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Ten years in, and gig economy platforms are continuing to grow exponentially. They have upended once-stable markets.
Disruption creates instability, and workers now need "personal branding" to get high ratings, "hustle culture" to justify working antisocial hours or under minimum wage and there's no union when all the workers are competing with each other for rides.
By 2017, a mere six years after entering New York, Uber’s drivers ferried more passengers than the city’s yellow taxis.
Is that Uber's success or the failure of the incumbents? Did cities with different policies (such as existing in-advance ride-hailing providers) see similar disruption or was Uber just mopping up untapped demand?
digital piecework might have increased the international workforce by as much as 2 per cent.
Big assumption here that Uber/Lyft drivers weren't already drivers as many in the UK were. Same job, different conditions.
Many labour markets are inefficient. Demand for a particular type of work goes unmet, perhaps because it is hard for employers to find workers or vice versa. Or perhaps there are middlemen taking an unfairly large piece of the pie.
(citation needed)
The platform UpWork is a great example of how the gig economy can help workers access the global economy, often in part-time roles. I’ve personally used the platform to hire developers from Egypt, Bulgaria, Pakistan and Colombia, a sound editor from Croatia, and designers from India – all in part-time roles.
And this kind of work (see also 4-hour work week) is exactly where OpenAI, Google and the companies using their apis are targeting.
A gig worker can work when they want rather than under the permanent subordination of an employment contract.
If this was the case, why would prices change with demand? You work when the money wants or you won't break even (and even then you might not)
The gig econony is an externality engine. People who have to make rent don't have time to fight the system.
Yet there is evidence that all is not rosy for workers on digital labour platforms, especially in advanced economies. Pay is often poor compared to traditional work; working patterns can be precarious, offering few protections should a worker get sick. The platforms themselves can make unilateral changes about how they operate and what they pay. Many companies maintain internal scores about workers on their platforms, which might affect what jobs they are offered. And equally, unions or other collective arrangements are uncommon among the independent workers on gig platforms
And there is the kicker
The British government’s survey from 2018 concluded that nearly two-fifths of gig workers earned less than the equivalent of £8.44 per hour, only a little over the British national minimum wage.
Platform workers in Germany make 29 per cent less than the local statutory minimum wage, while workers in France make 54 per cent less than its minimum wage.57 Because gig workers often have to meet their own expenses – repairs, fuel, even uniforms – take-home pay can get squeezed.
In 2019, researchers found that American workers for DoorDash, a food delivery service, made $1.45 an hour after expenses, or about a fifth of the then national minimum federal wage.58 (If you are using a gig-based delivery service, it might be worth tipping handsomely.)
The system is fucked, the users should fix it, not the owners.
judges concluded that the drivers were not self-employed entrepreneurs in any sense of the word. Uber controlled all aspects of their work, including the number of trips they received, the price of their service, and even the communication between driver and passenger.
part, these teething problems are down to an exponential gap – between new modes of employment enabled by exponential technologies, and a set of labour laws designed in the twentieth century.
So the solution is to re-fight all the battles of the 19th and 20th century so that workers can again have the stability and income to live and raise a family?
And we wonder why the birth rate is falling and "noone wants to work"
To boost productivity, he preached, managers should measure everything, link pay and bonuses to performance, and break complex tasks into simpler ones.
Improve performance by removing enough slack that all failures are catastrophic . Just ask Boeing
It was in the run-up to the dot-com boom that companies started to care about their employees. Gone were grey cubicles, vending machines and fluorescent lights. In came bean bags, free lunches and craft beer.
Appeared to care.
In return they got workers who spent more time in the office and more dependent on their company and less likely to leave. It is hard to get someone to accept the truth when their job depends on them not accepting it.
unlimited time off
The biggest con of the lot. European countries have minimum leave requirements for a reason.
oocyte freezing – a procedure young women can undergo to freeze their eggs, to delay having children – had become a perk some technology firms provided to their employees. And not only technology firms: Goldman Sachs offers to cover its employees’ fertility treatments and egg freezing up to $20,000.
And why would companies want to delay their employee's childraising years?
Google, meanwhile, was a pioneer of unusually generous death benefits – if a Google employee dies, the company gives their surviving partner 50 per cent of their salary for a decade after their death – which is unusual even by Exponential Age standards.
That's a lot of value Google extracted from Labour
Unilever used AI to save ‘100,000 hours of interviewing time and roughly $1m in recruiting costs each year’ by delegating job interviews to video analysis software.
Just use AI trained on that software to deepfake the interview for you then. If they don't care, why should you?
This system of management works like Taylorism on steroids – with all the dehumanising downsides but without the commensurate high pay or job stability. One Amazon worker’s claim, reported in The Guardian, that the company leaders ‘care more about the robots than they care about the employees’ encapsulates one of the oldest criticisms of scientific management.
well-educated and lucky can thrive. Those who aren’t might find themselves trapped in an increasingly punitive workplace.
The panopticon however raises its view higher up the chain, whilst those on top seek ever greater privacy protection.
We aren’t on the verge of a jobless future, but we are perhaps looking at a future in which – if we aren’t careful – work no longer serves the interests of society.
He's starting to get it
In 1947, workers received 65 per cent of the national income in America; by 2018, this had declined to 56.7 per cent. More than three-quarters of the decline since the end of World War Two occurred in the first two decades of the millennium. For decades, workers have been systematically getting a smaller share of the economic pie.
something surprising happened.
Surprising? Reagan and Thatcher happened and the free market and trickle down economics replaced the idea that those eho benefitted most had to pay their share, and the idea that a full time job should be sufficient to support a family.
high-tech, intangible economy, dominated by a handful of big firms. According to one study, more than two-thirds of the loss to workers results from the transition to intangibles and the growth of superstar firms.
Concentration of power
The average software engineer at Uber was paid $147,603 a year in 2020. Senior engineers with five or more years of experience might make three times that. On the flip side, there are Uber’s drivers. As we’ve seen, gig workers are often paid relatively little. Your typical driver will make $19.73 per hour before expenses, or $30,390 a year if they drive 40 hours a week.
As a software developer, are you ok for your salary to be augmented by transfer from the most precarious of your colleagues?
Those with high levels of education are compensated handsomely. At the same time, there remains a group of less well-rewarded, less highly skilled workers, who may not even be acknowledged as employees. In aggregate, the result is a reduced share of income that goes to employees. Middle-wage earners, who used to be the engine of Western economies, are evaporating.
Its a Brave New World where Alphas rule and everyone else is conditioned to be satisfied with their lot in life.
Between 1790 and 1840, wages of workers rose by a modest 12 per cent, while GDP per worker increased by more than half. It was not until the 1860s that ordinary people’s wages caught up with the gains of technology; and not until 1900 that they levelled up entirely. There was a century where workers lagged behind the gains; an uncomfortable century, even if it worked out in the end.82
Worked out in the end, after those workers and the bosses were long dead.
That means finding new ways to prevent bosses taking advantage of unfair power differentials – with employees being given greater autonomy over how they work. For workers increasingly managed by algorithmic systems, that might mean getting a chance to speak to a real person to seek redress when the algorithm has been unfair.
Workers should also be given more insight into the data that firms hold about them, and clearer explanations on how automated decisions are made.
This is part of GDPR, and a reason many products aren't available in Europe
It seems fatuous to point to TikTok as an example of how people can reskill
Although that is a core audience in China, where there's a lot more skills and a lot less eating laundry pods
Of course, TikTok alone will not reskill the economy – but it points to nascent forms of digital learning, the potential of which is only now being explored. Why shouldn’t we all be constantly educating ourselves via digital platforms?
Is it profitable for the company to promote learning?
Small-scale experiments in the US city of Stockton and Finland’s capital Helsinki have shown that people receiving UBI report increased wellbeing and lower levels of food distress. And when they lost their jobs, UBI recipients were nearly a third more likely to get back into work within a year, relative to those who were on more traditional forms of assistance.
Punishment beatings via welfare-to-work programs surprisingly don't improve morale
For one thing, employers need to invest much more in their workers’ development – so they can move into more skilled, better-remunerated roles as technology develops.
Should tax breaks for training be extended to encourage companies to invest in non-core skills and levelling up the workforce, and funding a new generation of coaches and teachers for the skills to work in what comes next?
For one thing, employers need to invest much more in their workers’ development – so they can move into more skilled, better-remunerated roles as technology develops.
Should companies fund that TikTok reskilling course?
In the US, the 1937 Battle of the Overpass – when angry Ford workers who were determined to form a union were beaten by Henry Ford’s security entourage – was a decisive moment, after which Ford agreed to sign a contract with the United Autoworkers Union and raise workers’ salaries.
Between 1979 and 1988, union membership declined 20 per cent, thanks to government policies
Note this was also the period where productivity growth started to outstrip wages but the author has chosen not to mention that or free market reforms when discussing the wage gap.
Yet collective action remains the best way to guarantee a workplace that is fair for employees. If we are to build an employment settlement that is dignified, flexible, secure and equitable, workers will need to get organised. Only unions can collectively bargain on behalf of workers. And unions are also better than individual workers at developing the expertise required to digest the complex technical issues emerging in a rapidly changing economy.
In West Virginia, where union membership rates hover at around 10.5 per cent,91 teachers looking to organise set up an invite-only Facebook group. Close to 70 per cent of the state’s 35,000 teachers joined, turning the group into a hub for discussion and coordination of major statewide strikes.92
Historically, food needed to be transported from rural farms to urban centres. But the new technology of urban farming means this need not be the case. With their smaller footprints, farms can be closer to the mouths they feed – sometimes even in the city they serve. Montreal’s 160,000-square-foot Lufa Farms greenhouse, the world’s largest, sits directly on top of a distribution warehouse.8 A tennis court is less than 3,000 square feet; Lufa would easily fit 50 of those. The proximity of Lufa to its consumers allows for fresher product, cultivated for nutrition. And many urban farms are
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Apart from the handful of nations with energy self-sufficiency, fossil fuels drive a large portion of world trade. They are so essential that the United States has kept an almost permanent military presence in the Persian Gulf to ensure the flow of crude oil continues unabated. But renewables have now put every nation on a path to energy independence. Once wind turbines are installed or a solar farm is deployed, they require few raw materials
The heart of "what if we make a better world first nothing"
This shift to renewable energy drastically reduces the amount of ‘stuff’ that needs to be carted around.
Sometimes second order effects are positive
Between 1999 and 2019, British GDP increased 75 per cent – yet the amount of electricity the economy uses has declined by 15 per cent. We literally create twice as much wealth for every kilowatt-hour of electrical energy we use.
Long may this trend continue
A $1,000 iPhone contains less than $400 in parts. The remaining three-fifths of its original sticker price are the intangibles – the design, the orchestration and the brand.14
This trend is in its infancy. The global market for 3D printing is tiny, only just nudging $10 billion per annum in 2019. Yet it is growing fast. And it is finding uses among demanding customers: those making components for cars and planes, for instance.
Consider the consequences of the collapse in oil prices during the 2020 Covid-19 recession. As plane flights were cancelled and a locked-down global population stopped refilling their cars, oil prices went into freefall.
3D printing will put downward pressure on the value of world trade. Analysts at the Dutch bank ING reckon it might eliminate up to 40 per cent of world imports by 2040.23
But we still need the raw materials, and cheaper for everyone could mean greater innovation.
Since 2019, when the US achieved energy sufficiency through its investments in fracking – a new method of extracting natural gas from bedrock – the country has been more willing to see chaos in petrostates the world over.
Less trade means less war. That's not what the WTO says 🤔
And it’s a familiar pattern in the Exponential Age: high-tech, rich economies thrive; others get left behind.
The future is not evenly distributed
Throughout human history, the majority of people lived in rural rather than urban communities. But from that day in 2007 onwards, more than half of us have been city-dwellers.
so, can the city sustain the agriculture and manufacturing required to keep the city running, or will we always need rural investment?
And yet we have consistently underestimated cities. They have largely been eclipsed in political terms – with power being held at a national level. Cities are neglected in the metrics and institutions we use to make sense of the world – gross national product, national populations, national languages, national anthems.
If we let cities run rampant, as London has in the UK, or Dublin in Ireland, the city itself becomes disconnected from the rest of the country. Unless, like Germany or USA, there are multiple cities big enough to share and wrestle power.
