Gig Workers Have Nowhere to Pee (2020)

> Can anyone familiar with policy making in gig economy companies explain why the spokesperson wasn’t told to say, “We think it’s not okay. Going forward, the first offense for a restaurant that denies bathroom access to a driver will be a 24 hour ban from our platform.”

> Courage is contagious. Why not take a stand?

This seems a bit like suggesting to use a band-aid to re-attach a severed limb. Gig economy firms thrive on exploitation. The lower the exploitative wages, the higher the parasitic economic rent they can extract.

My point is, this is a problem with the system.

If you think peeing is the only thing tainting the gig economy world, I'm afraid much exploitation has been successfully hidden from you due to your privileged position as a knowledge worker... or you've somehow been able to stay blissfully unaware (doubtful)... or you're ok with this level of exploitation - in which case, please please go make some new friends, try finding a therapist, and/or come join your local DSA chapter and join/set up a union with colleagues.

Edit, I loved this take:

"What I want is to see Uber’s technology become a protocol. Same with Airbnb, same with Postmates, same with other companies in the gig and sharing economies. Same with lots of other important technology companies, while we’re at it. Obviously this can’t happen overnight, but if the technology is useful enough to provide real value, then it’s too useful to be subjugated to the whims of profit forever. I would love to see these technology platforms either fully decentralised, or centralised in such a way that the entity running it is not-for-profit and, ideally, accountable to all stakeholders. The actual mechanisms for making this work are beyond the scope of this post, but I want to throw this idea out there and get people thinking about it, because it’s the only way of making the future work for all of us.

I suspect — and feel free to call me naive, but I don’t think I’m wrong— that the majority of people working on Uber’s technology would prefer to build a system whose social impact they could be proud of. Based on my admittedly limited sample size of people I know in the tech industry, I feel like lots of people working at companies like Uber are there because they want to solve interesting technical challenges and deploy useful innovations in the world. I believe that if given the choice, most would prefer to build a system that makes the world a fairer and more equitable place. The problem is that this choice is, for the most part, withheld from them, and whatever individual intentions they may have are inevitably co-opted by the capitalist structure in which they make their living. By working together to counteract these prevailing systematic forces, though, they may be able to open up a space in which to envision alternatives."

Source: https://medium.com/@dellsystem/dont-put-your-faith-in-uber-7...