“If technologies are not developed with the user in mind, they often fail,” said Lisa Kresge, a research and policy associate at the University of California Berkeley Labor Center, who has written about union responses to technology.
The pandemic temporarily paused the trend toward more strikes, but workers’ anger continued to rise as they dealt with the dangerous work environments and staffing problems that the pandemic caused. “I think all of this is boiling over now,” McAlevey told me.
Strikes with strong backing from union membership “are the only way to win standard-setting contracts, and winning standard-setting contracts is the only way to rebuild the labor movement,” said Jane McAlevey, a scholar and longtime organizer. Her coming book, “Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations,” documents the importance of aggressive labor actions in improving pay and working conditions.
Opponents of the ballot measure note that drivers would be compensated at that rate only while completing a task and not while waiting for their next rider. Factoring in that lag time, one study has estimated drivers could make only $5 to $7 per hour.
“People used to say, ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ It’s the base, stupid, in my argument,” McAlevey says, emphasizing the need for unions and large organizations like the A.F.L.-C.I.O. to learn from Amazon and focus on bringing more workers into the fold.
Ms. McAlevey also questioned an approach she called “mobilization,” in which the union takes on an employer primarily through the efforts of a professional staff, consultants and a cadre of activists rather than a large group of rank-and-file workers. “The staffers see themselves, not ordinary people, as the key agents of change,” she wrote.
Professional union strategists, such as Jane McAlevey, often argue that successful union campaigns require visits to workers’ homes so that conversations can be had without employer supervision. They also stress the need to persuade a supermajority of workers — typically 70 percent or more — to sign authorization cards, which often function as a preliminary statement of interest in union membership before an official election.
Nearly two-thirds of undocumented immigrants in California who are younger than 65 lack health insurance, compared with less than 10 percent of all Californians in that age range, according to a recent analysis from the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California, Berkeley.
The technology needed to fulfill orders is costly for stores, and the workers who pick items off the shelves often feel the pressure of being tracked.
When the pandemic settled in, many drivers realized they had no safety net, as rides slowed to a trickle and they were made to appeal to the federal or state government for unemployment benefits, funds that gig companies don’t pay into. (By one estimate, Uber and Lyft saved more than $400 million in California alone over a five-year period by eschewing the payments.)
A study by three research groups at the University of California at Berkeley found that Uber and Lyft drivers would be guaranteed only an estimated $5.64 per hour. This no doubt would have surprised 40 percent of those in a survey of early voters who said they had supported Proposition 22 to ensure workers earned livable wages.
It seems that these companies would sooner destroy their own businesses than grant workers the dignity of comprehensive benefits, guaranteed wages or unemployment insurance. Rejecting Prop 22 is a chance finally to ensure gig workers the protections all workers deserve.
A recent report by the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and the nonprofit Working Partnerships USA predicted that workers would come under new pressure as stores began to resemble Amazon warehouses, and noted that “stock clerks’ jobs seem destined for more radical change than any of the other major retail job categories.”
Warehouse workers are more likely to toil in dangerous conditions that put them at greater risk of infection. A recent report from the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley, found that, nationwide, Latino and Black workers were far overrepresented in warehouse jobs.
Many gig-based business models help customers take advantage of workers. Let’s stop giving tech companies a free ride.
The focus on the gig economy has obscured the more widespread impact of the new law in traditional businesses where workers — like the delivery drivers who sued in 2005 — have been misclassified for years.
