When we talk about the abusive nature of gig work, there’s some obvious targets, like algorithmic wage discrimination, where two workers are paid different rates for the same job, in order to trick occasional gig-workers to give up their other sources of income and become entirely dependent on the app:
Then there’s the opacity — imagine if your boss refused to tell you how much you’ll get paid for a job until after you’ve completed it, claimed that this was done in order to “protect privacy” — and then threatened anyone who helped you figure out the true wage on offer:
Opacity is wage theft’s handmaiden: every gig worker producing content for a social media algorithm is subject to having their reach — and hence their pay — cut based on the unaccountable, inscrutable decisions of a content moderation system:
Making content for an algorithm is like having a boss that docks every paycheck because you broke rules that you are not allowed to know, because if you knew the rules, you’d figure out how to cheat without your boss catching you. Content moderation is the last place where security through obscurity is considered good practice:
When workers seize the means of computation, amazing things happen. In Indonesia, gig workers create and trade tuyul apps that let them unilaterally modify the way that their bosses’ systems see them — everything from GPS spoofing to accessibility mods:
So the tech and labor story isn’t wholly grim: there are lots of ways that tech can enhance labor struggles, letting workers collaborate and coordinate. Without digital systems, we wouldn’t have the Hot Strike Summer:
As the historic writer/actor strike shows us, the resurgent labor movement and the senescent forces of crapulent capitalism are locked in a death-struggle over not just what digital tools do, but who they do it for and who they do it to:
When it comes to the epic fight over who technology acts for and against, we need a diversity of tactics, backstopped by tech operated by and for its users — and by laws that protect workers and the public. That dynamic is in sharp focus in UNITE Here Local 11’s strike against Orange County’s Laguna Cliffs Marriott Resort & Spa.
The UNITE Here strike turns on the usual issues like a living wage (hotel staff are paid so little they have to rent rooming-house beds by the shift, paying for the right to sleep in a room for a few hours at a time, without any permanent accommodation). They’re also seeking health-care and pensions, so they can be healthy at work and retire after long service. Finally, they’re seeking their employer’s support for LA’s Responsible Hotels Ordinance, which would levy a tax on hotel rooms to help pay for hotel workers’ housing costs (a hotel worker who can’t afford a bed is the equivalent of a fast food worker who has to apply for food stamps):
But the Marriott — which is owned by the University of California and managed by Aimbridge Hospitality — has refused to bargain, walking out negotiations.
But the employer didn’t walk out over wages, benefits or support for a housing subsidy. They walked out when workers demanded that the scabs that the company was trying to hire to break the strike be given full time, union jobs.
These aren’t just any scabs, either. They’re predominantly Black workers who rely on the $700m Instawork app for gigs. These workers are being dispatched to cross the picket line without any warning that they’re being contracted as strikebreakers. When workers refuse the cross the picket and join the strike, Instawork cancels all their shifts and permanently blocks them from new jobs.
This is a new, technologically supercharged form of illegal strikebreaking. It’s one thing for a single boss to punish a worker who refuses to scab, but Instawork acts as a plausible-deniability filter for all the major employers in the region. Like the landlord apps that allow landlords to illegally fix rents by coordinating hikes, Instawork lets bosses illegally collude to rig wages by coordinating a blocklist of workers who refuse to scab:
The racial dimension is really important here: the Marriott has a longstanding de facto policy of refusing to hire Black workers, and whenever they are confronted with this, they insist that there are no qualified Black workers in the labor pool. But as soon as the predominantly Latino workforce struck, Marriott discovered a vast Black workforce that it could coerce into scabbing, in collusion with Instawork.
Now, all of this isn’t just sleazy, it’s illegal, a violation of Section 7 of the NLRB Act. Historically, that wouldn’t have mattered, because a string of presidents, R and D, have appointed useless do-nothing ghouls to run the NLRB. But the Biden admin, pushed by the party’s left wing, made a string of historic, excellent appointments, including NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who has set her sights on punishing gig work companies for flouting labor law:
UNITE HERE 11 has brought a case to the NLRB, charging the Instawork, the UC system, Marriott, and Aimbridge with violating labor law by blackmailing gig workers into crossing the picket line. The union is also asking the NLRB to punish the companies for failing to protect workers from violent retaliation from the wealthy hotel guests who have punched them and screamed epithets at them. The hotel has refused to identify these thug guests so that the workers they assaulted can swear out complaints against them.
Writing about the strike for Jacobin, Alex N Press tells the story of Thomas Bradley, a Black worker who was struck off all Instawork shifts for refusing to cross the picket line and joining it instead:
Bradley’s case is exhibit A in the UNITE HERE 11 case before the NLRB. He has a degree in culinary arts, but racial discrimination in the industry has kept him stuck in gig and temp jobs ever since he graduated, nearly a quarter century ago. Bradley lived out of his car, but that was repossessed while he slept in a hotel room that UNITE HERE 11 fundraised for him, leaving him homeless and bereft of all his worldly possessions.
With UNITE HERE 11’s help, Bradley’s secured a job at the downtown LA Westin Bonaventure Hotel & Suites, a hotel that has bargained with the workers. Bradley is using his newfound secure position to campaign among other Instawork workers to convince them not to cross picket lines. In these group chats, Jacobin saw workers worrying “that joining the strike would jeopardize their standing on the app.”
Today (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
[Image ID: An old photo of strikers before a struck factory, with tear-gas plumes rising above them. The image has been modified to add a Marriott sign to the factory, and the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' to the sky over the factory. The workers have been colorized to a yellow-green shade and the factory has been colorized to a sepia tone.]
First post-strike payday for MDRC employees today. Thinking about my bargaining unit siblings who sacrificed somewhere around $600 to be out on the picket lines for three days to make their point. There were years when that kind of loss would have wrecked me and I'm glad I could help support those in that situation now. But we shoulnd't have had to do it and that kind of loss shouldn't be as dire as it is. For anyone.
Management has offered to come back to the table (note that they have not offered to make us right on our long over-due year end raises), but they suggested we split the cost of expensive professional mediators instead of using the free ones the government offers. Guess why? So the shenanigans of their union busting lawyer have not stopped, and the sincerity is not really there. We'll see how they do at the table.
Let me reiterate that this is an organization who studies the best ways to lift people out of poverty. I love the smell of irony in the morning.
AFGE Charges Education Dept. With Trying To Bust Labor Union
Union’s ability to represent workers undermined by Secretary DeVos’ team
WASHINGTON – The American Federation of Government Employees has charged the Department of Education with violating federal labor law by throwing out the contract covering 3,900 federal employees and denying workers their legal right to representation.
AFGE filed an unfair labor practice charge with the Federal Labor Relations Authority on March 12, stating that the Education Department failed to negotiate and bargain in good faith over a new contract.
After months of anti-union proposals and hostile behavior at the bargaining table, Department of Education management told AFGE Council 252 President Claudette Young on Friday, March 9, that it would not negotiate and would instead implement its own terms. The so-called “collective bargaining agreement” referred to by management is an illegal management edict that guts employee rights, including those addressing workplace health and safety, telework, and alternative work schedules.
“The Education Department has imposed on its workers an illegal document that we had absolutely no bargaining over,” Young said. “Secretary Betsy DeVos and her management team are attempting to strip employees of their collective bargaining rights and kill the union.”
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ vendetta on public education has now taken stage within the Department of Education by gutting employees’ right to representation in the workplace, and interfering with AFGE’s legal obligation to represent employees by taking away representational time for union representatives. Education’s management edict subverts the statutory process established by Congress 40 years ago to facilitate the representation of all employees covered by a collective bargaining agreement, regardless of their decision to join or not join the union.
AFGE Council 252 represents 3,900 Department of Education employees across the country, all of whom will be adversely impacted by this new anti-union decree. The council is composed of 10 locals in the following regions: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington.
Joining the union is voluntary for workers, yet AFGE and other federal unions are required by law to represent everyone covered by the union contract – even if they choose not to join. For this reason, Congress provided representational time so that the union can carry out its legal duty of fair representation to all those who are covered by the contract, including those who choose not to pay dues. Removing access to this time is like asking the fire department to operate without firetrucks or a firehose.
DeVos’s new edict requires shop stewards and local union officers to use leave without pay to carry out their statutory representational duties – which include things like meeting with employees and managers to resolve workplace disputes, addressing issues of discrimination and retaliation, and effecting improvements in work processes. This edict is counterproductive and wrong. It’s bad for public employees, and it’s bad for public education.
“AFGE did not agree to these unilateral terms,” Young said. “AFGE is, and has been, eager to return to the table to negotiate a fair and just contract, which all employees deserve.”
Read more: Biggest Violations in DeVos’, Dept. of Ed. Management’s Edict
AFGE Charges Education Dept. With Trying To Bust Labor Union was originally published on NH LABOR NEWS
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