Uber's Bastards II

Hello everyone! Today we are going to talk about my favorite subject: the impact of Uber and its bastard spawn. Last time we did this, we talked about the (im)moral economy of on-demand labor platforms and their transformation of care work via A Roosevelt Institute report by Katie J. Wells and Funda Ustek Spilda. Today, we’ll look at another report from Wells, Spilda, Veena Dubal and Mark Graham—this time at Fairwork US, investigating the industries corrupted by algorithmic management tools (and the firms deploying them).

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Last time, I talked at length about my core issues with Uber and the firms taking after its business model before opening up the conversation to talk about its transmogrification of care work. I’ll summarize some key points here before we move on, but revisit my previous essay to read more:

• The so-called “gig economy” is an altar to greed and misery. Mass immiseration, starvation wages, mental health crises, horrendous working conditions, the offloading of every conceivable cost onto workers and the public, the narrowing of political imagination, racial discrimination for workers and consumers, the acceleration of surveillance pricing, these and many more social ills are key consequences of the on-demand business model.

• On-demand labor did not proliferate because it was profitable or innovative. This business model metastasized across the economy because of a stringent commitment to worker misclassification, algorithmic discrimination, anti-competitive capital-intensive strategies, impressive public relations, robust political lobbying, and shoddy journalism.

• The core ambition of the on-demand ride-hail model is to make previously illegal profits legal again. It's about subverting urban governance, breaking New Deal labor regimes that prohibit certain types of exploitation, subjecting workers and workplaces to more authoritarian forms of control and discipline, and reshaping drivers, markets, consumers, firms, and governments into forms more amenable to privatized profits and socialized losses.

• On-demand nursing promises to be even worse for everyone