St. Louis Magazine – July 2019

(Wang) #1

 stlmag.com^ July 2019


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TECHNOLOGY’S CHANGING SO FAST, THE LEGAL SYSTEM
IS RACING TO CATCH UP.


BY JEANNETTE COOPERMAN



  • WHIRLING GIGS -
    Saint Louis University law professor
    Miriam Cherry spent last year at the
    United Nations, probing the ethical
    challenges of tech-based multinational
    crowdwork—in other words, anything
    “done by a large group of people on open
    call on a tech platform.” If I’d hired some-
    body in Mumbai to transcribe the tape
    of this interview, it would be considered
    crowdwork, which has become a huge
    part of the gig economy.
    Decades ago, such workers’ coun-
    terparts might have been day laborers
    sitting around waiting for a big job or
    women at home doing piecework. Today,
    some argue, its tech platform makes
    crowdwork entirely different from those
    earlier forms, but Cherry sees many of
    the same opportunities for exploitation.
    Since the Industrial Revolution, labor
    and employment laws have layered in
    protections for the worker—but these
    protections are all predicated on a steady
    job in a physical workplace. What hap-
    pens when people are trying to cobble
    together a living working long hours
    at one or two or three flexible jobs and
    they’re injured or need benefits? “A judge
    in Italy said these workers are definitely
    independent contractors,” says Cherry,
    “because the worker gets to decide when
    he or she works. The U.K. said, ‘Hey, they
    look to us more like employees.’ Belgium
    says they are employees.”


Here, the response has generally been
“You’re an independent contractor;
you’re on your own.” And in civil suits
that could’ve resolved this issue for all
of us, companies (among them Uber and
Lyft) have settled out of court instead.
Nor are these employers willing to turn
over HR data—they say it has value to
them; they could sell this information. So
it’s anybody’s guess how the gig economy
is affecting the U.S. unemployment rate
and other economic measures.
One thing’s sure, Cherry says: “Crowd-
work doesn’t map that well onto the old
system.” Gig labor is the new Wild West.


  • FUNNY MONEY -
    First money was gold, then green, then
    invisible. Now it’s sometimes cryptocur-
    rency—Bitcoin and the like—and the law
    must respond. “The big change will not
    necessarily be with Bitcoin and other dig-
    ital transactions,” says Michael Kahn,
    senior counsel at Capes Sokol, “but with
    the concept on which it’s all based: block-
    chain technology.”
    Kahn explains blockchain as “an open
    ledger of information that can be used to
    record and track any sort of transaction,”
    not just cryptocurrencies. “A global net-
    work of computers is creating this public
    ledger, a database in which every trans-
    action can be traced.” The technology’s
    brilliant, he says, and its potential uses
    are only now becoming apparent. “It’s

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