Tech Won't Save Us - Fighting for Gig Workers’ Rights After Prop 22 w/ Wilfred Chan

Episode Date: December 3, 2020

Paris Marx is joined by Wilfred Chan to discuss how gig companies misled California voters to back Prop 22, whether the Biden administration will be an ally to gig workers, and the need for solidarity in the fight to preserve (and expand) labor rights.Wilfred Chan is a contributing writer at the Nation. He has also written for Dissent, The Guardian, NBC News, and more. Read his recent piece on the fight for labor rights after Prop 22. Follow Wilfred on Twitter as @wilfredchan.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. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter.If you want to join the Discord and check out the new supporter tiers, head over to Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network and follow it on Twitter as @harbingertweets.Also mentioned in this episode:The Economic Policy Institute published an explainer on California’s Assembly Bill 5 (AB5) and worker misclassificationThe gig companies bought endorsements and sent out fake progressive mailers for Prop 22. The head of California’s NAACP stepped down after the election for taking $1.7 million to back ballot measures.VP-elect Kamala Harris’ brother-in-law Tony West is chief legal officer at Uber, and now there are calls to make him Attorney General in a Biden administrationBiden’s transition team is full of people from Big Tech with concerning pasts, including from Uber and LyftUber and Lyft’s share prices soared after Prop 22 wonFind out more about Rideshare Drivers United and New York Taxi Workers AllianceSupport the show

I mean, you think that you've got your nice, cushy job making six figures with your benefits and that you're exempt from this. No, you're a worker, too. I mean, this business model is coming for everyone. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks. And I don't know if you noticed, but we have a new logo this week. I hope you like it. It was designed by Cara Mills, a fellow Canadian socialist, and I think it's pretty cool. In addition to that, the website has a small update with some more information and a reading list if you're looking for something cool

to read, you know, over the holidays or even to gift to any friends or relatives. And the Patreon also got an update. There are some new tiers. You can now be a fruit worshiper, a Caesar cut replicant, a space cultist, or even if you're a rich person and really hate yourself, you can be a venture fascist as well. And some of the key new additions there, the big one is that we now have a Discord server so you can get to know other people who listen to the podcast and who enjoy it, and so we can talk about how shitty tech companies are on there together. And I'm also working on putting together some stickers now, and they will be shipping out in the new year if you become a supporter on Patreon. Obviously, as I talked about a few weeks ago, that's super important so that I can continue to do this work to make the podcast

possible and also hopefully to expand it in the future. So if you like the show and you are able, please go to patreon.com slash techwontsave us and become a supporter. And now on to this week's episode. My guest this week is Wilford Chan. Wilford is a contributing writer at The Nation, and he's also written for Dissent, The Guardian, NBC News, and a number of other publications. He wrote a great piece recently for The Nation discussing Prop 22 and its implications now that it's been passed in California, and what it might mean now that these companies are pushing to roll it out in other states and even on a national level, and whether the Biden administration can actually be relied upon to stop this from happening. I think this is a really good and interesting conversation,

especially when we consider what the next step in the fight for gig workers' rights, especially in the United States, but ultimately this will reverberate to other countries as well. So, you know, even if you are an international listener, I still think that this is a really important thing to be aware of and to be paying attention to. And finally, before we get into the episode, just a reminder that tech won't save us is part of the harbinger media network a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in canada and you can find more information about that in the show notes and if you like the episode please make sure to share it with any friends or colleagues who you think might enjoy it and also leave us a five-star review on apple podcasts because it can help convince other people who might see the show

on the app to put their time into it and to give it a shot. So again, thanks so much for listening, and please enjoy my conversation with Wilfred Chan. Wilfred, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you. It's great to speak with you today, because you've written this fantastic piece in The Nation recently, talking about Prop 22 in California and the implications of that for gig workers and for labor law in the United States kind of going forward. But you obviously have experience as a food courier yourself. So I wanted to start by asking you, you know, what your experience was like as a food

courier and how does that kind of influence the way that you approach these topics since you have that firsthand experience of what it's actually like on the ground. I started doing food delivery in New York City in 2018. At the time, I was working as a copywriter for a tech company and really didn't like it and kind of turned to doing delivery before and after work as partly a way to get my mind off of the stress of my job, but also as a way to better understand what exactly workers were going through, right, beneath all of this techno-utopianism that's so prevalent in the industry. And of course, also as a way to make some extra money to survive living in New York. And when I was laid off by that company in 2018, I just started doing more delivery.

And nowadays, I still do it occasionally in concert with freelance writing. And I like to say that I'm kind of the mythical independent contractor that these gig companies cite to justify the myth of this being kind of a flexible business model. I do it whenever it suits me, right? I don't have to do it to get by. It helps, but I can take long breaks. I can cherry pick the best hours to hit the lunch rush, the dinner rush. And so, you know,

I'm a college educated writer. I'm not like most of the workers who are actually out there sustaining this business model. And the guys who I meet out in the street, I mean, they are predominantly immigrants. They don't have college degrees. They're low on savings. They're pretty desperate. I mean, there's no other way to really put it. These are the most marginalized, desperate workers out there right now. So doing this work gave me a taste, a pretty visceral taste of what it's like for a lot of people in the American economy. And it's not easy. I mean, I think the only reason I have been able to keep doing it is because I just have a love for biking. I mean, I've been riding bikes for most of my life, and it's a form of exercise for me, but it's pretty degrading work. You're out there. People don't treat you like a human being. You're unsafe in pretty much every single respect, whether that's traffic that you're contending with or over-policing by the NYPD, or just the algorithm really putting you in difficult situations, sending you on these long trips that make no sense from a traffic standpoint, or pushing you to go faster when it's raining or

snowing. It has no regard for you and your needs as a human. It's really just trying to maximize, you know, the profit of the gig company. It's the kind of work that I sometimes really can't stand. And right now I'm kind of taking a break, trying to assess whether this is something that I really want to be part of my life in that way. But I have been doing a lot of writing about it and trying to talk to other workers as well to figure out what we can do. Yeah, I appreciate you kind of giving that perspective and explaining your experience with it. Because not to say that you need experience being a delivery worker or being a gig worker to write really well on these topics. That's certainly not the case. But I feel like your experience brings something additional to it, right, when you write about it. And so your recent piece, as I was saying, for The Nation,

really gets into Proposition 22 and what has been happening with that and kind of what is likely to happen going forward now or what might happen. And so I was hoping that you could give us a brief idea of what Proposition 22 is. I think listeners will already know kind of a bit about what's been happening in California before that, because we have spoken with Veena Dubal and Sam Harnett in previous episodes. So if you could just kind of summarize what Proposition 22 is, what its kind of promise to gig workers was, and how the benefits, I guess, that are part of Proposition 22 differ from what they would have received under AB5 had they been reclassified as employees?

Prop 22 is a big lie. That's what you need to know. It's a rebranding of exploitation. You have AB5, which is a landmark piece of legislation passed in California, which basically put an end to these gig companies misclassifying gig workers as independent contractors when they work full time. They're out there with no protections, busting their ass, holding up this business model. And what AB5 did was say, all right, you actually do get unemployment insurance. You do get overtime and paid time off and everything, you know, the right to unionize these things that are guaranteed to you that generations of activists have fought for to make sure that work isn't just complete,

you know, unsafe misery in the United States, right? That's what AB5 said gig workers need to also have. And what Prop 22 does is actually carve out an exemption for these gig companies from AB5 so that they don't have to offer any of these rights and basic working conditions to gig workers and instead give a slightly, they're trying to frame it as upgraded version of the bare minimum of independent contractor status. So that's a couple of extra health benefits for workers who meet a certain threshold of hours, a so-called wage guarantee, which is only based on the amount of hours that you're actually carrying a passenger or carrying some food. But any time that you spend waiting, which is actually a huge amount of time if you're a gig worker, then we can get into why, you know, that's uncompensated. So when they say that this is a wage guarantee for more than California's minimum wage, it actually ends up being closer to five or six dollars. If you factor in the waiting time, if you factor in the taxes and

the expenses, the independent contractors have to shoulder the lack of paid time off. And it goes on. I mean, what it ends up being, you know, as I said, is a way to take the worst parts of independent contractor, unprotected labor and give it a nice little name. Uber is actually calling it IC+, which is disgusting, and sell it as a kind of progressive improvement when actually it's a total rolling back of things. And what you have to understand, which a lot of people have heard about by now, but just got to emphasize, is that they rolled out a $200-plus million campaign to basically trick voters. I mean, when you look at the surveys they did in California, they found that 40% of people who voted for Prop 22, voted yes, thought that they were doing so to help workers when, you know, this was wholly backed by the gig companies, opposed by all the

labor unions, opposed by the majority of drivers. But, you know, $200 million buys you a pretty solid disinformation campaign, and it worked. I'm really sad to say. I think that's a really good point, because that's something that really stood out to me. They pushed this new law, this ballot measure, as expanding the rights of gig workers instead of actually removing their rights simply because they hadn't reclassified them as they were supposed to on January 1st of 2020, right? And so I think it was nearly 60% of voters actually backed this ballot measure. And when you look at the way that they ran the campaign, they were paying for endorsements from

prominent organizations. They were sending out mailers that made it look like they had this big kind of progressive backing when that wasn't the case. And so do you think that that is ultimately what helped to sway this ballot measure? It wasn't actually people voting to restrict the rights of gig workers, but they actually thought that in voting for this, they were expanding those rights and they were kind of duped by these companies. Absolutely. My friends in California showed me the voter pamphlet. It doesn't have actually any information about Prop 22. So people had to rely on TV, internet, mailers, just whatever they were getting. And all of my friends in California told me that they were inundated. I mean, just literally an avalanche of disinformation, which had the aesthetic of

progressive pro-worker legislation. And I totally think that people fell for it. California did not vote to fuck over gig workers. California thought that it was helping gig workers. And I mean, it's a big problem with this ballot initiative system that this was even allowed to happen. And we definitely need to talk about that. And we need to talk about money and politics more broadly, because there's no reason why this couldn't be replicated in other states. And that's already what's happening. across the United States is a really important one, right? And in your piece, you spoke to Veena Dubal, who told you that the passing of Prop 22 was the most radical undoing of labor legislation since Taft-Hartley in 1947. And that law obviously placed numerous restrictions on labor unions and the ability to organize, right? So I guess, what do you think that Proposition 22 now means for the future of labor rights in the United States? And do you think that they're now threatened in other states as a result of this passing? Absolutely. It's very dangerous for the future of labor rights.

Unions opposed Prop 22, but there was a bit of wavering, actually, which I talk about in my piece. At the beginning, when Uber first started drafting this proposal, they reached out to the unions and the SEIU in California almost decided to work with Uber on crafting something that would become sort of a compromise. And, you know, Uber's bottom line is always, we'll give you kind of this benefit and that benefit, but we will not budge on classification because their business model 100% depends on employee misclassification. If you actually gave workers the employment rights that are guaranteed under U.S. labor law that were given again through AB5, Uber's business model simply would not be sustainable. It would cost them hundreds of millions of dollars a year

in every state, millions of dollars that they actually owe in unemployment insurance that they didn't pay into in a bunch of states, including California. But the fact is that it just wouldn't work. And so they're trying to strike a deal with these unions to basically do something that seems kind of progressive, maybe even can grow the union's ranks a little bit by allowing workers to join these unions, sort of, but not really organize, as long as the unions don't challenge the employee classification issue. And so in the aftermath of Prop 22, you have, you know, these gig companies riding high, feeling pretty good about themselves, and they're reaching out to the unions again to basically make the same deal. Say, hey,

all right, you saw what we just did in Prop 22. We cleaned your clock. So maybe you should rethink this and get together with us and let's craft out some kind of deal. You can help shape the new IC plus 2.0. Right. And again, we're seeing the Teamsters, SEIU. I mean, we're seeing a lot of the bigger, dare I say, more neoliberal unions, you know, and granted, these are diverse organizations. You have folks in them who are advocating for more militant approaches, folks who are advocating for compromise. So it's unfair to characterize one union completely with one stroke. But the fact is that there are unions who are definitely considering working with these gig companies. And that's frightening, because we know that without these employment rights, without these rights that

generations of workers have fought for, we're just giving away everything that makes work barely bearable in this country. And we shouldn't have to bargain for things that we already had, right? Why would we go back 10 steps to try to bargain back five steps, right? Like, we were already at somewhere, and now we're losing ground. So we really need organized labor to be united in this. We need unions to not waver, to know that, you know, you might think you're compromising now with the gig companies, but you're going to get steamrolled in the end. I mean, this model is only going to keep infecting different industries beyond delivery workers, beyond rideshare. It's going to come for, you know, people are talking about Amazon workers being the next in line, UPS workers. And you can really let your mind imagine the different ways

that something like this, this kind of computational precarity could be applied to different industries. So we got to stop this now. I completely agree with that sentiment. I do want to drill down a little bit more on this kind of idea of Uber kind of reaching out to the unions and then them working together on a deal, right? Because it does seem that these deals would allow union membership to grow, but then those union members wouldn't actually have very much power to push

back against what is in these agreements in the end, right? Because they are not being reclassified as employees. There's an argument that's been made that unions see this as a positive thing, or certain unions, certain union leaders, because that would increase the membership, increase the amount of people who are paying dues, even though those workers wouldn't really have the power to then further improve their conditions. Do you think that is potentially actually what could be happening here? And then what would that mean for workers' ability to push back in any way in the future? Because if they're in a union, but then they don't really have the power that necessarily comes with a union, that seems to put them in an even

more restricted place. I mean, that's exactly what's happening. And that shows the savviness of these gig companies is that they are looking down the line and they're trying to anticipate what are the threats to this business model? What are all the different ways that we could be undermined? And they're trying to neutralize these things. They know that they can't simply ignore them. They know that they can't even completely win head on. So they're trying to co-ops them.

They're trying to confuse people and they're trying to co-ops them. They're trying to confuse people. And they're trying to buy themselves more and more time to continue to cement their business model. I mean, here's the thing. These companies are growing more powerful every single day, but they're also losing immense amounts of money. They have a ticking clock, which is the ticking clock of their investors saying, hey, when are you going to turn a profit, right? I mean, these VCs have poured in who knows how many billions of dollars at this point subsidizing this flawed business model. And they're going to want to see the gig companies make good on their promises to fully crush labor and start turning a profit at some point. And so what the gig companies are hoping is that the unions don't get organized together in time to actually stop them before they reach a critical mass, which some people might argue we're already kind of there, right?

Where they're too big to fail, where they've kind of taken over public infrastructure. They remade American cities into their own playgrounds. And then everyone depends on them. And they're a new fact of life, right? I mean, if you live in a city like New York or San Francisco or LA, that's already a fact of life. It's everywhere. It's ubiquitous. But back to the point about unions, I mean, you can look at one model of this sort of union gig company collaboration in New York City, which is in 2016, Uber struck a deal with the Machinists Union in New York, and they agreed to co-found and co-fund a group, an association called the Independent Drivers Guild, the IDG.

And they have a lot of members in New York, tens, maybe hundreds of thousands in the tri-state area. And they have done protests. They, in many ways, look like and kind of have the appearance of a radical union, right? They do work stoppages. They do things that feel like strikes. They have rhetoric that pushes back against the gig companies. But they're taking money from Uber. They still take money from Uber. And during Prop 22, they stayed completely silent. They didn't say a single thing about whether gig workers should be employees. And so that, again, shows you the gig company's bottom line. They'll actually go along with forming groups that speak out against them on everything except for employee classification,

because they know that that's the golden goose. As long as they can continue misclassifying their workers, then their business model is okay. And so that's why we can't compromise from the labor perspective, and we need to not fall for this. You know, going back to the point that you made earlier as well about other companies looking at what Uber is doing and wanting to follow it, right? When the gig economy was early on, there were talks about a ton of companies who were kind of the Uber for X, Uber for dog walking, Uber for whatever else, right? And they were kind of adopting the Uber model and then rolling it out into these different industries, right? And in some of those cases, they were industries where people were already working, would have been classed as an employee,

and then they were able to offer this service for a cheaper price because they were undercutting by not paying workers properly, by not following the same regulations, the same things that Uber did with taxis and transportation, right? And so now it looks like Uber is pushing forward with this in a different way, and now kind of pushing a reduction in working rights that other companies will want to follow. So it's not just whether Uber and Lyft and DoorDash and Instacart will be successful at cementing this model for themselves, but if they are able to do it, it does seem like other companies are then going to want to try to follow and try to reclassify their workers from employees to independent contractor plus or whatever this is going to be.

And that suggests that this is not just an issue when it comes to gig workers, existing gig workers. It's a threat to a ton of workers across the United States and even beyond the United States, I would say as well, because it could mean that things are going to change really negatively for a lot more people if they are able to win this battle. Absolutely. And I'm using Uber as a metonym here for this larger capitalist movement of spreading exploitation across this country and this world. And what we have to remember is that labor has as much leverage as the most disenfranchised worker. If you have workers out there who are getting screwed over and you're

not defending them, then that actually lowers the leverage of every other worker, regardless of what kind of organization you're in or how much protections you have. If someone out there can get away with it, then more people are going to want to try to get away with it. So that's why we have to hold the line. I mean, they actually found that the only thing right now that sustains Uber workers having a minimum wage at all is the fact that Uber employees, sorry, I keep saying employees, they're not employees, is the fact that Uber workers quit. It's pure, just raw supply and demand, like capitalist misery, you know. So if more workers left Uber, if more workers left these gig companies, then you might actually see the wages

going back up. And it just kind of shows the interconnectedness of labor overall, that your leverage one place determines your leverage in other places. This is not a time to sell out gig workers because we're actually selling out ourselves. I want to shift this a little bit. Obviously, Prop 22 has been passed in California. It looks very unlikely that they'll be able to overturn it without another ballot measure down the road at some point. So for the time being, at least, it looks like that is going to be the law in California. And these companies are obviously trying to now expand that model to other states, to Illinois, to New York, across the country. And there's even been talks of bringing it to other parts of the world, India, places like that. And so it seems that some people are hoping that

a solution to this could come from the federal level and could come from a democratic administration passing a new labor law or clarifying some labor codes to ensure that Proposition 22 is kind of overturned on the federal level. And then these workers will be made employees by federal standards, right? We already know that Vice President-elect Kamala Harris has connections to Uber through her brother-in-law and has strong connections to Silicon Valley. Besides that, we're already seeing that some people who are connected to Uber are being considered for positions in the Biden administration. So do you think that there is a pathway through the federal agencies to achieve this, or will that prove to be more difficult than maybe

some people are thinking? I have no illusions about the Biden administration kind of coming in and just fixing this for the reasons that you just mentioned. One thing, though, that I do hope happens soon is that they fire the National Labor Relations Board general counsel, who, you know, is an anti-worker hack hired under Trump. And his term expires next January 2021, right? So that one move could already open the door to at least the NLRB saying that gig workers should be considered employees or at least have the right to form unions or collectively bargain, right? That is not the case under Trump's NLRB. And that's a simple change that the Biden administration could make. But as for whether the federal government

is going to fight for a nationwide AB5, which they seem to kind of hint at in their platform, which is kind of interesting, but you didn't hear much about it on the campaign trail, right? It's unclear whether some kind of staffer or intern wrote that or Joe Biden and Kamala Harris really do believe in that, right? So I'm not going to come out and say that Biden's going to fix this. I think it's still going to require militant grassroots activism, right? It's going to require people standing up and saying that this needs to change and folks

standing up to show what the reality is like when you're misclassified and you don't have access to all of these employment rights. Because if California can get fooled, granted, there was such an expensive campaign for the yes side, but the no side was working their ass off. I mean, people were making hundreds of thousands of calls, texts, trying to just use every kind of volunteer leverage, you know, the unions put $20 million, which is still on its own a pretty decent amount to try to educate people to try to fight back. But it's just going to take a shift. And I

think that overall mindset, I think people are still not quite at the point where they're ready to wake up from the techno utopian dreams that Uber sold to us, you know, in the early 2010s. Just this kind of user delights that that Americans are obsessed with. Oh, I can just pull out my phone and have whatever I want in like 10 minutes, right? Like five minutes, two minutes. That's all happening on the backs of a very exploited worker. And if people don't realize that, if the laws don't reflect that, we're just going to keep getting people who vote in their own short-term interests and their own sense of convenience and not to fix these larger structural problems. And I'll be very surprised if the Biden administration spends

political capital to try to actually fight for this without a lot of pushing. No, I completely agree. I think it was Ed Agueso Jr. at Motherboard who pointed out that, yes, they spent like $ 200 million plus on this ballot measure, but the degree to which their stock prices rose in the aftermath of like Prop 22 winning, it was massive, right? They made all their money back. Yeah, they made all their money back in the first minutes of the opening bell. I mean, it's like it's a great deal for them. I think the market cap of Uber and Lyft went up something like 14 billion in the first day of trading or something. So 200 million is sofa change compared to that.

So why wouldn't you do that? Right. And, you know, Uber, Lyft, Postmates, DoorDash, Instacart, they all work together on this bill. Right. I keep saying Uber, but it's really this alliance of the worst companies and their competitors. You know, they're definitely you know, they don't like each other, but they're but they're very good at forming the solidarity to at least destroy these bulwarks of employment law first so that then they can fight over who gets to be the final victor. But, you know, where's our solidarity? They can form such a tight battlefront to do this. I mean, we got to do the final victor. But, you know, where's our solidarity? They can form such a tight battlefront to do this. I mean, we got to do the same. And, you know, that's unions, that's ordinary people, that's customers knowing what they're actually getting into

when they're ordering food or ordering a car. It's just going to take a lot, a lot, a lot of work. Just briefly going back to, you know, the point on the Biden administration, there is that thing in their platform where they do talk about, you lot, a lot of work. Just briefly going back to the point on the Biden administration, there is that thing in their platform where they do talk about expanding the coverage of the labor law and ensuring that those things are changed. But Biden has also talked a lot about being a union president and expanding union membership. And I've seen it argued that on one hand, that could be a really positive thing, right? That could result in changes that are much needed in the United States to, you know, labor legislation and making it easier to unionize. But on the other hand, as we already talked about, that could also mean, you know, unions

working with companies like Uber and Lyft to create these unions where or to expand the membership, but in a way that doesn't give the workers very much power. So it really does seem that just based on the little that has been said so far and looking at, you know, the relationships that are involved, that it really could go either way. Yeah, I mean, unions for all the good that they've done are a kind of disciplining model, you have to get your workers in line to do a certain thing. And if you're getting your workers in line to do something that's actually not quite fully in their interests, I mean, then you have a problem. And that's exactly what they're trying to

do right now. In our last few minutes, I think there's been some pretty negative things in this conversation between Prop 22, ensuring that workers are classified in a way that gives them little power, little benefits, very poor pay, and few protections, and how things really seem stacked against them in very many ways, right? But you have covered these issues. You have worked as a food delivery worker yourself. So I wanted to kind of shift it and ask, what are the positive things that you're seeing in terms of workers working together, pushing back against these companies, trying to demand that their rights are observed instead of being steamrolled over by these companies? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of really inspiring kinds of solidarity.

One great model is Rideshare Drivers United in California. Look them up. I wrote about them in my latest piece, but they've got like an app that they built that allows them to recruit new members really easily. They pass flyers through windows at stoplights. I mean, they're LAX kind of protesting. They honk their horns in front of the Uber headquarters on Market Street. It's cool. I mean, it's exactly the kind of thing that we need more of. And of course, they're not a recognized union because they're actually trying to push for real structural change. But these are the kind of formations that are growing, that are gaining thousands of new members every year. But they're not big enough

and they don't have the support that they need. So, you know, I also really admire the work of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, which is a real union, but fights for both professional drivers, you know, like taxi medallion drivers in New York, as well as gig workers, because they understand the fact that our fates are intertwined, that they can't just sort of say, you know, well, forget about you. I'll take care of my own. No, we got to take care of, you know, all of us. And they're not compromising on the employment classification issue.

They're not trying to make sweetheart deals with these gig companies. So I really appreciate them as well. You know, when I'm out there in the streets, something that happens a lot is workers just come up to me. They see me with my delivery bag and my bike, and they'll just say, hey, I mean, how's Postmates today? You know, how's Uber? We're trying to figure out how the algorithm works. We're trying to figure out what the hot spots are, trying to figure out, you know, which which restaurants have the longer waiting times and kind of where to go next. But, you know, it's really sad because we'll strike up a conversation and then inevitably one we're atomized. And that's, you know,

this so-called independence, this so-called flexibility is actually used against us. It means that we can't form that collective power that we need. You see a lot of immigrant groups in New York, and they do have their own group chats where they try to figure these things out. There's a lot of message boards. But you know, you can only get so far with them. And the fact is that for every person who's on the message board trying to suss out the algorithm and trying to come up with tactics, there is two other workers out there who are not on these sites who are more desperate, who probably maybe don't even speak English, and are just busting their ass trying to squeeze out

every dime from this terrible job. And for every worker who quits because they realize that the game is rigged, there will be another desperate worker who unfortunately needs to take on this work. And that's how these gig companies stay alive, right? And so I don't want to overly paint a rosy picture and say that this sort of self-organized, organic mutual aid is enough because we definitely need the government to fix a lot of these structural problems. We definitely need the popular support of the American people, right, to just realize how flawed of a business model this is. I wish there was more good news, but overall, it's pretty bad. Yeah, but, you know, I think those models that you described, the Rideshare Drivers United and

the New York Taxi Workers Union, and, you know, the other organizations and just kind of groups that are forming in order for workers to make those connections to work together are going to be really essential to pushing back against these laws, against the pushes for more IC plus and more degradation in worker status. And as you say, in New York in particular, recognizing that the taxi workers and the ride hail drivers have these things in common and shouldn't be just separated, I think is really important, right? One more point. I think we should really talk about the resistance within the tech companies themselves, right? One of the most inspiring things that I saw in the run up to the election was actually Uber engineers and different

software engineers coming out from these gig companies and saying, I can't be a part of this. I can't, in good conscience, keep doing this kind of work that I know is screwing over these vulnerable workers. Because, I mean, they're getting paid a lot to engineer these political campaigns. I mean, we're not just talking about the app anymore. We're talking about the engineers who are actually getting paid to do the push notifications that were flooding Californians' mobile phones, the little pop-up that required you to say, yes, I support Prop 22 before you even got a car. These are things that tech workers are out there making happen. And if we have more folks within the industry realizing that, hey, I mean,

you think that you've got your nice, cushy job, right, making six figures with your benefits and that you're exempt from this. No, you're a worker too. I mean, this business model is coming for everyone, right? Don't screw over the little guy thinking that you're gonna be safe. And more and more workers are realizing that.

And I'm hoping that we can get louder voices in Silicon Valley standing up against this as well, because that's really going to be able to undo some of this maybe at the core. Yeah, no, I completely agree with that. And I really appreciate you taking the time to talk today, Wilfred, to fill us in on what's going on here. Thanks so much. And we'll, you know, I'll certainly continue watching your writing and seeing what you're doing. Thank you. Wilfred Chan is a contributing writer at The Nation and has also written for Dissent,

The Guardian and NBC News. You can find a link to his recent piece on Prop 22 in the show notes, along with other relevant information based on what we talked about in this week's show. You can also follow Wilfred on Twitter at at Wilfred Chan. You can follow me at at Paris Marks, and you can follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us. If you want to get in on the Discord server and get to know other listeners of the show, make sure to go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus

and become a supporter. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, which is a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada. And you can find more information about that in the show notes. Thanks for listening. Thank you.