The Commodification of Labour
“[The] commodification of labor reflects a ‘seismic shift’ in the structure of the American economy in recent decades, as more businesses have found ways to operate outside the bounds of U.S. employment law. As former Obama labor official David Weil documented in his 2014 book, The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It, businesses have increasingly placed their workers at arm’s length, spinning the purchase of human labor—once a messy, worldly matter with attendant responsibilities—into something like a market transaction with a contractor (or an “entrepreneur,” as Postmates might put it). Businesses, under pressure from investors and enabled by technologies that allow them to monitor work from afar, are essentially trying to “have it both ways,” according to Weil: controlling work done on their behalf while evading the obligations that come with being an employer.”
“In the fragmented world of gig-economy work, effective regulation and workplace organizing form the two major avenues by which individual workers can protect themselves from the whims of management—or the algorithm. But the business models of companies like Uber and Postmates are organized, with uncommon brazenness, around the steady erosion of these bulwarks. Workers, organizers, and worker-allied policymakers are drumming up strategies to push back, but—stopgap measures to support struggling gig workers notwithstanding—the coronavirus crisis threatens to accelerate a race to the bottom.”
“Unemployment rates are skyrocketing. Absent a robust government response, desperate workers abound. And in the coming months, gig companies, already leveraging the crisis to recruit cheap labor, may well find that it’s a buyer’s market.”
The New Republic, April 8, 2020: “Gig-Working Through the Apocalypse:The app-based economy was already a race to the bottom. The pandemic raises the question of how much lower things can go,” by Andrew Schwartz
Harvard Business Review, March 24, 2017: “How to Make Employment Fair in an Age of Contracting and Temp Work,” by David Weil
From the Fissured Workplace website
Institute for New Economic Thinking, March 2020: Thoughts: Who’s Responsible Here? Establishing Legal Responsibility in the Fissured Workplace By Tanya Goldman and David Weil (53 pages, PDF)