How do you get an exploited underclass to feel like a class of plucky entrepreneurs? In today’s gig economy, you bombard them with euphemisms.
Amazon warehouse workers are called ‘Associates’. When they are dismissed they are not sacked, fired or made redundant, but instead ‘released’. Budding Uber drivers are greeted during their ‘onboarding’ (hiring) by a hipster in jeans and t-shirt who talks in the language of a ubiquitous ‘hustle porn’ Instagram post that fetishises excessive overworking. Deliveroo couriers are referred to patronisingly as ‘Roos’ by management.
[su_unherd_related fttitle="More from this author" author="James Bloodworth"]https://staging.unherd.com/2018/07/why-we-cant-ignore-the-working-class-identity-crisis/[/su_unherd_related]
John Steinbeck said that socialism never took root in the United States because the American dream encouraged the poor to consider themselves not as a downtrodden proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Gig employers appear to be attempting to pull a similar trick on their employees – sorry, ‘partners’. “We’re here to make money. If your wheels aren’t turning, you aren’t earning”, I was told by an enthusiastic Uber employee when I drove for the company back in 2017.
I worked as a cab driver – or as an 'entrepreneur', if you are to believe Uber’s rhetoric – for around three months while researching my book Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain. I also interviewed my fellow drivers as well as couriers who worked for gig employers such as Deliveroo and CitySprint.
One thing that became strikingly apparent was the vast chasm between the rhetoric espoused by companies and the reality endured by those who worked for them. Despite being categorised as self-employed contractors – and as a consequence losing the right to sick pay, annual leave and the minimum wage – Uber tightly controlled much of what we did on the job. “You can’t pick and choose which jobs you do,” we were told during our induction.
There were even restrictions on the subjects we were allowed to talk about with the passengers in the back of the car. Politics, religion and sport were strictly off-limits. If an Uber driver’s customer service rating fell below 4.7 stars, they would be summoned into Uber’s headquarters for a dressing down and potentially ‘deactivated’ – another euphemism for losing your job.
We were induced to take up the job with Uber on the alluring basis of autonomy. “Always wanted to be your own boss and set your own times? This is your chance!” reads the marketing on Uber’s website. And there were positives about the Uber experience. We had the autonomy to log in and out of the Uber app at a time of our own choosing.
Moreover, the Uber algorithm was less capricious and tyrannical than a human line manager. At the very least, Uber’s algorithm was not going to stop you from earning enough to eat simply because it took a personal disliking to you.
[su_unherd_related fttitle="Suggested reading" author="Polly Mackenzie"]https://staging.unherd.com/2018/07/warehouse-work-neednt-worthless/[/su_unherd_related]
Uber isn’t the only company operating in the gig economy of course. Callum Cant's new book, Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy documents life as one of the food delivery company's 15,000 UK couriers. As of 2018, there were around five million self-employed people in the United Kingdom, many of whom work in the booming gig economy.
Cant’s book resembles my own in many ways, not least because the author unflinchingly documents the methods used by gig employers to keep workers impoverished and under tight control and supervision. Making consumers aware of what really goes on when they order a taxi or food is an important task. As Cant writes, the reality of the gig economy is an economic landscape where “the worker takes all the risk”, while the company he or she works for “get all the reward”.
In the case of platforms such as Uber and Deliveroo, workers shoulder the cost of doing the job – the car, the petrol, the cost of time taken off through injury or ill health – while the companies themselves avoid the usual burdens associated with having employees. These are passed onto the workers themselves but also to the taxpayer. One Deliveroo courier I interviewed took time off with a ligament injury and ended up signing on for housing benefit because he was not entitled to sick pay.
The biggest difference between my own book and Cant’s, however, is that readers of my book tend to come away depressed after reading it, whereas Cant strikes a more optimistic tone. This is partly a consequence of gig workers making substantial progress in organising themselves (predominantly through the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain) since I wrote my book back in 2016-17. As Cant writes:
“This is not just a sob story about workers being exploited in bad conditions by bosses who get rich off their work, it’s about how workers have squared up and fought back”.Indeed, several fashionable shibboleths are demolished very effectively in Cant’s book, from the notion that trade unions are irrelevant to those toiling away in the flexible economy, to the idea that migrant workers can’t be unionised. [su_unherd_related fttitle="Suggested reading" author="Paul Embery"]https://staging.unherd.com/2019/09/who-will-speak-for-todays-working-class/[/su_unherd_related] The book focuses predominantly on London and Brighton, where Deliveroo couriers used WhatsApp group chats to organise workers against exploitative piece-work and a local oversupply of labour which was driving down wages. Initially Deliveroo couriers in London protested against collusion between border enforcement agencies and Deliveroo managers, but the dispute quickly escalated as the company made changes to its payment structure. As Cant writes,
“The system would be changed from a flat hourly rate (£7) with a bonus per completed delivery (£1) plus an additional petrol bonus for moped riders, to a fee-per-delivery piece-wage (£3.75) with no hourly rate. If there were no orders, workers would earn no money.”This prompted a wave of strike action among Deliveroo’s couriers. Cant does get carried away. “Deliveroo workers have launched a militant struggle for a better world,” he writes. This is true as far as it goes, but Cant seems to define a better world strictly as one in which socialism has triumphed. This is quite a philosophical jump, not least because contemporary socialism is spectacularly ill-defined, even by its adherents. "Fundamentally, the socialism movement relies on two parts,” Cant writes. “The first is the struggle of the working class against exploitation, and the second is a critique of capitalism and a socialist programme.” But what is the socialist programme in 2019? For Cant, socialism entails the lofty idea of workers’ democratic control of every workplace. Yet socialism also requires a centralised plan if markets are to be eliminated. Herein lies the fundamental contradiction at socialism’s heart. As I wrote earlier this year for UnHerd:
“you cannot advocate central planning on the one hand and workplace democracy on the other. As soon as workers rebel against the state’s central plan, their democratic rights are stripped from them”.I won’t dwell on this aspect of Cant’s work, because the book contains many important lessons about fighting back against exploitative gig employers. My own book was written to lift the lid on an underreported aspect of working-class life in Britain when gig practices – at least in their current guise – were relatively new. We’ve moved on since then. We are now at a point where workers whom we were told had no time for trade unions –predominantly migrants and students – are getting organised and fighting back. Anyone who cares about social justice, whether you share Cant’s politics or not, should be cheering them on.
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SubscribeTrump bugs me but so does the identity politics of the Democratic left. The spasms of self loathing are being kept mainly to the US but what happens when they spill out to the rest of the World which is not nearly as ‘progressive’? Wait till the next Olympics when the US enter a load of blokes into the women’s events – see how much the rest of the planet will appreciate the Democratic left. If they focussed on jobs, wages, wealth inequality they could be very effective but why the constant focus on issues that only serve to tear apart the population?
Trump will win. Get over it.
President Trump is the last gasp for the free America designed by the founding fathers. His second term will likely be the last four years of the Constitutional Republic. The problem for America is complacency. For decades “We the People” have not recognized the Left as our mortal enemy. We allowed the Leftists to take control of the education system. The result being an endless hatch of brainwashed anti-America useful idiots. The teaching of a Cultural Marxist agenda to divide, disrupt, and cause chaos in our society and government has resulted in an environment for change for the worst. With the endless influx of undocumented Democrats across our borders and the relentless assault by the Left on the Constitution it is just a matter of time. Once the Demographics change results in a White minority of Representatives in Congress then the fundamental transformation will rapidly replace Capitalism with some form of Marxist system.
That would be awful indeed. But I am reminded of the TEA party that spontaneously arose in 2009 in response to big government, high tax Obama. We may suffer through a decade of inflated socialism, but eventually it will be overturned. I am more fearful that this will result in a despot who is less restrained and more competent at manipulating the levers of power than Trump.
Popular music, just like gospel music, in churches is all about the Emotions and Me. That is OK in its place: on the telly, in clubs, etc, as entertainment. But not when in search of the Divine.
Drivel, these people be they blm or twitter thugs are just that thugs and need to be dealt within law. Twitter if it cannot perform and deal with woke thuggery should be taken down like huawei.
Kind of makes you want to nail your manifesto to the door of a church… Or maybe to the forehead of the most influential Wokey… Yes it’s official the singular of the woke is a wokey.
The best critiques of “wokism” are theological, not secular-rational. “Wokeness” is hopeless and denies redemption, making it a quite terrifying “religion”. Its noxious blend of puritanical enthusiasm and secular-rational Machiavellianism is nothing new. Robespierre wrote its first catechism, Nechayev its second. Let there not be a third.
And it’s FREE
So Al Jahiz wondered “whether it was permissible for women to groan with pleasure during sex.” And what was his verdict?
Of course America COULD be great again! This is the nation that blessed the world with a Constitution both magnificent and mercurial, a United Nations (blessed by so many great workers, sincere and honest at grass-roots level), phenomenal leaders like Charlie Munger, John Kennedy, Noam Chomsky, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Charlton Heston, Walter Kronkite, Shirley Maclean, Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, Steven Sondheim, George Washington, Mark Twain, Humphrey Bogart, Muhammad Ali, Henry Kissinger, Billy Graham, Elvis Presley, Gore Vidal, Arnold Copeland, George Gershwin, Charlie Chaplin, Billy Wilder, Robert, Ernest Hemingway, Martha Graham, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Wayne …. a list almost without end.
At face value EUCOM seems like a rational decision. Russia is not going to invade Europe. Russia is busy making lucrative deals with countries like Syria, Iran, Turkey, Isreal, China & Saudi Arabia. Why would they need to invade anyone? They’re doing fine!!!
Rather than continuing to try & provoke The BRICS, perhaps we should learn from what they are doing. They are winning, where we are losing.
If President Trump is good to his word, and doing this for intelligent economic & business reasons …. trying to save money, reduce tensions and create balance, then he deserves a certain amount of credit.
An expansionist American Empire, threatening, coercing, bribing and bullying, cannot stand long-term. Far better to close bases, stop protracted, un-winnable wars, drone killings and instead gradually navigate the national mindset towards engendering a new international climate of negotiation and mutual respect.
Empires are expensive. They are a drain on resources. The American model seems to be inspiring disproportionate resentment and hatred, which can only increase. Far better to engineer a face-saving transition to a commonwealth of nations (as Britain did), considerably preferable to degenerating into a horrible, execrable dictatorship, where the most intelligent people escape to other countries.
I disagree with President Trump over climate change. I think he talks a lot of nonsense and find myself myself cringing at some of his quasi-Hegelian rubbish. Yet IF he is sincerely trying to reduce tension In the world & create an atmosphere for more equitable, friendly, peaceful dialogue, this should be allowed to continue.
Rather than inventing fairy-stories about POTUS/digging up old prostitutes he slept with twenty years ago, these intransigent old neo-liberal, neo-conservative billionaires should perhaps consider two things :
If there is a war in Asia, between US Proxies against Russia and China, this would risk going nuclear (possibly through miscalculation or hubris) and we would ALL be destroyed.
This destruction would effect the grandchildren of wealthy families as well as poor families.
There’s a time element to this. As a 16 year old in 1970 I entered Christianity and its slightest expressions of popular culture were a key to opening that door. I didn’t want to abandon the exciting modern trajectory of rebellion, new ideas, brightness and fun in design and music. Contemporary worship gave me a possible hybrid of ancient faith expressed through my own generation’s creativity.
I’m a musician and my children and I participated over the next 40 years of change. Out with the pews; out with the choirs. In come the carpets; bands with drum kits in acrylic boxes.
The new styles definitely work for the unchurched who walk in ‘off the street’ and are deeply struck that a familiar musical language might be applicable in approaching a God who they assumed was as distant from ordinary life as a Bach cantata.
But for me the superficialities were wearing thin. I’d grown up and developed a need for more nuanced theology, and deeper expressions of a wider range of experiences.
Like me, many people grow up and change. Switching to a different musical style is not the only way to access different messages from music, to support our changing needs in worship, but it can be a shortcut.
Me, I like a nice cantata these days!
“Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification.” -Karl Marx
It is ironic that Marxian wokeness fits the definition and fulfills the religious impulse. But then it would be difficult from Marx’s time to comprehend that the actual outcome of his proposal is given in the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel.
Excommunication and the burning of heretics is what woke is all about.
Now woke needs codifying or no one will know who to obey or how to avoid transgressing.
What with the sheer numbers of so called woke practitioners, good luck with that. Will we see woke wars along the lines of the Catholic Crusades against the Mohammedans to sort it all out?
I might suggest a prayer: Lead us not into temptation to forgive those that trespass against us. (Us being the woke, of course).
It seems like the awful regimes throughout Communist Eastern Europe and the mass slaughter in the Soviet Union and China have not killed off the Marxist ideologues who want to inflict it on the Free World. I guess we will have to go through it again only for it to be overthrown once more. What is puzzling is that journalists who should know better seem awfully keen on it too.
It’s not for the likes of us is very much an attitude of this country. In Italy, opera is for the people and national TV put on an opera every night during lockdown.
If the Left wins in America, cultural relativism will predominate and consequently we will see cultural infighting amongst the Left as to which group should dominate.
Biden will play a Starmer like role trying to quell the infighting and the country will divide along state lines. A Roosevelt economic recovery package might help but the infighting will mean constant indecision as to where help will go.
The likelihood of a Left meltdown may well mean the people of America will choose the least worst option, that being Trump.