Nursing and other healthcare jobs are becoming gig work — like driving or delivering food for Uber — making the jobs more miserable and low-paying, writes Cory Doctorow.
The platforms collude with lawmakers and regulators who are in the pockets of investors.
It’s part of a larger economic trend: “From fintech to price-fixing to gig-work, the entire industry runs on the very stupid proposition that ‘it’s not a crime if we do it with an app.‘”
Cory: “Sometime in this century, our political class and our financial class arrived at a consensus that Douglas Rushkoff describes as ‘go meta,’ in his 2022 book _Survival of the Richest_:
pluralistic.net/2022/09/1…
“The ‘go meta’ ethos insists that the most important, smartest and most valuable move is always _away_ from productive labor. Don’t drive a cab: go meta and own a medallion that you rent to a cab driver. Don’t own a medallion, go meta and start a gig-work ride-hailing company. Don’t start a gig-work ride-hailing company, go meta and _invest_ in a gig-work ride-hailing company. Don’t invest in a gig-work ride-hailing company, go meta and buy _options_ in a gig-work ride-hailing company – and so on and so on, into ever more abstracted forms of gambling and rent-collection.”
I’ve been saying this for years: It often seems that the only way to succeed is not to do work that produces value, like a nurse. It’s not even to own property, like a 19th Century robber-baron that owned factories and railroads that produced value. The only way to succeed is to move money around. That’s a bad way to run a society, and it results in riots and blood in the streets when the workers get desperate enough.
i’ve read some literature that points out two major evils of the system: 1) the gig nurses actually get paid a little bit MORE than regular nurses for having more flexibility, which demoralizes nurses who stay put; 2) the fact that there’s incentive to become a vagrant nurse means nurses can’t get used to a single hospital’s way of doing things, including their emergency operations plans or even just “hey what do we do if we run out of amoxicillin?” this is insanely dangerous on all fronts. we are walking back not just worker protections but public health safeguards developed over decades of crisis management research. it’s all coming unraveled because of corporate greed.
Text I received yesterday:
