypod.com slash books to check out our special bookstore with books from authors that we have had on the show. Your purchase goes to support not just this show, but your local bookstore. And that is it for us this week on Factually. I want to thank our producers, Sam Rodman and Chelsea Jacobson, our engineer, Ryan Connor, Andrew WK for our theme song, the fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible custom gaming PC that I'm recording this very episode on. You can find me online at adamconover.net or at

adamconover. Send me an email at factually at adamconover.net. I love to hear from you. Thank you so much for listening and we'll see you next time on Factually.