22 | New Scientist | 21 September 2019
I
T STARTED with a rumour.
“Don’t use the DoorDash app
to tip your driver,” a friend
told me. “The company steals tips.
You have to pay the driver directly,
in cash.” Sure enough, a few days
later the story broke: DoorDash,
the food delivery app, was using
tips to cover drivers’ guaranteed
base rate of $10 per delivery.
If I tipped my driver $10 via
the app, DoorDash would use
that money to cover her base
pay and she would get no tip.
If I tipped her in cash, she would
get her $10 base from DoorDash,
plus the tip she had earned.
Drivers were rightly incensed.
But there was nothing they could
do. Like drivers at Uber and Lyft,
these gig workers had been hired
as independent contractors – and
that meant no worker protections
under US federal and state law.
Now that is about to change.
Thanks to a law that has just
passed in California, known
as Assembly Bill 5, many gig
workers will be reclassified as
employees, making them entitled
to benefits, legal protections
and the right to unionise.
This is what it sounds like
when the future arrives. You
were expecting disco, but you
got punk rock. For over a decade,
gig economy companies have
been promising that they would
launch us into an age of smooth,
post-scarcity goodness, where
everyone could do the work they
wanted to do, when they felt like it.
All thanks to apps and algorithms
that help workers find customers
who want to pay them.
But when the rubber met
the road, it turned out that the
algorithms didn’t assign people
enough work to survive. And
then companies tried to squeeze
even more money out of their
gig workers, with things like
DoorDash’s tip-keeping practice.When workers complained,
companies pointed to barely
comprehensible “arbitration
clauses” in the click-through
employment agreements that
their drivers had signed. These
arbitration clauses meant all
problems had to be resolved
privately, between worker and
company, without lawyers or
union representatives.
Assembly Bill 5 has taken away
those arbitration clauses too.
Uber has already vowed to fight
the law. Its lawyers claim that the
company’s primary enterprise is
“technology”, not transportation.
Its drivers are therefore peripheralto its business, and not entitled
to employee status. Uber’s
representatives also claim
that if drivers go full time,
everything will suck because
employees have to work set
hours in limited locations.
These are mind-boggling
assertions. First, Uber is literally
nothing but drivers. Take them
away, and the app is useless.
Second, the Uber app is incredibly
sophisticated, capable of
coordinating millions of requests
and routes and fare changes.
But it is somehow too hard for
Uber engineers to figure out how
to assign flexible full-time hours
to drivers in multiple locations?Luckily, we can do more than
merely pose snarky questions
about Uber’s intentions. We
can sue them. Under Assembly
Bill 5, the state and cities have
the right to sue businesses that
incorrectly classify employees
as contractors. That is what
California is likely to do.
The whole scenario is a
reminder that technological
change doesn’t always lead us
towards a more futuristic culture.
Sometimes, it leads us back to
the Victorian era, when workers
had no recourse to justice even
when newfangled factory
machines kept eating their arms
and fingers. As we career into the
next decade, this contradiction is
likely to become more obvious.
And we are having to call on a
very old-fashioned system, the
law, to prevent the 21st century
from turning into a Charles
Dickens novel.
Gig work has spawned a new
generation of union organisers
and labour lawyers. And their
movement is bleeding into the
upper echelons of the tech
industry, too. Google’s employees
have staged walkouts to protest
pay inequities, and Amazon is
so worried about unionisation
that it has created anti-labour
educational videos for managers.
Even friendly crowdfunding
site Kickstarter just fired two
employees who were trying to
organise a union. I’m pretty sure
this isn’t the future that DoorDash
and Uber’s funders were promised
when they poured billions of
dollars into gig apps.
Technology rarely leads to the
social changes you might expect.
Even our shiny new phones and
brilliant apps are mired in
conflicts that go back centuries.
Maybe the best way to predict
what’s next is to pay attention
GADO IMAGES / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO to what came before. ❚This column appears
monthly. Up next week:
James Wong“ If I tipped my driver
via the app, DoorDash
would use that money
for her pay and she
would get no tip”Your job has been cancelled Gig workers in California will fight
employers the old fashioned way – with laws. By Annalee NewitzThis changes everything
What I’m reading
Gideon the Ninth by
Tamsyn Muir, which
features necromancers
in space!What I’m watching
Tigers Are Not Afraid,
a cinematic fairy tale
about the ghosts of drug
war victims in Mexico.What I’m working on
Programming my
coffee table.Annalee’s week
Annalee Newitz is a science
journalist and author. Her
novel Autonomous won
the Lambda Literary Award
and she is the co-host
of the Hugo-nominated
podcast Our Opinions Are
Correct. You can follow her
@annaleen and her website
is techsploitation.comViews Columnist