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.
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