But by participating in and advocating for an exploitative system, that’s what you’re doing. Your actions in this world have consequences for others - we are not individualized so much that we can do whatever we want in the world and NOT impact those around us. So, YOU are the one who is forcing others into insecure labor by ignoring the reality that many people who work for uber who don’t agree with you. If YOU want to continue that relationship with Uber, that’s YOUR choice, but you are here arguing that it should not change or that everyone else should just take the same deal, no matter what their actual circumstances are because “choices”. Rather than there should be choices in how people’s relationship to uber should work. You’re saying that the status quo is fine and should be the only choice, rather than understanding that your circumstances might be very different than other peoples.
I can. There is plenty of exploitation this modern work environment, across the board. In all fields. Lower wage, “independent” contracting is becoming the norm in a surprisingly large number of fields… There is giving people weekly shifts that are just under the limit for full time, in order to deny them benefits which they need. There are millions of undocumented workers who are incredibly vulnerable to all kinds of abuse, from withholding pay to sexual assault and physical abuse. Or contract workers who have to keep working faster for Amazon, so they wear diapers on the line. To working class retirees who move around the country following work. Or the millions of people who can’t retire because they had shitty 401ks that were constantly being hit with a tanking market. Don’t get me started on the adjunct problem in academia, people who have advanced degrees in their fields and end up working in insecure jobs at 3 or 4 college campuses (again, often with no benefits) and STILL can’t make ends meet.
This shift to the gig economy has had disastrous consequences for millions of Americans who are about a paycheck away from homelessness. They have no security, often not through choices of their own, but because their communities have been gutted via the runaway factory syndrome, and the only jobs left are Wal Mart, McDonalds, or gig economy jobs - none of which you can support a family on and STILL do the necessary work of raising a family.
When we talk about FULL employment in our economy, we constantly gloss over the nature of the work that people do.
This is patently untrue. A tiny percentage of private workers are unionized, in all fields. The largest unionized sector is the public sector, by huge margins. The Teamsters, for example ONLY represent something like 75,000 people in freight. Labor board’s numbers for unionization in the US:
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/union2.pdf
Even if truck drivers are more unionized, that is still a tiny fraction of drivers who are unionized.
Not all of them have the same choices. YOU may have choices, but plenty of others have a choice between a low paying job in the service sector or something like uber, and they make the choice for uber, because it’s more flexible… or they do both. We should work to ensure that the workers with the least options have security and access to a living wage. If uber can’t pay drivers a living wage and offer them benefits, then they should not be in business. If uber couldn’t pay their programmers or couldn’t pay their rent for their offices, or couldn’t afford computers for their office workers, or for whatever else they need to do business, we’d rightly call that a FAILED business. Labor, like every other aspect of a business has a cost, and given that we’re talking about human beings, with real needs, why should that aspect of a business be constantly cut over others? Maybe the CEO can take a fucking pay cut instead of the people who make the business profitable - the people who do the actual labor.
