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accept less money to get away from some of the nasty firms they were working for. But it’s [the algorithm] become a bit of a monster of its own.’
In the ‘gig’ economy, whoever controls the algorithm controls what is inputted into it. This seems obvious when put like this. But tech utopians were essentially asking those of us who were managed by algorithms to accept them as neutral entities, when in reality they were the creations of those with their own distinct interests – interests very often antagonistic to the interests of those who requested work from the apps.
However, the important point to note is that there is no way of knowing whether the algorithm is discriminating based on ratings, revenue earned or how long a driver has been online.
Indeed, some of the drivers I chatted to at Heathrow’s Authorised Vehicle Area (AVA) told me they were happy enough driving with Uber.
‘Uber, what they’ve done is they’ve got the customer [so] used to this cheap, cheap service that when it’s surging, they think they’re being extortion [sic],’ said Aman. And for that, he said, they ‘blame the drivers’.
Another thing that cropped up in conversations with drivers was a sense that falling fares were fostering disrespectful attitudes. Drivers felt they were viewed almost as a servant class who existed for entitled Londoners to order around.
Aman believed the lack of respect for drivers has something to do with the dwindling amount that customers expected to pay when they hailed an Uber.
Many drivers didn’t like POOL (every driver I spoke to hated it) because of the potential it generated for antagonisms erupting in the back of your car when total strangers were brought together, often in a drunken state. But also because the fare was potentially lower for drivers than an average fare with UberX.
Uber and the rest of the ‘gig’ economy: the grim atomisation of it
Some of the big London courier firms were also offloading a large portion of business risk onto their contractors. One way in which they effectively did this was by ‘flooding the circuits’ to ensure a cyclist was in the right place when a customer placed an order.
‘There’s so many times I’ve heard that people have been threatened with [being] sacked for turning down work or actually getting sacked for turning down work ... The whole thing seems weird to me because the very idea of getting sacked ... I mean, I’m self-employed!’
Shu told BuzzFeed News that Deliveroo ‘would like to offer more entitlements and security’, but that if they offered those things then the flexibility that allowed riders to decide their own hours would be lost. ‘It’s as simple as that,’ he added confidently.
I did not grow up as far away from a dreary future of running up and down warehouses as I might have liked. I too could have ended up with a precarious job as my only source of income, and I understood even before sitting down to write this book not only how easy it would have been to become trapped in that world, but also how the superiority of those who stood a few rungs above was often illusory. The ‘talent’ upon which one’s social superiority rests is often little more than the confidence to say, ‘I think I’d be rather good at it’, to paraphrase the former Prime Minister David Cameron.
I had for a while carried around with me the vague feeling that disquiet over immigration was a class issue; typically, that of an ill-educated working class that was set against moving with the times. This is a very middle-class sort of prejudice
It would be far better if, instead of doing this, the left was simply honest with people as to the challenges that immigration can sometimes bring with it. It is perfectly possible to do that and make the argument that there are better ways of dealing with it than border controls. Instead, it has become fashionable to treat people as fools, and pretend that it makes no difference if ten people are chasing every job and if nine of them are from some poor Eastern European country.
A different approach is also sometimes required to unionise people who only intend to stay in the country a few months at a time.
it is not seen as wrong that a child who fails the 11-Plus exam should have to spend a lifetime doing soul-destroying work; rather, the tragedy is that it should happen to the wrong child. Woe betide if a ‘bright but poor child’ should slip through the net, so to speak. One can do what one likes with the other lot.
In practice, making the FTSE 100 representative – let’s say by appointing chief execs who come from council estates – would do very little for the people on minimum wage labouring away in the post-room or cleaning the floors. Tuning up elites is a quite different thing to abolishing them altogether, even if it is an improvement on what went before.
There was always a section of the left that viewed the working class in purely instrumental terms. They were a weapon to be wielded against the bourgeoisie rather than human beings who required liberation.
The deserving poor are over there – in Cuba, in Palestine, or in another exotic-seeming land.
