If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
"Minimum wage" is one of those odd concepts that seems to have an intuitive definition, but the harder you think about it, the more complicated it gets. For example, if you want to work, but can't find a job, then the minimum wage you'll get is zero:
That's why politicians like Avi Lewis (who is running for leader of Canada's New Democratic Party) has call for a jobs guarantee: a government guarantee of a good job at a socially inclusive wage for everyone who wants one:
(Disclosure: I have advised the Lewis campaign on technical issues and I have endorsed his candidacy.)
If that sounds Utopian or Communist to you (or both), consider this: it was the American jobs guarantee that delivered the America's system of national parks, among many other achievements:
The idea of a wage for everyone who wants a job is just one interesting question raised by the concept of a "minimum wage." Even when we're talking about people who have wages, the idea of a "minimum wage" is anything but straightforward.
Take gig workers: the rise of Uber and its successors created an ever-expanding class of workers who are misclassified as independent contractors by employers, seeking to evade unionization, benefits and liability. It's a weird kind of "independent contractor" who gets punished for saying no to lowball offers, has to decorate their personal clothes and/or cars in their "client's" livery, and who has every movement scripted by an app controlled by their "client":
The pretext that a worker is actually a standalone small business confers another great advantage on their employers: it's a great boon to any boss who wants to steal their worker's wages. I'm not talking about stealing tips here (though gig-work platforms do steal tips, like crazy):
I'm talking about how gig-work platforms define their workers' wages in the first place. This is a very salient definition in public policy debates. Gig platforms facing regulation or investigation routinely claim that their workers are paid sky-high wages. During the debate over California's Prop 22 (in which Uber and Lyft spent more than $225m to formalize worker misclassification), gig companies agreed to all kinds of reasonable-sounding wage guarantees:
When Toronto was grappling with the brutal effect that gig-work taxis have on the city's world-beatingly bad traffic, Uber promised to pay its drivers "120% of the minimum wage," which would come out to $21.12 per hour. However, the real wage Uber was proposing to pay its drivers came out to about $2.50 per hour:
How to explain the difference? Well, Uber – and its gig-work competitors – only pay drivers while they have a passenger – or an item – in the car. Drivers are not paid for the time they spend waiting for a job or the time they spend getting to the job. This is the majority of time that a gig driver spends working for the platform, and by excluding the majority of time a driver is on the clock, the company can claim to pay a generous wage while actually paying peanuts.
Now, at this phase, you may be thinking that this is only fair, or at least traditional. Livery cab drivers don't get paid unless they have a fare in the cab, right?
That's true, but livery cab drivers have lots of ways to influence that number. They can shrewdly choose a good spot to cruise. They can give their cellphone numbers to riders they've established a rapport with in order to win advance bookings. In small towns with just a few drivers – or in cities where drivers are in a co-op – they can spend some of their earnings to advertise the taxi company. Livery drivers can offer discounts to riders going a long way. It's a tough job, but it's one in which workers have some agency.
Contrast that with driving for Uber: Uber decides which drivers get to even see a job. Uber decides how to market its services. Uber gets to set fares, on a per-passenger basis, meaning that it might choose to scare some passengers off of a few of their rides with high prices, in a bid to psychologically nudge that passenger into accepting higher fares overall.
At the same time, Uber is reliant on a minimum pool of drivers cruising the streets, on the clock but off the payroll. If riders had to wait 45 minutes to get an Uber, they'd make other arrangements. If it happened too often, they'd delete the app. So Uber can't survive without those cruising, unpaid drivers, who provide the capacity that make the company commercially viable.
What's more, livery cab drivers aren't the only comparators for gig-work platforms. Many gig workers deliver food, meaning that we should compare them to, say, pizza delivery drivers. These drivers aren't just paid when they have a pizza in the car and they're driving to a customer's home. They're paid from the moment they clock onto their shift to the moment they clock off (plus tips).
Now, obviously, this is more expensive for employers, but the Uber Eats arrangement – in which drivers are only paid when they've got a pizza in the car and they're en route to a customer – doesn't eliminate that expense. When a gig delivery company takes away the pay that drivers used to get while waiting for a pizza, they're shifting this expense from employers to workers:
The fact that Uber can manipulate the concept of a minimum wage in order to claim to pay $21.12/hour to drivers who are making $2.50 per hour creates all kinds of policy distortions.
Take Seattle: in 2024, the city implemented a program called "PayUp" that sets a "minimum wage" for drivers, but it's not a real minimum wage. It's a minimum payment for every ride or delivery.
A new National Bureau of Economic Research paper analyzes the program and concludes that it hasn't increased drivers' pay at all:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w34545
To which we might say, "Duh." Cranking up the sum paid for a small fraction of the work you do for a company will have very little impact on the overall wage you receive from the company.
However, there is an interesting wrinkle in this paper's conclusions. Drivers aren't earning less under this system, either. So they're getting paid more for every delivery, but they're not adding more deliveries to their day. In other words, they're doing less work and then clocking off:
A neoclassical economist (someone who has experienced a specific form of neurological injury that makes you incapable of perceiving or reasoning about power) would say that this means that the drivers only desire to earn the sums they were earning before the "minimum wage" and so the program hasn't made a difference to their lives.
But anyone else can look at this situation and understand that drivers only did this shitty job out of desperation. They had a sum they needed to get every month in order to pay the rent or the grocery bill. They have lots of needs besides those that they would like to fulfill, but not under the shitty gig-work app conditions. The only reason they tolerate a shitty app as their shitty boss at all is that they are desperate, and that desperation gives gig companies power over their workers.
In other words, Seattle's PayUp "minimum wage" has shifted some of the expense associated with operating a gig platform from workers back onto their bosses. With fewer drivers available on the app, waiting times for customers will necessarily go up. Some of those customers will take the bus, or get a livery cab, or defrost a pizza, or walk to the corner cafe. For the gig platforms to win those customers back, they will have to reduce waiting times, and the most reliable way to do that is to increase the wages paid to their workers.
So PayUp isn't a wash – it has changed the distributional outcome of the gig-work economy in Seattle. Drivers have clawed back a surplus – time they can spend doing more productive or pleasant things than cruising and waiting for a booking – from their bosses, who now must face lower profits, either from a loss of business from impatient customers, or from a higher wage they must pay to get those wait-times down again.
But if you want to really move the needle on gig workers' wages, the answer is simple: pay workers for all the hours they put in for their bosses, not just the ones where bosses decide they deserve to get paid for.
One thing I love about tumblr is, here bloggers try their best to spread news about all the shits that keep happening around the globe (BLM, Yemen crisis, Phillippines Anti Terrorist Bill, Polish LGBT education ban just to name a few).
These encouraged me to draw attention to news that have been circulating on Instagram but surprisingly found no one to talk about it here in tumblr. The matter itself is alarming and I feel we should be more vocal about it. For your reference I attached some Instagram links which contain the details, go ahead and check them out.
To give you the picture of this whole shenanigans of global fashion brands that are threatened by this campaign and collective rage of angry hashtags, western brands such as Kohl's, ASOS have canceled product orders from their Asian (Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Cambodia, Vietnam etc) suppliers. Not only that, these brands (Gap, Arcadia, Primark, Walmart, Fashion Nova, Kendall + Kylie etc, you can find the whole list in venetialamanna's instagram post) are refusing to pay for the in-process goods which is resulting in forced shut down of factories. A major portion of these unemployed workers are women often having no government protection, are even forced to work at rates below living standards (see giving fashion for more details). It's just an irony how Kylie Jenner posted her support for BLM on her social media but her companies are refusing to pay the workers in Bangladesh (where most of the workers are brown women). Not only that, she even went on her way to delete those comments where people used the #PayUp hastag and called her and her sister out. Like bitch, what matters most to you is being a billionaire where you don't give a fuck about the workers whom you're depriving of their rights?
FUCK YOU Kendall + Kylie!
FUCK YOU Cardie B, Diddy, celebrities, fast fashion brands who've bloods on your clothing lines.
Wanna hear a joke? A lot of these brands are even giving sales on their clothes where behind the scene they've millions of dollars yet to pay up and for them people are starving.
This is a small blog but I will request you to spread the words. Please try-
Use the hastag #PayUp on your socials, email the brands, flood them with hashtags
Sign the petition
if you're on instagram follow Who Made Your Cloth, ReMake, Clean Clothes Campaign to stay updated.
Support Remake, CleanClothesCampaign, Labor behind the labels, Asia Floor Wage Alliance, Garments Worker Center, One Billion Rising, Pull Up for Change.
Donate to garments workers and their unions
DO NOT SUPPORT the companies that are sucking the labor force and not treating the employees fairly.
PayUp is one of the most successful labor rights campaigns in the fashion industry in modern times.
In order to offset the financial losses of the pandemic, executives had made a swift and nearly universal decision: They were going to steal $40 billion from their most vulnerable workers.
“This wasn’t theoretical money,” said Elizabeth L. Cline, who works with the consumer activist nonprofit Remake. “This was garment workers not being paid for work already done, which is slavery.”
With her new song, "Sugar Baby" -- released at 12.01 on 2.12.21 -- @tatianalimamusic makes her debut on the @alivewithclivetvshow playlist on @spotify discussed in the Blog post at https://alivewithclive.tv/spotify_playlist
Spool Feathers Here: I'm about to put the finishing touches on the Go Fund Me, but before I do, I'll be running a small giveaway for a cause that is the very heart of the Spool Feathers mission statement.
Of the 74 million some garment workers worldwide, it's estimated 80% are Women of Color. Standing with garment workers, in the US and abroad is an important part of the fight for racial equity in the face of Fast Fashion brands. (Faces that are overwhelmingly white, skinny and cis-gender.) #PayUp is a campaign that aims to ensure that garment workers are paid, as many, many Fast Fashion brands have canceled orders that have ALREADY BEEN FUFILLED by factories here and abroad. The clothes are made, the work has been done, but the workers remain unpaid-- this CANNOT stand.
Fast fashion has profited on the labor of women of color since the earliest days of colonialism, and that it continues to this day is unacceptable. By making Fast Fashion last well beyond it's 'sell by' date, Spool Feathers is determined to do its part in lessening the exploitative hold it has on garment workers.
To put my money (and time) where my mouth is, two weeks from now, that's June 25th I'll be giving three of my followers who send me proof that they've asked Fast Fashion to #PayUp one free alteration to one (1) garment of their choice!
Proof of entry are twitter screen caps, signing one of the petitions, or donating. REBLOGGING THIS POST IS NOT AN ENTRY. The only entries that count will be proof that you've partisipated in the #PayUp campaign, which can be either reblogged to this post or sent to the shop email: raesoflight @protonmail.com
