Tech Won't Save Us - How Tech Journalism Legitimized the Gig Economy w/ Sam Harnett

Episode Date: August 20, 2020

Paris Marx is joined by Sam Harnett to talk about how the flaws in tech journalism provide a distorted view of what “tech” companies are actually doing and why it looks like California will finally force ride-hail drivers to be recognized as employees (without Uber and Lyft).Sam Harnett is a reporter covering labor and tech at KQED in the Bay Area. He recently made a radio series called “How We Got to Here” and is the co-creator of The World According to Sound. Sam has an essay about the problems with tech journalism in “Beyond the Algorithm: Qualitative Insights for Gig Work Regulation.” Follow Sam on Twitter as @SamWHarnett.For more related articles, see Sam’s article about how Uber and Lyft evaded regulations for eight years, Paris’ article on why California should kick them out if they won’t comply with labor law, and Veena Dubal’s criticism of the franchise model they’re now considering.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.Support the show

It took eight years of pressure from labor advocates in California. It took California Supreme Court, the California legislature, and now the California executive branch to finally bring this question to a head. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, a podcast that's really excited that California might finally be forcing Uber to treat its drivers as employees. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today I'm joined by Sam Harnett. Sam is a reporter covering labor and tech at KQED in the Bay Area. He recently made a radio series called How We Got Here and hosts a podcast called The World According to

Sound. An essay of his called Words Matter that looks at how tech journalism has a number of flaws and how that helped to legitimize the gig economy will be published in Beyond the Algorithm Qualitative Insights for Gig Work in 2021 by Cambridge University Press. A lot of what we'll be talking about today comes from that article and deals with the real issues with the focus of tech journalism and how it looks at tech companies. We also talk about the ongoing fight in California against Uber and Lyft to make them reclassify their drivers as employees. Today, August 20th, the day that this episode comes out, is supposed to be the day that Uber and Lyft are supposed to finally reclassify those drivers. As of right now, on August 19th, as I record this intro, it looks like they will actually

be leaving the state instead of complying with that order, but we'll have to see what actually happens. If you like our conversation, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and make sure to share it with any friends or colleagues you think would find it interesting. And if you want to support the work that I put into making this podcast, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy the conversation. Sam, welcome to tech won't save us. Yeah, thanks for having me on. It's great to speak with you. So I wanted to start you have this new, I guess, like podcast series radio series that came out recently called how we Got to Here that kind of reviews, you know, I guess like the evolution in labor rights and how society has changed all these

things in the United States over the past century, I guess. And one of the key threads that kind of comes out there is you discuss a welfare capitalism that kind of dominated the post-war period, and then how that changes into a shareholder capitalism in the 1970s and 80s. So I was hoping we could start just to kind of give some context to listeners. Can you kind of describe what welfare capitalism was and how that evolved into shareholder capitalism and what changed? Sure. As you said, welfare capitalism was post-World War II in the U.S. And I mean, it's important to note when you talk about about welfare capitalism, you're talking about it for mainly white men. And basically, yeah, after World War II, there was this huge boom in the U.S.

And the way corporations were set up, they were actually sharing some of that wealth with workers. I mean, actually, you could say workers had the ability to fight for some of those gains through unions and such. And, you know, ever since basically workers in America won protections in the New Deal, those who had power, business owners, have been fighting against them, you know, to take away the things that workers have fought for. So in the 70s and 80s, you get a shift to something that seems pretty natural and normal now in America, at least, is that like the profits that a company makes should go to the shareholders and the primary concern of a company should be to make more money. And it's easy to forget that there was a period in U.S. history where that wasn't the case, where corporations were actually,

at least the public idea of corporations, were that they should be thinking about the common good and the public good. And it's also important to note that those 30 years post-World War II, that's also an aberration in American history. Like, that's not the way America has been since its founding. I mean, the ethos of shareholder capitalism, which is that corporations should make as much as they possibly can, no matter the cost, is much more in line with the history of the United States. And the series, I mean, just to back up, like, the series really came as a sort of reaction to what I was covering as a journalist and the way that I was doing stories. It was basically like, I'm a journalist in the Bay Area. I cover a lot of the interaction

between tech and capitalism. And I just felt like I wasn't really getting at the story. Like I was doing all these things where I was interviewing like Lyft drivers and other gig workers. And I felt like I wasn't really doing the whole backstory. So the whole How We Got Here project was just an attempt by me to sort of try to tell the story a little deeper. Yeah, and I think it's a really important perspective to have in there, right? So we can understand and see that society used to work in a really different way. And as you say, like, it can be really difficult for people to remember that there was a time before, you know, you call it shareholder capitalism, I think other people would call it neoliberalism, where the company wasn't just solely focused on making profits, right? And delivering value to shareholders, there was kind of a broader concern, I guess, about the workers and communities.

And part of that, as you say, was simply because the workers have more power to push back. And I think it's really important that you noted there that this kind of golden age of capitalism, as it's often called, was really a unique period, and it's not the norm. So when we hear a lot of people kind of hearkening back to that era now and saying we need to return to it, we also need to remember that the conditions that made that possible are not the same conditions that we are existing in now. And so, you know, the kind of society that we build and the improvements that we try to build are also going to look different as a result of that. And obviously, we want to ensure that it's more inclusive than kind of what that was in the past, right? Yeah, I mean, that's what the tricky problem is. I mean, you look at, you know,

I mean, wages in the US have been pretty much flat since the 70s. And if you look at the minimum wage back in the 50s and 60s, or if you look at wages in general, it was better for the average worker. But again, the average worker was a white man, and it was a lot harder for women and people of color to share in any of the profits. So it's like, on the one hand, the worker power of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, in early 70s, there is value in the power that workers had. But also as a society, it was obviously messed up in a lot of ways that we've actually made progress on. So it's really difficult to like separate those two things out and try to figure out how to reconcile them. But yeah, nostalgia for the past is obviously very dangerous as we're seeing because nostalgia for the past right now is being like leveraged and used for

propaganda by all kinds of right wing governments around the world. So yeah, I don't know. It's funny. I mean, I did the series of how we got here. I don't really know any of the answers to like where we go from here. So but I mean, I also thought as a journalist, like there's all this like, everyone's always talking about, oh, we should do solutions based journalism. And I feel like that's so a naive, but also dangerous. I think really, what we should be, you know, concentrating our, our intellectual powers on is understanding how we got here. Like, what are all the mistakes that we actually made? And then only when we kind of do that and own up to it, I think we have any chance of trying to change course. That kind of brings us to the core of what I wanted to talk to you about. And that is

the emergence of the gig economy in the kind of post 2008 era. And the role that journalism and tech journalism in particular played in giving those companies a bit of a free pass. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Not even a bit. I would say not even a complete free pass. They like helped.

Yeah. Like the sharing economy as a concept, which was obviously so damaging because it gave such a positive cover to companies like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Instacart, etc. Like that wasn't a phrase that came out of tech company branding. That came from journalists, like journalists and pundits were the ones being like, oh, this is the new sharing economy. No way. Yeah, it's really like and this is, I mean, a much longer conversation about like the flaws in journalism and consumerism and commodification and journalism and, you know, the ad model

driving media organizations have to get clicks and attention. But like, there's so much pressure to get something new and find the new trend that journalists make it up, you know, like the sharing economy being a prime example. Yeah, no, I think that's a fantastic point. And like, obviously, you describe how in the aftermath of the recession, there were a lot of people out of work and in a really precarious situation. And a lot of these companies took advantage of them, right? And part of the way, I guess, society in general accepted it, other than the fact that, you

know, a lot of people were just really desperate and had few other options, but was because, you know, it was touted by much of the press. And so the first thing I wanted to ask you about that was, what is the real core of the problem with tech journalism and how, I guess, a lot of tech reporters kind of approach the companies and the technologies that they report on? I was asked to write this essay for Cambridge University Press, and the idea was just to put a lens on what media organizations had done

and how they had covered Uber and Lyft and other companies when they came on the scene. If you go back and read the articles, like whenever one of these new, quote unquote, good companies appear, there would be a very predictable way that they were handled. And the first slew of articles would always be like, oh, my God, there's this new app and you can do this thing with it. And it's so cool. It's basically the article. And they just read like regurgitated press releases. And you would just see that anytime, you know, Instacart, Postmates, Uber, Airbnb, Lyft, they would basically get the, oh my God, this is cool treatment. So I started there just looking

at why those articles appeared and how they were constructed. And again, they really just look like a press release. I mean, as a journalist, I can understand basically how they're made. Like there's some blogger or some writer for a news organization that's expected to turn out a ton of articles really quick. They get this press release, this thing, it seems kind of cool. And they just write it in an hour and then post it online. And that was really like the first wave of content. And then from there, like as soon as something started to get steam, more legacy media organizations would want to write stories about it because it already, to be the first one on something and like to write the story that then people click on so that the media organization gets more ad revenue. So that's the pressure on all journalism. And tech journalism is built around

this idea that these tech journalists know what the next cool big thing is, so they don't want to miss out. So they're even more overeager to be the first one to write about something. Just like built into the whole way this whole kind of journalism is approached, there's no time built in for reflection or like, I'm going to go talk to an Uber driver and see what it's really like. You know, I'm going to go dig into like the business strategy of Uber or Lyft and think about like how they're coming up against regulations. That's not part of the game. It's basically churn out the article as fast as you can. So yeah, it's depressing. And again, this essay, it came out of me being a journalist and

covering tech and feeling even some of that pressure myself, you know, being asked like, oh, Uber is doing something like, can you do a story about it? Just because it seems new. I completely understand that. And obviously, there is an issue with the beat itself. But there's also this larger structural issue with, you know, how media is organized and how it gets its revenue and the kind of things that it has to focus on because of how much has changed. And some of that is also because of the very technologies that were lauded by these media organizations, right? Right. Yeah, it is kind of sick that like changes in technology, namely the Internet, is part of what has undermined journalism and created an environment in which journalism produces articles that benefits tech. Yeah, so it is a bit is pretty circular. But I think it's true. I mean, I think it's really true. Imagine you're a young journalist who like you're expected to do two or three stories a day and you're like, huh, Uber, Lyft, that's interesting. Like, how are they handling taxi regulations? Like, understanding taxi regulations city by city is extremely complicated and complex.

You'd have to spend a long time reading a bunch of, like, transportation law. You'd have to spend a bunch of time on the phone talking to people that even understand it. And are you going to pursue that story? Or are you going to pursue a story that's, wow, Uber and Lyft is cool. And if you're drunk, you can get a ride home cheap. And if your editor is going to take the latter option, there's just pressure on you financially as a reporter to just do the easier, quicker story that your editor is pushing you to do anyway. Yeah, no, definitely. And especially if you don't have much of a background, you know, as you say, like kind of that historical perspective, but also

that kind of perspective on the industry that this tech company is coming into, because, you know, as you say, like kind of that historical perspective, but also that kind of perspective on the industry that this tech company is coming into, because, you know, so many of these companies call themselves tech companies, but in actual fact, they are entering into traditional industries, and then just competing against these other players with a tech branding that they've not only used to kind of skirt regulations, but also to make it easier for them to access capital so that they can underprice their services and kind of push traditional companies out of those markets, right? Yeah, I mean, basically, the thesis of the essay I wrote is that these organizations pop up, Anubra, Lyft, etc., they get a tiny bit of seed funding, they prove that they can look like something new and cool and different, they prove that they can look like something new and cool and different. They prove that they can be called sort of, quote unquote, tech companies.

And once they prove that, you know, tech journalism, if they go for it, they jump all over them. They write all these articles. And then an Uber and Lyft can take that back to venture capitalists and be like, look, we're something totally new and different. And because we have that label, that means that we can get around labor law. We can get around transportation regulations and we can undercut our competitors, which in the case of Uber and Lyft is the tax industry and then public transport, which Uber and Lyft is also competing with. And the venture capitalists see the money and they poured in the billions and billions. And they weren't pouring in billions and billions because Uber and Lyft had some technological

innovation. No venture capitalist was giving all the money to Uber and Lyft because of their app, which is actually technologically extremely simple. Like they were pouring the money in because they saw, well, Uber and Lyft have the brand and the brand is fooling regulators or because they can underprice their rise, the brand is so appealing to consumers that politicians will feel the pressure

to give these companies a pass. That's something I want to put a lot of money into because it's going to, you know, undercut competitors. So that's really like the whole system is built around that. And again, when you start looking at all these companies, what's the technological innovation of Airbnb? What's the technological innovation of Uber and Lyft? What's the technological innovation of Instacart? None of these companies invented geolocation or smartphones or any of that stuff. They made apps.

Yeah, totally. And I think that's one of the really interesting things that you actually point out in the article, right, is that so much of this modern tech reporting actually doesn't have much focus on tech. Yeah, like tech, like as you as you know, like building computers and stuff like that, there's a much greater focus on what these tech companies are doing, how they're using tech to like, make money, and you know, all these other sorts of things, right? Yeah, I mean, really, you could just say, if you know, tech journalism is really just consumer journalism, like what we're talking about is like, things that consumers can use to consume more faster, cheaper. That's what a lot of tech reporters is really central to the beat. Yeah, I mean, I don't know.

I grew up, my older brother, who is what? He's like 38 now. Like when we were kids, he was like building computers and teaching himself programming languages. And he's actually now a programmer. And like growing up with him, like I saw what real quote unquote computer science and technology was. And now I always can fact check things by him.

I'll be like, you know, how difficult actually would it be to build Uber or et cetera? And it's just clear in case after case after case that all these major tech companies, that tech is a misnomer, you know, and that's not to say it's not actually like tech issues happening at these companies. Again, if you look at a company like Uber or Lyft, like they're processing tons and tons of data and they do have to manage like this network of drivers and riders. And there is a lot of like computer science and technological advancement that's happening on that side of the company. But those none of the tech reporters are covering any of those stories. And the same with Facebook, you know, Facebook and Google, for that matter,

like the amount of data that they're handling leads to computer science work that Facebook, you know, Facebook and Google, for that matter, like the amount of data that they're handling leads to computer science work that is arguably a technology story. But, you know, that accounts for so little of what tech reporters write on. I think that's a really good point. You know, I remember when I was younger and even just getting like some tech and even like video game magazines, right, there would be so much of a focus on the computers and the different hardware that was in them. And, you know, the different specs and how good one, I don't know, like graphics card or whatever would be over another, right? And you see so little of that in the reporting now. It's like at best you get like, oh, which laptop is like good for back to school and like stuff like that, right? Right. Yeah, right. No, maybe it was similar for me, too.

I remember looking at those early PC magazines, stuff like that. And I sort of trace this in the essay, too, like the mainstream tech media of the 80s and 90s was a lot around consumer hardware. And it had a lot of the like product reviews, right? Like you'd read the specs on the latest hard drive and it was a lot of it was for, you know, computer enthusiasts who would like be building computers at home. And you actually see a lot of the approach of like basically a consumer centric approach,

a product centric approach to journalism. A lot of that's carried over into the tech beats of today. So you have someone writing about Uber or Lyft or Airbnb like a user experience as if they were writing about a piece of hardware the way that a tech journalist in the 80s and 90s would have written up for PC Magazine. So we sort of, we carried over a lot of those habits of like product reviews and like testing this out for a consumer into companies that were doing things that were very, very disconnected from technology. You also talk about how, like in the

same way that those things are carried over, there's also a language that kind of develops around technology and around these companies that you say kind of becomes normalized, but they have a lot of kind of assumptions and subtext packed into them. Can you explain that a little bit more? Maybe give a few examples. Yeah, I mean, we're basically talking about techno-utopianism. And if you look at the PCMag

or some of the early wired stuff, but like Macworld, like all of those publications are infused with techno-utopianism, which is the idea that like bigger, better, faster technology can somehow save us. And it really, I mean, not to over-reduce it, but it is sort of like a certain kind of wide-eyed, again, I go back to the early 80s internet of just thinking that somehow if we

connect everybody on the internet, everything's going to be solved and great and perfect, which is so naive now in retrospect. You're you're like no it took a little while maybe but it got colonized by capital the same as everything does and now it's dominated by a bunch of huge corporations that don't care about the public good they care about selling the most stuff and making the most money so yeah techno utopism is what we're talking about and like i mean everything is an example i mean again all all these companies come around and i mean i remember the early stories about. And like, I mean, everything is an example. I mean, again, all these companies come around. And I mean, I remember the early stories about Uber, like, this is going to lead to a reduction in cars, and this is going to help us with global warming. I mean, there was such a

wide eyed optimism, as opposed to, oh, this is going to undercut public transportation. Oh, this is going to clog the street with cars. Oh, this is going to destroy local taxi industries. Every single example of one of these tech companies, like the early coverage is wrapped in techno-utopianism. What's shocking is how long it lasts. It took years and years and years for people to turn a critical eye to these companies. And I would argue that the only reason that tech is getting criticism in the U.S. is because tech got wrapped up with the election of Trump. And people were seeing things like Facebook as connected to Trump's election. I think it freaked a lot of people out. And that's when

there was a real turn in coverage. But it wasn't until 2016 that a company like Google, which had been around for years and years already at that point, suddenly got a critical lens put on by mainstream media. It's so frustrating, right? Because there obviously have been people kind of writing and talking critically about these tech companies for a long time. But because that dominant narrative in the tech media and then in the mainstream press was really boosterism, basically, those perspectives were pushed down when they were actually saying really important things that we should have been listening to much earlier about these tech companies, right? Yeah. And again, that's when we get down to like consumerism and media and like the fact that

nuance has been beaten out of journalism because, you know, the story that's going to look at how Uber and Lyft are coming in conflict with local taxi transportation laws, that story's gonna take a long time to write. And it's not going to be as sexy and consumer-centric as a story about why Uber is cool and cheap, you know? So it's frustrating, but it's like also obvious. It's like, yeah, if journalists don't have months and months to probe around and do work on something, and if they're being encouraged to generate something like a highly commodified, consumable piece of content very quickly, if that's the case, then of course you're not going to get insightful critique. One of the interesting things there is that, as you say, at least until 2016, a lot of that criticism came not from tech reporters, but from, say, labor reporters or transport

reporters who actually had that experience and knowledge of a different beat so that they could actually look at these companies through a more historical and a more critical lens and actually understand what they were doing rather than, you know, just looking at this app and all the funding that they're getting from venture capital firms and all this kind of stuff, right? Absolutely. You know, and in the essay, like I call out a lot of journalists who I felt like had like succumbed to that coverage. But I think it's important to remember that this is not like a case of like bad actors, like the journalists who wrote articles that were booster ish, we're doing so because they were being pressured to by editors, they were doing

so because that was the way to get ahead as a journalist, like as a young journalist, post 2008 2009. Like if you came in and said, Hey, I'm young, I'm a journalist, I can write about tech and a bunch of products that you guys don't understand. And newsrooms were like dying for that. So this isn't about individual journalists not doing a job. This is about a system that encourages bad journalism. Yeah. And I really appreciate that clarification as well, because it is very much this broader structure that has arisen that is creating these kind of stories and this kind of not full perspective on these companies that's really not completely understanding what they're doing. So I think that's an important thing to point out. I mean, even me as a journalist,

like it was easier for me to get on NPR early on if I was doing a story about Uber. My career was shaped by going to tech because it was a thing that I feel like I could write about and, you know, I could get attention. And even, even you know I came into journalism very critical of technology and capitalism but like my stories are riddled with errors I called it a ride share and a couple stories early on for sure just because that's what the editors want me to call it and it was hard to fight against them and you're like okay fine I'll just you know call it a ride share maybe let's put in quotes you know but like the pressure is just always on I didn't go as far as the sharing economy because that was just you know i was just like wait who's sharing what nobody's sharing anything people are paying for

stuff i don't understand even still like there's always pressure to use the word startup like i think startup is totally uh editorializing like why should you call any company a startup what does that even mean how big big? How much money? How long do they have to exist? When do they stop being a startup? Just call it a corporation. You know, call it a business. There's always pressure to, like, use charged rhetoric,

to write about things in a way that makes it seem new and trendy, and to write on things non-critically. I completely agree. I think we've had a pretty similar experience in that way. You know, I started writing about these tech companies in 2016, 2017. And, you know, I had a critical perspective. But again, sometimes my stories would be edited to kind of bring in some of that language. And I'd push back as much as I could. But, you know, you can't always push back on everything.

Right. And, you know, I had that similar experience of I've written a lot about Uber and a lot about Elon Musk because they get clicks and they're the pitches that I know will get accepted. Right. Totally. And, you know, there's so little money in journalism and you're trying to make it like we can't lay this problem at an individual's feet. But media organizations really like and I really do think it comes down to the advertising model plus the Internet. You know, like journalism needs a reckoning. Like the advertising model has always been problematic it's always problematically shaped content but with the internet it's just become a disaster it's no longer even local advertising

it's just like it's just clicks in the internet it's a mess and like until we change that this is not going to change yeah you know we've already talked about how you know a lot of these kind of introductory pieces are written like slightly reworded press releases. One of the ones I found really interesting was kind of the first person experience story that you talked about and how it's kind of the experience of the journalist, not of the worker. So can you describe a bit more about that kind of frame and how how it really gives this different perception of how these companies really work? Sure. So, you know, after you get the first slew of articles that were basically press releases rewritten, then a journalist, usually from a bigger news organization, would go out and

try the app themselves. And they'd either use it as a consumer or they would actually sign up to like deliver the services themselves. Like they become an Uber driver for a couple of days or, you know, work on Instacart or put up their house on Airbnb. And like these stories are where you can see the legacy of tech journalism being rooted in consumer reviews. This is where you can see the danger, right? Because like, it's a totally different thing to like take two hard drives and compare them than it is to say, I'm going to be an Uber driver and see what it's like to really understand what it's like to be an Uber driver. You need to do an ethnographic study. You know, you need to

approach it like interview a bunch of Uber drivers over a long period of time and see what their life is like and see what their experience is like. If you flip on the app and try for a day, like what you're really getting is not what it's like to be an Uber driver. You're telling the story of what it's like to be a journalist going out and trying Uber for a day. And that's really the story you're telling. And like, it's so obvious then that you're not going to get the true experience. So, and actually I drove Lyft for a brief period for this project I was working on where I was like getting all these interviews. And like in the beginning, when, especially back in 2012, 13, like the companies were using venture capital to prop up the amount of money of Lyft and Uber drivers were making. So you turn on the app, you go out and you make a little money, you'd meet a bunch of

people. It seemed fun. You would have a good time doing it. And if you wrote an article, you would not be capturing the true experience of like what it's like to do 50, 60 hours of that a week for, you know, six months or a year. And again, every service of these gig economy services you look at, there is a spate of articles that are like, what it's like to use these services. It's so interesting to see how by having the journalists go and do it for a few

days, and obviously there are some journalists who have done it and offered a critical perspective of it because they, you know, also spoke to workers or really understood what was going on. But, you know, there are a lot of these earlier stories where the journalist just drives for these companies or, you know, participates in any of these kind of gig economy companies for a few days. And you get this really distorted view of what is actually happening with these companies or whether you can actually make a living through them. Right. And again, for like problem with journalism is having a reporter go out and do the Uber story where they sign up and drive Uber for a day is far cheaper than paying a reporter to follow Uber drivers for a year and document all their experiences, right? Like you can generate a story in a day just by going out and driving around Uber and seeing what happens. So it's like, again, the incentive on journalists to generate content

super quick and super cheap also pushes them to create content that doesn't capture the whole truth. Yeah, no, definitely. And I guess one of the issues with this framing is where it gets so much attention, the people who actually have the power to make decisions then kind of get this distorted perspective of it, right, paired with all the lobbying that these companies are able to do because of all the venture capital funding they get. And then that leads to regulations or the lack of regulations that really leaves workers and even residents of cities and communities being hurt or not being well served by these companies, right? Totally. I mean, even the sheer fact that a company gets called a tech company in the media and gets covered by tech journalists immediately lends a credence to something new and innovative.

And all of these gig companies, like they are built on avoiding regulations by appearing to be new or innovative. So they've already had a huge success if they're being covered like tech companies. And if you actually look at the language of regulators and politicians, you'll see them adopting a lot of the language

around these companies that has this feeling of newness. You hear regulators calling Uber and Lyft innovative. You can hear them talking about like Uber and Lyft having a quote unquote platform of being a tech company instead of a transportation company. Like that language of framing gets adopted. And we want to believe that regulators and judges, I mean, we've given up on politicians, right?

Like no one believes that politicians like aren't being swayed. But you want to believe that like a judge, you know, is like going to be free from like an ideological framing in the media. But it's just not true. You know, judges are driving around listening to NPR, they're reading the New York Times. If they see Uber in the tech section, or they hear, you know, NPR talking about Uber as a tech company, those things have an effect. Yeah, it's so frustrating when you hear them kind of repeating that same kind

of language. But now, you know, in the past few years where there has been this growing tech lash, Uber and Lyft in particular, there have been some jurisdictions that have been paying attention to their model, right, and what they're doing. And one of those places is California, where the most progress seems to be happening to, you know, actually try to regulate these companies and to force them to reclassify their workers as employees. And so last year, the California labor law was updated with a bill called AB5 that would effectively force many of these gig companies to switch their workers from contractors to employees. And, you know, obviously, there's been a lot of support for that law. Obviously, I'm very supportive of what they're trying to employees. And, you know, obviously, there's been a lot of support for that law. Obviously, I'm very supportive of what they're trying to do. But there's also been a lot of pushback from these

gig companies, right? So can you give us some insight into what's happening in California and how this has developed? Just to back up the story you're telling. So eight years ago, when Uber and Lyft started putting drivers on the road and calling them contractors, like even then their model of labeling drivers contractors instead of employees, even then that was legally suspect. And even under the old California labor law, the quote unquote Borrello test, it was very arguable that those workers were employees. And so since 2012, there has been attempt after attempt to get the drivers reclassified as employees so they could have basic labor protections. You know, they could

have unemployment insurance, workers comp, guaranteed minimum wage, and all of these attempts have failed. And in a way, Uber and Lyft were very smart. Their biggest weapon were mandatory arbitration clauses, which forced workers to handle disputes with the company through arbitration instead of the courts. So this allowed Uber and Lyft to fend off the employee classification in question for years. But then, you know, the California Supreme Court issued this Dynamex decision in 2018, which made it much harder for companies to classify their workers as contractors. And still Uber and Lyft continued with the contractor model. Then the state legislature passed AB5, which became law in 2020.

And still Uber and Lyft continued to classify their drivers as contractors. And it was only when the coronavirus pandemic started that California's executive branch stepped in and the state attorney general and a bunch of city attorneys sued Uber and Lyft for worker misclassification. for workers not to have unemployment insurance and other employee protections, like this question still couldn't come to light. So basically, it took eight years of pressure from labor advocates in California. It took California Supreme Court, the California legislature, and now the California executive branch to finally bring this question to a head. And where it stands right now is the judge in the case issued an injunction, which would force the companies to classify the workers as employees immediately. Now, Uber and Lyft have said they're going to have to suspend service in California for an

unspecified amount of time. Uber CEO said it would be until November. It's not clear if this is just a threat. Uber and Lyft, it has long been part of their playbook to say they're going to pull out of a market when they don't like regulations. And it's a way to use their popularity with consumers to put pressure on politicians. But right now, with the pandemic, you know, people aren't taking Uber and Lyft rides. And again, I think, I mean, they would never say this. Part of the reason the Attorney General stepped in when he did California was because suddenly the consumer power wasn't so strong because people weren't taking Uber and Lyft rides because of the pandemic. Yeah, I appreciate you giving that longer perspective so we can get a better idea of what's been going on. And it has been really interesting to see how these companies have

been trying to fight back and how, you know, obviously the workers are largely against them. Obviously, a lot of the lawmakers now are turning against Uber and Lyft. But it's been interesting to see that even a lot of the media now is saying, you know what, maybe Uber and Lyft should actually treat their drivers as employees. Like I think it was even the Financial Times the other day had like an editorial saying it's time for these companies to actually just treat their workers as employees. So as a final question, I would ask you, do you think this is going to finally happen in California? And then what ripple effects do you think that might have to finally happen in California? And then what ripple effects do you think that might have through the United States and, you know, hopefully the world?

If Uber and Lyft really were violating California labor law and federal labor law by class nine workers and contractors, and they were able to persist for eight years, like then that just shows you that the regulatory systems and the democratic systems in the US are not strong enough to stop corporations from overrunning people. And again, Uber and Lyft almost pulled it off, like, and they still might pull it off. But in eight years with all the venture capital, like, that's just so much time for them to make something normal, to make it so that consumers are so hooked on it. And that the alternatives like taxi industry and public transport have been so overrun that then they become the only business in town. They become the only business in town. They become the only game in town. So I would say, yeah, if you're looking at this story,

it's that eight years of this not changing is the major point. I do think, like, given the pandemic, given the political situation in the country, in California, like the relation of California to the federal government, like, I think California will succeed in getting these companies to reclassify their workers as employees. I think that'll happen. I don't know the ins and outs. Like, will Uber and Lyft actually pull out? And in November, they got an initiative on the ballot that would exempt Uber and Lyft from AB5 and allow them to keep classifying their workers as contractors. I don't think that will pass, but it might, in which case, you know, we're back to

drivers as contractors. So it's hard to say. You know, California is a huge market. So if Uber and Lyft do have to reclassify their workers as employees, other states that have liberal governors and liberal legislators might make a similar push. But, you know, Uber and Lyft are not profitable. And so there's like a major question mark in their business model just in general. Like these companies might implode, like they might not be here in a couple of years. Even by classifying their workers as contractors, which was saving them a ton of money, Uber and Lyft still weren't making the kind of money they need to make investors happy. You know, people love having cheap, convenient rides, but there's already talk in California of having like driver-owned co-ops

and doing things like that, which, you know, maybe they'll cost a little more, but they might actually be better for the community in the long run. If there are worker-run co-ops, then that could also have a positive impact on the taxi industry. And if they're a bit more expensive, you know, that could be positive for encouraging people to use transit a bit more often and maybe e-bikes and, you know, all these other forms of transportation that use transit a bit more often and maybe e-bikes and all these other forms of transportation that are getting a bit more attention in this period. And I would just add that you said that the fact that they were able to violate labor law for eight years shows how weak these institutions are in the United States. I would say it shows how weak they are globally,

right? The fact that they could get away with this on a global scale, not just in the United States, really shows how a lot of governments, after decades of this ideology of neoliberalism and of the private market kind phones and we'll have cheap rides and cheap groceries and it'll all just be free and easy as opposed to tackling like the harder questions of like, how can you create a society in which, you know, we get what we need and no one is worked to the bone and like, and stuff is shared fairly equitably. Like that's the hard question and it's not going to be done with an app. That's for sure. I think that's a really great place to leave it. Sam, it's been great to speak with you and, you know, to hear about your work. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much.

Yeah, thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure. Sam Harnett is a reporter at KQED and has an essay in an upcoming book by Cambridge University Press called Beyond the Algorithm, Qualitative Insights for Gig Work that you can preorder now. You can follow Sam on Twitter at at Sam W. Harnett. You can also follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us. And you can follow me, Paris Marks, at at Paris Marks. If you like the show, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Ricochet Podcast Network, which is a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in

Canada. Thanks so much for listening.