Nina-Bytes: Exploitation as a Business Model

Editor’s note: Nina-Bytes is a weekly blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web. Want more? Click here to subscribe to NIDC today. 

 

Gigged

As anyone who works in an affected industry can tell you, the primary purpose of the “gig economy” is to “disrupt” the so-called “free market” by ignoring labor laws, forcing workers to toil for far less money than they would otherwise be making (including sub-minimum wage take home pay) and pass that extracted wealth onto corporate executives and investors. Despite the fact that we all know this is literally the business model of the gig industry, it rarely comes up in the official discourse for two reasons; first, gig companies straight up lie about how much they’re actually paying their workers, and second, modern American capitalist society largely screens out the voices of actual labor class individuals. Given this, the exploitative nature of the “gig economy” is a story that mostly remains on the sidelines of our discourse; it’s not exactly a “secret” but it’s also a subject that will never be fully recognized by corporate ghouls and the governments they own either.

Unsurprisingly, whenever someone actually digs into the data, they find that gig workers are wholly correct when they say this “industry” is more or less a kind of sweat shop brought home to the imperial core. Let’s take a look at this short September 2nd, 2024 article about a recent study examining the real wages of folks working in the rideshare industry, by Chris Mills Rodrigo writing for Common Dreams:

Don’t Take Rideshare Companies at Their Word When It Comes to Worker Pay

“The study is particularly notable for the results it extracted about California, where in 2020 gig companies poured tens of millions into Proposition 22, legislation which allowed the industry to continue to classify their workers as independent contractors rather than employees.

The companies promised that exempting drivers and delivery workers would preserve the “flexibility” of gig work while ensuring that they would make over the minimum wage.

Four years later, that promise seems broken. Rideshare passenger drivers, the study found, take home $7.12 per hour in median net hourly earnings before tips—a fraction of California’s $16 minimum wage. When you account for the employee benefits and taxes that drivers have to pay for themselves, the number is even lower.”

The study in question was conducted by the U.C. Berkeley Labor Center, and while the quote I featured here focuses primarily on the take home wages of rideshare workers in California, the survey itself examined the pay of workers across five major metropolitan areas and found that gig economy rideshare drivers were making less than minimum wage in all five cities. Given the pay standards of this industry as a whole, I’d be willing to bet you can extrapolate that data to pretty much every city in America, and even to other Pig Empire nations that don’t expressly forbid rideshare companies from paying their workers a wage below the minimum; after all, that type of ruthless exploitation is the business model of every company in this sector.

So how do rideshare and other gig economy companies get away with this? Mostly by selectively cooking the data to make it appear as if rideshare drivers and other gig workers are making more than they actually are, classifying gig labor as independent contractors to skirt existing labor regulations, and spending fuck tons of money lobbying governments at all levels to exempt their workers from the types of labor laws that say you’re not allowed to pay workers less than half the minimum wage in your region. Why do politicians and governments agree to this exploitative bullshit? Mostly because they’re absolutely on the take, don’t give a damn about the labor class whatsoever, and are ideologically aligned with a capitalist order that demands maximum profits and endless growth regardless of how many people that hurts. In other words, none of the people involved here are your friends, and if they can figure out a way to work labor class people to death without paying them sweet fuck all, they’ll gleefully do so.

Of course some people will read what I’ve said here and shrug, possibly while making a snide comment about how this is simply the way things are in “late stage capitalism.” I don’t begrudge them that observation, but I would like to remind everyone that capital itself doesn’t plan on ending capitalism – or its requisite extreme exploitation – any time soon, and the only way this era is going to be remembered as “late stage capitalism” is if we the people in the labor class start forcing capitalist exploiters to shut down the fuck barrel. When your great grandparents realized that big business, investors, and the government were all in it together to squeeze every last ounce of profit out of them even if it meant driving them to an early grave, they didn’t make pithy comments about “late stage capitalism” – they organized unions, took to the streets as part of mass protests, physically fought cops and Pinkertons, and started smashing the machinery of capitalism. The mass exploitation of the labor class still depends on the participation of that same labor class, and it relies on an orderly society where brutal extraction that violates the spirit of our labor laws is shrugged at and complied with as “just the way things are.” If you want that to change, you are going to have fight for it; not just at the ballot box, but also in the streets.

 

– Nina Illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.

Subscribe to NIDC to for email updates whenever a new post is published.

Support my work on Ko-Fi by clicking here.