Tech Won't Save Us - Europe’s Subservience to the United States w/ Ben Wray

Episode Date: December 11, 2025

Paris Marx is joined by Ben Wray to discuss the Europe’s capitulation to pressure from the United States on Nexperia, as well as on digital protections and labor rights that could have big implications for the future of work. Ben Wray is a researcher specializing in the platform economy. He writes the Gig Economy Project newsletter and his most recent report for the ETUC is called Uberisation. Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon. The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson. Today’s sponsors are ExpressVPN and ⁠Aura Frames. Get four months free by visiting ExpressVPN.com/TWSU. Exclusive $35 off Carver Mat at ⁠https://on.auraframes.com/PARIS⁠. Promo Code PARIS Also mentioned in this episode: Ben wrote about the brief attempt by the Dutch to nationalize Nexperia. In leaked documents from 2012-2017 Uber executives recognize their own illegal activity and refer to themselves as ‘pirates’. Spain recently ordered Meta to pay €479m fine for breaching EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

There is no neoliberal globalization anymore where profits rule and states don't matter. It doesn't matter what sector it is, every company can be used as a geopolitical tool. And I think Nixby proved that, but also proved where the power really likes, you know, and it's not not in Europe. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Ben Ray. Ben is a researcher specializing in the platform economy. He writes the Gig Economy Project newsletter and has written a number of reports, including a recent one, called Uberization. Now, in this interview, we talk about a few different things.

We start by digging into the case of Nexperia, which maybe you haven't heard very much about. Maybe you have been paying attention to, but it's this interview. chip company in the Netherlands that was recently in the middle of this geopolitical firestorm. And for Ben, it shows a lot about how Europe is really limited in its ability to project its sovereignty, whether that's digital sovereignty or, you know, just political sovereignty, because it's quite clear that the Dutch government was pushed to try to take over this chip company because of things happening in the United States, because of the United States broader

project of trying to restrict China's chip development and access to chip technology. Before, of course, Donald Trump made an agreement with Xi Jinping, and this was all reversed. So it's a good indication of how these European governments, even as they're talking a lot about sovereignty, are displaying that they're actually very dependent on the United States, its decisions, and have limited room to make decisions in their own interests when it comes to these bigger geopolitical subject matters. And then, of course, you know, this is not just an issue. when it comes to something like Nexperia, but is a much broader one when we think about tech policy more generally.

And this was the case when I talked to Aline Blankhurst last week. But in this interview, we also dig into what that means for platform workers, right? For the regulations that are defining the so-called platform economy, you know, the workers who tend to work in it and who have been, as Ben's report suggests, Uberized over time and where there's this pressure to Uberize even more of the workforce. And so we use that to pivot into talking a bit more about the report that been put together to look at these pressures to further reduce the working rights and protections that so many workers have, whether it's across Europe, as we're talking about specifically in this interview, but also many other countries that have been experiencing this dynamic, right, you know, this pressure from companies to make sure that workers can't push back. They can't demand better pay and, you know, all those sorts of things. So for me, I think that this is a really fascinating conversation because it gets to, a lot of the subjects that we have been talking about through this past year, subjects that I have been interested in for quite a long time,

especially when we're thinking about the gig economy. And so I think this is a really nice follow-up to the conversation that I had with Aline last week, and I think you're really going to enjoy it. So if you do, make sure to leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, you can share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work, that goes into making tech won't save us every single week, so we can keep having these critical in-depth conversations to help you understand

how technology is interfacing with the world, the way the power interacts with technology, and all these other subjects that we talk about. And in the meantime, you can get access to ad-free episodes of the show, as well as stickers if you support at a different level. And you can do that by joining supporters like Paul in Lismore, Australia, Antoine from Quebec City, and Nikita from Oakland by going to patreon.com slash Tech Won't Save Us, where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation.

Ben, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us. Hi, Pais. Nice to be here. Absolutely. It's always great to have you on the show, and it's been a little while since you are on blast. You know, usually we're talking about the gig economy, but we're going to start by widening it out. And then, you know, later on in our conversation, we'll get to some developments on how the gig economy is playing out in Europe right now and what developments we're seeing there. But I wanted to start by asking you about this company, Nixperia. And you wrote an article about this recently.

And I feel like it's a story that didn't really get nearly as much play in North America as it did over in Europe. concerns about what was happening here, how it was developing, what was leading to it. So maybe the place to start is just by getting you to explain what this company actually is and what it does to give that degree of context to listeners who might not have heard about it before. Yeah, so Nick Speer is a semiconductor company, makes chips, and those chips are used. A lot of them are used in automobiles, which, as we'll get onto, is an important part of this story. It's quite an interesting company because it was like a subdivision of Phillips, which is an old Dutch tech firm. So it was created as a subdivision of Phillips in the 1920s.

And then it became an independent firm in 2010 and was floated on the NASDAQ. And at which point in 2018, it was bought by WingTech, which is a semiconductor firm in China and it's part state-owned. So Nick Spears' kind of development, this kind of path is sort of typical globalisation. You know, and the latest thing that's happened with this company is like, you know, indicative of like a new phase of like, what's been called weaponized interdependence, you know, where these companies become battlefields between states. So basically what happened was on the 30th of September, the Dutch government surprised everyone when he announced that they had taken over the company. They nationalized Nick Speer. So Nick Speyer is a subsidiary of Wing Tech, so they nationalize the subsidiary part of the company. Because Nick Speyer, I should have said, actually, Nick Spears headquartered in the Netherlands.

Wingstech is obviously Chinese company's headquartered in China. So they take over NextBear about six weeks after that, they completely reversed their decision. And they say, the Dutch government say, we're not, we're suspending this, we're not taking over the company. It's all going back to the way it was. And what happened in between was basically a huge geopolitical fight over the company, whereby China responded to Nick Speer's nationalization by banning the company from the wing tech part of it, from the kind of principal part of the company, which was necessary for Nick Speer to produce its chips, and preventing WingTech from selling any of its chips abroad,

which then had a knock on effect on European oil manufacturing firms who couldn't access those chips. There were days from shutting down the operations. They then put pressure on the Dutch government and eventually the issue was resolved. Actually, it wasn't resolved by anything which the EU and the Dutch government did. It was resolved by Donald Trump when he came to a trade agreement with Chinese president Xi Jinping,

which took next pair off the entity list, off the US government's entity list. And really, that's the key to this story, which we're going to get on to. The reason why the Dutch government had done this mad thing, this small country, taking over a big subsidiary or a Chinese subsidiary, was because they were on an immense pressure from the United States to do so. That gives us a great overview of what went on there. And there are a number of pieces that I want to pick up on and dig into further.

But maybe just to make it clear for people, it's pretty unusual, especially in 2025, for government, whether it's Dutch government or any European government, to step in and, like, try to nationalize a company, right? It's practically unheard of, especially when you're dealing with a company that's, you know, as I said, it's basically part of the Chinese state almost. You know, it's a part, Wing Tech's part of Chinese state own. So it's clearly that the Dutch had decided they were going to take on China here. There's no way you can interpret this, and they were challenging China directly.

And the Dutch government could not have done that without the European Union's informal backing. So this was a major geopolitical ploy which turned to disaster pretty quickly. I don't know if I should have been surprised to hear about a company like Nexperia being in the Netherlands. But the Netherlands is already this country

that has an important foothold in the semiconductor industry, right? You know, ASML is a Dutch company and is one of those companies that is like basically essential for the global chip manufacturing. string supply chain because I believe it's like, you know, lithography kind of systems that it makes and it's the only company in the world that produces them. And so then, you know, maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, but to hear that there was this other firm that was operating there that is certainly not as important. It's not like a key. It's not like the only company that does this sort of thing, but there are still a lot of other companies that are reliant on what comes from Nixperia, as you were saying, right? Yeah. So the semiconductor like supply chain is, it is globalized, but it's also like extremely trade. So there's only like sort of certain nodes in I think maybe five, six different

countries that are really important. Taiwan with TSM, which produce something like 85% of the world's most advanced chips, Samsung in South Korea, obviously America, China. And then after that, there's not many other places except the Netherlands is one of the key ones. And it's the really only key one in Europe. It's the only part of the European economy, which has an important part of the semiconductor supply chain. As you said, ASML is the absolute key company because they're the only company that produce ultraviolet lithography machines,

which, as I understand it, are like tiny rays of light which cut out the tiny chips for semiconductors. And next beer, and you're right, I didn't know about next beer either, but it does seem to be one of those other keynotes, which is why it came in the, it came a target for the US, right?

because the U.S. for years now has been trying to use semiconductor supplies as a way to undermine China and cut China off from most advanced chips. So Nixperia was kind of next on the list. That's why this has happened at this moment in time. Maybe it would be good to get you to expand on that as well. Like what actually happened with the United States in going after Nixperia and Wing Tech to kind of get this whole story rolling? What was the United States actually doing here? What the economy minister, who's been responsible for this in the Netherlands called Vincent Kamens, what he's said in an interview is that the US had contacted the Dutch government about the concerns about Nick Spear in 2020. So this goes back to the Biden era in the US.

And basically what they do was something called the foreign direct product rule. And if the U.S. government decides that not just any U.S. product, but any product which contains U.S. technology, if they decide that that should not be exported to any company or any country, which is on the entity list, which is basically the U.S. blacklist for exports, those companies can't do that are also going to be cut off from U.S. technology, right? So it's like a form of secondary sanctions. And basically, you can't have, a semiconductor company which, unless you're in China, you can't have a semiconductor company which doesn't have US technology, right? It basically forces all these companies in different countries to bow to US demands and not export to specific companies and specific countries. So the Dutch government denied that it had anything to do with the US, their takeover of an experiment. But that's completely contrary to the facts, right? Because on the same day that Nick Speer went on the entity list, the U.S. blacklist, the Dutch government announced

his plans to take over Nick Speer, right? And then there was a court case that quickly happened because Wing Tech obviously challenged the legality of this. And if you look at the court documents, which I cite in this Jacobin article on this, a U.S. official is quoted in those court documents, meeting Dutch officials and saying, why are you not moving? faster to get the Chinese out of Nick Speer. You need to be doing this. If you don't do this, then Nick Spears in danger of being cut off from the US. Those secondary sanctions will kick in. And that meeting that the court documents referred to was in June. So you can see that the pressure has been on the Dutch to act on Nick Speer and to take it over. And it really raises questions

about how sovereign Europe is, the European Union is and countries like the Netherlands are because it's not really in the Netherlands interest as a country with a big semiconductor industry to start a trade war with China, right? A small country out of the Netherlands doesn't make much sense for them to do that. But the pressure from the US is so unrelenting

and the vests are being cut off from the US are so big that usually they fold and they concede. But this time, you know, they came up against a, a powerful enemy, you know, as willing to kind of counterattack, so to speak. Yeah, it seems quite unique how the United States does that as well, right? You know, it's not just sanctioning another country, right? Like putting sanctions on, say, China or, you know, a certain industry in a different, in a certain country.

You know, we've seen this with Iran as well, but actually saying then if any other country around the world or if companies in any other country around the world do business with this sector that we have cut off. or the set of companies that we've cut off or this country that we have put sanctions on, then you will also get hit with this whole kind of range of consequences as well. I don't know, it doesn't really feel

that you see that same kind of system from other countries. The US is the only country that can do that and get away with it. I think the first case of this was really Iran because Obama agreed to what was called the GCPOA, the nuclear deal with Iran, and then Trump tore up that deal, but lots of other countries around the world were signed up to that deal. So they were legally obliged to continue trading with Iran.

That was part of the deal of these countries where if Iran sticks by the deal, these countries will stick by it as well. And the US basically said, if you try to do it, you guys are going to get sanctioned as well. And the EU and other countries that were signed up to it didn't resist. So that set the president, which is now being expanded to lots of different industries and to the relationship. with China, whereby the U.S. can basically dictate the economic and trade policy of other

countries and companies in other countries. These countries, they can resist. They can say, no, we won't do it. But the consequences are, you know, you're cut off from U.S. tech. And this is a problem that Europe faces. It's not economically sovereign, right? It doesn't have strong technological base in Europe. It is reliant on U.S. tech. It's relying on China as well. And therefore, that loss of economic sovereignty eventually, you know, trickles food to politics, right? Well, you lose political power. You lose the basis to make your own decisions. You lose even the power to nationalize companies, you know.

Dutch government has tried to do that and failed, you know. That's the sad reality of where you have is right now. And I want to talk a little bit more about that later, right? Kind of the broader implications of everything that we're seeing here. But for me, as I was reading this story, you know, I saw news articles. about Nexperia. I saw the challenges that this presented for the European auto companies, which I want to ask you about as well. But as I was reading, especially your piece, one of the kind of comparisons that really stood out to me, obviously being from Canada, is when the US put

pressure on the Canadian government to arrest Meng Wenjo, the Huawei executive, who was kind of transiting through Vancouver. And as she was transiting from the US through Vancouver back to China, she was arrested and then, you know, set off this kind of long court case and things like that. But like, it completely torpedoed the Canadian relationship with China for years. And it's something that's only starting to be rebuilt now with a new prime minister. But it's like, again, this was like, we have documents showing. It was clearly at the behest of the United States. It resulted into Canadians being held in China as a result of it. And it was like, this was the consequence that we had to accept to do the United States bidding.

And it feels like in the case of the Netherlands, this was a very similar example where it was like the United States wants you to do this. You have to do it and accept the consequences that come with it because you'd rather face the consequences of deteriorating your relationship with China than losing this key relationship with the United States and you're being forced to choose one or the other. Howie was the big test case, right, where you can take a tech giant, you know, how he was the leading company when it comes to 5G broadband. equipment and you can basically decapitate a global tech giant. And they're still working on that in the US and Europe to pressure governments to give up contracts at Howie has got the country I live in Spain. The US has been press in the Spanish government to give up contracts that Howie has in terms of, I think it's internal servers for the Spanish public service that Howie runs.

So that's still ongoing, you know, they've been largely successful in pushing Howie out of Europe, still got some contracts. But for example, the UK, Howie was going to run all of the 5G rollout, but just constant pressure hammering away from the US was successful and they cancelled those contracts. Going online without Express VPN is like driving without car insurance. You might be a great driver, but with all the crazy people on the road these days, why would you take that risk? Every time you connect to an unencrypted network in cafes, hotels, airports, and other places. Your online data is not secure.

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a VPN like ExpressVPN to stay safe while going online in unfamiliar places. Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com slash TWSU. That's EXP-R-E-S-V-P-N dot com slash TWSU to find out how you can get up to four extra months. ExpressVPN.com slash TWSU. You were talking earlier about the consequences for the Netherlands, basically, of taking this action. How did we see Wing Tech and then the Chinese government respond to this attempt to take control of Nixperia? So I think within three days, they had issued a statement saying that, number one, the subsidiary

Nick Speyer has cut off from Wing Tech. So basically, Nick Speir makes the chips in two factories, one in Hamburg and Germany and the other in Manchester and the UK, and then sends them over to China for assembly packaging and distribution. So once you have cut them off from that assembly packaging and distribution, there's no easy way to fix that, right? So I think 70% of Nick Speer's output was decapitated by being cut off from Wing-Tor. You'd think the Dutch government would have thought about this before taking over the company what's going to do when the Chinese react.

Anyway, they didn't seem to have done so. And then the Chinese also said the products that Wing Tech does have, the finished products, the finished chips that they do have, you can't sell them to any country outside of China now. You can only sell them within China. So a lot of companies, Japanese, but especially European car manufacturers, had a big problem whereby, you know, as you know, these chips are fundamental to modern cars because the whole electronics are based on that. The whole digital aspect of the car is reliant on chips. And therefore, production was almost shutting down in a lot of countries. And that leads to big pressure, you know, because probably the most powerful corporate

lobby in Europe today is German auto manufacturers. They're powerful in Germany. and Germany is the most powerful country in Europe. So that power transcends from Germany up to the EU level. And German auto manufacturers are in massive trouble. They're being out-competed by Chinese electric vehicle companies. They're falling miles behind Volkswagen for the first time. And Volkswagen is the biggest German car manufacturer. For the first time, and it's history shutting down a factory in Germany,

which has now been taken over by Ven Metal, which is the Germany's biggest arms manufacturers. You see the way the German economy is going, you know, they're moving away from cars to tanks, which is pretty grim. You know, this was another problem, basically, for these all manufacturers on top of all the other competitive problems that they have. So they wanted, you know, the Dutch government to reverse it. And the Chinese basically met the German government,

and they said publicly, after a meeting with the German government, we told the German government to get the Dutch to rescind this measure. Like, there's no compromise here. We want an expirator back, was basically what they said in so many words. And the Dutch then flew out to Beijing to have, like, emergency meetings with the Chinese. And there wasn't any resolution until the surprise Trump trade deal. But that, you know, that trade deal with China, it only came after the Chinese had threatened to cut the US off critical raw materials that it needs, right? So you see how this is all about power politics, you know, and all about resource control.

And that's the only language that Trump speaks. That's something the Europeans don't seem to have learned that Trump is only ingested in if you have power. You can suck up to him as much as you want. He doesn't really care. And that's why Europe got royally screwed over when it came to the trade deal a few months ago that it signed with the U.S. tried to suck up to Chump and all I got for it was a terrible trade deal. Anyway, I'm expanding into other areas, but I think the thing that's important about the next year's story is, it's basically global political economy today in a microcosome.

Everything is weaponized. Everything can be used as a geopolitical lever. There's no neoliberal globalization anymore where profits rule and states don't matter. It doesn't matter what sector it is, every company can be used as a geopolitical tool. And I think next year, proved that, but also proved where the power really likes, you know, and it's not not in Europe. After the reversal happened in November where the Dutch government was like, oh, yeah, okay, we're not going to nationalize next beeria now. Again, as you say, because of this trade deal between Trump and China that took these measures away, did the economy minister in the Netherlands and the Dutch government, did they ever admit the role that kind of US pressure played in this?

Or are they still trying to pretend that this was solely their own initiative? They've denied it, right? Because they have to deny it. But there's an interesting interview which this economy minister, Kiamen, is done in the Guardian, where he denies the U.S.'s role in it. The next breath, the next sentence, he literally says, well, Wing Tech came off the U.S. entity list, and therefore we could come to an agreement with China.

So he denies it, but then he admits. it in the next sentence, so it's completely obvious that that's the reason why the Dutch government has managed to patch things up with China is because Wing Tech has come off the entity list, right? It is worth saying that all this is still rumbling on in the courts now. So there's still like a legal battle over who the CEO is because the CEO was ousted, Chinese CEO of Nick Spear. The legal battle is still rumbling on. But as a geopolitical conflict, it's over, know, China won. It's pretty straightforward. But it's amazing the interview with Karmans, because his response is completely arrogant. He says, I wouldn't have done anything

differently, given what's happened, I would have done the same thing, again, knowing the facts that I know now. Are you guys unwilling to ever learn? This is a typical response from European elites. They don't seem to ever be able to learn from their own failures. You know, there's been no learnings from the disastrous trade deal with the US. There's been no Noor learns from Nick Speer. You may have seen in recent days the attempt to use Russian assets, which are held in Belgium and give them to Ukraine,

that's falling through now. So it seems to be one mistake after another. And nothing's ever learned from any of these errors. I don't know, it's frustrating in a way, right? Because on the one hand, it's like you see the pressure from the United States and the way that the United States wields its pressure, whether it's over Europe or Canada many other countries around the world is just like put on full display for everyone to see right you know

there's no denying it now the united states still use its influence under biden and under previous presidents it was just much better masked right but with trump it's just completely out in the open you can clearly see it you know there's no real denying it and then of course you know you hear european lawmakers talk about the need to champion you know european power european sovereignty these discussions around digital sovereignty and things like that. But then you see Ursula von der Leyen sitting next to Donald Trump and looking completely subservient. You see the economy minister of the Netherlands completely going along with what the United States wants and needs in the case of this nexperia. What does this all say about Dutch and European sovereignty in this fraught political moment

that we're in and the rhetoric versus what we see in practice? It's kind of the elephant in the room that Europe is losing sovereignty to the US. Like, Whenever you see any speeches by European political leaders, they will talk endlessly about Russia. The threat Russia poses to Europe. And they will never say anything about the threat America. America is an ally that they sometimes have difficulties with, but fundamentally they're on our site, right?

And the whole narrative around Trump has been, Trump is moving away from Europe, and now we have to strengthen ourselves, and that's why we have to rearm and all that sort of thing. But is Trump really moving away from Europe? or is he basically changing the relationship between the U.S. and Europe? It's amazing to me that isn't the case of Greenland isn't talked about more. Like, Trump has openly said that the U.S. wants to take over a European territory,

a country that's part of Denmark, which is part of NATO. He wants to seize control and take over that country. We had reports a couple of months ago that the CIA are active in Denmark and in Greenland and agitating for U.S. control of. of Greenland. So this is like an active operation, right? Same way as they're active in Venezuela and trying to, you know, get rid of the Maduro regime and all that sort of thing. People don't want to talk about it. Like, people just want to talk about the threat that Putin poses. But Putin has never said that he wants to seize a European Union territory, right? Whereas the US has

said that. And so there's an unwillingness to face the reality that we're dealing with the United States that's extremely aggressive, willing to tear up international law at whim, willing to seize the country, it sees territory from NATO countries, if they can get away with it. A hostile country, right? What should be seen as a hostile country, but we're still because there's so much fear about splitting from the US, there's so much to lose in terms of the economic lengths and so on so forth. And there's so little ambition. to build economically, technologically, politically sovereign Europe that, you know, it's just paralysis. And it's just focused on the Russian bogey man. That all get us foot. That's basically

where Europe's at at the moment. Yeah, it makes me think a lot about earlier this year in Canadian politics. And, you know, obviously we have a new prime minister, Mark Carney. And as we were like going through the election, and this was still in the period where Donald Trump was openly talking about making Canada the 51st state of the United States, right? And Mark Carney was asked, like, what is the biggest threat? What country is the biggest threat to Canada? And he was like, oh, it's definitely China. And it's like, what are you talking about? The country that we're completely dependent on is talking about taking us over. Like, I don't know, it's like they live in a completely different world. But as you're saying, it's because the dependence on the U.S.

is so great, even though it's threatening, whether it's Europe or Canada or wherever else in these ways, it's like you still don't want to piss it off enough to like just completely break the relationship so it's irreparable, right? Like, it's so wild. Looking for the perfect gift for someone important in your life, aura frames is the hidden gem that becomes the favorite gift long after the wrapping paper is gone. We all have those people who've really gone above and beyond or hold a special place in our hearts. Maybe they've been there through a difficult time in your life, helped out while you were busy with so many other obligations, or they're just always there when you need them. We want to give them a gift that reflects that and that they'll really

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Do you see any opportunity for Europe to, like, escape the trap that it seems in with the United States with regard to its sovereignty? You know, what would that look like if it's possible or does it just seem like with the leadership that's there, it's hard to we've done? even imagine? It is hard to imagine because the way, I mean, politics in Europe is very polarized in a sense right now because it's polarized between sort of the liberal center and the far right. But both those political wings are dedicated to Atlantisism. And they're both dedicated to a European Union, which, you know, there isn't much sovereignty for the countries within the European Union. European Union has seized quite a lot of power.

over recent years. The hard right, they might have like nationalist rhetoric, the far right, but you never see them talking about actual democratic control over these decisions which people like the European Commission President Ursula Wunderland's

is taking. It's difficult to see the prospect of change at the moment, to be honest. But I guess the thing, I guess an experience story does tell you something about the problems with American dependency, it's not like it's cost-free to just follow the US constantly.

Like China is the biggest trade partner of the European Union, bigger than the US. That relationship is really important, especially for Germany, that really is very difficult for the European Union and for European countries to entirely break with China, and therefore they will have to think about in the future how to have some balance between the relationship with the US and relationship with China. Because if they don't have that balance, the economic pain is going to be immense. China is arguably as dangerous to cut yourself off from the Chinese economy as it is from the American economy, right?

So maybe that's where the hope lies, that the hard reality of Europe's situation is that It has a twin dependency on the U.S. and on China. And politics at some point is surely going to have to reflect that twin dependency a bit more than it does at the moment where politics is heavily skewed towards interests of the United States. I think that puts it really well. It makes me think a lot about like Australian, New Zealand as well, right? Where sure, they have these really close ties with the United States, you know, defense relationships, all this kind of stuff. But economically they're like completely dependent on China right and exporting to that market and it creates a very interesting political dynamic that I feel like we're often not as aware of

certainly in Canada but maybe maybe in Europe as well and things are going to need to start shifting to reflect those sorts of things especially in light of where the United States is right now but I guess on that point of like how Europe is acting in this moment and I this is something I was talking with Aline Blankhurst about last week as well is in the digital sphere you Obviously, we're talking about in Experia, and that's chips, and this is really important, but there's also this attempt to regulate these American tech companies in order to get better control over them, or at least that was the plan in the past. It seems like that is increasingly eroding in front of our eyes.

And in the past, we've talked a lot about the gig economy and platform work, because that's something that you have worked on a lot. And I wonder what you're seeing in that sphere as well, as we're seeing these increasing pressures from the United States and I guess to protect, you know, U.S. tech companies from regulation abroad in Europe as well. How is that playing out in the platform economy? The defense of the European Union and what has achieved so far in its 30 odd years of existence has been that it's what's called a regulatory superpower, right? It might not have the military might of the United States. It may not have the economic muscle of China, but it's able to impose

regulations which then have what's called the Brussels effect, right, whereby because a big company like Google has to bend its system around EU regulations, that then has a ripple effect in the rest of the world where Google decides, look, we'll just have these regulations for the whole world because we have to have them for the European Union. And things like general data protection regulation, GDPR, lots of laws that the European Union's past Digital Services Act to regulate big platforms, big tech firms have all been with that idea in mind, right? We might not be an economic power, but at least we're a regulatory power, because we've got a big consumer market that all these companies want to get into.

So that has been the concept. That is now under major attack. In the trade deal that was done with the US, it didn't include limits on the regulatory power of the EU, but we know that the United States has put massive pressure to reduce, and restrict these regulations. And the EU has bowed to that pressure. It's got what's called a simplification agenda,

which really means a deregulation agenda going on right now, where it's trying to pass through the European Parliament and the European Council a bunch of changes to regulations it already has. So, for example, one of those is GDPR, right? In Europe, you're allowed to access your information, the data which companies hold on you. You make a request to those companies, they have to give you the data. Simple.

Well, now, with the changes they want to make, it won't be so simple. You'll have to give a good reason why you want that data. And the company can say, well, if we don't believe they have a justified reason, we don't have to give them that data. So it's going to restrict the right to information. So that's one example of the simplification agenda.

Now, the interesting thing where the platform economy comes into that, platform work comes into that, is the platform work directive came right, before this simplification agenda really kicked in, right? So it's one of the last major regulations about tech in Europe before the deregulation drive started. Just to quickly summarize, the Platform Work Directive establishes what's called

a presumption of employment for platform workers in Europe, whereby it's basically like innocent until proven guilty, right, in criminal law. So you're presumed to be an employee until, a company can prove in a court of law that you're not an employee. That's going to apply to all platform workers by December 26. The question is, this is the interesting thing, this is where links back into the debate about where Europe's going.

That's going to be a big problem for American tech firms like Uber and that sort of thing, right? Uber's already said, if you do this, we're going to pull out of lots of different places. It's going to cost us too much money. There's different estimates, but people say that the difference we're employing a worker for Uber and for hiring them as a quote-unquote independent contractor, it's about one third more expensive for every single worker. So that's a big increase in their costs. Can the EU push through this regulation, which has already been passed by the EU, but it has to be transposed into national law? There's some leeway for governments to transpose it in ways that are different in different countries. Can it be transposed in a way where workers actually get these rights?

Because these big U.S. tech firms like Uber have come in and smashed up Europe's labor model. You know, Uber has imposed itself on countries without following local taxi laws. It's just rammed itself into these economies. The Uber file scandal revealed they themselves knew that they were doing this. They said, we're just fucking pirates, quote unquote. So they knew what they were doing. can we bring these companies to heal? Can we actually regulate them?

It's going to be really interesting to see it. Like, right now I'm in Warsaw, in Poland. The Eastern Europe is traditionally not part of Europe, which has strong labor rights in the post-communist era. It's been highly liberalized labor markets. I mean, speaking to people here about the transposition, the platform work directive, some changing units have said to me,

we're not even sure if they're going to transpose it. They might just decide to delay and delay and delay the transposition because they don't want to, because, you know, the platform lobby doesn't want to. I've heard about the platform lobby putting forward proposals for how they transpose it in Poland, which would basically make it toothless, which would mean that, you know, it would be extremely difficult for workers to access their employment rights. So for me, it's really interesting to look at the whole question of Europe's weakness, political weakness, geopolitical, geopolitical, economic weakness, through the lens of trying to regulate the platform,

platform economy. And I guess we'll see what happens over the next year, whether it is transposed in a way which does, you know, give platform workers the rights they desperately need. And just for those outside of Europe, transposition is kind of taking that European law and then bringing it into national law in these different member states, right? I think that's fascinating, right? And one of the things you were telling me even before, you know, we started talking is like we're seeing in so many places right now, a lot of the governments across the European Union are right-wing governments. And they obviously don't want to. to implement these rules in such a way that is going to harm these companies, right?

Yeah, I mean, Poland's addressed in that sense, because right now it's got a kind of centrist, neoliberal government, the hard right, they left power a couple of years ago. But these countries in Eastern Europe have got such entrenched liberalized models that they just don't have the notion that poorly paid workers would get workers' rights, you know? That's not part of their kind of vocabulary. So it's kind of an uphill battle in these countries. say, though, it's very different on the other side of Europe. Like, Spain, where I live in, I know that the Spanish government have a very ambitious plan. Part of the platform work

directive relates to algorithm management rights. Okay, so like the right to access information, the right to a human decision, or any important decision that the platform makes has to be made by a human being. Like, for example, suspending a worker's account has to be made by a human being, the right to an explanation. There's a whole bunch of algorithm management rights. What the Spanish government want to do is to implement the platform directive so that those rights don't just apply to platform workers but apply to all workers because I saw a study by the OECD which said that 70% of European companies use at least one form of algorithmic management. So algorithm management is much bigger than just, you know, food delivery workers, taxi drivers expands to normal

jobs, you know, standard employment jobs but part of your job is still managed algorithmically. government's thinking, how can we expand these rights to other workers and trying to think of ambitious ways to do it? In Germany, they're discussing a transposition of the platform work directive, which would ban subcontracting. Because one of the models that the platform companies use when they have to employ their workers is they say, okay, we'll employ our workers, but we won't employ them directly. We will instead pay a tiny, unaccountable company to employ them on our behalf. And if that tiny unaccountable company happens to operate illegally, abuse the workers' labor rights, not pay them properly, not pay them the minimum wage, well, it's not our problem because we're not the employer, the subcontractor is. So Germany is looking at banning that so these platforms, they have to employ the workers directly.

So I don't want to give the impression that it's all, you know, it's all negative. It looks like there's some pushes towards, like, ambitious transpositions of the platform directive. But it's quite a polarized picture. It depends which type of government is in power. And it depends what the kind of labor model is in each country. I think what you're saying makes a ton of sense, right? And as I hear you describe that, one of the first things that comes to mind is thinking

about a company like Amazon, even. This is a company that its warehouse workers are employed as employees of the company, but there's still a whole load of algorithmic management that is taking place in a workplace like that. And, you know, obviously we've seen a lot of other employers adopt those kinds of practices as well, maybe not to the same degree as Amazon, but, you know, still implementing systems like that. And when you talk about subcontracting, obviously a lot of the Amazon delivery model, if it's through its own fulfillment network, is through subcontracting delivery companies that then control the workers. And, you know, it's easier for them to kind of push down the rights and all that kind of stuff.

result, right? And if the workers try to try to unionize, as we saw in a few places in the U.S., then Amazon can just cut the contract and, you know, find a different delivery company to do things, right? So, yeah, just to kind of add to what you're saying there and kind of how we see these things

taking place well beyond the platform economy, right? And it's worth saying that part of the reason why the Spanish government is doing this is exactly because Amazon has refused to play ball with the national regulations that Spain currently had. So Spain in 2021, implementing the law whereby workers were allowed to access information on algorithmic management.

They were allowed an explanation for how the algorithm works, what are the rules that govern the algorithm. And there's a warehouse, an Amazon warehouse near Barcelona, which is unionized, and they have tried to get this information. And Amazon just point blank refused, no, doesn't matter what it says in the law. We are not handing over our rules about how we manage. workers in the warehouse, right? So they just refused to do it. So now the Spanish government's doing labor inspections, you know, it's trying to strengthen the law

to stop the, you know, these loopholes. So Amazon is a big motivator for this kind of regulatory offensive. That's good to know though and something to watch to see how it moves forward. Do these changes that you mentioned to the GDPR and people being able to request their personal information, does that affect those type of rights

and platforms workers' ability to try to get information from the companies? That's a good question. I'm still looking into what those changes are going to mean for the platform directive because the platform work directive is based on GDPR, but a lot of the texts of the directive says this is in addition to GDPR.

So it should be the case that the platform directive isn't affected that much by these changes from my understanding, but we'll see how that plays out because the general idea of these changes is to make it harder for workers, consumers, anyone, to access, what is their own data, right? That's what these companies are holding their own data. So it's just access and their own data, but the idea is to make it more difficult. So I think there's probably a good chance it's going to become more difficult for platform workers as well.

That's frustrating, but good to know, right, as we're looking into how this is developing. And I wanted to ask, obviously, we talk about this process of employees becoming contractors and losing these rights as a process of Uber right you know the company has really come to exemplify how this is working and I know that you have a recent report where you looked at the broader consequences of this and so I wonder for you how you see this this growing pressure to uberize more professions within Europe and how that is actually playing out at the moment yeah so the study I've I've published is called like which workers are vulnerable to uberization so it's trying to analyze not not predict the future it's

It's trying to analyze where workers are in a situation where they could be exposed to Uber-style business models, or if Uber-style business models are already, you know, exist in these sectors, could they take over them? Could they become the dominant model? So there's a number of different industries we look at home care, for one, in the US public Canada as well. You already have quite big care platforms like care.com, for example. They're expanding in Europe. And, outsourcing and prioritisation of home care, the increased demand for home care as, you know, with a rapidly ageing population, is attracted in these kind of business models into the sector. So that's one.

Education is another one as classes move like from in person to online. They're increasingly being platformised, especially like online adult learning, online language learning. But even universities, like there's a platform called Coursera. which has relationships with lots of universities in the US and Europe. So there's risks there. Mental health care, therapy platforms took off during the pandemic and they're still really big. Probably everyone who's listened to this podcast

has seen better help adverts because they're, I hope they don't sponsor, I'm sure they don't sponsor Paris Mark's podcast. They do not. I said explicitly we're not doing better help. So they spot, they're the biggest podcast. podcast sponsor in, I think, in the U.S., so you'd regularly hear them on podcasts. So they're expanding very fast. Live music platforms are growing.

Agency work, like temporary work, a lot of that's been organized through platforms now. And the one that I really want to mention is data annotation work. And the reason why this is, I think, really important is the link between generative AI, the expansion of generative AI and Uber-style business market. of those has been hard to see, but I think we're starting to see where that link comes in. And it comes in through this data annotation work. Basically, data annotation is the people behind artificial intelligence, right? The human workers who are invisible to most of us.

I'm sure you've talked about it on this podcast, like Click Workers, people who are testing, chaining, fixing AI systems to turn like sort of low-quality AI products into high-quality ones. You need these human data annotators. And as generative AI becomes more complex and becomes more like sector-specific products, you need a sort of higher level of data annotator, people who can give what's called human feedback data where you compare two different AI responses and you can explain why one's better than the other. So as that develops, the kind of geography of the data annotation workforce is changing

because previously it was just in the global south, right? People working in Africa, Venezuela, you know, the poorest countries where there's some level of English spoken often you would have these kind of click farms, you know, of people working in terrible conditions, terrible pay, companies like Remo Tasks would cut them off. They would have like a click farm in Venezuela, then they would decide to cut those workers off, set up somewhere else. Suddenly all those workers would lose their job overnight.

So that's been in the data annotation industry up to now. As it changes, as they need sort of a higher level of data annotation work, more sector-specific, is becoming more important in the global north. And we're seeing these companies like surge AI, scale AI, these big data annotation firms. Uber has set up its own data annotation wing called Uber AI Solutions. It's first time it's had a non-transport sector part of Uber. That's going pretty fast. And they're looking for more skilled data annotators.

Now, this is the interesting thing. If AI products do start displacing workers in some of these industries, it's not that you lose the skill altogether. It's that the worker becomes a data annotator, right? So let's say you have like a paralegal today who's working for a law firm. If you had like a paralegal AI product where the lawyer can just type in and say, you know, we want the AI to do this research for us, find this information for the court case. if it worked, and these are lots of ifs, right? We don't know if these AI products are going to be good or going to work and that sort of thing. So there's big question marks.

If they're able to do that, you will still need paralegals to be the data annotators, to be fixing and refining and improving the AI product. That's the point where these workers, who previously would have been non-employment contracts, will be organized for big economy style models like Uber's AI solutions, or organizes workers in that way. that's probably, you know, overly long explanation. But I think that that's why we should be thinking about Uberization, not just as a problem for like food delivery workers, taxi drivers. This is a problem for every worker, right? And it could come into lots of different industries

that we're not aware of yet. So we should be treating addressing the problem of platform as a problem for the whole working class. Even for people who are in what we call middle class professions today could be vulnerable to Uberization in the future. So that's the idea of the study is to make us think a bit more broadly about what types of workers this could affect in the near future. No, I think it's a really important point, right? Like as long as this Uberization process is taking place somewhere, there will be a desire to try to expand it to even more workers. Because companies want to pay less money for labor. You know, they want workers to have less power and their ability to push back to unionize all these sorts of things. And by Uberizing

the workforce, then you achieve that, right? And I think it's important to make that link to the generative AI process as well, right? Because often these things can be easily obscured by these companies. So you don't see what is happening behind the AI product, you know, the humans that are contributing to it. I remember early on in the life of chat GPT, I guess, there was the story about the workers in Kenya that played a key role. making that tool work in the way that it did. But again, we're completely like, you would never hear open AI talk about them and what they contributed and the fact that there was humans in the loop there, right?

Because they want you to think it's just a computer that's doing all this and the computer is so intelligent. I guess then my question as we kind of round off our conversation is, as you are seeing, you know, the risks of further Uberization increase and obviously the desire of companies to roll out whether it's algorithmic management tools like you were talking about in, and many other types of companies, whether it's AI, but this process of Uberization in more places, what are the opportunities to try to stop that in its tracks?

What needs to be done to try to rein this in? Yeah, I think there's two aspects to it. First is if you're trying to prevent Uberization, you prevent your job being Uberized, the best way to do that is by controlling the rollout of technology in your workplace, right? It's to stop it before the technology is introduced. What we talk about in the report is the importance,

of workers being on guard for new technologies being brought in. And they might be being brought in unassuming ways, in ways which seem like they're just going to be efficiency tools for workers. You know, they're going to be aids for workers. It's all going to be very, you know, we're going to advance the company. Everyone's going to improve. It's going to get better for all the workers. And then suddenly you find it's displacing workers or it's undermining their conditions

or suddenly you're being paid per task because the algorithm management system can calculate how much time it takes you to complete a task. You know, you can see how these systems can be used in ways which are exploitative. So you need to guard against that, and that's why you need strong unions, you need collective agreements. Every new technology that's brought into the workplace should be negotiated by workers before it's brought in, the terms on which it's brought in, even potentially prohibiting the use and blocking the introduction of some technology.

So that's the first thing, the prevention part of it. And then what I talk about in the report is a sort of strategy for de-uberization. So jobs that are already subject to Uber-style business models. How do you go from that to dignified, secure work? And the key thing is to fight for employment rights. Until you have workers' rights, you're a very weak bargaining position in with the company. Everything is operated through the algorithm. You have no human relationships with management.

So you need to reduce the intensity of algorithmic management and you need to have accountable human relationships between workers and management. So employment advice is the easiest way to do that, the most effective way to do that. I've seen cases, for example, in Spain, where workers were previously organized on an independent contractor basis, they've then become employees,

and you can see how the unions have been able to establish more of a presence. unions seem more relevant to workers when they've got an employment contract because they've got something to defend. So you can see how that works. Now, it's not to say that there's lots of workers in Europe, Canada, the United States that have employment contracts

and have terrible conditions, right? It's not to say everyone's going to get better overnight when you have an employment contract, obviously not. It's a starting point for organisation. This is a starting point for some accountability. Whereas if you are organised on a paper task basis, you don't have any contractual rights, it's difficult to get started with holding the company to account.

So we kind of try to develop this kind of approach to how to de-barize the workplace. And we're hopeful that the platform work directive can be a breakthrough in that respect. And we can move away from Uber-style business models, not just for current platform walkers, but for the much larger workforce which could potentially be subject to these models in the future. Yeah. No, I think that's a really important point to need to try to counter this, to need to retake that control. And, you know, I know that we took a bit of a journey through this episode from talking about an exterior to the platform economy. But one thing that always sticks out in my mind as well is, and I think it was in the Uber files that you mentioned earlier, in how these U.S. companies push really hard to make sure that they could get into Europe. They even use their relationships with the U.S. government, with the Obama administration to try to make sure that American diplomats, Europe, we're working with European governments to try to make sure that they were not going to regulate the Uber model out of existence before it could even take a foothold.

All these things are very much wrapped up together and very much interrelated, right? Exactly. The same way in which the US government is influencing Experia, it's influencing the platform perspective as well because it's supporting companies like Uber, which have massive lobbying budgets, which they use in Europe to influence the governments. and try and defend their interests, right? So it's the same thing. It's the dominance of American tech

and American economic power translates into political power as well. So I think it's a lot of the same challenges looked at from different angles. Yeah, 100%. And it always something that we need to keep in mind, especially given what's going on in the moment and the discussions that we're having.

And it's always great to get your insights on all this stuff, you know, to learn more about what's happening over in Europe and how that relates to so many of these broader issues that we're always talking about on the show and that so many of the listeners are concerned about. So thanks so much for taking the time to come back. I appreciate it. Thanks very much for having.

Ben Ray writes the gig economy project newsletter and his most recent report is called Uberization. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with the Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Kyla Hewson. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry.

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