Yesterday Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi — Crikey’s standout Clown of the Week — told The Australian Financial Review that the company is considering a trial process in Australia whereby drivers bid for rides and set their own prices.
It’s an obvious attempt to clear up all those pesky questions about the company’s responsibilities towards the workforce it relies on, cementing their status as independent contractors rather than employees. Or, as Khosrowshahi inevitably tells us, it’s “designed to empower drivers”.
Consider the string of events that lead to this announcement. In the last three months, five people have died while working for gig economy food delivery services.
The gig economy is designed to strip away not only sick leave, the minimum wage and unfair dismissal protections but also workers’ compensation and requirements around training and protective gear. Uber is one of the only gig economy companies to even provide its workforce with insurance.
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Beyond that, we have just lived through a year where, time after time, states have been dragged to a halt by a virus that is most efficiently spread by workers and independent contractors who can’t take sick leave and work across several workplaces.
Uber didn’t invent insecure work, but it supercharged it and made it a dominant and legitimate basis for new businesses; every app-based gig economy innovation was invariably described as “Uber, but for … “, and people were happy to ask no further questions about the conditions faced by the people who staff them.
Whatever the gaps in the protections of the Fair Work Act, the gig economy created a giant workforce with no protections at all. In the last few years the illegality of a lot of this has become clearer and clearer.
So, at the end of this cycle, Khosrowshahi’s completely predictable response is to make sure his workforce is even less protected.
We know this process of chipping away will continue until Uber entirely automates (or just collapses) and wipes out a huge workforce — a workforce that, thanks to the dominance Uber and its ilk, may have nowhere else to go.
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Oh Crikey, I just know that wasn’t a sudden change mid-narrative to the present tense. The word is “led”.
I remember when a clown was just a harmless figure of fun. Khosrowsharhi and his monstrous non-commercial enterprise/scam is clearly a different sort of clown. There is an excellent long-form article Uber’s Path of Destruction in American Affairs magazine, summer 2019.
Uber will never automate, it is simply a prank being pulled on capitalists and workers and exists to collapse in the most harmful way possible.
Why are food delivery deaths blamed on the employers?
How is this NOT the same as blaming Krudd & Garrett for pink batt deaths?
As with MeThreeWotever, whatever happened to individual agency?
It might have something to do with Uber recruiting folk who really need every dollar and requiring them to make each and every delivery within a tight deadline monitored with absolute efficiency by technology that cannot cheated, so that any delay by the so-called contractor who is really an employee, no matter how reasonable, justified or necessary for safety reasons (or any other good reasons), will result in dismissal.
It really does not compare with pink batts. Not at all. If the pink batts fatalities had been entirely blamed on those running the companies who employed the dead workers there would be the start of a comparison. But with Uber, can you point out which ministers are getting all the blame for the deaths – the blame for not regulating the gig economy is of course another issue.
You are over thinking this, rather poorly.
People choose to do the job.they are responsible for their actions.
End.Of.
Ah yes, the just-world fallacy. Everyone gets what they deserve.
And while over-thinking is no doubt a terrible failing, it still comes ahead of not thinking at all. Which is only the way to come up with the imaginary equivalence you put forward.
You are extremely underthinking this, or you really loath workers, one of the two. How about we don’t throw out the concept of workplace health and safety and duty of care? Would that be OK for you?
No intelligent person blamed the government for the pink batt deaths, the fault was clearly the greed and callousness of the employers. As it is here.
Individual agency? The choice between accepting appalling working conditions and below-poverty line wages, or starvation? Pardon me, your privilege is showing.
It’s true that no intelligent person did so but that still leaves that bulk of population in thrall to the Sun King’s mendacious minions.
Blimey Indunn, you’d have us sending kids back into coal mines. Workplace safety has been the employers responsibility for about 40 years now. That doesn’t discount individual responsibility, it adds to it. An unsafe building site rightly cops serious fines, just as should Uber. Being a contractor instead of an employee doesn’t remove the onus of responsibility in any industry.
The pink batts reference to Krudd etc is not remotely close. They were a thrice removed party from the employer/employee relationship. Not remotely relevant.
You may need to check on the definition of ‘contractor’ inlcuding the bit about providing their own insurance & OH&S standards.
My point about Batty Pinkos was not that the slur was true but that it is now a meme, aka ‘common knowledge’, amongst a distressingly large proportion of the populace, esp. the shoutjocks of Macquarie network.
I heard the worst offender (against decency, taste & rationality) use it only a couple of weeks ago – it ain’t dead, just stored away in the grab bag of mendacity, waiting for the next run around the block.
Monday morning, 30th Nov on 2GovernmentBroadcasting Hately brought up pink batts yet again in his continuing vendatta against NSW’s Matt Kean.
And who was his interlocutor? Step forward mad Marky, the ultimate turncoat.
Ah, now I know which member of that toxic swill you meant – I heard him not just mention it but promo that he would do so on the early breakfast show.
Almost as if softening up the audience for another serving come the net election.
Yep. They are killing competition and their employees