So I submitted a thing on how we should vote no on CA Prop 22, and we absolutely should, but we should also take away a very important lesson from the battle around it.
^This is DISGUSTING^
These multi-billion-dollar apps are spending hundreds of millions to not have to treat their drivers or deliverers as employees because if they’re classified as contractors they don’t deserve the same benefits or protections and it makes it harder to unionize because the only people who work for you are already scabs.
And yet we’re being gaslit to believe most of these drivers want the “flexibility,” despite the much greater desire for stable income and health benefits because America can’t get its shit together enough to provide 21st century healthcare. “New benefits” doesn’t speak to the quality of benefits at all. “Choos[ing] independent work” is a fun little way to say “the only choice we want to be possible for you to make is being an independent contractor.”
But it’s worse than that. Because these ads are all paid for by the companies who would benefit from 22, when they say “it would eliminate jobs” it should be considered a threat. “Fine,” they say petulantly, “If you want to lower our profits to force us to guarantee basic standards for workers, we’ll hire fewer people and make our service worse.”
Seriously, why are we trying to work with companies at all? So much of our taxes go into subsidizing these companies and we still have to beg them and fight it out in the courts for them to provide the most threadbare protections. American labor is exported to China (et al.) because it’s easier to circumvent human rights there and the response from both liberals and conservatives is to make America more “business friendly,” but when it comes down to it that means not protecting those rights here either.
And the worst part is that they’re decreasing taxes and making the government smaller but instead of letting the onus of welfare rest on private companies, they’re deregulating those too, so there’s millions of people who are going without what should be the bare minimum of human rights.
We’re so focused on employment statistics we lose sight of the fact that we shouldn’t have to rely on employment to receive healthcare or food or shelter but also that if we do force that reliance we shouldn’t allow companies to underpay employees or shirk providing benefits.
Trying to work with companies instead of fighting them can never work. We can pull all the levers and turn all the valves we want, but in turn companies will always work their machine to keep as much profit as they can.
This is why we need to either tax the rich and corporations to fund welfare or regulate corporations to advance workers’ rights instead of eroding them. Ideally both. Not to be a total communist but seizing the means of production and ending the artificial scarcity leveraged for profit would be much more direct.
